Sales Funnel Radio

"Steve, how do you come up with content?" Well, here it is! Hey what's going on everyone. This is Steve Larsen and you're listening to a special segment of sales funnel radio. Now, a lot of you have asked, "Hey Steven how do I set up a podcast? or how to publish or how do you come up with things to say every single time? How do you get consistent with this? What's your routine? What kind of mic do you use? How do what to say? How do how you should say it?" and all those different aspects. And I'm excited for this episode. I think you guys are gonna enjoy it because I've had a lot of questions and I'm going to drop some answers here. Welcome to Sales Funnel Radio where you'll learn marketing strategies to grow your online business using today's best internet sales funnels. Now, here's your host, Steve Larsen. All right you guys are really, really excited for this. Now, right off the bat I'll tell you, this episode, I'm calling it the power of publishing and I'm going to ... I've talked about this before in the past. I've talked about how publishing is power. It helps you with so many things but I don't want to think is ... My podcast is growing like crazy. It's definitely not the top podcast out there. I know it's not. But my podcast is really only 10 months old. I mean, really? Maybe, actually, not even that. The first month I had, I think, 1,100 downloads and it was all organic. 1,100 downloads than 1,400 downloads, then went to 3,000 and 4,000 then jumped up to 5,000 in a month, and then it did this massive spike and went to 8,000 a month and over 9,000. And we're not even halfway through this month as it is, and I can tell we're going to blow past this previous month as well. And it's been a lot of fun. And so please don't think that I'm saying, "Oh my gosh. I am the expert. I'm the guru." But I have figured out a few things of how sales works and it's been working for me, it's working great. So, and the followings been exploding and you guys have been great. So, I want to show you guys, and beg you and urge you that in your personal business, and in the things that you're doing, whether it's a business or you just feel a need to podcast, or publish, or whatever, video, audio, anything, written. I don't really like to write that much unless it's a sales letter, or sales copy. But some people like that. Whatever it is, choose some kind of platform and just stick to it. The weirdest things begin to happen, the coolest things begin to happen. You become an authority figure you become somebody ... You start to build a tribe. I think one of the coolest aspects of this, and why I've enjoyed it so much is because I have perfected my own craft far more. And selfishly, it's one of the major reasons I wanted to do the podcast in the first place. And it's worked. Holy crap, it's worked. It's worked really, really well. I helped do the fulfillment for Russell Brunson's Two Comma Club Coaching program, and once a week for about four hours every week we jump on and I do a four hour Q&A call, and we dive into people's businesses and help them create products that will ... We're trying to them make a million dollars with that product. And it's really cool. Super unique offer. But after six or seven times, I turned to Russell and I was like, "Dude one of the coolest aspects of this is that I'm getting better at my own craft. I already knew the material but the depth and how it fits, and all these extra scenarios is just so amazing." And he's like, "Yeah, it's one of the coolest reasons." And it's funny because I remember way back in the day, it's probably what? Two years ago, three years ago, I decided I knew I needed to start publishing but I did not want to do it. There was so much mental ... huge mental block for me in publishing because it was like "What do I come up with every single time I do it? How often do I do it? How does it work? How does the tech work? What do I say? How do I say it?" And those are all the big questions that I had and I've got a lot of those questions recently from you. So I'm excited for this episode and how to do it. It's funny, one lady reached out to me shortly after I started this podcast, and she was like, "Stephen were you a radio announcer?" And I was like, "No." She's like, "It sounds like you got a radio style voice. I expect to hear your kind of voice on the radio." And I was like, "Aw, I appreciate that." She's like, "Keep going with that. That's awesome." That's one of the first little wins that I had. It was shortly after I started the podcast and it kept me going, and I'm like, "Oh my gosh. it's so cool." But even before I started this, I had a periscope channel. A lot of you guys probably don't know that about me. I had a periscope channel. I was following Russell Brunson. He had no idea who I was and we were ridiculously poor, and it was ... This was a story I was not planning on telling you guys. But I was in a period of college where I was in the middle of my marketing degree and the things that I was learning on my own was dancing circles around what I was learning in my marketing degree. I was learning from guys like Russell. I was learning