Episode #74 – Russell Brunson on How To Generate Boat-Loads of Cash With A Multi-Million Dollar Email List (and manage it like a BOSS)

Hey, it’s John McIntyre here, the Autoresponder Guy and it’s time for episode 74 of the McMethod Email Marketing Podcast where you’ll discover one simple thing… How to make money every time you send an email to your list. Now today I’ll be talking to Mr. Russell Brunson. Russell is one of the most accomplished info marketers around on the planet. He’s sold millions and millions of dollars of his own products, he sells to clients. I just bought his book. It’s called like 101 Split Tests and it’s got some great ideas in there on testing and split testing. Anyway, today we’re gonna talk about how Russell builds and manages a multi-million dollar email list. How does he use his email list in his business to create basically a crap ton of money?  A crap ton of profit and revenue and sales and all that stuff that we all want. So, that is today, we’re going to get into that in just a minute. 

To get the show notes of this episode of The Email Marketing Podcast go to themcmethod.com/74. Now this week’s McMasters Insight of the Week is a special one. I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned this before – the insight is basically this – that email is just one piece of the puzzle. Cuz one thing I’ve realized over the last 3 to 6 months, it’s that sometimes it’s easy to think well you know email… you’ve heard about it from me, from Andre Chaperon, from Ben Settle, from any of these big email marketers out there and sometimes just, you know, a marketer. Someone whose told you and you’re like, wow, email is going to change my business. 

And, unfortunately, it’s probably not gonna change. It’s not gonna revolutionize it. Its not gonna make you a millionaire just because you start using email alright? Email is just one piece of the puzzle.    In business you need traffic, you need a conversion process, and then you need an economic process where you make people buy a lot of stuff. Email falls under that conversion banner.  It’s another tool in your arsenal. Another weapon you can use to make people buy your stuff.  So instead of just thinking, well email is gonna save me and email is gonna make everything better, you really gotta have the mindset and think, “well in my business right now… within everything in my to-do list, everything that’s not on my to-do list… where can I make the biggest impact?”  You know, you got a big ass wall in front of you, and there’s one spot on that wall where if you tap it softly the whole wall will come crashing down, but if you tap it anywhere else, it’s a wall of steel.  There’s no way you’re getting through it.  So you have to be a bit of an engineer and think, “is email really my biggest area of improvement right now? And if not, what is?”  And then go work on that.  We’ve been talking about this in McMasters.  

McMasters is my private training community that teaches how to write emails, how to write pages that convert, how to basically build a sales funnel that’s converting well… And why I’m really excited about today is I’ve just added 10 fill-in-the-blank templates. Now these templates are based on story based selling format that I use in my own list.  I’ve taken these ideas and the method that I teach and created some templates that you can use. You sign up, you take the template, you literally fill in the blanks and then you add it to your auto responder software. Then you can send it out. The idea is that someone can sign up and have a 5-10 email sequence on the first day. They don’t even have to learn how to write emails. No struggling with writers block and no training at all. Just fill in the blanks, maybe some people in there have tweaked them a little bit to sort of fit their audience more, but… I know for a fact, Im a copywriter and I would much rather have a template that I can work off then be starting from scratch.  Cuz even if you do tweak it, it’s just so much easier. There’s way less creative energy and power needed. So anyways, I wanted to mention that those templates are in the McMasters. To learn more about McMasters, just go to www.themcmethod.com/mcmasters. That’s the sales page. That’ll give you all the information you need on whether you should sign up or not. Anyways, that’s enough for now. Let’s get into this little interview conversation with Mr. Russell Brunson.

John McIntyre: It’s John McIntyre here, the Auto Responder Guy. I’m here with Russell Brunson.  Russell is one of the most accomplished Info Marketers around online.  He’s sold millions of millions of his OWN products.  And he actually just put out a recent book, which I’ve got right here in front of me called the 108 Proven Split Test Winners and he sent it out all the way to Thailand, which is pretty cool.  He’s got Dot Com Secrets, which their goal is to help 100,000 people earn their first hundred dollars online.  And some other cool goals going too and success, etcetera.  I’m not sure how to say it, but they want to help making a more healthy, wealthy, and wise, which is pretty cool.  How’s it going, Russell?

Russell Brunson:It’s going awesome, man.  Great to have … Good to be here with you.

John McIntyre:Yeah.  Good to have you on, man.  Before we get into sort of the content, tell the least that I’m kind of giving them a little bit of a background on who you are.  Some people might have heard about you anyway, but for someone you hasn’t, give the listener a bit more background on who is Russell Brunson and what does he do.

Russell Brunson:Yeah, definitely.  So, yeah, my name is Russell Brunson and I look like I’m probably 11 or 12 years old as everybody tells me.  But I’ve actually been doing this game for long time.  I had my online business for over a decade now, over 10 years, which is crazy.  I feel like a dinosaur in Internet years, but I’ve been doing this for long time.

