How to Work Your Way In

Enjoy another awesome episode from the Traffic Secrets book launch podcast.

Want to learn how to systematically attract your dream customers overnight... and how to get in front of them over and over again? On this episode, Russell Brunson will teach you...

• Why you should dig your well before you're thirsty.
• Why he spent 10 YEARS building a relationship with Tony Robbins (that paid off!).
• How to attract your dream customer RIGHT NOW and how to attract your dream customers over the long-term (BUY your way in or WORK your way in!).

Listen in to learn more! Also, go get your FREE copy of Traffic Secrets here!

Hit me up on IG! @russellbrunson Text Me! 208-231-3797 Join my newsletter at marketingsecrets.com ClubHouseWithRussell.com

---Transcript---

Hey, hey. What's up everybody? This is Russell Brunson. Welcome back to, what do we call this, Quarantine Traffic TV? We should be talking about viral traffic, how viruses grow. We actually are going to be talking about viral growth, viral traffic towards the end of the Traffic Secrets book. When we get to growth hacking, there's bunch of really cool things. But, we will save that for another day.

Just checking in on everybody. Hope you guys are doing great. I know it's crazy times, a lot of things are happening, but a lot of good things are happening in the world right now, too, and just grateful for just so many amazing people who are publishing.

I went live yesterday to our 2 Comma Club collective group and I told everyone, I said, "Look, now is the time for you to all be publishing. Your people need you. They need faith. They need hope in a better world. They need things like that to happen. It's time to start publishing." We're going to get deeper into that in the next couple episodes here as we're talking about Traffic Secrets, about publishing and finding your voice and things like that, but now is the time. Your people need you more than ever. It's important for you to go out there and start sharing. Even though it's scary and even though all the stuff, it's time to be a light for the people that follow you.

Today, we are getting back into Traffic Secrets. Hope you guys have been enjoying this so far. Have you guys enjoyed these, going live every day? It's been fun for me to kind of start and of kick off the day. Hopefully, it's been good for you guys as well to give you something to think about and talk about and brainstorm on throughout the day.

One of mantras I've had in my business for the last, man, probably 10 years or so is this concept of how do you give yourself a raise every single day? Every day, I wake up in the morning and I'm like, "How do I give myself a raise today?" Because think about in the real world, the only way to give yourself a raise is to go back to school. If you're a doctor and you want to give yourself a raise, you got to go back to like four more years of medical school or postgraduate school or things like that.

As an entrepreneur, it's kind of fun because I can come into my office and be like: "Okay, if I can increase the conversions on my page; that gives me a raise today. If I can get more traffic coming into my funnels, that's giving me a raise today." There's all these little things we can do to give ourselves a raise every single day. Hopefully, this hanging out with you guys, talking about Traffic and going through the Traffic Secrets book, is giving you guys ideas as you come every day to listen for tip, a hit, an idea, something that you can grab that'll be the thing that'll give you a raise today. The more you guys do that, the better so it's kind of fun.

Anyway, we're in the middle of the Traffic Secrets book launch. I think we're halfway through the official launch. It's been going amazingly well. The funnel's converting well, the books are selling like crazy. I want to thank you guys all for participating, even though times are crazy.

I think this is the time for all of us to start sharpening our saws. You look at the best companies in the world were all built during these times of economic uncertainty. And so your business, your following, your brand, it is the time to start building it now. All right, so here we go. You guys want to jump into Traffic Secrets again?

I've been going through chapter by chapter every day. Some days we've covered half a chapter, but I'm going to be moving into the next stuff. If you don't have your copy yet, we're in pre-order right now. You can go get trafficsecrets.com to go get your copy. They're there. It's free plus shipping, so it costs you I think 9.95 US, 19.95 international. We start shipping these on May 5th, so you may have to wait a little bit to get them but the audiobook, which I recorded, it's seven hours of me reading this entire book, is available right now. Every single day, we're going live and I'm going through the book so while you waiting for the book to come, also I'm sharing with you guys so you can start getting the wheels in your head spinning and get the ideas coming forth.

Anyway, if you haven't got it yet, go to trafficsecrets.com and get book. I'd recommend getting the audiobook because you can listen the whole thing tonight. It took me three days to record, but it's seven hours of audio. You can listen to it all day today and by to this time tomorrow have the book done and in your head and understanding it all perfectly well.