from guys like ... all over the place. Ryan Levac, Jeff Walker, all over the place, all these people and I was doing it. I wasn't just learning it. Some of my clients were like Paul Mitchell. Some of his hair schools, a billion dollar company really, really ... It's awesome stuff, really unique for a college student and I totally get that. And all along I kept hearing Russell say, "You got to start publishing. Got to start publishing." That's what he was saying when he would publish. And I was like, "I don't want to do that. That's crap. No, I don't want to do that. You know what? I'll do it ... I know better." That was kind of the attitude I had, a little bit. And one day I was like, "Fine. The dude said to do it. I'm going to start publishing regularly." And so what it did is I took out my phone and I didn't even know what I was going to say. I just hit go, and I planned out some stuff, I put some things together as far as like the look in the feel. And I was looking at graphics, and I was heavily into ... I never did any sports in high school or anything like that. I was always in theater. I was on stage a lot. Actually, you guys probably don't know this about me either, I sang a lot, from 4th grade all the way through halfway through college, I sang a lot. And so I took the lead in a lot of musicals and stuff like that, a lot of stage time, and I was a head editor for yearbook, doing a lot of layout design, and got a lot of Colorado state awards for my layouts designs and things like that. It was really, really fun, super cool. I enjoyed what I did, I do regret that I didn't do a sport. But, honestly, it's really helped with all the things I've been doing, though. And fast forward, when it came time for me to actually start publishing, I was scared to death. And I had to lean on a lot of the other talents I had developed over the time to try and deliver stuff that's interesting that people could listen to. And you've probably thought that. And if you're listening to this podcast right now, you've probably thought that before, you're like, "Aw, I should probably podcast," you know what I mean? So one of the things I love is it just helps you get more and more clear on your craft itself. The inner action is insane. And honestly, as I was reading, I was just writing out a list of the benefits of publishing frequently. And really, though, what it boiled down to, was two separate things. And I guarantee you will always need these things, you are never done with them. And the first thing that you need, is that you've got to find your voice. You have to find your voice. I remember, it's so funny, it was probably like two or three months ago, I was listening back to some of my first episodes ever on this podcast, and I was like, "Ugh." Like, "Ugh, crap, that's what I sounded like? Gosh. That was not a good story," or whatever. And I leaned over to Russell, I was like, "Dude, I think I'm gonna delete the first few episodes of my podcast, they're not very good." And very seldomly does Russell turn with this level of fervor. And he turned to me, I still remember this, and he goes, "No!" He goes, "Don't delete it!" He's like, "That is part of your story! You need to leave it on there, that's part of your journey, man. People want to know that about you, that oh my gosh, he didn't turn out with this, whatever- he wasn't born perfect, he wasn't born in a suit! And you become real, and you become vulnerable." And I was like, "Okay, that makes sense, that makes sense." And super helpful. So that's the number one true benefit, I believe, of publishing frequently, is that you find your voice. You figure out your own personality, you get really, really comfortable with who you are and what you say and how you say it. And the stories you tell, and the analogies and the principles behind there. And the way you start and the way you end and the way you address your audience, the way they interact with you back and forth. It is so incredibly important because in the future, when you decide you need to go sell something, you know how to do it, and they have heard you do it before, right? They've heard your voice, it's not new. You get past the croc brain easier, you know? All right, so that's number one. Second thing is distribution, you create a following. And like I said, it's really, really fun. This podcast now is at a time where the moment I publish it, within the first day or two, there are already four or 500 people who have downloaded it. And I know that's not huge or whatever, but it's not ... It's not small either, and I know it's growing a lot and it's been a lot of fun too, so super cool. So to me, when I think about publishing and I think about specifically podcasting, for me. It has become this therapeutic thing, I didn't want to do it and several years ago I went to Russell's Funnel Hacking Live event and he was like, "You gotta publish, you gotta publish, start a podcast, start publishing." And I was like, "I don't want to! I'm not gonna do it!" And then I was like, "Fine. Gah. I guess he has more money than I do, I should probably listen to him." And I got really, "Fine, whatever, I'm gonna do it." And