Funnel Magazine First Edition by Funnel Magazine™

FUNNEL MAGAZINE TRAFFIC & LEAD GEN

MARKETING

9 COMMON SENSE TIPS How to spend no money and improve your marketing with 9 easy to implement tips

FUNNEL FEATURES

LEADERSHIP & TEAM

43 CLICKFUNNELS CERTIFIED PARTNERS

STRATEGY & TACTICS

TECH

73 SOCIAL MEDIA

33 THE INTERVIEW

METRICS

IN EVERY EDITION

37 CASINO ROYALE

10 TECH TOOLS

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PUBLISHER 03 WELCOME

LETTER

ONCE

WHAT

FROM THE EDITOR

UPON A HACKER

IS YOUR WHY?

RUSSEL BRUNSON YOU’RE JUST ONE FUNNEL AWAY...

MARKETER’S 33 GUIDE TO SOCIAL MEDIA

RYAN

STEWMAN: HARDCORE

BUSINESS 45 ON THE BOARD

LIVE

VIDEO WAR

ALL THIS... AND MORE!

With the launch of Funnel Magazine this is a landmark edition with insights from Russell Brunson sharing about his new book Expert Secrets. This edition we cover all things Free +Shipping. Keep an eye out for the next edition all about High Ticket Funnels.

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Article by HAWK MIKADO

Special Thanks: This magazine would not have been possible without the following people: Our Team: Jane Amora John Amora Jonah Bocabo Omar Buscato John Paul Cabrera Anjie Demasco Noelene Delos Reyes Russ Enriquez Joe Freeman Aubrey Gestoso John Roca John Villanueva Terri Levine for your warmth and encouragement when we were on the ropes. Jeremy Wenger for the laughs and lifting our spirits when we hit our wall. Michael Dantu for your guidance on making sure this magazine was the highest print quality. Our Feedback Team for helping us make those last minute improvements. And to our family who has always supported us in all our endeavors big and small. And to you, our readers who are FunnelHackers at Heart.

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WELCOME FROM OUR PUBLISHER Hey, this is Hawk Mikado, publisher of Funnel Magazine and I have a special message for you. First of all, thank you so much for choosing to read Funnel Magazine and getting our very first edition. This publication is truly something special, just for you, and we want to make sure that you’re getting the most out of building, creating, and expanding your funnels. The things you’re going to read in our magazine are going to give you some powerful ideas. I want you to bear in mind that they work for the person that is currently using them. It’s working in that industry, in that niche, for those people’s clients. That doesn’t mean that it’s going to work for you, but that also doesn’t mean that it’s not going to work for you. I want you to take each one of these concepts and ask yourself one simple question. Is this going to work for my company and me? If

you think it will, then I want you to take it, and I want you to run with it. I want you to take the idea and split test the shit out of it because as long as you’re split testing, you can never go wrong. As you read the magazine, you can use the strategies, tactics, and tools as you design, split test, and increase your conversions with your funnel. If you decrease your conversions, you’re going to throw that idea out the window and try the next thing. If you increase it, you’re going to throw out whatever was there before and try something new and see if you can start to increase the conversions from that point forward. Just like Thomas Edison in his lab, no experiment is a faliure because it still brings you one step closer to your goal.

Again, thank you so much for reading our magazine. I want to share with you I truly appreciate you. I believe in my heart that you have made an incredible decision to change your life, to change your business, and to get real results by modeling what successful people in your industry and other industries are currently doing. One of the best things that you can do is take ideas from other industries and apply them to your own business. Some of the best things that we’ve ever implemented have come from other people’s companies from industries that we would never have thought would have worked in our situation. As long as you’re testing, as long as you’re growing, and as long as you are developing funnels, you’ll be able to continue to succeed and continue to rise, make millions, and be world class.

Coming Up: In our second Edition, we talk with Caleb Maddix and his high ticket funnel that made him five figures in just one hour. In our third Edition, we talk with Ryan Levesque, Author of Ask and do a deep dive on the power of a survey funnel.

“...ask yourself one simple question. Is this going to work for my company and me?” EDITION 1

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LETTER FROM THE EDITOR OF

FUNNEL M

Dear Funnel Hackers: In full disclosure, I used Funnel Scripts and the Origin story to write you this letter. My name is Kate Mikado, and I’m the Editor-In-Chief of the publication you are holding in your hands right now. Let me tell you a quick story about how we came up with the idea for Funnel Magazine. At the time we were having some challenges internally with our company. My husband was trying to put out all the fires. As a result, we realized that our value ladder needed a serious makeover. And so Funnel Magazine was born, and it’s why our First Edition is all about the Free + Shipping Funnel. I had a passion for writing, and now I was trying to learn how to be an editor of a magazine. I’d never been an editor before, and with this edition coming out January 31st, I had a quick learning curve. It was so amazing working on the whiteboard wall (some of you may have seen the video) and discovering that this was something I could get lost in. If people were going to take us seriously, we HAD to play bigger. Now I was staying at the office until 9 pm and working over the weekend to make sure everything was to the standard of the Impact, Excellence, and Innovation that we at Funnel Magazine strive for. It was easy to have people say yes, and I started adding people right into my phone (you don’t need business cards). By listening to Russell Brunson for three days straight I was able to understand better what Hawk was always going on about. For many of you reading this, that is what funnels do for you. It’s our Mission here at Funnel Magazine to take a stand against hype internet marketing, the people who are making their money with Facebook Ads teaching about how to make money using Facebook Ads. Now I’m living the dream of getting the amazing content and insights to you, and I never have to worry about making money ever again (well almost never again). And that’s why I’m so passionate about Funnel Magazine. Because it was the beginning of a new chapter in my life and one that I want to be around for many years to come. Thank you for joining us on our journey. - Kate Mikado, Editor-In-Chief

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“This was something... I could get lost in.”

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TRAFFIC & LEAD GEN

LEVERAGING VIDEO TO DRIVE MARKETING FUNNEL PROFITS ARTICLE BY MICHELLE LANGE The natural assumption is small companies don’t have the budget for a robust video platform, yet when we spoke to several fast-growing companies, we found a different reason. Our insights interviews with CEOs and CMOs at companies ranging from six figures to $30 million reveal that it is a lack of video strategy - not budget - that keeps small businesses from creating a video. The CEOs and CMOs we interviewed are unclear as to where to start and what videos would give them the greatest ROI on their time, money, and effort. This knowledge gap causes them to press the pause button and put the video at the bottom of their priority list. WE will uncover the essential videos you need for each phase of your marketing funnel and demystify the video strategy challenge.

“...it is the lack of video strategy - not budget - that keeps small businesses from creating a video.”

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VIDEO MARKETING

Did you know... 93% of all marketers use video for marketing online. Video has been proven to increase lead generation, conversions, and profits in marketing funnels (Invodo).

This report has been approved by the SCAA and the IFC.

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Here are the videos we recommend for

the 5 phases

The Righ Video for the Right Occasion Attact, Nurture, Convert, Retain, Reignite Although 96% of B2B companies surveyed are engaged in video content marketing, and 73% claim that video has positively impacted their marketing results and ROI (Web Video Marketing Council, ReelSEO, and Flimp Media), only 22% of U.S. small businesses plan to post a video in the next 12 months (BIA/Kelsey). Which brings forth the question: Why are small businesses trailing behind other B2Bs who are leveraging video for their marketing? With this compelling data, one wonders why any small business would NOT use video in their marketing funnel. When creating your video strategy, it is essential to identify where your

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96% 73% 22% Video Marketing Stats client is in your marketing funnel and the optimal video(s) to use for each phase of the funnel. Let’s look at the five stages of marketing funnels. It starts with Attraction. You must create awareness of your service or product and inspire prospects to learn more. Nurture them by building a relationship with your prospects by providing valuable, engaging content. Convert the opportunity by taking them past the goal line to become a paying client. Retain your customers by keeping them fully engaged and commited to using your products and services.

Lastly, you must Reignite and rekindle your inactive clients’ interest and engagement. Companies often create videos for the first 3 phases of their funnels (Attraction, Nurture, and Conversion), yet they neglect the last two phases (Retain and Reignite). Most companies miss key opportunities to maximize their profits by using video through all phases of the client life cycle. Attraction stage. There are 3 kinds of videos that are best utilized in the attraction stage. Your brand message video, your explainer video, and your traffic video. The brand message video shares the brand story of your company: What inspired you to create it, the challenges you solve, the solutions you provide, the benefits and transformations you bring clients, and the greater “Why” behind your business. It’s a great way for a new prospect to get to know your company in 3-4 minutes or less. Hubspot did an excellent example of a well executed Brand Message Video.

High Impact Videos High ROI for Your Funnels The explainer video gives an overview of your product or service and addresses how your product or service works. It is especially effective when selling a complex product or service that requires explanation or simplification for your target audience, and technology companies often use it. Oracle created an explainer video for their product Big Data SCE, which helped their sales team book more meetings and close more sales. The traffic video is a short 60-90 second video that is used in online advertising to lead the viewer to take an important next step. It often drives the audience to a landing page to opt in for content, sign up for a webinar or make a purchase. Nurture stage. Tip videos provide valuable tips and content that address your ideal clients’ top of mind challenges. Tip videos establish your expert status while building rapport with your prospects. Marie Forleo has created a huge following of raving fans by sharing her advice on Marie TV. “Tip videos establish your expert status...” The how to videos show your prospects how to do a particular task within your area of expertise. Neuman’s Kitchen, a catering company that made the Inc. 500 fastest growing company list in 2014, uses how-to demo videos to engage their B2B and B2C prospects. Behind the scenes (BTS) videos build rapport with your audience by pulling back the curtains to give your prospects a behind-the-scenes look at your business or a particular initiative. BTS videos help establish trust with your audience by providing

”The brand message video creates a WOW factor...”

Attraction videos can also help fill live events and generate multiple six figures.

a degree of transparency. Conversion stage. A sales page video is crucial to your sales success. At this juncture of your funnel, you have attracted and nurtured your prospect, and the goal is to take them past the finish line. A wellcrafted sales video is the next best thing to having an in-person sales conversation with your prospect and is a highly efficient way to close the deal. The opt-in video is similar in structure to a sales video, yet the goal is “convert” the client to sign up for freebie content such as an insights paper, self-assessment, or webinar, as opposed to a paid

offer. These unpaid conversions are important - if you enroll your prospect in a freebie offer, you are one step closer to enrolling them in a paid offer. Client success videos provide social proof and vital ROI metrics. It can persuade a customer who is on the fence that they will get their desired results if they purchase from you. This video tells the story of where your client was before using your products or services, how your product or services helped them,

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In Fact: • Prospects are 72% likelier to buy your products and services when video is used. (Wharton School of Business) • Video increases landing page conversion rates by 100%. (Optimizely) • Video boosts email click through rates by 200300%. (Forrester) • Video added to your social media means audiences are 10 x more likely to engage and share your post. (Content Marketing Institute) • 59% of executives would rather watch a video than read text. (Forbes)

and the benefits and ROI they experienced. Retention stage. Videos for the retention phase of the funnel are similar to videos for the nurturing stage. The goal is to engage the client with compelling, valuable content. The leverage video is a powerful retention tool as it shows your customers how to utilize your product or service better to maximize their results. ToDoist shows their clients how to leverage their platform in their video “10 ToDoist Tips and Tricks You Need to Know”. The special offer videos announce special offers and promotions to your clients, such as a discounts and flash sales for the holidays, Cyber Monday, and Black Friday. Reignite stage. Share more client success story videos in the reignite stage. These videos can be shared with existing clients to remind them of what’s possible if they fully utilize your products or services. Also in the reignite stage, you will want to share more special offers to inspire clients to make additional purchases with discounts, flash sales, and other promotions. The last type of video to use in your marketing strategy is the Ask video. These videos can re-engage clients who have become inactive or lukewarm. “Ask” videos invite your clients to ask their most burning questions or give input on an upcoming initiative. Creating the right video mix for your marketing funnels takes time and energy up front, yet once you create your videos, they will do the selling for you while you are off running your business or better yet, enjoying a vacation! Using video through each phase of the client life cycle will not only boost your profits, but it will also increase your brand recognition, improve your engagement, establish your expert status, and build your tribe of raving fans. The only thing you stand to lose by waiting to get into the video game is time, money, and opportunity. So go for it! Your marketing funnels will thank you for it. Michelle Lange is a Video Strategist who helps small and mid-sized companies make a big brand splash by creating high-impact videos and sleek marketing campaigns that make you unforgettable and in demand. You can check out Hubspot’s videos and more at: funnelmagazine.com/read

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9 Common Sense Marketing Tips That cost $0 to implement By Janice Means

1) Email Signature 2) LinkedIn Profile 3) Facebook Biz Page 4) Review Sites 5) Website Updates

6) Receiving Calls 7) Voicemail 8) Soliciting Calls 9) Get Contact Info

Don’t make it hard for people to do business with you. These common sense tips while small go a long way. Remembering to do these nine things can help separate you in the marketing information overload. Always use a signature line on your business email to contain your contact information. Particularly in the case of your email from your phone. Be different from “Sent from my iPhone.” LinkedIn Personal Profile. Make sure the information is correct for your current business(es) and have a professional picture (pertinent to your business). Make sure your Facebook business page is up to date with contact information. Make sure the hours are correct. Make sure it links to your website if you have one. Don’t have a Facebook business page? You should probably get one. Periodically check your listings. Claim your listings on Yelp, Yahoo, Google+ and other review sites. There is a reason that “reputation marketing” is a thing. Keep your brochure website up to date and give accurate contact information. Answer your business phone with your company name and your name. Remember to include your company name in your voicemail and tell people how long it will be before you can call back.

When cold calling, get to the point, get permission, and be polite. Example: “Hi, I’m Janice with Marketing with JR, and I have three quick marketing questions, do you have a minute or 2 to answer them?” Give people your contact info; a business card, or an even better approach is to put them right into your phone.

Janice is President of Marketing with JR – Common Sense Marketing with Extraordinary Results. Janice spent years in Corporate IT interwoven with various Marketing stints. Janice brings her Fortune 50 experience to you with a focus on traditional

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NOT ALL FACEBOOK FUNNELS

ARE CREATED EQUAL Article by Chad Lio

It’s no secret that Facebook marketing has commanded 90% of marketers’ attention And not just digital marketers. The “traditional” marketers that were/are so accustomed to the primary channels of television, radio, and print is looking to allocate significantly more budget to the social media giant. Quarter after quarter, year after year, Facebook’s advertising revenue continues to outperform projections, and for a good reason. Facebook’s ad platform is one of the most dynamic demographic targeting interfaces ever to hit the advertising and marketing profession. Its ad pricing model is dramatically cheaper than that of TV, radio, and print advertising. As Facebook continues to improve and expand on their ad offerings, marketers need to do a better job at well…marketing. It’s no longer a time to ask “Should we be utilizing Facebook ads,” but “What type of Facebook ad is going to have the greatest ROI.” As businesses and entrepreneurs invest more of their marketing budget into Facebook Ads, there also comes a responsibility to learn all the different options of a Facebook ad and the sales/lead generation funnels that will behave differently. Let’s break down Facebook’s ad technology and the various types of funnels that we may want to test to achieve a higher conversion rate.

” It’s no longer a time to ask “Should we be utilizing Facebook ads”, but

“What type of Facebook Ad is going to have JANUARY 2017

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It’s All About the Pixel Before we even begin to break down some of ad/ funnel combinations, I can’t stress enough how important it is to implement the designated Facebook Pixel that is assigned to your ad account. This pixel is crucial to remarketing, lead conversion, and audience building, so be sure it’s implemented across your entire website.While the primary pixel will be applied across your website, Facebook also has several additional modifiers that you can add to specific pages for better tracking and ROI. To save time and resources, Google Tag Manager is an excellent way to implement these ad modifiers. If you haven’t utilized GTM, make it one of your first priorities. Once your pixel is installed, you will now have access to multiple variations of ad products offered by Facebook.

Here’s where marketers go wrong: They do minimal research to find out who their potential customers or leads are. They cast an extremely wide net to target as many people as possible, and their ad performs poorly.