And because that we’ve had a chance to test out and try a lot of things in lot different markets, we’ve had a lot of stuff that works really good and a lot of things that don’t work good.  But I’m super passionate about business and about marketing, and about the testing like you said, our most recent product is our 108 Split Test Book, which is, in 4 or 5 in the markets wherein we do a lot of heavy split testing, and so, we kind of just shared all our results and gave it away for free, and it’s been a ton of fun, and yeah, that’s kind of … I mean I’m probably the biggest marketing nerd you’ll ever meet.  I buy every book, every course, have to go through their sales process and have to see what I can get from the information.

Prior to my marketing world, I was a wrestler.  That’s kind of my passion.  It was wrestling forever.  Now, I do more jui-jitsu because it’s like wrestling for all fat guys.  It’s kind of nice show out there.  You know, I have to work nearly as hard as wrestling.  But you still get kind of that rush and I got a wife and four kids, and life is awesome.

John McIntyre:Nice, man.  You’re in Boise, Idaho right?

Russell Brunson:Yeah, I’ve been living in Boise.

John McIntyre:Okay, I’ve got a friend from out there. Have you been to Thailand? There’s tons of like Muay Thai, Jiu-Jitsu, couple of friends do it.

Russell Brunson:I … No.  No, I never actually have been there.  One of our own employees actually was a Muay Thai fighter from Thailand and so, we had 2 or 3 years, we hung out a lot with him.  And so, I’ve never made it out there, I really would love to.  It’d be fun.

John McIntyre:You should come.  Check it out, man.  It’s a good place.  Anyway, let’s talk about some of the content… you got a podcast on Daily Seinfeld Emails and you talked about an epiphany on email marketing.  So, let’s sort of dive in to that and see what we can … what sort of fun we can have.  Tell me about that.

Russell Brunson:Yeah.  So, we’ve been doing email marketing forever.  Right?  And that’s kind of I was lucky.  My very first mentor was a guy named Mark Joyner.  Yes, you may have heard of him.  He owns a company now called Simpleology.  And I’m grateful that he was my first mentor because a lot of mentors teach everything but he like drilled my head like “build the list, build the list, build,” like that’s all he would just … preach, and so, for me, that was like … you know, all that mattered.  So, I focused my first 3 or 4 years 100% on building a list and it served me ever since.

And so, big into list building and then, try to figure out like how … what’s the best way to monetize your list but keep them happy?  And you know, get kind of that balance like, “How do you … how you do that?”  And I’ve had times in my business where I totally screwed it up and I’ve killed my list.  I’ve had times I had to go back, and rebuild it because that I’ve had times that were awesome.  And so, it’s kinda interesting, I … and that you may have had both these guys on your show.  I’m not positive if you have or not.  But there are two kind of guys that I started really looking at.  It was interesting because they very like conflicting beliefs on how to do email marketing.  And one of them was Andre Chaperon.

John McIntyre:Yeah.

Russell Brunson:And Andre’s whole thought process is the “Soap Opera Sequences,” right?  Somebody comes in and you have this 5, 10, 20 and he’s got like 80-day … like Soap Opera Sequence email series that I don’t know how he does it… that are weaving together these storylines and sucking you in and then, you’re like … he’s like a sniper and all of a sudden he introduces this offer after like 80 emails and like everybody buys because they’re so connected, right?

And so, like that whole school of thought, I thought, “Oh, that’s really cool! I like that,” then I met this guy named Ben Settle, and I don’t know if you’ve had Ben on your show or not, but Ben just like sends out a daily email every single day they’re all over the place.  And I was like on his list and stuff, and it was funny because at first, I was like, “This is really cool.”  And after a while, like his emails started like, I was getting emotionally charged by these emails.  I remember like a couple days I’d wake up and I’d read these and I’d get so angry by these emails and I was like, “Just so frustrated.” I was like, “I can’t stand this guy.”  Like, “I don’t like the way he does in marketing, doesn’t like anything.

And one day, It was literally like six in the morning, I was on my phone in my bed reading one of those emails.  I was so upset and I stopped and I was like, “Whoa!  Look at the reaction he’s getting out of me like, “This is like amazing, like I haven’t had every single morning I’m reading his email first.  Everyday I’m getting frustrated or annoyed, whatever.  I’m having this like emotional impact.  It’s like sucking me and then making me keep reading, right, and I was like, “Wow!  There’s something to this.  I need to step back and pull my emotion out of it and look it like what he’s doing.”  I started watching and I think that’s one of the big takeaways for anyone.  A lot of times just look at what people are doing and not what they’re saying, and that’s the couple times I stepped back started watching him, and that’s the guy I gave the really big respect for him and I became friends with him since, but just realizing his model.