it was almost out of annoyance, I was like, "Gah, let me put this podcast together, freaking thing." And I put it together and I was like, "Crap, what do I do? How do I actually execute something, how do I execute publishing in general, let alone a podcast?" I remember, I just started thinking of stories, I was like, "Okay, what does every publisher, someone who regularly publishes, what's a blog post? Okay, usually there's a story and there's some kind of principle in there. Okay, I'll kind of follow that format." And then it got more and more in-depth, and more and more in depth, and what I put into the podcast and how I structured them. And sometimes they're just ad lib. I know there's stuff on my mind and I've got to get it out. And sometimes they're more for me than it is for you, and then other times I plan the whole thing out and I get it going. Like, this episode right here, it's a full page of notes, I've got a lot of cool tips for you guys on how to publish podcasts and publish in general and I'm excited to jump into it here, it's taking a little bit. What's funny though is that I was so nervous, this is going to happen to you. If you've not ever published before, it's going to happen to you. I was so scared that what I was going to put out there wasn't good enough, that I confused action with success. I confused action with progress, and so what I did is, I must have had 13, 14 episodes done and ready and still, I had not launched the podcast. There was that much mental angst for me, I was just like, "Am I good enough, is this good enough? I think these are really good, what I'm saying in there is real, maybe my delivery is not polished enough yet, maybe I'm not the best at it yet, but I know this thing right here works, I should talk about it here on a podcast." But I was so afraid, I wouldn't launch it for a really long time. I remember, I think there was two dates I set. I was like, "Okay. Okay, coming up, I'm gonna launch this podcast, it's gonna be awesome, it's gonna be so good. Okay, here's the date, I'm gonna do it on this date, here it comes, " and I had to psych myself up about it. And the date came, and here it was ... and the date went. And the date left, and I didn't launch the podcast. I was like, "Okay, this is ridiculous, why am I so scared. What am I going to do, what am I going to say, so what, okay. Okay." And then I went and then published the podcast and I put three of them out at once because iTunes cares how many episodes people are listening to, and so if someone listens to the first episode and they like it and there's not a second one for them to listen to, you're already shoot yourself in the foot, right? And so I was like, "Okay, I'm going to launch with three episodes. I'll tell a story. You know what, honestly? I don't know that I'm good enough, and so what I'm gonna do is I'm just going to go interview other people." And that's what I did. And I lined up, I think it was probably nine interviews. So if you listen to the first 20 episodes of the podcast, about eight or nine of them are interviews. And I thought, "You know what-" And this is not true at all, every single one of you have got something that is awesome inside of you that can bless somebody else's life, I'm telling you that that belief that I had before, that I had nothing of value to give, was false. And it's false for you, if you believe that. It's not true. You have something that is worth to humanity, okay, to your market. And I'm so sad that I had that belief and I didn't launch it with more gusto, but it was just something I had to get over internally. What I did is I just started interviewing other people around the subject of sales funnels. That is literally why I did those interviews in the beginning of this podcast. And some of you guys have asked, "Okay, well Stephen, why haven't you done interviews since?" Well what was funny is when I started learning the pattern of how to publish and how to put value in the marketplace, and how to pull people together, and how to speak, and how to have confidence and all that stuff. I always reference this, but Robert Kiyosaki says, and it's always stuck with me, "The moment you move down the path of entrepreneurship, your character flaws blow up in your face." Well, it's no different for any kind of publishing either. And I had to get over myself, you know. I went and I launched all these different episodes, and I was like, "Wow. Sweet. People are liking it, that's really cool." And iTunes has 42 days for you to get on the new and noteworthy section, and I was like, "Cool, let me get out there." And there's a few people that say if you don't hit new and noteworthy section, that you should just abandon the podcast and I do not agree with that. Now, it depends on the podcast and the purpose of the podcast. For me, this is me sharing with you tricks and tips that I am using to build cool sales funnels. I've built over 170 of them in the last year alone, working for Russell Brunson. And I have my own clients and I kind of left that path so I could focus on you guys with this podcast and specifically working with click funnels and with Russell Brunson