Top of the Funnel: Quantity Isn’t Always a Good Thing When you’re looking to grow top of the funnel awareness and leads, it’s a no-brainer to utilize Facebook’s massive demographic database to put your ad in front of potential customers or subscribers. Interest targeting is one if not the most popular features used within the ad platform, which allows for continuous variables to target a potential customer. Here’s where marketers go wrong: They do minimal research to find out who their potential customers or leads are. They cast an extremely wide net to target as many people as possible, and their ad performs poorly. They continue to target individuals who like similar brands or products to their product or service, without completing the necessary competitive research to differentiate themselves.

specific fan bases of popular pages and highlight unique demographics that can have benefits ranging from ad copy to a webinar or lead magnet ideas. To complement audience insights, Buzzsumo (www. buzzsumo.com) is a valuable tool that will highlight the most shared content across social media networks based on your keywords. Seeing what type of content resonates with your potential audience also gives ideas for content upgrades and overall free offerings that you might want to offer as an incentive for lead information. Recommended FaceBook Ad type for Top of Funnel: If you’ve built a custom landing page to assist in conversion rate, a traditional FB ad that sends traffic to your website will suffice. If you’re looking to increase CRO or decrease bounce rate, you may want to a try a Facebook Lead Ad, which captures information without the person leaving Facebook. Recommended Funnel for Top of Funnel: Since this will be your first attempt to collect an MQL (marketing qualified lead), your funnel should reflect that of a typical free offering. Your ad would promote some webinar or free piece of content that addresses a pain point of your potential customer, which would then require submitting their information to obtain. Once the lead has been acquired, they would be put in some automation sequence that eventually moves them to the middle of the funnel.

Website Custom Audiences: Hyper-Relevance At It’s Finest A Facebook Pixel implementedon your site allows for custom website audiences. It lets you advertise exclusively to individuals that have previously visited your site. Advertising to website visitors is hyperrelevant because they already understand what our brand is about.

It’s a common mistake that most marketers make at this stage in the funnel. When you have a highly targeted audience, not only do you increase your amount of conversions, but your CPC or CPM decreases as well. Some valuable tools that you can use to find out more about who your audience is Facebook Audience Insights and Buzzsumo. Audience Insights (https://www.facebook. com/ads/audience-insights) allows you to drill deeper on EDITION 1

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“If current customers have had a positive experience with your product they will likely buy again” With Facebook Website Custom Audiences, the technology allows you to drill down on specific pages of your website they have visited, creating different offers and funnels for specific pages. Example 1: Visitor has landed on your homepage or a general navigation page. Because this is a free visit, you create an ad that offers a free lead magnet that puts them in an email funnel sequence. Visitor lands on website> guest heads over to FaceBook> visitor sees an ad for free ebook or webinar. Example 2: You’ve created a general awareness ad that promotes a piece of valuable content on your website. Because that person lands on that content, you will now enable a webinar ad that offers an upsell after the webinar. FB ad that promotes valuable blog post> visitor reads blog post> visitor returns to FB> visitor sees the ad for a free webinar that offers solutions to pain points> visitor signs up for a free webinar, and is now in nurture funnel. Example 3: A visitor has viewed a sales page on your website and has not converted. You can offer a bonus upsell once they login into Facebook, ultimately enticing them to become a customer. The visitor comes to a sales page but doesn’t convert (doesn’t reach a Thank You page)> visitor returns to FaceBook> visitor sees the ad for product sales page they left. Whenever you have an opportunity to remarket to a previous website visitor, your opportunity for moving that visitor down your funnel increases significantly from real exposure to your brand or product.

Customer Retention: The Growth We Continue To Forget About As much as I actively participate in growth hacking (where growth is your only metric), I continue to see brands completely bypass their current customers for new ones. While growth is necessary, customer retention is just as critical for sustainable success; and yes you can utilize Facebook ads and funnels for this as well. Facebook Custom Audiences also allows you to upload email lists to their platform, which allows for multiple segmentation for customers vs. non-customers. If current customers have had a positive experience with your product/services, they more than likely will buy again or upgrade. You can remarket this with a custom Facebook Ad that targets them by email address, and leads them into your highest-price product funnel.

It’s Only Just Begun Just remember, when you selected which Facebook Ads match up with your funnels, it’s only just begun! You may find that you’re having success with a click-through rate of your ads, but conversion rates may be lower than expected. You’ll need to test different funnels with ads by mixing and matching to find the best available combination. When you can fully utilize Facebook’s dynamic ad technology, not only does your remarketing provide a better customer experience, your ROI increases significantly.

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5 Steps to Writing A Lead Generation

Sales Page Article by Carol Brennan

JANUARY 2017

FUNNEL MAGAZINE

A way with

Words

So it’s time to your write your sales page. But to be honest, you don’t know where to start. Navigating the rules about what goes where, what to include and how to keep it from turning into a page that simply sends your readers to sleep rather than captivates them can be tough. Writing your sales page doesn’t have to turn into a nightmare if you remember to include a few vital components: • • • • •

Start with the Pain Get Clear Handle Objections Prove Your Solution Works Close with a Strong CTA

Many people make the mistake of starting their sales pages by talking about their product. Remember that your clients are seeking help for a pain they have in their lives. You have to show them that you understand their pain to convince them that your product is the solution to that pain. For example, if you are a productivity coach, your clients might feel totally overwhelmed. One of the symptoms of this overwhelm might be an evergrowing list of tasks that they never finish. They’ve tried writing

to-do lists, but they never seem to get to the end of them. They haven’t worked because the tasks they are setting are too big. You help them break down these tasks into small, manageable chunks. You might not want to define your ideal client because you want to appeal to everyone but a product made for everyone appeals to no one. It ends up being very bland. Decide on who your best client is. Who would get the most out of your product? For example, my productivity coaching is ideal for working mothers who need shortcuts to productivity. Common objections are over time, price and whether the product is suitable for them. You can even take several objections and answer them in a frequently asked questions section.

make more money when they implement the productivity strategies she teaches them. You have to provide evidence that your product can do what you say it can. Sprinkle testimonials that back up you claims throughout your copy. End with a strong callto-action to encourage your ideal client to buy. Give them a reason to opt-in now such as a deadline for when the doors close. Also, explain what happens next – for example, will they get instant access? So your call-to-action might look like this: “To end the overwhelm and get super productive, click the buy now button. The program starts on the 1st of December. You get access within 24 hours.”

For example, our productivity coach might tackle the objection of price by pointing out that her clients will have more time to

“Many people make the mistake of starting their sales page by talking about their product.” Carol Brennan is a copywriter who helps coaches craft persuasive copy which connects their unique talents with the needs of their target market so they can easily attract a steady stream of ideal clients.

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MA GI

Attract new customers like magic! As someone who wants to know about funnels, you are interested in finding out what works, and that’s what we want to share with you. We’ve enrolled some of the best and brightest people who know how to actually get a funnel to convert. You want a converting funnel, don’t you? Well, this section is going to teach you some incredible things. We hope that you enjoy the insights, and again, think back to what I shared in my publisher’s note so that you can indeed make sure you’re leveraging the right funnels, the right tactics, the right strategies and techniques for your success. HAWK MIKADO

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HOW DO YOU STAND OUT IN A

CROWD?

How do you answer the Dan Kennedy question, “Why should I do business with you, as opposed to anyone else who does what you do?” With a magical marketing proposition that makes them want you and only you! How do you do that? You have to start with who you want in the first place, your target market. What if (pardon my crazy example, this is something we crafted for an actual financial advisor funnel we worked on) your target market was affluent baby boomer REPUBLICAN HUNTERS with money? Does that change your marketing message? You bet it does. The hunting Facebook fan page ads you are running (you mean to tell me you aren’t hanging out where your prospects hang out? shame on you), when someone

asked what you do, you could say “I help conservative sportsmen protect their retirement nest egg from Hillary Clinton.” BOOM! You think that started a conversation before Trump was elected? You bet it did! All of a sudden you had lots of wealthy hunters asking you questions because they were all terrified that she was going to get elected and take their guns, health care, and money away. We have a client right now who is a plastic surgeon. When we analyzed his patient base and interviewed him about the patients he liked serving the most, we came up with two groups of people:

That totally revamped his website, his videos; his opt-in offer, everything he does for both traffic and conversion. He is now working on a separate funnel for each of those markets, and you can bet that they will both convert better than a general plastic surgery offer. Once you figure that out – what do you do next? Tune them of course! We will go more into this in the next edition, but here is a teaser of what’s coming... An anti-oxidant 1,400 times more potent than blueberries and will be the next big alt-health product. When they came to us, the opt-in video on their home page didn’t tell anyone to opt in for the eBook! 1. Breast Cancer Survivors who But these folks are the #1 US were looking for reconstructive distributor of this product, have an surgery. email list of 100,000+ eBook optins, and they weren’t doing it... 2. Pediatric burn victims.

“Sometimes it’s hard to see the forest for the trees and you need fresh eyes.” JANUARY 2017

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HOW TO BE A

DEALMAKER...

And then, the funnel was born... Today a smart realtor or investor looking to get offmarket deals will run a very cheap ad on Facebook to homeowners in a particular geographic area and entice only the would-be sellers to contact them. Use a value driven hook like “get a free ebook” or “7 Secrets to Selling Your House for Top Dollar” or “Three Steps to Avoiding Foreclosure” in exchange for an email address and phone number. Running ads takes very little time and a $500 ad spend (likely overkill) on FB will make you look like you are king of the mountain. Just remember, marketing is just making friends and giving them value. Focus on giving the right kind of value that only serious sellers would want and you will be able to get qualified leads for motivated sellers coming to you in droves. We run several funnels in our local market.

bu ”I a ne y a m I a igh ho look m bo use ing w rh fu illin oo in y to ll p g d ou ric to and r e” pa y

I recently read a post on Facebook from a realtor that said if they had to start from scratch in a new town they would get $500 and bribe 100 random people at Starbucks to sit and talk with them. In hopes of building a relationship with the community and ultimately (someday hopefully) listing a home for sale. Well, maybe this is how they did it in the olden days when cars had wooden rims, and the MLS was printed on papyrus.

” m ma a gi kin rke vin g tin g fri g i th en s j em d us s va an t lu d e.”

Most people in real estate are doing it wrong. Whether you’re a real estate agent or an investor our business is all about attracting motivated sellers. In the olden days, realtors would spend endless hours walking neighborhoods in their high heels knocking on strangers doors and having idle conversations with random people hoping - just hoping - someone they met along the way might consider them (over their Aunt Sally) when it came time to list their home for sale.

As an investor first (and a real estate broker/contractor second) I focus on running ads to apartment owners, divorcees, and homeowners facing foreclosure. But my best ad just says “I am looking to buy a house in your neighborhood, and I am willing to pay full price”. Honestly, we don’t buy many properties with that ad, but my firm does list a bunch of them. My ad spend is $100/week, and we average about five qualified leads with a commission potential of $15k to $30k each. Don’t get caught in the trap of working hard like a peasant. Automate everything and get the “robots” (your funnel) working smart for you.

Matt Skinner is a professional real estate investor and manages a private equity fund. He is founder of RealPeopleRealReturns.com and creator of the secret real estate entrepreneurs club DealMakerSociety.com

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RYAN STEWMAN

Ryan Stewman:

HARDCORE Hardcore Heart Article by Kate Mikado

Ryan Stewman is the rock star CEO of Hardcore Closer. He became a household name...by accident. “I started this not thinking it would take off under that name; people started calling me that.” And although the people proclaimed Ryan as the Hardcore Closer neither Google or Facebook liked it much. His tribe came because his content was good. He had a powerful message to share, and nothing was going to stop him. Ryan started the Hardcore Blog as a means to Jumpstart Break Free Academy, a sales training course. “It all starts with a three-day, intensive, get shit done event and is followed by six weeks of accountability, continuing education, and support.” To say Ryan doesn’t care what you think about him is an understatement. He is comfortable in his skin, saying what he feels and open to anything. This in part comes from Ryan’s background. “I remember with serious clarity, in prison at age 21 and coming back from snack and shit line; a couple of older black dudes said, “Hey man

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nothing like snack Tuesday.” For those men in prison, it was the highlight of the week, and Ryan knew that he had something more to do in this life. Making a choice to change was the first step. However, it seemed that Ryan would have to fight for his freedom. After the passing of the Dodd-Frank Act, he was back at square one. “In 2010 the Government passed the Dodd-Frank Act, and due to my felony gun charges, I was unable to get a Federal mortgage license. I went from being one of the top producing mortgage people on the planet to nothing. Overnight.” At this point, Ryan shares the story of Joseph in the the Bible. Taking liberties with the story and peppering with a lot of profanities he understood and felt a connection to what Joseph went through. From being sold into slavery to winning favor with his owner then being chased off for assumed adultery. Finally, Joseph was in prison when he was summoned by the Pharaoh to interpret his dream. As a result, Joseph saves Egypt from a famine, and the Pharaoh makes him second in command. Ryan went through many trials just like Joseph. “If I let prison define me I could have been like, ‘nothing has been right since prison,’ I’ve chosen not to let that stop me.”

Funnel Mastery Now Ryan has produced funnels that have generated millions. He says it’s like getting a black belt in karate. For anyone struggling to make it you first have to get your white belt then yellow and green and so on. When something isn’t working in the process, Ryan states, “It’s not working because you’re stopping because they didn’t work.” If you just spend a little bit more time and become slightly more resilient, that is where success will happen. As the Hardcore Closer Ryan has learned the ins and outs of sales. I asked him to teach me something about sales, and he said this: “The #1 thing about sales objections, they are nothing more than buying signals. Some people say, ‘Oh they gave me objections it’s time to stop.’ When someone wants something, they are scared to make a bad decision. They have objections because they want to make a good decision. When you offer someone something, and they say no, it’s pretty firm. I say ‘I appreciate your time’ unless I know better. ‘I need to think about it’, ‘I don’t have the money’, they haven’t said no they are just feeling blocked. Objections will be the stopping point, so you need to help their people move through. People are wanting to say yes and are just not certain about it yet.” Step 1

”We are all sitting here with specific DNA code...” What’s unusual about Ryan is that although he comes off as this tough ex-con who’s made some serious cash he has a big heart. “I care about the people that we help because I’m one of them. Most of us are damaged goods, especially in sales. I didn’t grow up in the Ivy League with a silver spoon. So I got into sales, I wanted to be a leader, and I have experiences that I’ve gone through and a lot of the selling community goes through. This is my Calling.” While Ryan doesn’t consider himself a religious person, he says that what he does is a lot like being a pastor or priest. And he feels that this is his divine calling. “We are all sitting with specific DNA code, like an operating code for a computer. When you figure out the DNA code and follow it, which is not external, then success comes. It comes from doing what you were put on this earth to do. I’m a success because I’m doing what I’ve been called to do. My family said I should be a preacher… which means I’m doing what I’m supposed to be doing.” Now Ryan has his own strategy for his success. “I wake up and do the work that needs to be done. Those that do the most work get the most money. It is not difficult, delegate, I workout most days, and I don’t stop working till I’m done. I have a great balance with family by using a calendar system. Date night gets put on the calendar.

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People are wanting to say yes they are just not certain

about it yet.

You set appointments in business, and I treat my personal calendar the same way.” Ryan has a lot of sayings in the business world calling them Stewmanisms. He claims to have about 14,000 of them. So when it’s time to create content, there is no short supply. His #1 Stewmanisms is this: “Knowledge + Action = Success, which is not the same as being successful.” Ryan says. Q&A Kate: What is the funniest thing that has happened to you recently? Ryan: Somebody sent me a picture of a caterpillar in Africa that looked like a dick. Someone your audience knows. K: What’s your one biggest pet peeve? R: People that complain and don’t want a solution. My team knows better. They complain to each other then come to me with a solution. K: If there was a movie produced about your life, who would play you and why?

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R: Ryan Gosling or Justin Timberlake - someone who looks better than you. Cool guys, good looking good guys, just not Will Ferrell. He’s funny but not good looking. K: What’s on your iPod during workouts? R: This morning - Audible, Art of Not Giving a Fuck, Mark Manson. K: What is your Superpower? R: I see through the bullshit. I can tell if someone is full of shit or not in minutes. Free + Shipping Funnel For Ryan’s book funnel, he has already given away 1900 books. With a 21% conversation rate that means less than 9100 people have entered his funnel. So you don’t need to get a million people to be successful. Time and again people say they want to make one million dollars, but you make a lot of money with a break even funnel like this one.