So, his model is kind of like … and I can’t remember if he told me this or if I just kind of … I don’t remember what, but like his model is kind of like a daily Seinfeld email.  So, you got Soap Operas which … you look at a Soap Opera, it’s a multi email sequence and just dragging people from thing to thing to thing and it’s a soap opera, right?  Then, you’ll get the TV show Seinfeld, what’s the difference?  Seinfeld is like these shows that each show is kind of its own standalone episode.  And if you watch the episodes where Jerry was trying to actually pitch a show on NBC or whatever, right, and it was a show called Jerry and they’re like, “What’s the show going to be about,” and like, “It’s a show about nothing.”  And they’re like, “Why would anyone watch a show about nothing?”  Well, this is … because it’s there.  It’s on TV, and like this whole big thing, right.  And then, obviously, the irony of it was that Seinfeld was a show literally about nothing like they ask him like, “What’s the Seinfeld about?”  They’re like, “I don’t know,” and people just hanging out, right?

John McIntyre:Yeah.

Russell Brunson:But it’s like the greatest sitcom of all time.  It’s been off the air for like 20 years and people still watch it every single night because of what it was, right?  And really like the daily Seinfeld emails that the power of them is very similar.  It’s emails you’re sending out that don’t really have much to do about anything.  They’re more just kind of like telling a story.  It’s more like entertainment, right, telling a story about what’s happening.  And then, from there, somehow tying it back into your product or your service.  And so, after I met Ben and he kind of walk me to some psychology about what he was doing and you know, why I was getting so emotionally charged by his emails.  He’s like … you know, it’s very much just like thinking each day like, “What’s something happened to my life that’s exciting or dumb or funny or annoying or whatever,” and then, you just kind of write this email about it and he get the emails to do … has nothing to do with anything.  They’re just kind of these random emails and then somehow, at the end, you have to tie it back into –

John McIntyre:Yeah.

Russell Brunson:- into your product, right.  And so, for me, I’m kind of walk you through my psychology real quick, now, then I’ll dig deeper into actually Seinfeld.  So, for me, like if you look at our businesses now, the way we do it is that somebody first joins our list, at that point, they don’t really know who I am or some of our businesses, I’m a big guru.  But they don’t know who the attractive character, who the guru is, right?  And so, I think that the best way to do that and to build that initial bond with your audience is through the soap opera’s sequence.  And so, typically, someone joins our list and they go through anyone from like a 3 to a 10-day email sequence.  It’s kind of like a soap opera.  I can’t write the 80-day once that Andre does.  But they’re shorter and they kind of like build … they very quickly build the relationship with the attractive character because that’s like the key because, otherwise, in the future, they’re not going to open your emails.  They’re not going to buy your stuff.  They got to have that relationship.

John McIntyre:Right.  So, before … Because this is what I was talking to a client about, today is, when someone signs up to the list, I think I have no idea who you are.  Before they’re going to buy anything, they’ve got to know who you are.  So, you sort of got that.

Russell Brunson:Yeah.

John McIntyre:I mean, the goal of these is like an indoctrination sequence where the goal of that, you know, you’re just sending 12 emails, to literally just indoctrinate them so they think that you’re awesome.  So, that’s what you’re talking about, right?  You’re telling them a story –

Russell Brunson:Exactly.

John McIntyre:- about who you are, they position as you as the authority that he was the trustworthy guy or girl, and so on.

Russell Brunson:Exactly, because you got to have that, because I’m here driving traffic, you’re taking their squeeze pages, so it’s kind of blind.  It was something to increase conversions, right?  But after you’ve got them in, now, it’s like, now, you’re going to warm them up and it’s got to be pure relationship.  I know, if your listeners are … or you’ve tried like if you … if you do a landing page that’s all like you focused and you start driving cold traffic to it, it doesn’t convert at all.  It’s really frustrating actually.  But you go in and do one that’s very like blind and that’s very bling and after getting them in.  But then, it’s hard to keep those people around just because like they don’t know who you are.  And so, that it’s key.

For me, it’s like that first 3 to 5 days, we’re building this awesome relationship.  Then, after that, after we build soap opera, we’ve got that relationship with them, then I transition to what we call in our … internally hear our daily Seinfeld emails.  And I can read you one or two if you want to hear them because the very first when I sent out, it was totally like … it was one of those days where like all the stuff was happening and it was frustrating and we had a bad sales call that … and a sales call, it went bad and it was … you know, I’m upset.  So, all of these things were happening and I was like, “You know what?  I’m going to write that Ben Settle style email, like a Seinfeld style email.”  So, I sat down and I’ve started typing this thing out.

John McIntyre:Yeah.

Russell Brunson:And it was like funny and it was like … had nothing to do with anything.  We send it out and that email made me over $100,000 in sales, and I was like, “Huh?!  I should do this more often.”  And so … Anyway, so, do you want me to read you that email because that email is my favourite one I’ve done so far?

John McIntyre:Yeah, do it, man.

Russell Brunson:All right.  So, the subject line said, True Story: He Flushed $20,000,000 Down The Toilet Today.  So, that’s the one out.  Then, here’s the copy.  So, it said, “So, yesterday, you had a guy who applied for my inner circle program.  I saw its app come through and I was actually really excited because he’s in the golf market.  Now, I’m no golfer, but I’ve got a lot of friends doing $20,000,000 plus in the golf market online.  I saw this product and I knew it was a homerun.  So, the coach who was going to call him back asked my opinion on his business before she called them, and I sat down with her for 10 minutes and pulled up, first, his three major competitors; second, I showed her every site that they were successfully buying traffic from; third, I showed her the top three converting ads for each of his competitors; fourth, I showed her the sales funnels that were converting and the main reason why his was not.