as his funnel builder. But before that, before I ever worked for Russel, before any of the others, I had my own clientele and it was awesome and that's how I broke into the industry. That's the purpose for this podcast, and so I don't think that by you missing new and noteworthy section that you should abandon the entire project. I think you're still going to find the voice, you're still going to create a distribution channel, you're still going to go and make your own craft more perfect by you learning how to teach it and coach other people through it. What I wanted to jump into here real quick now ... So all I was trying to say in the past, is just have some courage with it and just know you will always have haters no matter what. I am blown away at the number of people who take the time out of their freaking day to come tell me that they didn't like something I did. And I was like, "What on earth?" You've just got to be prepared, okay? Here's the metrics, okay? Ten percent of your following are going to be slimy thieves who just take crap from you and never want to pay for anything and think that you owe them everything, that's just how it works. Just plan on that when you start in any entrepreneurship, 10% of them are going to be the slime balls. And I don't care calling them out that way because I put a lot of sweat and tears- not tears, they're man-tears, right? But I put a lot of time and a lot of effort into things that I produce and I know that they're good. And if someone comes to me and says, "Hey, that's not good, I think I should steal it." Russell told me once, "If people are willing to steal your stuff, it means that you did it right because there's so much desire to have it." And I was like, "Okay. All right, 10%, you dirtbags, go take it," you know what I mean? You just need to know, when you start publishing, people are going to steal your crap. So that's one of the metrics. The other metric is that 10% of your following is going to become your raving fans. They're going to share your stuff, they're going to go on Facebook when you post things and they're going to re-share them and post them. They're going to talk about you, they're going to do shout-outs, they're going to go and they're going to say, "Oh my gosh, Stephen, that was amazing, I absolutely loved what you did, this last thing helped me here, here, and here." And it is fuel. And you've got to learn to love that, and you've got to learn to attach yourself to it. It's such a good feeling, it's so cool... It's fun to know and legitimately know that there are people's lives that have changed because I started this podcast. And it's going to be the same exact thing for you when you decide to consistently start publishing, on no matter what. And as long as you're consistent with it and you are honestly trying to solve legitimate problems and help people out, it's going to be a great experience. It's this side benefit I was just not expecting, to be honest. And there's just been times that I just fall asleep at night, I'm just like, "Oh my gosh ... man. That last episode was so good." And sure enough, people will come reach out to you and they'll be like, "Oh man, that was so sweet! Thanks so much, that helped a lot, it helped me do X, Y, and Z." And it's this cool community that you have the ability to create as the entrepreneur and the marketer and the leader and guru or whatever. And it's very, very exciting. Anyway. I was not meaning on having this be a rant of what it's been so far. My notes are completely different on what it is that I'm talking to you guys about right now, but it's all these side things that just have been really, really fun as I've learned how to do all this stuff, and it's been a lot of fun. So with that, let me jump in here real quick to a few quick things. I usually try and keep my podcasts no longer than thirty minutes, which to some people is way too long, but eh, whatever, it' my style, you know what I mean? You can choose your own. The biggest question that I get from people is, "Hey, Stephen, how on earth-" and I'm not trying to pat myself on the back, but they'll say, "Hey, you've got great content, how do you come up with it all the time." Have you ever felt that way? I'm sure you have, especially if you listen to this podcast, my podcast is all about how to sell stuff. And teaching how we are doing it, how I'm doing it. Part of that is marketing, and what's marketing? Marketing is education and belief re-building. That's basically it... You're basically re-building belief patterns by educating. That's what marketing is, that's what sales is in the long run, and so I'm sure you've had that kind of question. So what I do to actually come up with my podcasts, or come up with any kind of content creation piece, whether it's an email or whatever, is I'll sit back and I've got to get passionate about something. And I've got to collect my thoughts. And what I do is I go back and I think of, it's either a story or an experience or some ridiculous tip that has really helped or increased the bottom line or whatever, increased conversions or something like that. And the trick is that I've got to get