What’s Next

Ryan’s Ad For His Free Book

On the horizon, Ryan has a new book out: Elevator to the Top. He is using the Free + Shipping model to sell the book. “This book arms you with the information you need to close more sales in the modern marketplace. Whether it’s your first day in sales, or you’re a 40year sales-dawg veteran, this book is full of awesome badassery that you can see results from with ease. Many readers have told me this book is an absolute game changer for them. My goal is for you to say the same thing. Grab your copy of Elevator To The Top, and I’ll see you in the penthouse.” (Ryan went from living in prison to life in a penthouse.) When Ryan isn’t giving his book away for free, he is focusing on the next chapter for Break Free Academy. He is looking to see, “How can we make it better, further fill that gap, take it from online/seminar to a full-blown school.” Ryan eventually would like to have multiple locations for the Break Free Academy. Ryan has a clear vision and a fantastic team to achieve that. To learn more about Ryan and to get his free book Elevator to the Top go to myfunnel.link/elevator

“Knowledge + Action = Success”

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Books as Funnel Strategy for

Marketers Article By Linda Stirling

At the Start Using a book as the start of a funnel can lend momentum. A book does something even greater—it gives authority. Something about stating, “John Doe is the author of” makes an impact on readers and potential clients. Even better, if you can say, “author of the bestseller” or “author of the number one bestseller” you’re going to grab attention right away. When a book is used to begin a product launch, it can be positioned as a low-priced or free gift to begin to build your list.

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Make sure to have an incentive within the book that leads to the ultimate purchase of what you want to sell. How you create that incentive should be relevant to your other product(s). For example, if your book is about how vegans can grow their own organic vegetables and your ultimate goal is to sell an online recipe membership to vegans, don’t make your incentive something like “How to Build A Raised Bed Growing Frame.” Yes, that ties in with the book’s overall topic, but you’re not going to sell a menu subscription program from this.

Instead, offer “Ten Simply Wonderful Vegan Recipes For Healthy Eating” as your opt-in incentive. This gets the reader thinking in terms of great recipes, not how to grow the food in the first place. The mindset becomes one of how to use the foods they’ll produce or purchase, putting you smack in the position of being able to sell the answer to that question. And you always want to be able to sell solutions. With your incentive, or what’s called an ethical bribe, you want to offer the most enticing recipes—or tieins to your ultimate product— as you can to capture email addresses.

Therein lies the danger with how marketers can go wrong when using a book as the starting point of their funnel. They offer a product they’ve picked up for a few dollars that doesn’t have relevance to what they want to offer down the road, or they offer lame tips or ideas of little value. I’ve seen opt-ins that were simply more spewing about how impressive the product is. Don’t do that. Give value. You want to make a strong impression with what you offer, establishing the thought that whatever you have to sell will be of incredible value. If you’ve already built trust through your book, a genuinely valuable opt-in enforces that feeling. Building trust is the greatest thing you can achieve, so don’t treat it lightly. The other thing to be aware of when using a book as the starting point of your funnel is how to position your incentive. It’s likely that you’ll have an eBook version. Because Amazon.com is among the largest retailers in the world and is the largest book retailer in the U.S., you will want to have your eBook on sale there. Amazon’s “Look Inside The Book” feature allows readers to see the first ten percent of the book’s contents. If you’ve cluttered that up with a table of contents, acknowledgment page, copyright page, etc., the

reader may not get to any of the content that compels them to purchase the book. Instead, put all that content at the end of your book and place your incentive right up front. (Yes, Amazon allows you to set your table of contents at the back of the book, in case you were wondering.) That allows even those readers who don’t buy the book to see the freebie when they look inside the book, and some may even skip buying the book and go directly to your offer—thus immediately becoming part of your funnel. An instant win! Provide the incentive at the back of the book, too, for many other readers may not want to opt for anything until they determine whether or not what you’re offering feels valuable. Amazon’s terms of service don’t allow you to have a link that goes directly to an opt-in that’s a standalone element on your website, so you’ll want to include other items on this page, turning it into an informational page. Maybe you include one or two recipes which the reader doesn’t have to optin to receive, along with some beautiful images of fresh produce, a story about how easy it is to cook simple and enticing organic meals, a list of herbs to have on hand, and so on. In other words, keep the general theme of this page in line with what you ultimately want to sell: recipes by subscription. Another way to set yourself up for a better chance of snagging that potential client is to list the fact that you have bonuses in the book inside the Amazon book description itself. Amazon no longer allows you to put a direct link to a bonus in your book description that resides on their site, but you can say something along the line of “Readers of this book will receive a special bonus: ‘Ten Simply Wonderful Vegan Recipes For Healthy Eating’ a collection of the author’s alltime favorite standbys that guests never fail to compliment her on.” Including something like that in your book description will appeal to a lot of potential readers and may be the deciding factor for purchasing your book instead of another. Perhaps the greatest advantage of all that a book offers as the starting point for developing a funnel is that you can place a book where millions of people can see it . . . Without spending a dime. For additional insights from Linda go to: FunnelMagazine.com/read

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STRATEGY Article by Hawk Mikado

ne of the smartest things that you can do is follow a proven formula. A strategy is all about taking what’s currently working and what has been proven to work, time and time again, and implementing it so that you can develop tactics to make an impact on your business.

ere’s one critical distinction. A strategy is a sequence of events that you’ve planned out for the long term. A tactic is something that you plan on doing work right away. A strategy, for instance, is developing a system, like a funnel, to bring somebody through the buying process. A tactic is driving traffic from Facebook ads so that you can put someone through that strategy.

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DESIGNED FOR YOU Customized Answers for Your Biz

The INVERT formula is designed to take your business to the next level, truly get your business into an impact driven, creative space, where you’re able to create your success...designed by you. It’s up to you to create the strategy and implement the tactics that make it able to happen. The INVERT formula is one of the biggest ways to make the incredible changes and make a big impact, both on the world and on your bank account so that you can make the most significant shifts in the world. What I’d like to introduce you to is a way to understand and learn the INVERT formula. I can’t explain it to you in just a page or two so we will be doing a deep dive on each of the steps in each edition of Funnel Magazine.

INVERT FORMULA This formula has been proven time and time again. We just put a nice label on it. Our formula has been derived from companies like Google, Facebook, Disney, Nike, and many other highly successful, Fortune 500 companies.

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IMPACT NICHE VISION ENGAGEMENT RECOMMENDATION TRANSFORMATION

ula m r o F T INVER

d e n g i Des ur

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o y e k a t to the o t s s e busin evel. next l

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Big Picture Insights to Shortcut the Process: It takes marketing savvy, copywriting skills, technical expertise and software, online advertising know-how, passion, persistence, and patience. Of course, if you have the budget, you can hire all these things out. To get great sales funnels is not cheap, it will cost lots of time or lots of money. But when it works, it will pay you back, over and over and over. I made the mistake of thinking I had a niche when I just had a product type. When I launched my Whiteboard Video Package, I was working with clients in a broad cross-section of industries. I thought if I just advertised whiteboard videos online, that would be enough. It wasn’t. I needed a particular audience to target, so I could get to know them and target exactly their needs with my product. When I noticed that over half the people finding me online were in the financial services industry, I thought, “That’s who’s finding me, so I should go find them.” So I did, and that was a major key to making my online sales funnel work. Be sure to choose a narrow niche that you can get to know intimately and serve directly. It will make all the difference in your online sales funnel success.

d o o ly g p.

l a ea h e c r not ta

e g To

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f s e l sa

The Reality

of Your First Successful Funnel... Article by Jill Addison

f you’re reading this article, I know you’re very interested in getting an automated online system to bring you new clients and customers effortlessly. Something that works even when you’re not working. And let me tell you from personal experience when it works, it is a beautiful thing. I’ve spent the last 18 months perfecting my online sales funnel, and now it is indeed running on autopilot and bringing new clients into my life effortlessly. But I’m not going to lie; it’s not easy to build a successful sales funnel.

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• • • • •

Choose a niche. Test various avenues to reach your target Test your lead magnet Automate your followup Use video to accelerate your sales funnel

When I was learning about online advertising, I tested several different media platforms to reach my target audience, including Google ads, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Facebook. Through measuring my results (no easy feat), I could see which one was the most effective in reaching my audience. So then I turned off the others and focused my advertising spend on the one that was producing the highest ROI. You may be able to guess where your ideal client is hanging out online, but it’s always a good idea to test your assumptions. Sometimes what works will surprise you..

Now, let’s look at some practical tools you’ll need to get it done.

After you’re satisfied that you have an offer that is enticing your target audience to give you their email address in exchange for it, now you’re ready to refine your offer. For instance, if you’re doing a webinar, do it live until you see a big positive response to your content. Then, and only then, you’re ready to automate that webinar. If you collect hundreds of emails, and then you never contact those people again, it’s a huge waste of time, money and energy. You must follow up, and the best way to do that is through an automated sequence. That commonly includes emails, but can also include physical mailings and sales calls. Probably the best option is a combination. For instance, I’ve found that an automated email sequence offering a “15 Minute Digital Marketing Strategy Session” is effective in generating sales call opportunities. I’ve found that video has made my Opt In pages convert at a higher rate. It’s also helped me close deals as I’ve incorporated videos into my automated email follow up sequences. There’s something magical about a video that engages people and helps them feel a personal connection to you. I often have people tell me “I feel like I already know you.” It’s because they’ve been “spending time with me” by watching my video tips all these years. So that’s a big picture look at some principles for building a successful online funnel.

Offer: If you’re going to put your offer on your website, I recommend you use Wordpress. It’s the most widely used platform for websites, and it gives you flexibility to easily change what’s on your website. Another option is a web page drag and drop builder. You just drag and drop your photos and text and type your changes right into the page. If you’re planning to do a lot of testing of different pages (where you’ll need to be continually generating new web pages), this is worth the investment. (It’s much cheaper than working with your webmaster if you’re doing a large volume of changes each month.) A third option is to automate a successful webinar. Once I had my successful live webinar recorded, I automated it. Automating your follow up: Email is the easiest and cheapest way to follow up, so that’s a good place to start. Even basic email newsletter systems like Mailchimp and Constant Contact have what’s known as “autoresponders”. These are email sequences you can set up to drip out over time. For instance, when someone opts in to your offer, you may set it to trigger an autoresponder sequence that will send them emails every three days for the next three weeks. If you want to take it to the next level, you can use more sophisticated programs. These programs enable you to responsively react to the actions your audience takes. For instance, if they buy your product, or take another action like scheduling a call with you, you can set your system to stop the current autoresponder sequence and start another more appropriate one, based on their responses. Hosting your videos: Although there are video platforms with fancy metrics like Wistia, I believe YouTube is the best solution for most small businesses The more views you get on YouTube, the higher you’ll rank with search engines like YouTube and even Google. Most people are surprised to discover YouTube is the second biggest search engine in the world, second only to Google.

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SOCIALPLATF The Marketer’s Guide to Social Media Platforms

Article by Chad Lio

hen many think of the internet, they immediately default to social media. And for a good reason. Not only does it seem like a new social media platform is emerging every second, but the amount of time and users that they acquire is nothing short of impressive. What’s the most appealing factor to marketers that these social media platforms accomplish more than any other vehicle on the internet? Attention. Attention is the Holy Grail that marketers flock to. The more users and daily views, the bigger the opportunity to reach your target demographic to sell your product or service. But with so many social media platforms to market on, which one(s) are right for your business goals. Here is a breakdown of the most popular social media platforms and the marketing opportunities they provide. Facebook If this is your first time hearing about Facebook, then you may be in the running

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for the worst marketer award. Facebook’s incredible growth and innovation have accomplished leaps and bounds for a relatively young company. With over 1.8 billion active users, there’s no doubt your target audience is on Facebook What makes Facebook such a crucial tool is their innovation; they continually develop tools for both the users (Facebook Live, 360 photos and video, Messenger) along with marketers (various types of ads, retargeting tools, and analytics reporting with custom events). As users of Facebook continue to offer more data to Facebook (brands they engage with, favorite books, movies, companies, types of post they engage with, tools used..., Facebook will continue to innovate products to help you reach your business goals.

FORMSMEDIA Twitter Twitter is grouped in with Facebook as one of the original â&#x20AC;&#x153;darlingsâ&#x20AC;? of social media. Created in 2006, Twitter emerged as a micro-blogging platform that allowed you to share your thoughts in 140 characters or less. While Twitter grew immensely from the time of conception, it remained a mystery to many how it worked or how it compared to Facebook. As for demographics, Twitter is far behind in Facebookâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s available data and the overall pattern of users. Twitter has now evolved into a speedy provider of realtime updates, and a great place for B2C. Instagram Created in 2010, Instagram is a go-to option for teens and millennials. Strictly focused on visuals (photos and videos), Instagram provides a wealth of opportunity for marketers targeting a younger demographic that engages frequently. While Facebook saw primary engagement and active time on the platform with image sharing, Instagram focused solely on images by catering to a mobile-only platform with easy-to-user filters to make pictures visually appealing.

With exponential growth, Facebook quickly took notice and purchased Instagram for 1 billion dollars. Instagram still operates independently from Facebook but has all the features of Facebook ads, which makes it one of the most promising social media platforms for brand awareness and engagement.

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Pinterest If your ideal customer is female, Pinterest should be your number one focus. Known for its visual boards, users of Pinterest create online “boards” that contain individual “pins.” Ideal for recipes, crafts, and interior designs, each pin can contain a clickable URL directly to a website or eCommerce product. Because Pinterest provides almost a “visual search engine,” it has become the 2nd largest social media platform for referral traffic, and its ad platform is coming along. They have recently installed a “Buy” call-to-action button that should increase its potential for eCommerce ad spending.

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LinkedIn LinkedIn is technically older than Facebook, but the two platforms are completely different in goals. LinkedIn is the central hub for business professionals, which allows each user to display their professional achievements, places of employment, and carry on business networking. While LinkedIn provides an immense opportunity for thought leadership and B2B lead generation, it absolutely will not suffice for B2C (business to consumer) eCommerce. LinkedIn provides the opportunity to position yourself as a thought leader by posting good content on their blog platform. However, this requires a large time commitment and many posts to achieve.

Snapchat Snapchat is all the rage these days with a dynamic platform that originally was a head-scratcher for marketers. How could you justify marketing success with a message that automatically deletes itself after viewing? Initially, Snapchat seemed like a cool and fun platform for users but had little marketing value. Fast forward a few years, and it seems like Snapchat is mentioned in every marketing blog! While there are few ways to track the success of snaps and it has a huge learning curve for older users, the platform attracts serious content creators and is great for daily engagement and brand awareness. Starting a brand profile is free, and you’ll have to use your other social media communities to build a user base for Snapchat.

Snapchat’s ad platform first rolled out to global brands only, attracting brands like ESPN, The Food Network, Comedy Central, and People Magazine, but have recently started to expand to small businesses. You can now create geo-targeted filters that can assist in drawing awareness to local businesses, events, conferences, etc. Snapchat’s technology is evolving every day to offer users different ways to engage. They recently released Spectacles, which is a pair of sunglasses that allows you to post directly to your Snap account, like Google Glass but in a much more authentic way. Also, Snapchat has partnered with Uber to create custom filters for users as they travel. The opportunities are endless for what Snapchat can do, and it will be exciting to see how they can better the platform for marketers also.

Be the Smart Marketer While these breakdowns of each social media platform give you the “nuts and bolts” of what each provides to a marketer, spend the necessary time to research your potential customer, how they engage within the platform, and identify pain points and the proper verbiage to helping your customer. You will more likely succeed in your marketing efforts, and be far more successful in building an online community that values your company and the way you engage with them.

Reddit Known as “The Front Page of the Internet” Reddit is simple in its design and functionality. Reddit is a discussion board style social media platform that allows users to post submissions that can be original content, links, or a combination of the two. These posts can be “upvoted” and the most upvoted links or comments will be brought to the top of the conversation. Reddit is massive for referral traffic, and allows a unique opportunity to engage a specific audience with your content. As of recently, community moderators have become stricter when a new user just posts a link to a specific conversation without valuable contribution to the conversation at hand. The Reddit community is very passionate and favors a social media platform that brings insightful comments and contribution. It’s ad platform is very simple in nature, but lets you target a very niche and passionate user base.

Chad Lio is the Director of Content Marketing for The Doyle Group, an eCommerce company for the alternative health and wellness space. He is also the founder of Waiver Warrior, a fantasy football advice site. You can always find him reading up on the latest trends in content marketing, growth hacking, and effective funnel building.