I then showed her the two media buyers I would use if I were in a golf market.  Both of who can send over thousands of sales a day consistently and armed with this information she called the guy out.  Now, he was a little cocky and rightfully so it’s all over 100,000 units of his product on TV.  And for some reason, he couldn’t figure out this pesky little Internet thing.  So, she started sharing with him some of my ideas and then he stopped her, “Look, I’ve read 20 books on Internet Marketing, and there isn’t a single thing that Russell could teach me they don’t already know.”  So, she tried to explain, “Look, you can read a million books on Jiu-Jitsu but that’s not going to help you to street fight.”  Now, I thought that was pretty funny.  But what happened next was just sad.  He said, “Well, Russell doesn’t know anything about golf,” and then he hung up on her.  Now, while he was right about me that I don’t know anything about golf. I know everything about selling golf stuff online.  I’ve been doing this now for over 10 years and I’ve personally trained over 2500 companies in my offices here in Boise in those 10 years.  I worked with a lot of golf guys and even one golf gal.

Now, I have worked with people who just know about every mark that I can think of except for bowling.  I never had someone teach bowling come with me which makes me sad because bowling is my third favorite sport behind wrestling, number one, and Jiu-Jitsu, number two.

Anyway, so you notice how these emails are just like … I’m just talking about stupid things, right?  So, anyway, for anything else I can think of and help them out on a funnel, show them what they were doing wrong, introduce them to my media buyer, showing them what size by their ads on, and what they should be spending to acquire customer in their specific market, and then, usually ensure them to gurus I know in those areas.  And after speaking on Dan Kennedy’s stages for over six years, I got to meet almost … most of the gurus in most industries and makes it easy to find connections for those people.   Those are the things you can’t learn in a book.  Those are the things I bring to the table for my inner circle people.  My goal for them is not to teach some more stuff.  It’s to make them more money.

Anyway, if you got a golf product, let me know because I’ve got a killer $20,000,000 a year blueprint that this dude just flushed down the toilet because of his arrogance or his ignorance, either way.  He lost out.  So, you can just plug in around with it or if you sell … well, anything else, I’d love to help you out with that.  Our next inner circle meeting is here in Boise, in May.  If you’d like to come, you gotta act fast.  You can apply here, boom!  And then, oh?  We only accept cool people. If you like to flush money down the toilet, please don’t apply.  Thanks, Russell Brunson.

Sent that out.  We got like 100 and something applications.  And from that, we signed up four people for inner circle at $25,000 a pop.  So, I was like … that was like so much fun and it was just me kind of ranting about just telling this random story and somehow tying it back into … to what we’re doing, right?

John McIntyre:Yeah.  It’s pretty cool.  I’ve seen that.  Like I was playing around with the Andre stuff about a year … a year and a half ago, and all like it works, it goes well.  But it wasn’t until then that I stumbled upon Ben Settle, same kind of story, started using that and that was when everything sort of took off like the whole people’s … yeah, people started listening.  People started responding to the emails and it was quite incredible to watch.  And since then, that’s pretty much all I do, every email is like a self-contained, you know, Seinfeld episode where it’s a random …

Russell Brunson:Yeah.

John McIntyre:It’s not even a story.  Like sometimes like you can just have a rant about … I told a story once about how I almost get arrested here in Thailand one day while driving.  And another one how I … think I went mountain biking one day and almost crashed into a tree, I think that was in the subject line… just like the most random stuff and it’s blowing me away how –

Russell Brunson:Yeah.

John McIntyre:- you take anything…

Russell Brunson:That’s the stuff to get keep people to move, right?

John McIntyre:It’s crazy!

Russell Brunson:Yeah. Yeah.  And, you know, it’s true because like, think about it, like people are bored out their minds like life is kind of boring and that’s why people have Facebook.  So, therefore … and literally hours that every night, they go to bed … before they go to bed, they stroll for like 20 minutes through Facebook trying to find something entertaining for 5 seconds so you can go to bed.

John Mclntyre:Yeah.

Russell Brunson:That’s the world we live in right now, right?  And so, I think one of my big epiphanies is now I think that was the premise about that podcast you’re talking about, it was just … it’s less like teaching and training and more just entertaining.  That’s what people are looking for.  And they’ll buy …

John Mclntyre:Yeah.

Russell Brunson:If you entertain them, they will buy from you.

John Mclntyre:Yeah.  It’s kind of like, you know, people want the education to train, there’s thousands of blogs out there on every topic.  The training is not hard to find but the entertainment is.  Because most people –

Russell Brunson:Yeah.

John Mclntyre:- can deliver.  I mean you can still teach someone in an email.  When you tell a story like or just have like an anecdote or a random, whatever, you can still teach them stuff.  But even if you don’t, the entertainment is the value for a lot of people like … anyone can talk about tips, but not everyone can entertain.