All right. And then on top of that, there's like five, I think it's five bonus videos you get when you get Traffic Secrets book that each of those by themselves, we could sell for a couple hundred bucks. You get them all for free when you go to trafficsecrets.com and get your free book. I think I said free like 40 times so far. It's time.

Anyway. All right. Everyone's asking, "What's Unlock Secrets?" Oh, well there's DotCom Secrets, which is book number one in the series; Expert Secrets, book number two; Traffic Secrets, book number three. Unlock Secrets is a workbook that goes with all of them to help mush them all together and mushify them. But right now, we're talking about the Traffic Secrets book. Okay, so should we dive in?

Let's recap what we talked about so far. In the introduction, we talked about the fact there's a storm coming and then it's crazy that we're in the middle of literally... Well, in Boise we're actually having a storm outside, but we're in the middle of this economic storm. It's scary times right now.

It's kind of, I don't know, kind of creepy. I wrote this probably 18 months ago, but the introduction starts with "There's a storm coming," and it's talking about... The reason I wrote this book is because there's a storm coming. Businesses are going to be struggling. The lifeblood of every business is what? Traffic. The lifeblood is customers. Right now, in these crazy economic times, the life preserver you have for your business is literally traffic. It's the customers coming around you and it's building up customers that'll be there for a lifetime. Anyway, so the introduction talked about the fact that there's a storm coming, how to prepare for it.

Then section number one was all about your dream customer, who is the person you want to serve, and then really understanding them at a deeper level. Are they someone who's moving towards pleasure and moving away from pain? Are they a searcher? Are they a scroller? Where are we finding these people at? How are we interrupting them? That was all in section one, which is one of my favorite chapters. Hope you guys enjoyed that one.

Section two, or secret number two then, was now that we know who our dream customers are, secret two is where are they actually hiding? I need to find those people. They got to be hiding somewhere. We talked about congregations and how to identify them.

And then in the third video we did like this, we talked about the dream 100. Who's already congregating those people? Where are they at? I had you guys do an exercise, so hopefully you did. It's on page 41 in the book when you get the book. Basically, it was going through each platform. So on Facebook, who are the people that have already congregated your dream customers? Who are the people who already have big Facebook following and writing their names down. Then who are the people who already have big YouTube channels and writing those names down. Who are the people who have big podcasts of your dream customers? Instagram channels, bloggers, big email lists, who are the people that have already congregated the customers you want to have and you want to serve? You got to start listing those people out. That's the first step here in the dream 100. We're going to come back to that today, so I want to make sure you guys have done that and prepared there.

And then yesterday, we talked about my favorite concepts, which is hook, story, offer. Whoop. We talked a lot about that. If you missed that one, all these are being posted on Facebook. They're on Facebook long term, so you can go and watch those on Facebook. We may or may not be putting out a Traffic Secrets podcast of these episodes as well because some people have been asking for the replay. That may be coming to you.

But today, we're going into secret number four. Secret number four, you guys ready for this? Secret number four is called work your way in and buy your way in. If you read the original DotCom Secrets book, I talk about there's three types of traffic. How many of you guys remember this? There's three types of traffic. This is internet marketing school 101. There is traffic that you control, there's traffic that you earn and there's traffic that you own. There's three types of traffic. Today, we're going to be talking about two of those three types.

All right, so working your way in and buying your way. In fact, let me see what's the best way I could share with this. Oh, yeah. It's interesting. When we were launching ClickFunnels five and a half years ago, as you guys know, I'm the non-technical co-founder, which means I got no skills. I can't code, I can't write software, so everyone's writing software for me because I can't do it. Todd and Dylan were creating software.

And so it was like what was my job in this whole thing? My job was to figure out, when the doors open on day one, how am I going to make sure that there's traffic coming into our funnel so that people are lined up waiting to create a trial? While they're up all night coding, drinking Red Bulls and doing the hackathon, stuff like that, I was hanging out with them, figuring out, "Okay, I got to figure out dream 100. Who are the people who's got our dream customers?" And so I built my whole dream 100 list, just like I just showed you guys right now and how we did this… actually I did this a couple days ago. I built out the dream 100, and then I started contacting them and calling them and messaging them and sending them stuff in the mail and getting to know them and all sorts of things.