myself in the same state that I was in when I had that story happen to me. Or when I experienced that tip. And what I have to do, is I need to covey enough emotion and I need to dive into the feeling and I need to dive into enough of what was going on around me when I'm telling the story, that you start to get in the same state that I was in when I experienced it. Russell literally calls this the "epiphany bridge." If you've ever read the book Expert Secrets, you know exactly what I'm talking about, it's one of the best books on how to sell that I've ever read in my life. And I'm not just saying that because I work there, it's true. I have two huge bookshelves next to me, just full of marketing books. And I've read and I've studied like crazy for someone my age and I know that, it's not normal, and it's still is one of the best books I've ever read in my life. Anyway. So what I do is I literally think through, "I've got to come up with, number one: an epiphany bridge. I've got to come up with a story." So number one, the epiphany bridge/story, you know, what's the story? And then what's the lesson that is attached to that. And then what I do is I sit down and the first thing that I do on the podcast is I try to tell the story first. I tell the story first, because I don't want to come right out of the gate and go, "Did you know you can increase conversion rates by changing your buttons from orange to red?" That's not true. But, you know what I mean? If I jumped right out the gate and I started telling you all this tech stuff, it's going to be really freaking annoying. And so what I do is I've got to tell a story, there's got to be pattern interrupt, there's got to be things that I do. Every once in a while, I start the episode, I yell. And I get really, really loud and I get intense. And that's literally the entire reason why, is because I need a pattern interrupt, I need you to know that this is not like what's happened the rest of your day. You know what I mean? And so I think through a story, I think through some kind of pattern interrupt, certainly the main lesson or nugget. But if I just come out and tell you the nugget ... Everyone thinks that, "Oh, just give me the bullet points, just give me the main ideas." And I'm not like that. "I wish that you'd just give me the main point and I'll just walk away." Okay, but everyone I ever just give the main points to, they never go do a dang thing with it. It's- story is powerful. You have to hear the story, it's part of the medicine, okay? It's like the spoon that holds the medicine. The story is super important to the whole thing. I come up with a story, like I said, some kind of lesson with it, and a hook or some pattern interrupt whether it's the headline or whatever it is. And that's kind of it, honestly. When my podcast started out, I had a few episodes, they were only like seven, eight minutes because I didn't know what else to say. But what I do is, as I'm reading books, and as I'm going through courses and as I'm studying other marketers and I'm sitting next to these brilliant minds- I will have my ear always perched towards what I could say in the podcast. That doesn't mean I steal idea, but if there's something that's applicable that I know you guys could benefit from, I sit down and I write it down. I've got a big, big, big list of lessons just from Russell because I sit there next to him. And it's a huge list that I call Brunson-isms, and there's just tons and tons of these different lessons, that- he'll say stuff when he's on another interview, and I'm like, "Oh my gosh, that was amazing," and I'll write it down. I don't always use it, but sometimes they'll pop up and float into my head in the middle of a podcast episode, or while I'm on an interview with someone else on their podcast, or whatever it is. And super, super fun, I really enjoy that a lot. So that's how I come up with the episodes, I hope that helps. The easiest way to do it is for you ... This is one of my rules. One of my rules, as you guys are going around and you're studying marketing and you're trying to learn how to sell you product and you're doing all this stuff. One of the biggest rules that has changed my life, and I started it about 10 years ago, okay? Wait ... when was it ... yeah, 10 years ago, it was 10 years ago, I remember it to the date. There was a guy who was mentoring me, and I was trying to make some changes in my life and all the things I was doing, and he said, "You know what you need to do." He said, "Every time you learn something," now keep in mind, this guy changed my life, I'm fully convinced. And it's a story for another time, but he saved my life. And there was a time, I was just trying to make changes in my life, I didn't like how I was living, I was trying to fix a whole bunch of stuff in my life, and he kind of was this heavy hand. He was kind of a hammer with a pillow around it, he was blunt, he was extremely forward with me. But what he did is he would sit me down, he would say ... You guys know I'm religious, okay. And so what he would do is he would sit me down and he would make me read scripture out loud and he made me put a shirt and