Russell Brunson:Yeah.  That is true.

John Mclntyre:So, what …

Russell Brunson:And it’s actually a lot easier than the other stuff.  And after you learn it, first, it’s kind of like hard.  But after you do it, it’s like … literally it’s like in the morning, I’m like, “Okay, so what happened today, or what happened yesterday? K my kid did something stupid or, you know, whatever it is, and then I just write a thing, I send it out and boom!

John Mclntyre:Yeah.

Russell Brunson:It gets the reaction.

John Mclntyre:It’s kind of like … I’ve done things where you set a time, and I do like a 15-minute time or … and just think, “All right.  Let’s just bust this out as fast as possible.”  And somedays you end up with a terrible email.  Send it out anyway.  But you know it’s not terrible.  You know what I mean, it’s a bit like, “uhh.”

Russell Brunson:Yeah.

John Mclntyre:But you can just pick up anything.  It’s crazy.  I just pick a random line like I would show someone at dinner before or something and just to show someone what I mean I would pick like a glass on a table and turn that into an email and then get them to do it too with something random like a fork.  And once you sort of get the idea, you can take anything and link it to anything.  It’s fascinating.

Russell Brunson:Yeah.  And the key is linking it back to your things.  So, that’s … I’ve talked about this a couple of times and people like, “Oh, I wrote a Seinfeld email,” and they show me, and I’m like “All right.  Well, technically you did, but you never sold anything.  You have to tie back to your things,” something like –

John Mclntyre:Yeah.

Russell Brunson:Telling stories is one thing, but how does that somehow tie back to your thing, and sometimes it’s not obvious, sometimes it’s like a … that I’ve seen even Ben the couple of times maybe laugh [inaudible 0:14:40.6] where he just like, “What’s that have to do with anything?”  “Nothing, but go buy my thing over here.” It goes like, if you can’t do anything maybe you can do that, but you got to bridge the gap somehow and kind of bring it back,” you know.

John Mclntyre:Yeah.  I mean how do you manage this, say, with the long-term?  Because I think … because like the email that you mentioned that you get $100,000 off and that was the first one you sent.  I think part of the reason that would have worked so well is because you’re one doing that at a time.  So, it was very much a pattern interrupt in terms of an email.  But once you do it every day and once you do it frequently, I think it starts to lose its effectiveness because people start to expect.  And when people expect, it doesn’t sort of interrupt or break that pattern as successfully.  So what sort of … and you’ve got that indoctrination sequence when they first sign up and then what do you do after that?  It sounds like you do the daily … the Seinfeld email, but you’re doing this every day indefinitely.  Well, how do you manage it?

Russell Brunson:In theory, I wish I was this perfect as I wish I was like if in a perfect world, I will send out email every single day this way.  I haven’t been as perfect, but, yeah.  I mean, basically, there’s the pattern but there’s different types of the things, right.  It’s not as always like a random source, sometimes it’s gave me some training and some content or something.  And for me, like we roll out new products every month or so. So, my call to action and how I push people is different.  So, it’s always tied and kind of the new thing we’re doing.  You know, somebody like Ben I think is interesting that, I’ve been on his list for like 3 years, and every day, he’s pitched the exact same product for 3 years.  And how awesome who does that?  Because I think that eventually, there’s the … you know, you’re talking about the pattern thing, but just the nature of this like because each one … I mean and conceptually, they’re the same, but the content and the entertainment is different in each one.  I don’t think that there’s the pattern thing as much.  It’s more like, what are you pushing in … and like I said, “For me, it’s just because each … every two weeks or so, we transition to new product, new service, or new kind of thing we’re focusing on.  The new frontend offer we have, it could change for us.  You know what I mean?

John Mclntyre:Okay.  So, you said you’re rotating an offer.  Every two weeks, you change the offer.  Where as Ben Settle, he’s got the email plays where he’s running in every single email for years at a time.

Russell Brunson:I don’t know how he does that, but he’s crazy focused.  I’ve got just too much cool stuff I want to create and put out there in the world.  And so, for us, so if you look at my business, it’s kind of interesting.  We have tons of front ends, and so people are like, “You have tons of products,” and we do.  But like the backend is the same in all of them, right, like I’m taking to every the same direction.  I just realize that for me, like people are going to respond to different things on the front like they all need the same thing in the back, right?  They need my inner circle.  Okay.  That’s what the people need.  They don’t know about it initially. Like they think, “Oh, I’m in an e-commerce business, so I’m doing this or I’m doing … like they’ve got their thing that they think that they … for them, they think their business is different like everyone does.

John Mclntyre:Right.

Russell Brunson:And so because that we create different frontends to attract different people like I’ve got a frontend for people who wants to sell High Ticket Stuff.  I got a frontend for people who are network marketers.  I had a frontend for people who were selling info products or creating a frontend people who got supplements like we’ve got … so all these frontends.  And they’re just frontends to kind of introduce an idea and then get somebody into our core backend, which is the same for everything, right?  So, for me, like on my business is the backend, we have this frontends that attract the different people into it.