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Article By Peter Drew

acebook has gone to War with the other LIVE Video companies, such as Periscope, YouTube, and Snapchat. They’ve already beaten Vine, those short 6 second videos owned by Twitter which just announced the end of Vine this week. So Facebook has already taken out one competi-

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tor, and they are winning. hey are winning because they’ve already got a captive audience of 1.8 Billion people. So what have they done to ensure their LIVE video wins and provides more views of their videos over the other companies? Well, they’ve weighted their Facebook timeline Algorithm heavily in favor of their own Live Content. That means when you go LIVE on Facebook,

all your friend’s Notifications light up, letting them know you’ve gone live. Plus they give more preference in everyone’s timelines to LIVE video over everything else including text, images, and other videos. When you go LIVE, your content pops up at the top of all your friends’ timelines, so they are ensured to see it and give you views. Now here’s where it gets interesting. We know there

are millions of groups on Facebook, and there are certainly a ton of groups of people passionate about whatever it is you’re promoting. So I searched Facebook and found there are over 100 groups dedicated to affiliate promotions, and these groups are filled with people who are passionate about making money.

Live Video

WAR

n average there are around 1500 people in each group, times that by 100 and you have 150,000 people. Which is an incredible reach especially for free and to laser targeted folk. But here’s where it gets cool, using FB LIVE as your medium to distribute your message. Here’s where it gets awesome. These

people don’t even need to be “In the group” to see my LIVE event. My live event will pop up in their timeline, generally at the top thanks to the advantage provided by the algorithm. So generally speaking my videos get a Reach on Facebook of 150,000 from one simple promotion. And it only

“In 2010 Google Indexed 620 Million Facebook Groups.”

takes me under five mins to setup this project (after the video is created.) Then, of course, the conversion will be only as good as my offer is in my video. LIVE videos need a ton of action in them to get them noticed and clicked on because the videos start playing without audio, so we use different strategies to get the engagement happening and to encourage people to click on the speaker

icon to listen in to the offer we are presenting them. Since you already know your market, you can craft the perfect message for them. The more value you present, the better your offer will convert. To top the icing on the cake, you need to give them something unexpected. An offer, they can’t refuse.

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Casino Royale Article by Joe Freeman

Are your sales funnels promoting a one-way conversation? How can you turn your sales funnel into a two-way one-to-one marketing channel? To discuss marketing metrics and data collection you first need to understand why the collection of this data is important to your business no matter what products or services you are bringing to the market. Most marketing professionals focus on mathematical marketing with the sole goal of utilizing metrics to calculate the effectiveness of their marketing campaigns so that they can take the guesswork out of their marketing and project profitability. However, there are so many metrics that are available to marketers today that it can be somewhat overwhelming.

â&#x20AC;&#x153;Statistics say that it takes 7 or more touches to get a prospective client to know, like, and trust you or your companyâ&#x20AC;? 50

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Acronym Mania (CTR) Click Through Rate, (uCTR) Unique Click Through Rate, Frequency, People Reached, (CPC) Cost Per Click, Cost Per Website Click, (DPL or CPL) Dollars/Cost Per Lead, (EPC) Earnings Per Click, (CVR) Conversion Rate, (CPA) Cost Per Customer Acquisition, Email Open Rate %, Email (CTR) Click Through Rate, Relevance Score, Webinar Show Up Rate, (CPR) Cost Per Webinar Registration, Webinar (CPA) Cost Per Attendee, (CCR) Contacts Conversion Rate, (BR) Bounce Rate, (LCV or CLV) Lifetime Customer Value, (ROR) Rate Of Return Visitors, Churn Rate...and there are many more. In some cases the old adage: “What isn’t measured cannot be managed.” can lead to information overload and get you stuck in a sea of overwhelm. All of the above metrics can provide insight into your marketing and can provide value if you learn to look at each one for their value over time instead of trying to focus on them all at once. These are the eight core marketing metrics that Conversionfly and Todd Brown have encouraged digital marketers to utilize when measuring each sales funnel. Total Sales Volume = Your total $ sales (for a given funnel) Average Visitor Value “AVV” = Your total $ sales / Your total visitors Revenue Per Lead “RPL” = Your total $ sales / Your total leads Average Cart Value “ACV” = Your total $ sales / Your total buyers Cost Per Acquisition = Your total $ ad invested / Your total buyers Lifetime Customer Value “LCV” = Your total $ sales + Jump Revenue / Total buyers Return On Investment “ROI” = total $ sales / Total ad dollars invested *100% Break-Even Speed = Your total $ sales in a given period of time / Total ad dollars invested I could go deeper into what each metric tells you and how to use it, but there are many resources available that discuss these topics. Personally, I would like to challenge you to look at marketing metrics from a different standpoint which is more focused on the data each user provides when traveling through your marketing campaigns specific to them.

The more you know about your perfect client, why they need or want your product or service, how to talk to them, how to serve them, and engage them in conversation the better chance you have for your business to thrive in the current age of information and technology overload. What are your primary goals in your marketing campaigns? Are they to gain brand and product awareness, generate leads, nurture those leads, acquire a customer, maximize your conversions and sales, engage your customers, retain customers and gain repeat buyers, earn your customers loyalty? The truth is you may have a Sales Channel for each of these goals, and one sales funnel may have multiple goals depending on where and when they are used. Your company sales funnels may have similar but tactically different marketing strategies, copy, and images but all of these goals have one thing in common, and that is that each of your marketing campaigns is another chance for you to have a conversation with your perfect audience. In most of the cases above, the leads you have already driven to your campaigns have already raised their hand by entering one or more of your sales funnels. Many marketing professionals create campaigns with visually pleasing designs and emotionally charged copy and broadcast it to the world either via blog posts, forum articles, email broadcasts, direct mail, television, radio, social media, etc. There are an abundant number of opportunities to communicate with your audience in our civilization today. However, if you do not monitor your metrics and collect data you’re having a one-way conversation with your prospective client, and you run the risk of losing touch with your audience and in some cases even annoying your audience. Statistics say that it takes 7 or more touches to get a prospective client to know, like, and trust you or your company and become a customer but once you create that relationship your client is 100% more likely to continue going to you, the company they trust on a repetitive basis. I believe that the first step in converting your sales funnels over to promote a two-way conversation is to select your mathematical marketing metrics strategically. However, it’s the following steps that my company and I enjoy focusing our attention and energy towards.

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TARGET YOUR AUDIENCE WHERE THEY WORK, LIVE, OR PLAY... with extremely precise personalized messaging that caters directly to your prospect’s needs, wants, and desires at that very moment. We combine sales funnels, Personalized URLs, Direct Mail, and Digital Advertising by onboarding and unifying your customer data. Our technology can match your client’s physical mailing address to their home or building’s internet connection allowing us to deliver your message to your client at their specific address online. making us the Mail Carrier of the internet. Contact us today to learn more about this or one of our many other online and offline marketing techniques.

ORANGETREEMARKETING.COM

JOSEPH FREEMAN | 4 12-757-5957

STRUGGLING TO WRITE, PROMOTE, OR SELL YOUR PHYSICAL OR DIGITAL PUBLICATIONS? Do you have a message to share but get overwhelmed by the complicated process of writing, designing, promoting, or selling your Physical Book, Ebook, Magazine Publication, or Catalog. Are you convinced you need a Tripwire, Checklists, Handout, Brochure, Membership Site, Blog, or any of the many information products that can be used to promote your message, create a following, and leave a lasting impression on your current or prospective client? With over 20 years experience in the graphic design, commercial print, and publishing industries we can help. We help create and sell your publication using the services provided by our many partners as well as Orange Tree Marketing.

ORANGETREEPUBLISHING.COM JOSEPH FREEMAN | 4 12-757-5957

Step two in transitioning your marketing initiative over to a two-way conversation is to utilize the things that current leads are naturally telling you about themselves while experiencing your sales funnels without adding additional technology. The utilization of email list segmentation and email triggers can do just that. I would argue that at the very least every digital marketer should be efficient with email list segmentation. What can email list segmentation do for you? Have you ever bought a marketer’s offer just to continue receiving emails day after day, week after week, encouraging you to buy the product you just bought? How did that make you feel? As a follower of a specific individual or company, we as human beings tend to get emotionally involved with the products we purchase. We’re looking for a connection, inclusion, and results. Not being recognized for your purchase feels like a slap in the face and scars that connection. And on the marketer’s side, you are wasting valuable revenue and energy trying to sell me something I already bought when you could be sending me new content and leading up to offering me the next product in your value ladder. Let me ask you if you have a sales funnel that promotes A free book -> Order Bump -> OTO -> Membership Site and I invest in the free book but do not take the OTO why would you send me an email promoting the free book especially if I haven’t received it in the mail yet? Wouldn’t it make more sense to send valuable content via email and promote another offer based on my interaction with your email topics? Email Segmentation can be configured to break your audience down into tiny subsets (buckets) based on their interaction with your sales funnels and email campaigns. One of the keys to this approach is making sure that when you include a client into another email list/bucket (ex. Bought Free Book Offer), you also remove them from the list they were on (ex. Free Book Opt-In). This allows you to promote the book to individuals who are opening your emails but did not buy the book without sending the same promotion to individuals who bought the book previously.

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Step three would be making sure to have a strong “CRM” Customer Relationship Manager and Survey Solution which would allow you to “ASK” additional questions and get to know your clients based on the data you already have. This can be a fun way to not only create a few more “buckets” of individuals who are your top clients and get to know their needs more but also prepare for step four

Step four is my personal favorite and is something I’ve had experience in for the last six years. Adding personalized content to your sales funnels based on the data you’ve collected while having a one-on-one conversation with your clients. Personalized Sales Funnels are usually referred to as “PURL” Personalized URL or Cross Media Campaigns. This approach allows me to use the data from my CRM taking into consideration segmentation and other data values to send a pinpoint marketing campaign to my current clients. PURL Campaigns are not primarily used to acquire leads but are instead used to maximize the value of a customer, lead nurturing, customer engagement, customer retention, loyalty, and referral programs. Each recipient receives their own completely personalized marketing campaign. The email, direct mail piece (postcard, letter, etc.), landing pages, funnel steps, offers, survey questions, etc. are all personalized based on the information you currently have on your customer as well as any answers they provide during the customer’s engagement in the campaign.

but to keep them coming back over and over and over again. Segmentation, Personalization, Direct Mail, Email Marketing, and Personalized Sales Funnels are being used right now to promote custom offers to players based on their actions both on the casino floor and in the marketing sent out by the casino multiple times a month. You can use these proven tactics as well, and I would encourage you to do just that no matter what product or service you have to offer your ideal audience.

As a marketing professional in the industry, today the more you approach your marketing initiatives as a two-way conversation and collect the data needed to promote the right offers with the right content at the right time the better your marketing metrics will be. I’ve had marketers argue that you can’t get 30%+ open rates in an email campaign. But if you utilize segmentation and personalization in conjunction with multiple touch points to nurture a house list it can be done. I’ve been working with casinos now for 10+ years, and they know how to use every tool available to them to not only get players on the floor and keep them there

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ransformational: The opening of a chess game, like a business startup, requires a leader who has a vision of how the enterprise will transform the market. When setting up FedEx, Fred Smith had the foresight to position his pieces like a chess player taking control of the center. He discovered that Memphis, Tennessee, provided a central location within the US, a willing airport administration partner, and the best chance to avoid the worst weather conditions from snowstorms to hurricanes. Once these critical opening decisions were made, it was possible to make FedEx what it is today.

hess is a way to practice leadership, financial management, risk management, and employee development which can transfer directly to your work. In Figure 2 which player do you think has been a better transformational leader of their chess pieces/ employees?

once asked this question to a person in my class who admitted other than how to spell chess she knew nothing about the game. Which side would you rather play? She considered for a few seconds and said “White.” When I asked her why, she said: “I don’t know for sure, but it looks like White is up to something.” Her insightful response demonstrated how intuitive and visually compelling leadership could be. Yes, White is up to something and although they have not won the game if Black is not careful their King is about to be run out of town in a hurry.

o be successful in your company startup use transformational leadership to build a strong foundation upon which to grow your enterprise.

J.K. Egerton is the CEO and founder of Business on the Board™, a leading-edge talent development company that uses a game-based approach with business strategies and tactics. His book, Business on the Board, is a #1 management self-help bestseller that reveals how business and chess are related. It’s available on Amazon.

Next Issue: Leadership: Managing the Situation at Hand.....use situational leadership because your business is in a unique position now that the opening is over. Analysis of threats, gaining an advantage known as making a profit, and staying on course uses situational leadership. The middlegame in chess and business requires deep understanding of strategies and tactics you need to know. JANUARY 2017

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When will enough be enough? Article by Tim Matthews

As men, we rarely feel like enough is enough and it’s affecting the quality of our leadership. We typically run a cycle of ‘create – conquer – next,’ ‘create – conquer - next,’ ‘create – conquer – next’...why? Whether we like to admit it or not, we are constantly trying to prove ourselves, and often, in the pursuit of proving we sacrifice our health, our relationships and ourselves. For me, this was unconscious for 29 years of my life, and it remains so for a lot of the leaders that we support, especially the coaches, entrepreneurs, and CEOs. The intention of this article is to bring awareness to this and to offer perspective as to why this is happening so we can shift from a place of hustle, grind and forcing to one of flow, ease and allowing...to a place of achieving the ‘holy grail’ that we all set out to experience on Day 1... having it all in every area of business and life without constant stress, struggle, and sacrifice. We’re in a totally different era to that of our fathers and forefathers. What worked for them does not work for us. Times have changed, but for so many of us, we’re still running the same mental scripts that our fathers ran in 1950 and it’s affecting how we lead ourselves professionally and personally. Let’s face it, as men we’ve been left behind. The past 30 years has seen the explosion of the women’s movement; women now have more options and opportunities in society than ever before. It’s no longer about men being the ‘bread winner’ and women staying at home. Sure that may happen in certain situations, but even there it’s a choice, not a given. Where has this left the male leaders of today? I see a lot of men that are lost and I was one of them. We’re stuck in the middle ground of knowing that there’s a different way to lead, a more effective way to lead but not knowing what it is.

A LOT OF WHAT I HEARD GROWING UP WAS, ‘MEN DON’T CRY’

Like so many men, I knew I was capable of powerfully leading my organization and myself without having to compromise every area of business and life, but the question was how?

WE’RE STILL RUNNING THE SAME MENTAL SCRIPTS THAT OUR FATHERS RAN IN

1950

I knew the hustle, grind, and force that served my father wasn’t going to get me there. I tried that for seven years, and I was constantly putting out fires. It’s about working smarter, not harder, but what is smarter? It’s time for something different, not something more, but what does different look like? So, let me ask you a question: What does success look like to you? And what type of leader are you when you are living out your success? My bet is that when you are truly visualising your ultimate, abundant life, you’re not the type of leader who is hard on himself, who judges his every move and who never allows himself to feel happy and successful. So where does this come from? From my experience of working closely with hundreds of high-achieving men it usually comes from our definition of what being a man means to us, and our unconscious desire for love and connection. At the end of the day, men are still human beings who crave love and connection as much as the next person, but we’ve been taught that emotion is a weakness. A lot of what I heard growing up was, ‘men don’t cry,’ ‘don’t be a girl,’ ‘man up.’ I was taught to believe that I had to compete with other men, it was either me, or them, and it wasn’t going to be me. Fast-forward 22 years to when I’m leading my first business and how did this serve me?