tie on. And he was a strength trainer for the Denver Broncos football team. Big, big, big dude, this guy was massive, and he would put a thousand pounds on his back and carry it until his nose bled, that's not a joke. He just won the strongest man competition for his weight class in America, ridiculously strong man. And I was super fortunate to have him as a mentor for things other than hi physical training, which was really, really cool. And this is the lesson he taught me that's changed my life forever, and is one of the reasons why I'm able to, I think, come up with what I think are pretty good episodes for this podcast. He said, "Here's the rule. Learn for two." That's it. That's the secret, you guys, to content creation in my opinion and and how I come up with these podcasts. It becomes the foundation for everything. Learn for two, learn for two people. Meaning, when I'm reading a book, when I'm going through a video course, when I'm attending a seminar, when I'm talking to somebody, any time I'm doing anything and I'm trying to learn, or even when I'm not. My ears are perked open and I'm learning for the next guy I'm going to teach it to. I literally envision myself teaching this from stage. A lot of times, you guys don't know this because it's audio, I have my eyes closed when I'm doing my podcast, envisioning that I'm standing on a stage. Because I know that I was learning it, envisioning that I would teach it on a stage. Does that make sense? And so what I would do, is I'd go read through all these books and I'd go through all these courses and I would think through myself, and go, "Okay. How would I teach it to the next guy, how'd I teach it to the next guy," and I'm convinced that's one of the reasons I sit next to Russell Brunson. Because in college and way back in the day when I was doing door-to-door sales, all these things, I literally was thinking to myself, it was a conscious thought. "How do I teach the next guy what I'm learning right now?" You know the depth you begin to learn when you do that? It's amazing. The depth is insane because you're learning it with this, almost like a mantle that gets placed on you. You have this responsibility to teach it to the other guy. Now is that always true? No, but if you act like it is, and I learn for two, then I'm constantly in pursuit of what I can share with other people that is of value. I have quotes all over my wall, I literally write them on legal piece of paper and I thumb tack them to the wall, and when I was in high school I did that too and I'd cover my walls, literally, so you couldn't see the wall, of just quotes. And I can't remember where the quote is, I'm looking at my wall right now. I can't find it, but one of the quotes is that basically any time you open and you communicate, you're either taking up space or you're adding value. And that's the key, that if you want to add value, you have got to start learning for two. Well how do you come up with consistent, awesome content? It's not like things come to you all the time, you've got to dig the well before you're thirsty, you've got to put stuff in the well, so start learning for two. That is one of the biggest tips I can tell you for content creation, ever. When Russell Brunson hired me, when they called and I couldn't believe it, they were like, "Hey, we want to offer you the job." And I was like, "Oh my gosh, are you kidding me?" I made a conscious choice right after that phone call, I remember this. I was like, "How am I going to make the most of this opportunity that is just insane? Well, I'm going to learn for two." And I remember that went into my head, I was driving my car, I was going back home after the interview, and I had that conscious thought: "I'm going to learn for two." And doing that put more responsibility on my shoulders, but it also helped me formulate ideas and put pieces of things together. "Okay, this guru over here, they said this, and this guru over here, they said this and it pulled this together." And some of you guys have come out and you've said, "Stephen, how come you can quote so many other people and their books?" Well, that's why. Learn for two. Okay? Anyways, that's not in my notes. Again, ad lib. but that's been a huge piece for me. So now that you guys know how I come up with my content itself, what I want to do is I'm actually going to take a break here for just a second, and on the next episode, I'm going to share with you guys how I actually put it together. I want to tell you guys how I actually- what kind of mic I use, how I actually get it transcribed, how I get it published to like 15 different places with a single click. Really, really cool and powerful stuff. For the fear of this being an extremely long podcast, I'm going to break it into two episodes here. Stay tuned to the next podcast here, I'm going to push it out at the same time of this one. I just want to make sure I break it up here. All right guys. Thanks for listening to Sales Funnel Radio. Please remember to subscribe and leave feedback. Want to get one of today's best internet sales funnel for free? Go to salesfunnelbroker.com/freefunnels to download your pre-build sales funnel today.Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands

Lets get one thing straight here... WHAT is an entrepreneur and are you one? What's going on guys? You guys ready for the greatest episode of Sales Funnel Radio ever, until the next one comes out? Me too, let's get started. Welcome to Sales Funnel Radio, where you'll learn marketing strategies to grow your online business, using today's best internet sales funnels. And now, here's your host, Steve Larsen. Hey guys, I'm super excited for today, this is going to be awesome. A lot of you guys know we just got a house recently, we just got a house, and my wife and I were getting used to the new chores that come with home ownership, you know what I mean? There's yard work, there's all sorts of stuff that you would not think about until you actually own your actual house, which is awesome, and it's been a whole lot of fun to do so. Funnels certainly have played a role in our ability to do this and be this. We know that realistically, we'll probably pay the house off in just a couple years here, and we're super excited about that. It's not a mansion, but it's much larger than we actually need, but it's very fun. I'm not bragging, but I just want you guys to know what's possible out there if you guys are just barely getting started, which I know a lot of you guys who listen to this are. So anyways, I was outside the backyard, and I was doing yard work. Actually, I really enjoy yard work, it's therapeutic for me, mostly because I'll toss on some podcasts, and I'll just lose myself a little bit while I'm doing stuff. I was in the backyard, and I was doing a few things, and I always like to find new podcasts, I don't know why, I just really like podcasts. I've personally gained a lot from them. Anyway, I like podcasts a lot, and so I'll go download tons of them. I have a huge list of them, and sometimes I'll just go open up my phone, and just start looking at random ones, and I always binge listen to someone's podcast, I'll listen to like 15 episodes at once, and decide if I want to keep going on it, you know what I mean? Well, there was this new podcast, and it will remain nameless, but it was so funny. I don't know if it was just episode number one, or what, it sounded like it was a podcast that was just barely starting, but it was this guy who was getting up ... And again, I'm not badmouthing him, but I am blatantly disagreeing with him, okay? If anyone's offended by that, whatever... Anyway, so this guy gets on and he's like, "Hey, thanks so much ... Thanks for joining my podcast." And he starts going into a few little pieces and tips, things like that, and he was extremely ... It always bothers me when people just get up, and they just try and prove how awesome they are. It's like, "Okay, let your content prove that," you know what I mean? Anyway, so he gets up, and he starts naming all these stats, and it's very professional, and I can tell he probably starches his shirts, you know what I mean, you know what I mean? I was like, "Okay, you know, this doesn't ... Already I don't really want to keep listening to this." But he said one line that about made me hit the floor... I couldn't believe that he made this statement that he did, and when he said it, I actually rewound the podcast, because I was listening to him at two times speed, and you know, because you can listen faster than you can talk and read and all that stuff, or you know, out loud anyway. I re-listened to it, and I was like, "Oh my gosh, he actually said it." He just listed all these stats out about himself. Is he just full of it, or is this a real thing, you know? It's not my podcast nature to typically go badmouth somebody else, so I'm so sorry if this is ... It's not the normal culture, but it's just, ah, what he said really threw me off. What he said was, "Entrepreneurs are not marketers." And I was like, "What the heck did you just say? Wait, what?" I went and I rewound it, and he said, "Entrepreneurs aren't marketers." I would like everyone on this podcast to know that yes, yes they are marketers by nature, because an entrepreneur is somebody who's proving an idea, therefore that means they're selling. What is selling? It's an arm of marketing, right? It's marketing, it's all marketing. Me doing this podcast right now, whether or not I want it to be, is a form of marketing, does that make sense? We've gone over the difference before, between what sales and marketing is, right? Sales is what happens when it's face-to-face, what you're actually saying to the person, right? What are you saying on the webinar, what are you saying when they're inside the funnel, what's on your sales video? That's why it's called a sales video. However, marketing is the act of getting people to your face, so it's all the other pieces that go into actually getting them to walk up to you, right? What actually gets them to your funnel, what actually gets them to your webinar, or whatever it is. That's the act of marketing, and it doesn't stop when sales start. Marketing continues to go all the way through the fulfillment of the product, as well as teaching them to consume the