John Mclntyre:Okay.

Russell Brunson:And so, for us, like I got my list of the half million people and I have no idea like … you know, my message I’m talking about, you know, information marketing is only relevant to half of them, let’s say, right?  And the other half are doing physical products.  And then, I got transition and talk about my experience to physical product business.  And often those guys are also raising their hand.  They come in the door and then we can get all those people into our program, is that we switch it to like a supplement thing.  We get people in the show now.  And so, that’s kind of how we run our businesses.  In every few weeks, we’re changing at the frontend just to attract and suck out a different segment of our audience –

John Mclntyre:Interesting.

Russell Brunson:- and bring them into our backend programs.

John Mclntyre:Okay.  Okay.  So, you’ve got … so the frontend might be the different angles that the different types of businesses that you’ve got.  But then, at the end of the day, every business owner needs a good masterminder, or a good sort of inner circle coaching program, and that’s really … like it doesn’t matter what sort of business they have –

Russell Brunson:Exactly.

John Mclntyre:- if they can work with you in the coaches.  It doesn’t matter.  You can just work on any business and you can help them out.

Russell Brunson:Yep.

John Mclntyre:That’s the idea.

Russell Brunson:Exactly.  And it’s the same with … and like … you know, any business, the weight loss industry is the same way, right?  Some people … and so like your backend coaching is the same.  But how many different ways do you know there are people who want to lose weight, people want to gain weight, people want to … you know, females, males, people post pregnancy, people pre-pregnancy, like there are so many different frontends you can attack.  Like if I was in the weight lose space, that’s what I’ve been doing, is I’d be figuring out all the markets they want.  And then I’ll create little frontends to attract those people in because …

John Mclntyre:Yeah.  So, you have like the same product for like $20,000, whatever, for each different angle.

Russell Brunson:Exactly.

John Mclntyre:And that funnels into the 200 – 300 – 500, whatever, main product, the flagship how to lose your weight, gain muscle, just does the whole…

Russell Brunson:Boom!  You got it.

John Mclntyre:Yeah.  Okay.  Okay.

Russell Brunson:And it works that way in every market like, “How do you supplement throughout to attract different segments?”

John Mclntyre:Right.  Right.  And you’re doing like … so, when you say you’re doing emails, your 500,000 people on the list, are you segmenting them out in terms of like these are the info marketing guys because they’ve come through that funnel they’ve clicked on links, or something like that, or are you just sending them out daily emails to everyone?

Russell Brunson:So, good question, so my initial soap operas are specific to the landing page they came in through.  And after they’ve come through that, now, we just group everybody together because the reality is that dude who comes in an from info thing, he may be interested in the info businesses, but he may have a physical product business, right, or whatever it is.  And so, I don’t know who those people are.  And so, like if I’m selling something specific just for info, I can go and send out just for that segment, but usually for frontend, I’m kind of just casting this net out there and trying to find out who is going to respond because like they may be in a network marketing business and they hate it.  And so, I came in through our network marketing funnels and so I can sell their marketing stuff but in the back of the mind, they hate it and I’d introduce info marketing.  I’ll introduce supplements, and all of a sudden they’re like, “This is the greatest thing in the world,” you know.

John Mclntyre:Yeah.

Russell Brunson:After they come in the initial thing, then, we’ve got this big pool and we’re just casting nets out and trying to grab the segment that we think will be interested.

John Mclntyre:Yeah.  What’s interesting about that is, so many people like spend … I have had people on this podcast where they go on and on to that segmentation and granted there’s reasons… you know, there’s a good time for it.  But I like how your approach here.  It’s very simple and, you know, bring him in.  Give him that soap opera sequence that’s relevant to, you know, in a context of where they came from.  But at the end of the day, somebody’s got that supplement business.  He might have any common business, too, or an affiliate business like that.  So, that makes your life, and whoever is, you know, managing the list, makes their life so much easier because you’re just sending that email out to everyone.  You don’t have to worry about –

Russell Brunson:Yeah.

John Mclntyre:- if you don’t have like 10 different lists with, you know … otherwise then you’d have to have ten daily emails.  I mean 10 emails a day –

Russell Brunson:I know.

John Mclntyre:- to 10 different segments, that would suck.

Russell Brunson: Yeah. Well, I thought about that a lot because that when people … I mean, you hear somebody who talk about segmentation, and only targeting the right person, and I really had the big epiphany.  I was out to dinner when I was this guy named Rory Fatt, who he’s like the guru of the restaurant industry, right.  And so, I was like trying to figure out like I want to make the frontend to get all the restaurant people and I’m talking to them and drawing about his business and trying to figure out, you know, what his audience wants.  And he stopped me in the middle, and he said, “Russell, you know, what all my people want?”  And I said, “What,” and he said, “They want to be out of the restaurant business.”  And I was like, “Really?”  He said, “Yeah.  Everyone like the number one thing they want to do when they start a business like, yeah, if you survey the world, they all want to start their own restaurant.”  So, they started.  They hate it and they went out.