“We are actually CHOOSING a state of being that most people consider to be an affliction and take medication to alleviate.” - Dr. John Ratey, Harvard University

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At every turn I ignored my gut instinct because I’d learned to shut down my inner voice, I’d learned that my inner voice didn’t matter. Every decision I made was out of desperation for success; I was hungry but needy. Success was the thing that was going to prove myself to my father, to the world and everyone around me. In reality, the tug of war that was raging inside of me was affecting every decision I made and impacting every action I took. I was rarely ever fully present in my business because of the guilt I was carrying at sacrificing every other area of my life. I was unknowingly carrying baggage, and it weighed me down. I felt exhausted, empty and alone. I daren’t speak to anyone about how I felt because I believed if I did then it would be a weakness. I pushed my emotions down and continued to put on a brave face as I hustled like a mad man for 15, 16, 17 hours a day. Business was number one, and it came before everything – my health, my relationships and myself. I’ve come to learn that this pattern is true of so many high achieving men in today’s world. They’re running outdated scripts that served their fathers in their day but that do not serve us in today’s world. Where has this left us? We deny our emotion, we show up in a mask, and we put on a brave face trying to prove ourselves. We hold back, we don’t feel fully worthy, and we play down our wins and wander through life looking like strong men, but in reality, we often feel like lost boys looking for acceptance. We don’t know who we truly are. We like to think that this doesn’t affect our business, but it does. We like to think that our business is the one place we’ve got it all together, the one place we feel safe to express, but the truth is we know we’re playing smaller than we’re capable of playing and we often feel empty there too. We’re never fully free to be in the total flow. Second-guessing, doubting. Not taking fast action, not taking big action and our relationships often offer the biggest mirror for this – the place where we fear being fully vulnerable and the place where we hold back the most. There are people in our lives dying to feel us, literally dying to feel us, and we’re holding back because we’ve been taught not even to feel ourselves, and if we don’t feel ourselves then how can anyone else fully feel us?

ut here’s the thing – it’s ok that we’re in this position, in fact, it’s exciting that we’re in this position! If we choose to combine the rugged work ethic that we’ve developed with a connection to oneself, then imagine what would be possible? The concept of ‘having it all’ doesn’t seem that far away…We can drop the stories of emotion being a weakness, and we begin to feel ourselves fully, and others, for the first time. The result is that our relationships can take on a whole new level of depth and connection because we’re no longer afraid of being vulnerable and we’re finally expressing ourselves. Now can you imagine the creative powers you tap into when you are leading your business every single day feeling aligned because out of the office you’re rocking one of the most important areas of your life?

and from here true success will flow. One of the greatest gifts we give our high achieving men is a community, a space to recognize that this type of openness, communication, and connection in men is ok. Space where they won’t be shunned or laughed at if they express themselves in this way.

“I hustled like a mad man for 15, 16, 17 hours a day.” Bravado has had its day; it’s now the time for a new version of masculinity that supports the new version of ‘conscious business’ that is sweeping the world. New age leadership for the new age man and it all starts with a connection to oneself.

e drop the desire to prove ourselves and let go of the need for acceptance because we become our own source of validation. As a result, we have more clarity, conviction, and confidence to play BIG. The need to work 15, 16, 17 hour days isn’t there any more because we are communicating more effectively with our team, so our business has better leadership and we’re taking bigger, bolder and faster action so the business is generally in better shape. Plus, we naturally want to spend time in our relationships, so we don’t want to be in our business for so long. It’s refreshing; it’s food for the soul. We’re no longer being controlled out of an unconscious desire to try and prove; instead, it’s our conscious desire to live, serve and be served. Life is meant to be lived, and life is today not someday. It’s time to live it, Tim Matthews is the founder of “The Powerful Man,” he is a men’s empowerment coach, speaker, and soon-to-be author! He is the creator of the ‘activation method’, and he is a master at helping men to unleash themselves from the patterns of selfsabotage and negative self-talk so they can have it all without stress, struggle, and sacrifice.

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Mikado // Kate

en you ially wh yees c e p s e plo ugh eur is to one day 50 em ake it. n e r p e r t . In n en to m Being a left on their own weren’t going . s his m e h t of m This wa hey t e ” ll h ? d t A il n . f ja a o n , e o e go t Som ,000 e froz nts wer ds and family. yroll was $500 krupt so I don’t u o c c a ban . Pa The r frien top fire you then another 30 ow do I not go o t e was on st e h v a e k h H “ li d , n lt d ju a e off ndere ng. He f mbled, he had d li c y c were laid nths Russell wo s ll ha e ca . Hu o ething h worked for him wished that he m o For 18 m htmare. s h g and that nig throu real life s going f all the people 00K to the IRS a w e h , ck S1 oo y. e owed oking ba d to let g compan e h t h While lo ld and then ha the company. H it r or orking w ing in his powe d il w w u l e b il h t e t s r f o ere elp yth ey ple to h le that w had to do ever s the orders th p o e p ten peo fire him. e , s pe to th locked. Russell couldn’t proce t 100% reserve o t o h s s e o iv b g a ere un ad to other them a ed and dy, he h the accounts w missioned bas merchant had en they told an e g a r t Wh om he ntil In this weeks u ple who were c ere unlocked, t roll was locked. o w t s a peo It w nts w s pay his sales nce the accou . For six month p e e k g to .O everythin inging in were br hey would keep gt meanin

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froze any still p m o c the me $100K; e get here… ired. So y g a l in s s ia e c r c h e one did fom e pro would b go to jail.” How en an in s and making m h y e w h r t e t h n t r ape is fa trying I nt accou V with h ds in the newsp . T mercha k was, “If I stop g in h watc his tiny a in etrics worked . sell was eme of buying without the m could th s ll u e s R s , u g R nin ow sch . So ds on late eve ds are n h quick ork for it ould get his han new w ll e s It was a mber the get ric hat Facebook A s e Ru and he c e w he mad irect mail ads pport his wife event. ; t c may rem . A little bit like u d o d to su g an ll the m the pr uy him signed up for a stler he needed hich was hostin with the b o t d e da t, w wre st. He sked his roduct. H e interne ge, as a email li ith n a g Russell a d bought the p orward to colle g money on th avin ce w an kin tf nce of h age an audien mith’s a t r o tush off as hooked. Fas mercial on ma p eng en S the im fo w ht him aperon how to n added Dag otional g And he saw another in u a t o e yner wh from Andre Ch ls does. He the ory to create em o J family. H k r a nne ckst er M ing red und g emails learn g that ClickFu en give the ba o t n e m h in th ritin He il”. nd t ad”) in every stered w eld Ema keting d ell l state a r a m “ is then ma , which is now eak emotiona n Settle’s “Seinf e calls h s of study, Russ g p e h in e B ll h m e t h t o t it y h r a w o st lazer (w s. After 2 year ering with the starting the next level G f l o il t B p , n e y conc Kenned antify his result psell was part he DVD was g that to n in a k a D T , . u t t u m impac Abraha was able to q oduct. The first rds. The cost of y a J m e r dvice fro le Adwo dcasts h n info p Taking a books and po s: a potato gu me from Goog ca es ny and ma rst internet succ gun kit. Sales to fi had his o sold the pota 0. 0 h 1 w people he upsell was $ dt $27, an

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“FOR ANYONE OUT HERE THAT THINKS IT’S THE RUSSELL BRUNSON SHOW, IT’S NOT”

Before Russell finished college he was making 1 million in gross sales (profit minus the ad cost). Using Google Adwords worked for awhile but soon the market became saturated, and he began losing money. Russell attended a marketing seminar, and it was his first time experiencing people running to the back of the room. He did the math, $60K than $100K and he realized that real money comes when you learn to sell. He was inspired by the book Ready, Fire, Aim and started speaking on stages. For his first offer no one bought. He took 15 different courses to learn and spent two years on the road speaking 2 to 3 times a month. At Internet Prophets Live when Russell introduced ClickFunnels before his talk finished people were raising their hands to buy. He wasn’t even allowed to make an offer at that event. Russell had figured it out. He went from the stage to webinars and then helped to craft “The Perfect Webinar.” In one year his client hit 1 million in sales. From there he built several companies: Supplement, Coaching, Software, Dating, Weight loss. With a team of 8, they were building funnels, and it took them three months to go from idea to launching the funnel. He would have conversations with people, and their eyes would glaze over at the complexity of what they would need to do online. At the time a traditional web build took $15k and 2 months. Russell saw a pattern in the way they were building that the elements were the same and only some of the pieces needed to change. Initially, he hired six developers to create ClickFunnels and were still unsuccessful after four years. Russell brought on two key partners to help build ClickFunnels, Dylan Jones and Todd Dickerson.

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It took Todd only three months to build the code for ClickFunnels. Russell says the key difference was that Dylan and Todd had a different mindset that the employees. Between Russell, Dylan, and Todd they equally split ownership 33%. “For anyone out here that thinks it’s the Russell Brunson Show, it’s not.” Russell flew Dylan out to Boise, handed him a check and launched the beta for ClickFunnels. Dylan is responsible for the look and feel of how ClickFunnels works for its users, the user interface (UI). Todd built the backend. With the help of two developers hired from Toptal, they used Ruby to make ClickFunnels work. Russell identified the base of what ClickFunnels needed: • • • • • • •

Landing Page Email Sale Upsell Affiliate Shopping cart (Stripe) SMS

And they eat their cooking.

It didn’t go well. The user interface was initially ugly. Six people received Free Access for a lifetime. They set a goal of 10,000 members by the first month. It took them a year. At first, they had a handful of users (1,200) then that dropped to just 200, and not all of them were paying.

to his own list and made an addition $150K. Both emails were sent on the same day, and he made $250k.

He offered a trial of ClickFunnels on the landing page and with a split test found that webinars worked better for the home page selling 3 to 4 times more trials. With the free trial link, people Filled with doubt, Russell wanted to see it, but ClickFunnels wondered, “What went wrong?” made less money as a SaaS Todd and Dylan did some website. split testing and came to the Russell did the webinars himself conclusion that people didn’t as the CEO and seller for the understand it. Russell spoke with company. He brought on John Mike Filsaime of WebinarJam Parks to handle the Facebook and landed a speaking gig in Ads. San Diego at his 3-day event. They were out of the woods…or so Russell created his “Funnel they thought. Hacking” presentation with a special offer. 38% of the room closed. At the event, Russell realized that he needed to share that it applied to all industries when he spoke with the audience at the back of the room. He had a friend with a list. After promoting ClickFunnels he did $100k in sales, then he promoted

ClickFunnels runs on ClickFunnels. The three core pieces: 1. CF build funnels (initially had to integrate with CRMs) 2. Shopping cart/Affiliate (Backpack) 3. Email automation (Actionetics) When ClickFunnels launched, it didn’t have all of that functionality. Initially, they had to integrate a shopping cart. After getting customer feedback, they sent out an email for people to sign up for ClickFunnels for no charge the first 60 days.

ClickFunnels, Backpack & Actionetics

ClickFunnels Runs on ClickFunnels

Now ClickFunnels runs with Actionetics. The CRM software which has tagging, smart lists and much more for keeping track of your customers. The second piece that was added was Backpack which is the cart integration that also allows you to track your affiliates.

The code for ClickFunnels is Ruby and allows the user to work in a GUI environment. This means you don’t need to know code in order to build a page. There are ways that you can use code for the more savvy FunnelHackers.

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“People’s Lives Change Because of

CLICKFUNNELS” “I was taking my family, and we were flying to London to speak to a bunch of entrepreneurs out there about ClickFunnels. So, I’m on the plane flying across the ocean with my family. I brought my wife and my kids, amazing experience. We land. You don’t have the Internet initially. I [check in] to make sure everything is good. I start seeing messages on Facebook and Skype and everything blowing up that we’re done, like, “What does that mean?” We’re racing to the hotel trying to get in there. It turned out the database server company we used in the past had kind of like handcuffed us. We were trying to move over to Amazon’s Aurora; I think it’s called, their highend database servers. This company handcuffed us like, “No, we won’t let you leave. If you do leave, you’re going to be down for a day to two to be able to migrate everything over.” Then all of a sudden the databases and the backups all just crashed. I guess that like on the timeline, they said to restore the databases, they said it was going to be a 24-hour thing. It ended up taking three weeks before this database server had been restructured. We would have been down for three weeks. Luckily our CTO and Dylan, these guys are geniuses. They saw that. They went to Amazon Aurora servers and rebuilt the whole database structure, migrated everything over. We were down I think for about six and a half hours or so. So, I’m sitting there in London not doing anything. Everyone is freaking out. ClickFunnels is down. My sites are down. I’m losing money. Everyone is losing money. Everyone wants to kill us. I was just like, ‘What do you do?” As the leader in this situation, do you try to ignore it? Do you blow it off? This is my first time as a real CEO. I don’t know the right thing to do. All I JANUARY 2017 * FUNNEL MAGAZINE

remember is how pissed I was, and I thought, “I’m going to let our community know how upset I am because I don’t want to try to hide this and so I got my iPhone out, and I’m sitting in the hotel room in London, I’m tired. My kids are going crazy. I just told everybody that it was unacceptable. I was mad. Everything was unacceptable. We were pissed. This was not okay that this happened to us and to you guys and everybody. I made this video. I posted it in our Facebook group. We had at the time about 10,000 people in our Facebook group. I posted it, and I said, “This is what’s happening. We’re sorry.” I didn’t know what was going to happen. I didn’t know if people were going to be mad at me or whatever. What was interesting was from that, we ended up getting 500-600 comments of people saying, “We understand. We’re here for the long haul. I don’t care what happens. We’re here through thick and thin. We’re with you guys. We’re praying for you guys.” Even Stripe who’s our merchant provider, they sent us this huge gift basket in the mail, like, “We’re here. We want to make sure you guys…” All this stuff, it was like this really weird rallying of our community that everybody came together and like supported us. It was the coolest thing in the world, and then six hours later, we were back up, and everything was functional. All these little hiccups we had been having over the last two or three months–we found out later it was because of the database server. We moved it over; it was done. All the issues were gone. Stability was perfect. We were looking at our log like, “If we’re down six hours, people are going to leave.” I can’t tell you how stressful it was. We looked at the logs, our cancellations. Our cancellations during that time did not dip at all.

It was just this thing where our community loved us, and what we’re doing so much, so they said, “We’re behind you.” It was just this really cool experience where I feel like we shifted from like a company to a community. I feel like the community did that as well. Ever since then, it’s been cool. But it was definitely a very scary, very painful day.” Russell loves working with entrepreneurs and helping people to get their message out. “People’s lives change because of ClickFunnels.” In their first year they achieved twelve million in revenue and an additional five million in coaching. Their second year they are performing at a million a month. When profits are at 40-50% margin, you know you are doing something right. With affiliates, buying ads, word of mouth and organic growth Russell can do some pretty crazy things. Like, pay for leases of dream cars for his affiliates. How was he able to this? Something Russell calls the mañana principle. Most people will push things back to tomorrow, again and again, and again. Russell doesn’t leave the office until it’s done. Tomorrow is not an option. He also talked about how it’s like the Mexican mafia that come into your house in the middle of the night. They have a bag of gold in one hand and a gun in the other. Lead or gold. Most people make a choice for gold. Don’t deviate. This commitment comes from his background in wrestling. You have to make weigh-ins, or you don’t get to compete. You might be wondering what got Russell out of the pickle he was in at the beginning of the story. Well if you’ve ever met or seen a video of Russell you know that he loves webinars and here’s why. The webinar saved

his business. Russell went from broke to one million in 3 months with the webinar, which got him out of the situation. “Get one webinar that works.” If he knew no one and only had his current knowledge, a laptop, and $500 what would he do: In one week he would get the trial of GoToWebinar, pick or create a product or service he loves, spend the $500 on Facebook ads, and pitch the product on the webinar.

message out) which Provides Value. You need a platform. Send gifts to build a relationship. A great example of this was someone that wanted to build a relationship with the author of Ask Ryan Levesque. Ryan loves LEGO, and so the person sent him Lego figures of Ryan and his family. For $10 in shipping and handling, that person made themselves memorable. Promotion: Products (Package as a gift), Deliver random pizza with a note (yes Russell did that too.) Parasite marketing – Facebook Ads to target (Tony Robbins, Zig Ziglar) push messages to their audience and finally JV.