After I figure out my dream 100, there's two things I'm trying to do. One, I'm trying to work my way in and number two, I'm trying to buy my way in. Working your way in is, how do I get those people who already have my dream customers to promote me? All you guys have been watching this Traffic Secrets book launch. I have a lot of people who said, "My entire Facebook and Instagram and YouTube feeds are all filled with people talking about Traffic Secrets." Literally, it's my dream 100. It's people I've been building relationships with for years who I say, "I got a new book coming out. Do you want to talk about it?" And they have.

I worked my way into those relationships. Those people are promoting it. I'm not paying them. They are affiliates, so they will get paid commissions if they sell a book, but I didn't buy ads from them. I said, "Hey, do you want to promote this?" They said yes. right. I worked my way in.

If you look at how do you work your way into your dream 100, you could go through the book here on page number 57. I start walking you through the process. Step number one is called dig your well before you're thirsty.

There's a book that Harvey Mackay wrote called Dig Your Well Before You're Thirsty. I remember reading that book and just being like, "Okay, that's the thing." A lot of times, people are like, "Well, when my product's done, then I'll go start working on my dream 100. I'll start building relationships. When I'm ready to launch, then I'll go do that." It's like no, no, no. You need to do that today because when your product's done, if you come to someone and the first time you meet like, "Hey, how's it going? My name's Russell. Do you want to promote my book?" they're going to be like, "Dude, I don't know who you are. All you're doing is asking me for favors and asking me for things."

Your job is to start building a relationship today, immediately. Start digging you well before you're thirsty. That's why I led the book with this, because you should start doing this today.

Let's say you do this on Instagram or on Facebook. Let's say Instagram, you figure who on Instagram already has my dream following. Who are the influencers who already have a huge list of people, a ton of followers of my dream customers? And then start messaging them.

I read you guys a couple days ago in here talking about dreaming 100 Rachel Hall, when she launched her book that became the number two bestselling book of the year last year, only losing to Michelle Obama, come on now, first thing she did is she went to Instagram and found everyone who had her dream customers who had over 200,000 followers. She personally DMed every single one of them. She started working her way in, getting to know them, messaging them, sending them free copies of her product and getting to know them.

Same thing with Tom Bilyeu from Quest. When they launched Quest Nutrition, same thing. He went to Instagram and found who was all the influencers who got my dream customers? I'm going to start working my way in and send them free samples, send them product and started working their way in. So that's step number one, is working your way and getting to know these people.

When your product's launched, they should already know who you are. They should be friends. In fact, I think I tell a story in here of Tim Ferriss.

When he launched The 4-Hour Workweek, he did the same thing. He said, "I'm writing a book. I need to start digging my well today." So he said, "Who's my dream 100? Who are the people that someday I'd love for them to promote my book?" He built a huge list of bloggers and podcasters and things like that. He started getting to know them, became friends with them, messaged them a year before he launched his book. He started digging his well before he was thirsty with these people, getting to know them as he's writing a book.

Eventually people are like, "What do you do for a living?" He's like, "Oh, I'm an author. I'm writing a book." They're, "What's the book?" "It's not done yet. I'll tell you when it's done." But people are like, "This guy's really cool. He's just really nice."

And then eventually Tim's like, "Hey, my book's done. Can I send you a free copy?" They're like, "Heck yeah," so he sent all these people free copies of The 4-Hour Workweek. And then he's like, "Hey, launch day is this day. If you like it, I'd love for you to write a blog post on launch day and tell the world." And on launch day, he had like, I don't know, a thousand bloggers on day one blogging about The 4-Hour Workweek. That built Tim Ferriss.

And so this whole concept is how it works. You figure out your dream 100 is and step number one, you start digging your well before you're thirsty. I'm not going to spend too much time, but we talked about all the different ways to do that here inside the book and the ways you do it the right way and then the wrong way.

Okay, let's see. Let me I make sure I'm doing this in the right order. Step number one is dig your well before you're thirsty. Step number two is you work your way in.

It's interesting. Right now, while we're on quarantine, my kids and I and my wife are doing the Marvel marathon. We started with Captain America and then Captain Marvel. We're doing it chronologically so it's not when the movies released, but when they chronologically fit into time. So Captain America's number one, Captain Marvel. Last night, it was Iron Man. Tomorrow, or tonight, it's going to be Incredible Hulk. We're doing the whole marathon.