He’s like, “So, for me, helping them figure out other ways to make money outside and give them out of the restaurant industry is what all they want now.”  that epiphany, I was like, “Wow!  Like that’s … you know, who … who knows what people want?”  Like who are we to say it?  And I think we can segment and target things so specifically we are speaking to it perfectly.  But maybe we were not.  Maybe we were completely off because they may be in that situation.  They don’t want that situation, you know.

John Mclntyre:Yeah.  It’s kind of hard like segmentation almost implies or it’s sort of set up to think that people are black and white, and they’re just not

Russell Brunson:Yeah.

John Mclntyre:Like … So … and I think you sort of start falling into trouble when you start treating a list like that where it’s a bit more of a dynamic relationship.  They’re not just numbers or, you know, people in a database with the little, you know, tag next to them.  These are people with, you know, varied interests.

Russell Brunson:Yeah.  And people who buy … The other thing is that there are people who will buy everything you’ve got like …

John Mclntyre:Some people, yeah.

Russell Brunson:If that’s … You know what I mean?  And that’s the other interesting thing, is like … is if you’ve got four or five things, they’ll keep buying them.  So, why hold those things back for him and not show it to him because they don’t fit the profile or the segment.  I think that let them raise their hand.  Let them figure out.  And I won’t go deeper on this topic unless they have opted in.  You know what I mean? Like most of … I feel like most of our business, most of our frontends like free plus shipping type things, right.  Our DotComSecrets Labs book that you got on a 108 Split Tests, that was bait that we created to track people who already have websites that are interested in testing because that’s the segment of our audience that in fact, that just … so, you know, like that bait that we created, has created more people in our inner circle on anything else we ever done.  We don’t have as many leads from it because it repels the person who doesn’t have a business yet and the person who does have a business, it attracts them like crazy.

And so, we will get as many leads from that, but the leads that come through are like gold forming, right?  And so, most of my friends are free plus shipping, so we just … You know w’re mailing the list we’re like, “Hey, there’s this cool new idea.  It’s free plus shipping, go check it out.”  And now, they start seg … they’re segmenting themselves from my entire pool they’re segmenting themselves if they buy that.  Now, they’re in the funnel that we send them up in that value at.

John Mclntyre:Right.  So, you’re saying, I can’t remember it now cuz it’s been a month or two ago.  But when I bought that, the split testing book, you’re saying that I would have been out for like a soap opera sequence of, I don’t know, a week or two on, you know, who is Russell Brunson, and that sort of stuff.

Russell Brunson:Yeah.

John Mclntyre:And then I would have start … I think I probably … I remember finding the inside of circle, the inner circle emails at some point.  So, that was when I got off the main list.

Russell Brunson:Yeah, exactly.

John Mclntyre: Interesting.  Interesting.

Russell Brunson:Very sneaky, isn’t it?

John Mclntyre:I like how it’s so simple.  So you get like these … different like free fronts the shipping the free opt in pages and then you go to the frontend like, you know, free product with pay for shipping, and then, you’ve got the inner circle.  It’s a very simple business structure.

Russell Brunson:Yeah.  It’s easy and it’s nice because it makes it easy because all … that it can get on all backend.  The middle level products in a backend are all the same.  And so, all I’ve got to do is I got to create new free plus shipping things to test different markets that I look at it as bait. Who do I want to attract? Create some different banners for that throw it out there and bring a new group.  But yes, it’s way simple to create a free plus shipping thing right our soap opera sequence, send it out, start driving leads in, and then they start adding a whole new stream of leads and traffic into our funnel and like I said, after that … after their 3 to 5-day soap opera sequence, they drop into our daily broadcast.  And now, they’re in the gauntlet to find out what are their offers they can raise their hand for.

John Mclntyre:I’m curious, man.  Why do the free product with shipping instead of, say, like, “Why not just give them a PDF or an e-book or a video?”  Why do you send it out?

Russell Brunson:Two reasons.  Number one, is there are so much free step on the Internet.  Like it doesn’t … it’s not interesting like “Hey, here’s a free PDF.”  And they’re like, “All right.  Sweet.  I got a billion PDFs that are never opened,” right.  But free book or free CD or free DVD is like … it’s this cool … just cool thing, right?  Second off, so you or the book a month ago, right?

John Mclntyre:Yeah, a month or two.  Yes, something like that.

Russell Brunson:So, is it sitting on your desk that you work out?

John Mclntyre:Yeah.  It’s got to … Yeah, you mean the glossy magazine, yeah, it’s right next to me.  I’ll grab it.

Russell Brunson:Yeah.  See, that what’s interesting is I want that, a thing on the desktop of every single person in my market.  So, every day, we wake up …

John Mclntyre:I’ve shown … I’ve got people out here and I give it to them and, say, “Check out this book.  I got from Russell Brunson.”  It’s like glossy and I say nice.  So, it’s like a proper magazine.

Russell Brunson:Yeah.

John Mclntyre:Like I mean it’s … Yeah, feels like a magazine you’d find in the news agency.