The best advice he got was from Mark Joyner, and that is that the only thing you focus on is “the list.” Russell emails every day or at least he tries to. The point of the emails is to be entertaining, exciting, and fun. He treats it like The Russell . Show similar to the way that Ellen Degeneres and Oprah Winfrey had their daytime talk show. People are on your list to be entertained so focus on 90% entertainment and 10% content when it comes to emails. Russell talks about the attractive character being the center of the email sequences. He created the attractive character from a relationship expert. Build the relationship and then blast to everyone and cross-promote products. The Dream 100 How do you find the dream people that you want to partner with? Well, Russell figured out this one too. After working with Chet Holmes, author of The Ultimate Sales Machine, He identified that first, you have to figure out who is your dream partner. Dig Your Well (before you’re thirsty). Do homework ahead of time. Ask yourself: How do I build a relationship? Comment on Posts, Follow, Friend, buy products, subscribe – get to know the people that you want to rub shoulders with. Start your own podcast and give them exposure (push their

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Hawk: What are the three key secrets that you’re going to be sharing in the Expert Secrets book? Russell: Cool, so the Expert Secrets book, if you look at it as a whole there’s a couple of things. The first thing is to try and teach people how to build a huge following. One of the biggest problems people have when they’re trying to sell things online is that they’re selling to cold audiences or they’re not building a following. I’ve done a ton of research on how cults are built and how are movements built and all these kind of things. The first step is, how do we build a movement of people to follow you and to listen to you? That’s probably the first big pillar of it. The second thing is, after you have a group of people, how do you speak to them and communicate to them in a way that gets them to change their belief patterns and to want to follow you and to buy your products and things like that? It’s understanding how to sell correctly in a cool way that gets people to like you and doesn’t make you feel all salesy and weird. Then the last piece is now you got this thing, what are the funnels that are tied to that? What are the funnels that get people in so they can hear the message so they can buy your products and follow you into your movement that you’re starting? Those are some of the core things. Hawk: Awesome. What’s one of the things that you feel is really important to be able to market your book? Is this one going to be a free plus shipping as well? Russell: Kind of. We’re going to be doing a kind of different funnel. Yes, it will be a free plus shipping book, but then we have a kit that’s called a funnel hacker kit. It’s going to have both the DotComSecrets book, the Expert Secrets book, and then nine other booklets that come with it. It’s going to be either the book or for super cheap like 30 or 40 bucks they’re going to get the kit with basically nine books in it. It’s going to be kind of a different funnel. In my mind, if someone has this kit with both the books it’s like the full system of what everything you need to be successful in life. While we’re doing the book free plus shipping, the goal will be to get people to buy the kit, which is everything. Hawk: Okay, and that’s going to be the bump order around this one? Russell: I’m not quite sure yet. I’m not sure if it’s going JANUARY 2017 * FUNNEL MAGAZINE

to be a bump order. I think it’s going to be two options. I haven’t designed it all yet, but in my mind, it’s going to be two options either the book or the kit, and then there will be bumps on either of those depending what you pick. Kate: I love Simon Sinek’s Start With Why. I’d love to find out why you decided to write this book. Russell: It’s kind of funny because I swore I’d never write another book again after the DotComSecrets book because there was so much pain associated with writing it. What I found in our community as a whole, I feel like the ClickFunnels community has become really good at building funnels. That’s what the DotComSecrets book was about, the strategy behind funnels and how they work and how they interact with each other. I feel like as a community, everyone’s amazing at that. I feel like where people are really struggling is selling in those funnels. How do you create the right offers to sell? How do you communicate with your audience? That’s what people are missing. I see people that put all this time and energy and money into a funnel, and they roll it out and then it doesn’t work for them, and it’s almost always tied to the fact that they do not know how to communicate. Persuasion, how do you get somebody to actually purchase your product or your service? It was almost like there was so much frustration around people getting stuck. I was like, this was the piece that’s kind of missing. That was kind of the reason why ... I mean there’s a lot of reasons why, but that was one of the big reasons why. This was the piece that people are struggling with and it’s so powerful when they understand it. When you get it, it makes this whole process simple. A good case study is Justin Williams who was in my inner circle, and they flip houses. They flip 100 houses a year. He nets over a million bucks doing that. They went out, and they were like, “We want to teach people how to do this.” They created this course and had these funnels and tried to launch it and for the life of them, they could not have success. They tried over and over. They were like. “We created this. It’s amazing. It would change people’s lives, but we can’t get people to give us money in exchange for this thing we created.” They almost gave up. They were literally on the brink of

shutting down their information business and sticking with the real estate. Then as a last ditch effort, they came to Funnel Hacking Live and then they joined the inner circle. When they came into it, all we had to do was teach them how to sell. As soon as we taught them how to sell, within eight months, they did a million dollars in sales with it. This year they’ll probably do three or four million. It’s just been skyrocketing. The one piece they were missing, they had the great product, they had everything they needed, they just didn’t know how to get people to desire their product and to want to give them money. It was such a simple transition that when we gave that to them, it became really easy. I’m like, “If we can give this to everybody it will give them the ability to sell the products and services.” The reason why I like working with entrepreneurs is because when entrepreneurs have a product or service, it changes people’s lives. The moment you can change people’s lives if you can break their faults, belief patterns, get them to actually invest in your product then it unlocks the gate to that. It’s like, “If I can get entrepreneurs better at the selling, then they can serve more people, they can change more people’s lives.” It kind of fits back to what my mission is, which is helping entrepreneurs to have what they need to be able to effect change in their customers’ lives. That’s kind of the why behind it. Hawk: From that, you mentioned he made a couple million. I saw your post about the two comma club. What inspired that?

As soon as I knew this was possible I was like, “I want that, I need ... “ He has proved that that’s possible. Just like, what’s his name? Roger Bannister? The guy that ran a four-minute mile. Everyone thought it was impossible and then he did it and afterward everyone else did it. Same thing happened with John Reese, he made a million dollar day and then me and Mike Filsaime and all these people were like, “We got to make a million dollars,” and then we all did. It gave me something to shoot towards and have belief; I could actually do this. That’s what Two Comma Club is about. I want everyone to see there are tons of people who are doing this. I think right now there’s 51, 52 something people in ClickFunnels who had a funnel that’s made over $1,000,000. I want to put those people up on a pedestal, so people see it and then they’re like, “Holy cow, lots of people are doing this, this is completely possible,” and now they got something to shoot towards and work towards. You give them belief that it’s actually possible. That’s kind of the focus and the goal for the Two Comma Club. Almost like a light that people can look at and say, “That’s where I’m going, that’s where I want to get to.” Hawk: Based on the Expert Secrets, what would you say is the quickest path for people to go from wherever they are now to the Two Comma Club?

Russell: Yeah. In fact, if you wanted, you can go look, if you go to 2commaclub.com there’s a video there that tells the story as well. When I got started in this business, my goal was to make a thousand bucks a month. That was what I aspired to. I’m like, “If I can do that I’ll be rich.” During that process of me trying to figure out how to make a thousand bucks a month, there was John Reese. During that time he launched his product Traffic Secrets and they did $1,000,000 in a day. When he did that, I remember getting emails about him and talking about him; I remember looking at that and was like, “Man, he made $1,000,000 in a day.” My whole perception of what was possible in this business and my life shifted. I thought my reality now was like this is possible.

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Russell: Yeah, so if you look at the Expert Secrets book, the first half of the book is picking the market and figuring out how to build your culture. All those kinds of things. The second half of the book is teaching basically my perfect webinar script. That’s half the book, is the perfect webinar. If you look in my Inner Circle, I would say probably 70% of the people in there wrote a perfect webinar, and that’s where they made all their money so far. I think for me, that’s the fastest way. If you create a really good product framework from 300 bucks to a couple of thousand dollars, create a webinar around it. If you look at the way the webinar is structured, it’s not selling on the webinar, it’s figuring out what your audience’s false beliefs are and reframing them for them. Then they’ll buy the product in the end. I think that’s the fastest way. That’s why this whole book, it’s a whole bunch of set up to help them understand who they actually are and how they can contribute and change people’s lives. It’s like this is the tool, the presentation, to give you money. I think that’s the fastest way for someone to hit the Two Comma Club. Hawk: How can you build your culture? How do you create that environment and build that group? You’ve got the CF Group; you have the DotComSecrets group, I’m sure there will be an Expert Secrets group, how did you develop that in a way that truly just magnifies itself and continues to build on itself? Russell: Well, one thing in the Expert Secrets book, you’ll see the first three chapters about that. I looked at that when I was doing all this research. It doesn’t matter who you look at; you can look at anyone from the way that Hitler did his thing to the way that Christ

did his. The evil spectrum, the good and evil spectrum. Both of them did it the exact same way. There are three things that are the pattern. The pattern is number one is there’s always a charismatic leader; number two is there’s a vision of where things are going and number three, the charismatic leader offers everybody a new opportunity. It’s not like I’m going to teach someone how to become better, or whatever. This is a whole new opportunity. We didn’t plan that initially, but as we started doing it and I started looking for patterns and started seeing it, it’s like there’s someone out there that’s the face of it, so that’s me. Then there’s what’s the movement and what’s the new opportunity? The new opportunity was easy for us. It’s this thing that’s called funnels, ClickFunnel; this is this new opportunity we’re offering. The second thing there is what’s the movement? How do we get people to buy into this thing we’re trying to do? It happened as an accident initially. If you look at the webinar that launched ClickFunnels, it was called the Funnel Hack webinar. On the webinar, we talked about funnel hacking and then a little while later we made a t-shirt that said funnel hacker on it. Then we started like, “Hey let’s give this away to people when they join ClickFunnels.” We started giving away these funnel hacker t-shirts, and everybody started getting these t-shirts and what was cool is they started selfidentifying with that thing. “Hey, I’m a funnel hacker.” In fact, I had a guy email me; he was like, “Hey, I’ve been a member of ClickFunnels for three or four months now, when I signed up I got the t-shirt. I’ve never actually logged into ClickFunnels and used it, but I wear the t-shirt every single week,

so I’ve never canceled because I feel like I’m part of this community, I feel like I’m a funnel hacker. I just wanted to let you know that I’m going to keep paying forever because of the t-shirt I feel like a part of something.” I was like, how crazy is that? That’s so powerful that people will keep paying monthly because they feel like they’re part of something bigger than themselves. Kate: I think we have five or six funnel hacker t-shirts. We’re definitely in that culture and selfproclaimed funnel hackers, right? Russell: I know, isn’t that cool? Hawk: If you were working with someone in your Inner Circle, they’ve got something that’s rock solid, it’s working well, and they want to bring in other people to promote them, what would you tell them? Russell: Basically, there are two sides of it. There’s one side of people that are already affiliates that are good at being affiliates, and there’s another side of people who aren’t affiliates but are your customers who love what you’re doing. We treat both those groups differently. In fact, right now I’m looking at a big box of ClickFunnels Avenger comic books that we just had designed, and we’re going to be sending them out for our Dream 100. I’m sure you’ve heard me talk about it before, it’s called Dream 100. Those are people that are already really good affiliates, and basically, they’re promoting stuff no matter what, but we need to somehow get them to see us and want to promote us. We actually send out a package almost every single month.

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35 It started out as Dream 100; I think it’s Dream five or 600 now, of people that are influencers who have the email list or big following, we want them every single month to be hearing from us, and trying to get them to promote something. That’s half the strategy. The other half is everyone has customers who buy your things, and they love what you’re doing and if they knew that they could get paid for referring others, they would. For us, it’s hard because we tried to tell people, “Hey, promote it,” and then no-one knew what to do. We created an actual training course. If you look at affiliatebootcamp.com, it trains people how to be our affiliate. I remembered probably nine or 10 years ago, Stu McLaren and I did a course teaching people how to launch their own affiliate programs. Stu was managing Dan Kennedy’s and a whole bunch of people with affiliate programs; I had my own affiliate program with about 30,000 affiliates at the time. We were teaching people how to get affiliates, how to attract them. Stuff like that. One of the guys we had on a call, Marlon Sanders, he got up and it was interesting, he was talking, he said, “You know what’s one interesting pattern between everybody who has a really successful affiliate program? What’s the one thing they all have?” I couldn’t think of what it was. He said, “Every single one that has a successful affiliate program has a product teaching people how to be an affiliate.” Teach them how to be an affiliate and then how to sell their products. When I got that, I was like, “Holy cow.” Every time, I think it’s like three core times in my business that I’ve launched a really good affiliate program, every single time I did it behind training teaching people how to build affiliates. With ClickFunnels I feel like the boot camp is the training program teaching people how to be affiliates for us. Kate: It’s such a powerful training. The attractive character, I got it, I understood what you were sharing, but it wasn’t until I got the boot camp training and we really did that deep dive with it that I was like, “Oh. I understand it on a whole new level.” It’s an incredible training. It’s amazing that you share that and it’s free. I’m like, people sign up, it’s free. Hawk: In terms of your best-converting funnel, what would you say for somebody who wants to promote you

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and promote ClickFunnels and promote everything, what would you say the best converting funnel is for them to jump in on? Russell: Ooh, that’s a good question. It honestly kind of depends on the audience in terms of relationship you have with the audience, things like that. We had the most successes with the webinar funnels. Typically, that works for those people who already have the email list to get people in the webinar. It works less for affiliates that are driving Facebook ads to a webinar, because it’s not quite as good. Whereas, something like the book funnel where they’re giving away free books, or a free MP3 player, usually works better on more cold traffic because it’s such a small community. “Get this free book; this is why I recommend it.” The free things typically do better for those kind of affiliates. It’s hard to say if there’s a best one. I think more importantly for me as an affiliate; I typically look less at what’s converting the best, and more which thing am I going to promote, where can I provide the most value? All the things that I’ve been a really good affiliate for, and I’ve been a good affiliate for ten plus years, I won Ferraris and all sorts of stuff, and it’s a product that I’m really passionate about. Because of that, I can create my own things to provide more value if I promote it. If I were going to promote the Dot Com Secrets book, I wouldn’t just drive and ask for the book, I would go and I would make a whole bunch of training or make a whole bunch of funnels and quick funnels that are all the funnels inside of Russell’s book and I would be like, “Hey, if you buy Russell’s book from my link you get all these funnels.” I’d be like, “How do I create more bites for this offer that’s already there?” Kate: What advice do you have for people that maybe want to write a book? We all know building the funnel is easy, but writing the book is the hard part. What advice would you have for someone who’s sticking the book at the beginning of the funnel and how they can get from idea to printed and sent out as quickly and easily as possible?

Russell: Yeah, well, I would say writing a book, at least for me, both my books took a year and a half of actual writing time, so it was painful. There are easier ways to do it. I know that I have friends like Rob Cosberg and other guys, you pay them whatever and they will help write your book, and they will get it done in a month or a month and a half or something like that. What I even say is, it’s funny, if you look at all the front offers that we have right now, the one that converts the best is the perfectwebinarsecrets.com, which is one piece of paper and a CD of me explaining the paper. That’s our highest converting, highest cart value front end we have. I almost look at it like, what can you create that’s easier? We just launched the Marketing in Your Car MP3 player. It was just me taking a whole bunch of my pre-recorded stuff, putting it on an MP3 player from China, and that was way easier to create than a book.

to somebody who’s getting started and they just got a ClickFunnels account or they’re just about to buy a ClickFunnels account through an affiliate link, what would you say to them to say, “Here’s what you need to do to actually get started and make money within 14 days or within 30 days?” Russell: What I would do, if it were me, I would first off figure out what you want to do long term. I know I want to be in the weight loss industry, I want to be in internet marketing, I want to be in Forex, figure out whatever it is you’re passionate about and then find someone who’s got a funnel that’s crushing it in that already. Let’s just say it’s weight loss. I go, and I find some Venus Factor beyonddiet.com or one of the ones that are doing really, really well.

Go back and look at what the funnel looks like, but then I would not go and recreate it, I would become an affiliate of that person because I would want to see if I can figure I’m going to say the book is the out how to get traffic to buy their hardest thing on earth to make. I product before I went and created would shift away from that. Unless you’re already doing it, then I would find someone who’s a good writer. Kind of the way I do my process is I have a super detailed outline, and then I record myself teaching all the stuff, and I have a writer who puts that in order and sends it back to me and I rewrite it from there. I don’t know if that saves me time because it still takes me a year and a half to write a book. Anyway, the time, it’s a lot easier to talk your content than it is to write it.

my own. It’s kind of similar, what we teach inside of boot camp. I’d set up a squeeze, a landing page, and I would drive traffic to it selling their product as an affiliate. If I can make the numbers work, then I would go in and build my own funnel that’s similar that would then replace theirs with mine and then keep all the money. A lot of times, especially in 14 days, there’s so many pieces you’ve got to learn. You’ve got to build the funnel; you’ve got the copy, the design, you’ve got to do all these things. If you can say let’s take all those things out and just figure out how to become good at one thing, which is like driving traffic or whatever that piece is, focus on that to a funnel that’s already working and see if you can make that work. Then come back and say okay, now I’m going to figure out how to build a funnel and I’m going to figure out how to make a product and plug in other things after you’ve kind of proven the model.