As I was watching, I was thinking about... I remember when Infinity Wars came out and Endgame came out. How did they launch those movies? Thinking about this, what they did is that the movie theaters, Disney, they have relationships with the people that have their dream customers, so The Today Show, The Tonight Show, Good Morning America, Late Night, all the different talk shows. About a week before any of these movies go live, what happens?

Again, let's just say that we're Hollywood right now. Hollywood builds out their dream... So here's your dream 100. I got to figure out how to work my way in and buy my way into these people. This is what Hollywood does. It's the same thing. It's like okay, here's the morning shows, the talk shows, late night talk shows. If we're going to promote this movie, we need to start working our way in today.

And so what do they do? They go and all of a sudden, you see the guy who plays Thor, Chris Hemsworth, is on every single show talking about the movie. And then you got Iron Man going everywhere, and you got all the famous people going on all these shows, talking about the movie like, "This weekend, the movie's coming out. It's coming out. It's coming out." They're working their way in to all these channels, letting them know that this thing's about to go live. And then boom, movie goes live on the weekend. They make a billion dollars. That's how they launch movies.

The same thing's true in our world, For the last two years that I've been writing this book, I built my dream 100. I got to know them. I built relationships. I sent free copies of the book. Now, I'm doing podcast interviews, Facebook Lives and all sorts of stuff, talking about my book, getting it out there to the world.

Same thing's true for your product. It's the same thing. You start working your way in. We call it working your way in or earning your traffic because it's free. You're not paying for it. You're paying for it with your time, your relationships.

But it's the best kind of traffic because it's... First off, doesn't cost you any money. Number two, usually it's coming with a personal recommendation. It's the best type of traffic you can get. So work our way in. The first goal is to work our way into everyone's side of the dream 100.

In fact on page 64, you see, well, here's a picture of it there. Personally, I try to figure out how to work my way in. I go through all my podcast lists. How do I get on everyone's podcasts? I want to hit the podcast circuits. Here's all my YouTubers. How do I get on the YouTube circuit? Here's all the people that Facebook live, people who have email list. I'm trying to work these circuits and get into every single person's thing. That's how I worked my way in.

In fact, when I launched the Experts Secrets book, I show a picture here, but I spent... Some of you guys saw that video. I did a whole YouTube video about this. I spent 10 years building a relationship with Tony Robbins, my dream 100. When the Experts Secrets book came out, I said, "Hey, can you interview me about my book on your fan page?" He's like, "Okay," and he interviewed me. This interview got 3.1 million views, of Tony interviewing me when the last book came out. I was working my way in. Didn't cost me any money, but I got in there and got this free promotion.

The first thing is working your way in. The second way is you buy your way in. Now in a perfect world, everyone in your dream 100 would just promote you for free. But the reality is for 10 years, for example, Tony Robbins didn't promote me for a decade that I was working my way in, working my way in, working my way in.

But what's cool is during that time, while I'm working my way in and hoping to get him to promote me for free, I'm still able to go and buy my way in. I was able to go to Tony Robbins, he's my dream 100, and I targeted his fans, his followers on Facebook. I bought ads to his followers. I know his followers are my dream customers, so I bought ads to those people. I knew that Grant Cardone's followers are my dream customers, so I bought ads to those people and I did the same thing.

There's two steps to the process. You figure out who your dream 100 is. Number one is you're going and you are working your way and trying to get free exposure to their following, to their fans, to their audiences. And then two, while you're trying to work your way in and get free exposure, you can also buy your way in. All the advertising platforms nowadays like Facebook and Instagram and YouTube allow you to buy ads directly targeting certain people.

If I have your dream customers, you can buy ads and say, "Everyone who follows Russell Brunson, I want them to see my ad." You can do that really easily. If you're selling a health product, you can say, "Everyone who follows Dr. Oz, show them my product." While you're waiting for Dr. Oz to put you on the show someday in the future, while you're building a relationship and trying to get on his show to get all this exposure, at the same time you can be buying your way in today. You don't have to wait for him to say yes. Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, the channels have already said yes to you. So I'm working my way in and I'm buying my way in.