Russell Brunson:And people like … and literally people are like, “Yeah, this is in my bathroom.  I read it every day.  This is on my desk.  I look at it every day.”  And now, I started website opening it up like, “That’s what I want.  I want my name in front of their face all the time.”  And if it’s in a PDF, it disappears.

John Mclntyre:Yeah.

Russell Brunson:Because the physical thing, you get the mailman delivering it.  They get that euphoria like, “Oh, this is a cool thing I got.”  They put it on their desk.  They show their friends.

John Mclntyre:Yeah.

Russell Brunson:It just … It changes the relationship.  And so, I’m big on that.  And just the fact that by saying it’s free, our conversions shoot up. By having them pay shipping, it qualifies the buyers.

John Mclntyre:Yeah.

Russell Brunson:Because PDF, you get all these people from India who have no money who will buy … you will opt in in download it, right?  Like half our list is probably, you know, people in the Philippines who made $20 a year right?  So, it’s like that’s hard to … you can’t sold people things, right?

John Mclntyre:Right.

Russell Brunson:But with free plus shipping, they got to pull a credit card out their wallet.  They got typed in the digit thing and I’ll click Submit.  So, now, and those people were actually buyers and it just changes … now, that I know their buyers, I can change how I market to those people.

John Mclntyre:Right.  I’m curious, too.  Like I know that if someone might be listening to this thing, well, that’s a cool idea.  But I just don’t have the resources to create a glossy, you know, 200-page magazine.  How do you go … How does like a layman go and get, say, take PDF that they’ve got and have been, you know, giving it away to people. How do they take that and turn that into a glossy magazine and have that sent out and do it sort of automatically?  So, they’re not actually…

Russell Brunson:Yeah, because that’s the really easy way.  So, what we use is … So, again, with DotComSecrets Labs, the book you got, like obviously went over top on that.  But most of our students that we teaches the process to, we show them through either CD or DVD, even if it’s a PDF like put it on a CD and tell people it’s too controversial for the Internet and you don’t want getting links.  So, it’s got to be on this magic CD, right?

John Mclntyre:Yeah.

Russell Brunson:And then we use a company called Disc Delivered.  If you go to DiskDelivered.com, I think it’s like $50 to sign up and then, if you put in a coupon code DotComSecrets, orcompany name, they knock off 50%, which is kind of cool.  And then, they will send you like the artwork for the DVD and you just design that, send it back to them, you record your CD or your DVD or PDF and then you mail them a physical copy of the CD and then they’ll do print on demand for you and it connects to most shopping cart.  So, somebody orders it, and then they just ship out the DVD for you.  And I said it’s print on demand so there’s no like it doesn’t cost you anything until something gets sold.

And so, that’s what we do.  And in fact, we have like 5 or 6 of our frontends are just through … just delivered because it’s so easy to set up, and it doesn’t cost us any money out from.

John Mclntyre:Nice.  Nice.  Cool.  All right.  I think we’re right on time.

Russell Brunson:It’s the fast, easy way like … It’s like a fast, easy way to just kind of test the market, right, through a CD, delivered, send it out, and see what happens.  If it doesn’t work, move on.

John Mclntyre:Yeah.  Yeah.  Yeah.  Nice.  Cool.  We’re running on time.  We’re running on 30 minutes.  So, we didn’t want to run out of stuff to talk about.

Russell Brunson:Very cool.  I was hoping I won’t bore you, guys.  So, I’m bringing out some good stuff.

John Mclntyre:I’m just being cool, man.  This is being fun.  Before we go, if someone wants to learn more about you, you know, sign up to one of the frontends or maybe you and check out the inner circle, where is the best place for them to do that? 

Russell Brunson:Yeah.  I would say the best thing is our … I mean our main website is DotComSecrets.com and that’s got our blog and our links to all products and stuff like that and our inner circle.  The other thing is that we just rolled out a new software program directly checking out.  It builds sales funnels called ClickFunnels.com depending where you’re listing this.  We did the beta launch last month, and then we closed back down in about two weeks for reopening it.  But it’s where I literally think will change the market.  I took … Yesterday, I built a 12 sales funnel that typically would take immediate programmer and a designer probably 3 to 4 weeks to design and get done.  I built the entire thing in two hours as well as the membership site.  It will change our entire industry for everyone.  It has for me already I can fire my entire team.  It’s pretty awesome.  So, that’s at QuickFunnels.com, you can check it out and get a free trial and you go play there.

John Mclntyre:Cool.  I saw that a couple of hours in a couple of weeks.  You go upon that from how do I think and it looks like I’ve been trying it out…

Russell Brunson:Oh, you allow it, and it’ll change everything for you.

John Mclntyre:And you’re still selling the 108 Proven Split Test, right?

Russell Brunson:Yup.  If you go to DotComSecretsLabs.com, they can get … they can go pick that up for free and just cover shipping.

John Mclntyre:You get that shipped that, and I can get on that list of yours.  That sounds good, man.  Well, thank you.  Thanks for coming on the show.  I really appreciate it.

Russell Brunson:No worries.  I appreciate you having me and it’s been a lot of fun.