Hawk: Yeah, so what advice would you give as an expert in the funnel world? The expert, I should say in the funnel world. What would you say

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35 Most of the funnels we do nowadays are successful, and they ask, how do you pick which markets you want to do stuff in? For me, it’s 100% tied to, do I know where the traffic is going to come from to make this funnel profitable? Then I say, “As soon as this funnel is done this is where I’m buying traffic from.” If I can see it, this is the email list, or this is where on Facebook, or then I’ll go into that market. I don’t want to build a funnel and then be like where’s traffic at and try to wander around hoping I can find it. I want to know exactly where it’s at. As soon as I find it, now I want to make sure that traffic is actually good. Become an affiliate, drive it somewhere else, see if it’s going to convert, see if it’s going to work, and if it is, cool now I know where traffic’s at, now I know what funnel works, now I can build a funnel that’s going to compete with that. That would be the way that I would definitely do it. If you guys have the funnel immersion package, in there, we’ve got the recordings from the very first Funnel Hacking Live, and Richard Cousins did a presentation in there that was the most brilliant. He’s kind of really smart, so most people miss the whole point of it, but if you watch that presentation, he explained that in super nerdy number terms. I’ve seen the guy when he goes into the market, he does exactly what I said, and he’ll go list seven, eight, nine thousand people before he gets the product done. He does it all profitably. He’ll get paid to build this huge list, perfects the market, perfects the traffic, then puts it in the funnel and he’s just off to the races. He’s brilliant at it. That’s what I would do. Hawk: Just to clarify, you create a landing page, capture an email, name, phone number potentially, whatever information you want, then from there you drive them to the sales page or the order page for the product that you’re affiliate selling? Russell: Yeah, one step beyond that the new survey element’s that’s coming out hopefully this week in the editor; it’s amazing. We’ll start teaching that a lot more as soon as the survey element is done. Hawk: All right, do you have any recommendations for people, because I know a lot of the people come to us and say we have ClickFunnels and we have InfusionSoft. They are asking, how do we get rid of InfusionSoft, how do we go so we can fully automate

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and have that sales pipeline functionality? Do you have any recommendations for the people who are interested in going purely to ClickFunnels or having that one last piece integrated with one of the other tools? Russell: I know there’s one, is it Polio or Podio? There’s one in real estate, all the real estate people that use ClickFunnels use what’s called Podio, is that right? Yeah, Podio. I think you can integrate that really easily, that’s what a lot of guys are doing. The other thing I think is I think people should upgrade their business models. I had a sales force, 60 sales guys on at one time. That was awesome, except for it sucked, every second of it did. We had all these people and all this overhead and everything and then we were able to replace one auto webinar, and two sales guys create 60 full-time dudes, and our CRM right now is Wufoo. Our sales guys they get a Wufoo form, they print it out, they put it on the desk, and that’s it. We’re making more money with two dudes and no CRM than we ever did with 60 people in this all complex CRM. It’s like I have people that focus on getting better at selling, it replaces a lot of that stuff. It’s probably not the popular thing to say, but honestly, I think that if people upgrade their business, those things aren’t necessary nowadays, nearly as much as people think they are. Kate: No CRM is perfect either, and that’s what I’ve found. It’s like that’s almost a better solution to this question of how do we keep track of people. I appreciate you sharing that with us. Hawk: I know it cracks me up. Russell: We knew the guys we were working with. You’ve got a new high ticket funnel starting to integrate all these huge and complex systems and stuff and they’re not even making that much money. I’m like, dude, we literally print out Wufoo forms, and we set them on the sales guy’s desk every morning. They call those forms, and they sell people stuff, and at the end, we’ve got three baskets they put the forms in: This person was broke; this person’s not interested, this person calls back in a week or two. That’s it, it works, and it’s magic. We make a lot of money with it. I don’t know; I do think CRM’s are going to be something we’ll look at.

Kate: What is your favorite part of Russell: I was six months into the book? writing the book, and I was on a family vacation doing one of the Russell: I think the biggest ‘aha’ final rounds of editing, and I got that people are going to get is so angry at the book I highlighted we talk about the creating of new 240 pages, and I deleted it live on opportunities as opposed to selling Snapchat and started over from improvement offers. I think that’s scratch. That was really painful, but like when people get that piece it was funny. of it, they’ll make infinitely more money. Most people are selling Kate: I was in one of Darren improvement. Improvement is the Hardy’s funnels, and I saw the link, worst thing on earth to sell because ClickFunnel and like shoot Darren for somebody to say yes, I want Hardy’s using this. Can you share the to become better; they have to people that are using ClickFunnels? admit they failed. Whereas when Can you share so that people know you structure your offer as a new who they’re in company with as far opportunity, then it gets rid of all as who else is using ClickFunnels to past failures, all past expectations. make tons of money in the industry? Every offer I’ve had that has blown Russell: Definitely. I always tell up and made insane amounts of people it’s not a matter of if you’re money has always been a new going to used ClickFunnels, it’s a opportunity I offered my audience. matter of when because it’s the I think that’s the piece, which when future. I think we’re a day or two people get that, it’s like the big away from passing 30,000 active domino knocks down everything customers, which is insane. Tony else. Robbins is using ClickFunnels, Kate: Do you have a fun fact about Darren Hardy; Success Magazine the book that people might not is using ClickFunnels, Dave Asprey know? from Bulletproof. All the top weight

loss gurus in the world are using ClickFunnels. Honestly, I don’t know anyone who’s having success out there right now that’s not really using ClickFunnels. In any market we have the top financial trading coaches, they’re all using ClickFunnels. E-commerce, if you look at the people who are in the Two Comma Club, I’d say half of them, probably more than half, are all eCommerce people. They’re shifting away from Shopify and Amazon and moving their platform over to ClickFunnels because it’s an easier way to do business. If you look at any guru in almost any market, if you look at their sites, it’s probably a ClickFunnels page. We did a test, probably five months ago, went to Facebook and started clicking on every single ad and nine out of ten ads we clicked on all went to ClickFunnel pages, which was awesome.

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Hawk: Why would somebody want to join the Certified Partner Program? Russell: I think for a couple of reasons. One, it helps your skillset. Helps you to be good, not just from a funnel building standpoint, but from how you find clients, how do you treat clients? Even if you are just working for yourself or you’re working with partners or an employer, there’s still the setting of expectation ... All of those kind of things go into it. I think that’s the first thing. Number two is now there’s such a good network of certified partners that are helping each other. In fact, Liz Tennis is working and actually flying up here today. She’s working on a second level group that a partition of people that are certified will have ... Them being in a group by themselves where you’ve got this unique mastermind group of people who are in the same business, doing the same thing, kind of a cutting edge thing. I think there’s a lot of opportunities that happen there. I send all my Inner Circle people. I send ... everyone talks to me, I send everyone to the marketplace, the certified page. I think there’s a lot of leads going there. As the marketplace starts growing, that’s going to keep dramatically increasing. There’s lead flow; there’s a lot of other good things as well. That’s some of the reasons. Kate: Is there anything you want to say to the readers in advance? I know your following has been blowing up. There’s over, I think, 40,000 people in just the ClickFunnels official group alone. Anything you want to share with them? Russell: It comes back to what our theme is for Funnel Hacking Live. The theme of you’re just one funnel away. I want everyone to understand that and believe that. I look at my business the last 12 years like the rises and the falls, every time I’ve had huge horrible problems; it was the funnel that saved me. I almost had to declare bankruptcy twice, and both times the funnel saved me from that. Everyone is one funnel away. It’s worth it to keep trying and testing and trying.

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Kate: What were the funnels that saved you? That’s pretty significant to go from bankrupt to we’re back to millions. What funnel does that? Russell: I’m going to be talking about that at Funnel Hacking Live, I do a whole 90-minute presentation to walk through the history of all the funnels that have saved my butt, and it’s going to be really cool. It’s been a lot. Sometimes it’s been webinar funnels; sometimes it’s been the high ticket. Every step in the journey there has been something different that saved my butt. It just depends. If you get the right message, the right audience, the right offer, the right time, it can change everything. Kate: When does the book come out, so everybody knows, and where can they get it? Russell: Launch date is April 18th, and it will be at MyFunnel.link/ExpertSecrets.

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Once

Upon A Hacker

Article By Lydia Puller

ee that little girl in the picture? Staring. Determined. Headstrong. Well, that’s me. A funnel hacker in the making. I was almost five years old in that picture, and I was rocking those Salvation Army second-hand knee-high boots because they made me feel like a total badass! Five years old! And yes...I was a badass! It was 1969, and we were a new immigrant family of six that lived in an old raggedy ranch style home in Levittown, Pennsylvania. 105 Magnolia Drive to be exact. We had scenic forest wallpaper, wood paneling, a sectional couch and a big fenced backyard where our dog Misty lived. Levittown was the place that Billy Joel sang about in his song Allentown. Levittown was a picture-perfect, carefully controlled community that represented entrepreneurship, ingenuity, and uniformity. I grew up in a post-World War II American suburb where you were expected to conform and fit in. At age 5 I knew I’d never fit in. I didn’t conform. I was different. First off we were poor, on welfare, and I was this half black half Jewish kid that just didn’t fit in with my surroundings.

Workaholic By the time 1970 hit our family of 6 had become a family of 5. My mom was always home, and my dad was always gone. Although we went without, my fondest memory was going to the Jersey Shore for the day, all of us kids and mom, with a bucket of Kentucky Fried chicken and our bathing suits! Sometimes we went to Trenton New Jersey to the museum. We all piled into my mom’s Fiat 500 and off we went. Or

sometimes we would take the train to Philadelphia and walk around window shopping in Roosevelt Mall talking about what we’d do if we won a lot of money. Once we visited the Philadelphia Zoo. To this day I don’t know where my mom got the money for her car or the gas or how she took us on those adventures. Four kids, a single mom and on welfare? I know I get my strength and drive from her. My childhood memories were also filled with memories of processed government cheese, powdered milk, Ovaltine, Bisquick, our dog Misty, second-hand clothes, fireflies and waiting for the mosquito man on hot summer nights. I also remember going back to school after the Christmas holidays watching classmates run around in new clothes and new shoes and bragging about their bicycles. While we had nothing new. Same clothes. Same Shoes. All hand me downs.I remember how we never had potato chips or Captain Crunch cereal like the other kids. I remember wanting more. The young girl in me was trying to figure out how to get money and how to get out of Levittown. I wanted more. I wanted more for me I just had to find it. And that’s when an entrepreneur was born.

Jax and view camera. I started to make money on the side by renting my toys out to friends that wanted to use them. At our house on Magnolia Drive, we had a big yellow bowl in the house where we collected all of our change. It also had four silver dollars! My goal back then was to fill that bowl with nothing but silver dollars! By the time I was 12 years old, I was renting out my clothes to my sister. I figured if she was going to wear my clothes and not give them back she could rent them! I charged her $1/item. After a while, I lost a customer, but it sparked bigger ideas for me. I also babysat after school for a next-door neighbor, and at 13 I was selling donuts around the neighborhood and charged a $.05 upsell for a baker’s dozen. At 14 I got my first “real” job at Taco Bell and then went on to McDonald’s. At 15 I hit my stride as a cashier at Macy’s and Rite Aid while renting out my bike so kids could take it 5 miles down the road to the Pong and Pac-Man game room. At 16 years old I was an Avon rep selling makeup and upselling lotions door to door!

The Entreprenuer In Me That little girl in the picture grew into a motivated, creative, driven, risk-taking visionary. It all began with the words; “I have an idea!” I was up on all the newest and coolest technology of the 1970s man! I had my second-hand typewriter, my transistor radio and my old black and white television with the rabbit ears wrapped in aluminum foil. I even got my hands on a push button phone, which was walkaway ahead of the dial phone! For the 70s I was all high tech! I had my hands in the mix with my knackers and

Lydia Puller; standing

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TRAVELER Being able to make money when I wanted and when I needed it was a huge awakening for someone from the wrong side of the tracks. I paid for my own Jordache jeans, my class ski trip to Killington Vermont and I was able to buy my mom real gifts for the holidays rather than make a homemade gift like we always did. Ultimately my side hustle allowed me to save enough money at 17 and I headed out of dodge with a one-way ticket to Europe and the Middle East. Four years of being a ‘traveling-gypsy-couch-surfingmaking-money-as-I-go’ waitress. I landed in Israel where I studied at Tel Aviv University and ultimately I ended up in a brief military program for new immigrants. In the mid-80s, I took a one-way ticket to California because I was determined to make my mark and hit the California coast. I had one goal in mind...get into U.C. Berkeley. Want to know why? Because I had a high school counselor in Levittown that said I would never get into Berkeley. His exact words were, “Lydia, you’re not the caliber of student that gets into Berkeley. Now let’s take a look at these technical school brochures.” I was dumbfounded. How can you tell someone that they aren’t good enough? That they can’t achieve their goals and hit their dreams? I think about that now, and I think about that girl in the picture. The determination. The inner resolve. Tell that girl now, and somehow she will get to yes. Needless to say, I got into UC Berkeley and then went off to law school all the while with my side hustle working over time as I worked as a library attendant, shopkeeper, bagel maker and au-pair. I left law school and went into high-tech recruiting, contract negotiations and real estate. I made good money, well into the six figures. I had what I thought I wanted but then everything shifted.

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My Reason Why

In 1998 I became a mom. And now, finally, I have my real and authentic why. I had made money in the past, and I had lost money. It always felt like it was never enough. My chase for the American dream was simply dollars and cents. Now it had meaning. My son became the ONLY reason why. The flesh of my flesh, living and breathing. For him I want more. In 2008 I lost everything. The real estate and financial markets tanked, my business stopped, and my relationship ended overnight. I lost my properties, and I lost all of my savings. I didn’t know how I was going to feed my child or keep the lights on or keep a roof over our heads. I had no income whatsoever. None. Nada. Nunca. Nothing. I was scared shitless, but I think that in our bleakest moments we find the greatest strength. The only thing I had going for me because it never left me was my drive. Just to give you some insight into my world I had someone say to me the other day “OHMYGAWD Lydia! You are a unicorn! You’re old, and you know technology? That’s unheard of!” I like the idea of being a unicorn but NOT the old comment. What The Hell!! Right now I am in my prime (for you millennials I’m over 50!), and I am starting a new chapter in my life as a ClickFunnels Certified Partner.

I’ve been an entrepreneur my whole life. The last 15+ buying and selling real estate, working with investors and coaching women to believe in themselves and build wealth. This year has been filled with lots of things that could have stopped me from reaching my goals. For starters I am a “solo” mom with no family around, one of my dogs died, my son almost didn’t graduate high school, so I had to drop everything and make sure he made it across the finish line. I was given 30 days notice to move while in the midst of packing my son off to college, my mom fell and broke her hip, and my home became the rehab facility which meant that I had to drop everything and take care of my mom. (I was nurse Nightingale, and Nurse Ratchet all rolled into one!). I got sick and was bedridden, my car broke down, and the list goes on. I haven’t shared my story, so you feel sorry for me. I am sharing with you because life gets in the way…all the time! Are you going to give up or are you going to dig in? Are you going to continue making excuses or are you going to excuse yourself so you can hunker down and hone in on what it is that you really want? Ask for help when you need it. Let go of the vampires and look for the cheerleaders! Your success depends on you. IF you want success it’s here for you and you have a community here that supports you. If I personally can help you in any way, please feel free to reach out to me even if it’s just for the encouragement! The biggest takeaways for me were over my lifetime are: believe in yourself unconditionally, don’t compare yourself to others and their timelines, stop being a perfectionist, get done what needs to be done without excuses, be kind to yourself, it’s okay to take a break, and…I am NOT old!

Lydia Puller is an entrepreneur, business strategist, and ClickFunnels Certified Partner. She is also the owner and founder of Herspective, a marketing firm that helps entrepreneurs and business owners discover their true potential! Lydia is also a mom, vegan chef and dog lover that lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.

“Being able to make money when I wanted and when I needed it was a huge awakening for someone from the wrong side of the tracks.”