People always ask me, "What's better? Is it better to work your way in or to buy your way in? The reality is you want both. Here's a little graph here, if you can see. See? If I'm buying my way in, boom. I can get a big spike immediately. I start getting traffic like yesterday. I can get traffic super, super fast. I work my way in, it takes longer. But over the long term, you can get way more traffic from that.

The reality is you want both. You want the immediate traffic in sales coming in from buying your way in, and you want the long-term consistent free traffic. If you're doing both at the same time, that's the best way to do it. ClickFunnels has built up of a lot of traffic from both things, free traffic that we're working our way in, as well as paid traffic that we're buying our way in.

That's kind of where we're starting. I could spend like six years going on this, but you got to get the book, you guys. You have to get it. You can't say it about your own book, that's annoying, but I worked really hard on it so I can say that. I think it's really good. I'm really proud of it. It's funny, because when you're you finish writing it, you're so proud of it, and then there's this phase where you have to send it to people to read. Man, it is a scary, scary phase.

I remember sending it to a whole bunch of my friends and just be like, "Here's my new book," and then just waiting and hoping and hoping. It's funny because at first, you don't hear back because books take a long time to read. You're just like, "Oh my gosh, they must hate it. I'm really, really scared."

And then a couple weeks ago, I was at Tony Robbins' 60th birthday party, which was insane. I'm sitting there and I saw Garrett White across the room. He came over, gave me a hug. And then he's like, in the way Garrett says it, "Brother." He's like, "I read the new book." I'm like, "Oh yeah. What'd you think?" freaking out like, "I hope he..." And Garrett's been one of the biggest fans of DotCom and Expert Secrets that we have, one of our biggest promoters of the book.

He's like, "This one's better than the other two." I was like, "What? Are you serious?" I'm like, "Oh, cool. Thanks." Inside, I'm freaking out because I've been so panicked, so nervous, so afraid that when people got this, what if they don't like it? It's the insecurities of the artist. You always will have it as you start putting your stuff out there.

But it made me really happy that... Anyway, so far everyone who's had a chance to read it has loved it. So many of you guys have had a chance to listen the audiobook and sent amazing feedback. I'm grateful for it. Anyway, yes. I'm excited.

If you guys don't have a copy of the book yet, now is the time. All you got to do is go to trafficsecrets.com. Again, we're in pre-order right now. These don't ship until May 5th, assuming that Amazon opens back up soon. Anyway, that's a story for the another day. May 5th, these start shipping. We'll be shipping from our warehouse, so you don't have worry about that.

But if you go to trafficsecrets.com, you can pre-order. There's an order of form bump for an audiobook. If you want to start listening to it today, you can start listening today. I spent three days in the studio reading it. It's seven-hour audio, I think, of the whole book. You can start listening to today and have it ready by tomorrow. It's going to be awesome.

Anyway, I'm excited for you guys. Hopefully, you enjoy the book when it comes out. I've got to jump. I've been working my way and I've got interviews starting in four minutes with a whole bunch of other people who are going to be talking about this book. I'm going to go jump off and jump on the calls with them, you guys. Yes, I practice what I preach.

But now's time to get your book. Go to trafficsecrets.com. I hope you guys enjoy it. I hope you guys love it. And again, while you're ready for the book to show up, there's the audiobook you can upsell.

There's five videos you get. One of them is me talking about Traffic Secrets at Funnel Hacking LIVE. There's one from Prince EA, who's over 3 billion views on YouTube. There's Peng Joon's video. There's a whole bunch of amazing Traffic videos you get instantly when you get the book, so go take advantage of that as well at trafficsecrets.com. Someone said, "Where at?"

Anyway, I'm jumping off. I got a call in three minutes. I appreciate you guys. Thanks for hanging out with me today. We'll talk back tomorrow.

Tomorrow, we're going to be going into the next secret, which is traffic that you own. This is the most important type of traffic, so we'll cover this tomorrow. Again, there's three types of traffic, traffic you control, traffic that you earn and traffic that you own. Tomorrow, we'll talk about traffic you own, the most important, most vital, most fun type of traffic.

Thanks, you guys. Trafficsecrets.com. Appreciate you all. We'll see you guys tomorrow. Bye, everybody.

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