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What is your

Why? Article by Connie Pak

Mark’s Why Mark starts his day early getting ready for work while his wife, Jennifer, gets the kids ready for school. He has some brief time to sit with his four-year-old son, Tyler, and his two-year-old daughter, Madison before he needs to rush off to work. Mark and his family live in the suburbs, and his drive into the city takes him 1.5 hours in and 1.25 hours home. Once Mark gets to work, he checks and answers the 100 emails that all urgently need his attention. Then, he’s busy in meetings all day, works through lunch and heads home. Even though he has plenty of work to justify staying late, he is excited to get home to his family, so he leaves as soon as he can to rush home and eat dinner with his family.” Mark loves hearing the stories about how Madison made cute bubbles while laughing, which made Tyler laugh too. He hears stories about the kids going between fighting and bonding throughout the day. Soon after

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dinner, Mark helps with the nighttime routine, and the day is over, and tomorrow will be the same routine. These wonderful but short times with his family make Mark wish he could be home more often. He’d love to start an online business, and he has plenty of ideas for it, but never has the time to work on it. Mark shared with us about how he was overly stressed at work, had impossible deadlines to meet, was carrying the workload of three positions, didn’t feel appreciated or valued, and didn’t feel like he had a purpose. He felt like he was just going through the motions to bring home a paycheck. Most importantly, Mark felt like he was missing out on seeing his kids grow up. The helplessness and defeat in his voice fueled the passion for my husband and me. We told each other we would not be in the same situation as Mark. Making the transition to becoming an entrepreneur is scary when you have a family, but if you know deep down inside that there is something else you want to do and share with the world, this is the best time to start. It isn’t going to be easy, and initially, it may take up more time away from your family to set it up, but it is an investment to get you to where you want to be.

Our Why

business going.

When my husband and I got married in 2007 in 3. Delegate tasks. Look to see if there is something that takes up a lot of your time that can be Orange County, CA, we both had two to three-hour delegated to someone else. There are virtual commutes round trip in opposite directions to go to our assistants you can work with. corporate jobs. A couple of years into our marriage, we made the decision that we were going to be 4. Set up an accountability system. Whether it is entrepreneurs. a colleague through Skype or your next door neighbor, set tangible monthly goals and reward We wanted to have flexible schedules and, most yourself when you achieve them. Choose someone importantly, spend quality time with our future that can encourage you when you are in a slump, children. This was our why. If you ask us why we are and be happy for you when you hit milestones. entrepreneurs, it is because of our son, Aidan. If we stayed at our previous jobs, we would only see him for 5. Be a part of a community. Join a community in your industry to learn new things and share ideas an hour in the morning and an hour before he went with, i.e. Funnel Magazine. More importantly, be to bed. This gave us the courage and determination a part of a community that will inspire you and to be entrepreneurs. Since 2010, I went from working encourage you to keep going, and ask them for part time to being a full-time entrepreneur. feedback. Separate yourself from the naysayers.

What Is Your Why?

6. Create partnerships. You are more powerful as a team. Identify your strengths, and look to find strategic partnerships for the other areas of your business. For example, if you love sales and sharing about your business but don’t feel confident about learning and building the funnel, find a resource or person with that skill who you might be able to partner up with.

If you’ve forgotten what your purpose is, take some time to journal it. If you feel you just don’t have the time for your business, remind yourself why you are doing what you are doing. If you are feeling like you are not making progress, remind yourself why you even started. You need to remind yourself of your why on a daily basis. When your kids get sick, and you have a rough week of sleepless nights, you need to 7. Always be teachable. Although we may be an expert in our field, there is still so much for us to remind yourself that you started this journey so that learn if we posture ourselves as being teachable. you had the freedom of being there for your kids when they need you. 8. Always be learning. There are books, audio books, podcasts, and more easily at your disposal. There When you feel like other people are making significant is no excuse not to be consistently learning. progress, and you feel so far behind, you need to remind yourself that we each have our own paths, and 9. Save up and give yourself an ample traffic budget each is unique and custom to our own lives. Remind to really test the market. Set aside a marketing yourself of your why every day, and follow this system budget and plan wisely on how to use that budget to create and build your own business using funnels. to give your funnel sufficient time to ramp up.

Ten Practical Steps of Building a Business Through Funnels

10. Don’t forget to constantly tweak and make changes to your funnels and your business. Remember to pivot appropriately and not just follow the puck 1. Create a plan and set goals. I highly recommend but to pivot to where the puck will be. the Law of Attraction planner. 2. Create a routine. If you have issues with time, then wake up earlier before the busyness of the day begins. Dedicate time every day for the business. Initial sacrifices may need to be made to get the

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How Low Volume Funnels Can Sell 6 Figures Article By Bryan Durkin I wanted to start out this article by thanking Kate & Hawk for allowing me to contribute to the first edition of Funnel Magazine. I love so much getting to help people, and I hope this gives you a different perspective of someone who’s an active user of funnels. I have been involved in the sales process for more than 20 years, but have embraced what the technology can do for us today as it is completely different than it was even just five years ago. One of the things that I always see, a common misconception, is when someone looks at using funnels and how they can help your business, is that you don’t need 100,000 or 200,000, or even 50,000 emails or contacts

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to make it successful. It’s simply that funnels are a process, and processes are something to make our life easier and to help us do more with less. By using these tools and automation that will help us greatly to keep us “top of mind” with our customers and prospects so that when they buy, they buy from us. That’s really important. If you are selling a $100 item, the volume is completely different than if you were selling a $10,000 or $20,000 item. “How do I create a list,” is a question I hear every day and I’m here to share with you that you don’t need a giant list. I’m going to share with you some

ideas of how I use this for myself and for my clients on how you might consider looking at different volumes for business. If we look at these so-called low volume sales funnel and who it may be ideal for you can think of the high valued service providers – both to business and consumers. For the B2B world, you could think of examples of coaches, consultants, accountants, and advisors. If you think about us as consumers, what we consume, you think about dentists, doctors, chiropractors, builders, attorneys, ophthalmologists, and realtors, and many other professionals that provide lots of high value to us as consumers. Many buyers

In a low-volume approach, the quality of your traffic is the key to being able to grow. You need to spend your time getting the most qualified prospects in your funnel and process them as efficiently as you can and as fast as you can fulfill.

(both consumers and business) don’t necessarily seek out information on getting new providers until we’re ready to buy. In MANY cases there are all kinds of reasons as to why they don’t buy today but with the right automation, the right funnel, and the right copy – you can help tell your story so that when those buyers purchase, they buy from YOU! As you’ve probably heard before you have to think about the overall lifetime customer value. In a low volume situation, you need to have highly qualified and specialized traffic because you need to have higher close rates than low-cost traffic. Whether it’s a $100 a month lawn service with a three-year average life ($3600) vs. a remodeling contractor doing a $50,000 kitchen, you have to understand what that customer value is so that you can determine what your investment is. If you’re going to invest, how much would you invest? As an owner of a lawn service, you may consider investing up to 1 month’s service to get a client that lasts for three years. As an owner of a remodeling contractor business that does $50,000 kitchen, you may spend up to $500 per opportunity if you can close enough business. You need to understand the value of your transaction and the ability for you to close deals.

Now, I’m going to share with you an example of a low-volume funnel. An example of a low-volume lead capture source might be something that is a local meetand-greet, a chamber event, a speaking engagement where you’re a speaker or just an attendee, and some type of network or BNI type events that happen all over the world on a very consistent basis. You meet a qualified prospect, or you meet a qualified referral source, put them into your sales pipeline so that they understand what it is you do. You can then determine how to treat them as you go forward. Another example would be customer referrals. Probably the single best way to grow your business is to refer people. It’s always the question of, am I going to refer a friend and you’re going to screw up? By building a referral pipeline and a referral funnel, you can help alleviate both your referrers and past customers pain points as well as your potential new clients as to why they can be a benefit. If you are selling any type of professional services or business-to-business, LinkedIn’s a wonderful resource to meet people who could fit your demographic and psychographic profiles, but you just don’t know who they are and you can certainly put them in that process. I’m going to share with you an example book funnel that I did for my business. I have written a book about a year ago called Stuck on First: The 9 Positions of a Playoff Ready Business. I share that book with highly qualified prospects through various sources. I may meet them at events, I may get referred to them by a friend, a colleague, or I may contact them through LinkedIn. The first thing I do is I send them a copy of the book. In most cases, they’ve asked for it, or I’ve had some prior communication to it probably 80% of the time. Then seven days after the book gets sent, I send automatically, a postcard with a sweet treat. In this case, I send the postcard that says, “Listen, I hope you’re enjoying my book. I sent you this postcard automatically with some brownies. Please enjoy it.” Seven days after that sequence event I send a voicemail to ask them how they like the brownies, and how much I would love to hear a review or any comments on my book.

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“I am averaging almost 52%

engagement and each engagement is typically between $7,500 & $25,000” The fourth step would be to send an email. The copy is something like “Hey, listen, I haven’t heard from you. You asked for a copy of my book. I automatically sent you a copy of my postcard. I sent you a voicemail asking how you liked it and I just wanted to see what you thought of it because I’d really love to get a testimonial of what you thought of the book.” Another seven days pass (now we’re on week five) I send a letter in the mail, again automatically, telling them how important it was for me for the book to share with as many people as possible and that if you have any friends that would like a copy of it to please ask me and I will send to them at no charge. Then one of the final steps, is we send them a newsletter, a printed newsletter, both in email as well as in the post, or post office. After that we put them into a monthly newsletter sequence, ask them to join various events that we have. There’s an example of a low-volume funnel. Now, I will tell you that I typically only put between 10 and 20 people per month in. Because parts of my consulting practice are not highly scalable, I choose how often I want to put them in. I am averaging almost 52% engagement and each engagement is typically between $7,500 & $25,000. This 6 step sales funnel has been a life saver for me and has helped me develop other lines of business that are fully automated and provide a market-while you sleep type of approach. While all of us are looking for the perfect funnel I will share with you that good is better than perfect – money loves speed! By using ClickFunnels and many of the other awesome tools available you can build a funnel that reaches your market and shows your prospects how far behind your competition is. Happy Funneling! Now go sell something! Bryan Durkin has more than 25 years of experience in the entrepreneur’s lifestyle, both as a business owner as well as a direct sales producer. For more than 20 years his direct clients included the Fortune 100. In 2016 Bryan wrote his first book “Stuck On First – the 9 Positions of Playoff Ready Business” that is available on Amazon. His passion for helping business grow is evident in the book that shares the ups and downs of a growing technology company.

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2013 3 WAYS TO FLOOD YOUR COURSE WITH STUDENTS Article By Brad Hart

courses and serves as an online learning platform for professionals who want to add new skills to their resume. While Udemy in and of itself pioneered the online course industry and offered a great platform for you to host your course, you can use it as a part of a funnel to drive traffic off-site, right to your self-hosted course. If you haven’t put the pieces together, that means you get to keep all of the proceeds instead of a paltry 50% while still having Udemy do much of the marketing. Here’s how it works: First up, you need to upload a ‘teaser’ course to Udemy. This can either be a short or even free course that serves your target niche.

that they allow you to pitch for your own product (or whatever you want really) in the last lecture of your course. So, you get to take all these warm to red-hot prospects through a low-cost (or free) course that delivers immense value, then at the end you get to hit them with the real deal (your full-fledged course, service or product), drive them off Udemy and directly to your sales page or website. Do this right, and you’ll get conversions galore. You can also upsell people to any related offering they might be interested in.

Of note: Despite being short or free, this still needs to be a For the uninitiated, Udemy is the quality offering that people can world’s largest collection of online derive value from. Udemy has been cracking down on less-thansatisfactory courses of late, and having great reviews as well as adhering to their guidelines is key.

You need to remember that you can’t be perfect or amazing at every aspect of running your business.Being able to recognize what you excel and suck at in your business is an invaluable skill to develop. When you know what you’re bad at, you can farm out to people who excel in that area.

Understanding funnels and how you can drive interested prospects to your courses, training programs, products, and services can be all too overwhelming. However, there are three simple steps you can implement to truly push the needle ahead when it comes to getting your content seen by interested eyes, leveraging other platforms for leads, and effectively marketing your course (although, these lessons also apply to other types of products or services). Let’s get into the meat of what you can do to stop the wheels of your business from spinning for any longer. #1. LEVERAGE UDEMY AS A LEAD GEN PLATFORM

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The great thing about Udemy is

#2. MARKETING YOUR CONTENT AND DRIVING TRAFFIC

If you have any hope of having a successful business that doesn’t work you into the ground one day, you need to cognizant of marketing. If you’re not going to spend the time and energy yourself to learn the tricks of the trade, you need to be willing to invest into people who are.

right up there with Google as one of the most powerful and most used search engines on the internet. That being said, find someone with a great grasp of the platform and how to use it effectively. Otherwise, you’ll be wasting a lot of time, energy and money.

Below are three of the most effective Facebook Ads ways you can market content and Facebook ads are still (and likely will drive warm traffic. be for a while) an incredibly powerful Content Marketing tool. The amount of data they have access to...it’s simply staggering. And Content marketing (provided you’re you can use it all to your advantage producing great content) is a fantastic if you know what you’re doing. tool. Because if you promote it Here’s the thing, though. Facebook effectively, you’ll be flooding your site ads require money, patience, and with genuinely interested people who want to hear more about what you have to say and offer. To a business of any level or size, these warm/ hot leads are everything. When you get into the content creation game, you must create content that blows away everything else around it. As a general rule of them, spending 20% of your time creating excellent, standout content, and the remaining 80% promoting the heck out of it is a great starting point. Seriously. Put 80% of your time into getting that piece of great content shared by as many people as possible.

testing. Similar to YouTube, you need to either be willing to invest your time and energy in learning the intricacies of Facebook ads or be willing to hire someone who knows what works and what doesn’t. The bottom line is that you need to produce consistent, high-quality content, and put it everywhere you know there are interested eyes. #3. EFFECTIVELY MARKETING YOUR COURSE When it comes down to marketing your course (effectively), there are two great ways to go about doing so.

• Go through and pick out highlight paragraphs. Use these for emails and Facebook posts. • Pick out great sentences for Twitter. • Use the blog as a script and make a YouTube video. • Pull the audio from the video and upload it as a podcast. That’s five different pieces of native content...all derived from one exceptional article. YouTube (paid and organic traffic) Next up regarding lead and traffic generation is YouTube. YouTube is EDITION 1

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Our current cold traffic (from FB Ads) conversion rates: Optin Page: Up to 94% (70% over the last 30 days) Webinar Registrations: 55% Webinar Show Up Rate: 51% Stick Rate: Up to 90% Conversion rates: Varies by audience and targeting, usually above 10%. Brad Hart is committed to helping entrepreneurs and investors reach their full potential, so they can focus on solving the grand challenges of our time. With extensive experience in real estate, investments, trading, marketing, sales and peak performance strategy, he’s been teaching entrepreneurs from every walk of life the skills to thrive in the modern world, growing their incomes, increasing the value of their assets, and making wise investments into their future, and the future of the world.

First off, there are webinars. Webinars are a fantastic way to sell your course (they work great for products and services as well) as the visual aspect allows you to engage and connect with your prospects at a high level. This aspect is key if you’re selling higher ticket courses. Here’s how you can flip one live webinar into a turn-key, high converting lead generation machine that sends loads of hot traffic to your course’s sales page: 1. Build an enticing opt-in page that directs visitors to register for your webinar. 2. Whether it be through paid traffic or smart content marketing, drive traffic from Facebook to the opt-in page. 3. With leads coming in left, right, and center, host and run weekly (or bi-weekly) webinars. Be sure to tweak and improve these as needed. Once you get your opt-in page and webinar dialed in, you should see 30-40% show up rates to your webinar, and 10-15% conversion rates.That’s it for webinars. It’s really quite elegant. Second, you can send emails to your list (you do have an email list, right?). Emailing your list is fantastic because you already have a relationship with them. More often than not, a large percentage of your readers are ready and willing to buy. If you’re not emailing valuable content to your list on a regular basis (at LEAST weekly, but daily is ideal) then you need to start immediately. You can also take this a step further by offering an exclusive beta test to your list. This serves a few purposes. 1. It helps foster the relationship with your list as it makes them feel special and respected. 2. You can get people to test your course (while you get paid for it). This means you can tweak and optimize as you go, have some funds to drive paid traffic during your launch, and then release a remarkable course. 3. When launching to your list, the sequence is rather straightforward. A simple 5-7 day email sequence where you ‘warm them up’ over the first three days before switching to hard selling will do the trick. Between running evergreen webinars and nurturing the relationship with your list, you’ll have more students in your course than you know what to do with.

JANUARY 2017

FUNNEL MAGAZINE

Funnel Magazine First Edition

Articles inside

Welcome From Our Publisher

Leveraging Video to Drive Marketing Funnel Profits

Letter From The Editor of Funnel Magazine