product, right? I think it was Dan Kennedy that said, "Marketing only has two ..." No, no, "A business only has really two responsibilities. The first is to innovate, and the second is to market." That's it, those are the only two things that you really have to do, those are the only actual two responsibilities that the entrepreneur has, to innovate and to market, and all marketing is, is education, right? It's a form of education that actually gets people to cause belief in your product, you know? That's basically what it is. And so this guy's coming out, and he's like, "Yeah, entrepreneurs are not marketers, and that's why my stuff's so good, and that's why I'm so amazing." I was like, "Holy crap, this is episode one for you, you're a brand new podcast, but I cannot listen to you anymore, that's pure crap, pure crap." You know what's funny? I've got this rule now, I never work with a business when the CEO, or entrepreneur, or person in charge of the business in general, whoever it is, president, whatever you want to call it. If the person who's in charge of the business is also not ... if he's not also the person who's in charge of marketing, I 100% already just do not ever work with them, ever. That comes from a lot of experience, that comes from a lot of places of me going, "Oh my gosh," it is so frustrating for me to go out and go, "Hey, person who's not in charge of the business, but who does marketing, but that makes no sense. How about we build a funnel?" Well, then they got to go clear it with this guy, and then they got to go over to this guy, and they got to go over to this guy, and then finally the guy comes back, "No." And you're like, "What? Are you kidding me? Hey, you know what would be cool, what if we added an order bump?" "All right, well let me clear that through legal, let me clear that through this person, let me go through here." I'm like, "Are you kidding me? It's an order bump, like what else is there to think about? Are you running through the benefits? Why are we not doing an order bump?" You know what I mean? It actually came to such a point that for a phase there, for Funnel Hacker TV, I was building a lot of funnels with Russell for all these people, and it was a lot of fun, lots and lots of fun. The challenge was that most the time, the person who was in charge of the business was not also the person in charge of marketing. Oh my gosh, it was so hard. It was like eating sand, I mean, it was so, so tough to get anything done... I think I told you guys before, I think I told you this here ... I can't remember. He said, "Is one of my ..." I'm pretty sure I did. I told you about a professor that I had, who was a CMO of Denny's, right? He was in charge of all the marketing for Denny's, he was in charge of all the marketing for Pizza Hut, so maybe in gigantic corporate businesses that are Fortune 500 companies, maybe sometimes that guy's not also in charge of marketing, but I mean, okay, can you not argue with the fact that, okay, Steve Jobs was very much in charge of marketing, but also in charge of Apple, does that make sense? Russell Brunson, very much in charge of marketing, in charge of ClickFunnels, all right? Most of the time when a business is doing prolific things, it's because there is an entrepreneur who is in charge of marketing also at the same time, does that make sense? I'm sorry I always reference Russell so much in this podcast, it's just that I literally spend more time around him per day than in my family, you know what I mean? So that's where I work. Anyways, it's so funny, he always makes fun of people, he's like, "Why would you outsource your marketing, that's like outsourcing your sex life," okay? If you're going and you're outsourcing your marketing, you're literally outsourcing your sex life. Selling is the sex of business, and the fulfillment is the remainder of what comes with the relationship, that's what he always says. Anyway, it's true though. I had this teacher, right? This CMO of Denny's, and I spent a lot of time with him, a lot of one-on-one time, and he taught me a lot of stuff, and it was great. I truly learned probably the most from him in college than anybody else. What he told me was like, "Look, think of business as a car, and you're driving down the road, and you got the guy who's in charge of supply chain. He's the guy who's got the oil dipstick, and he's saying, 'Oh yeah, we could go this far, because our resources are this far.' You know, he's the guy in the supply chain. 'Oh yeah, we can go this far, let me order as much as we can.' That's the supply chain guy. Well, the finance guy, he's looking at the rest of the gauges at the dashboard, he's sitting next to the marketer who is the driver. Right? The finance guy is sitting to the side, and he's like, 'Yeah, we could do this, we could go this far at this space, at this speed, I advise you to turn this way, advise you ...' But who's actually in the driver's seat? Right? Whoever is in charge of sales." Nothing happens until somebody sells something, right? The person who's actually in the driver's seat is the marketer, and he's the one who's driving the car, pointing out the directions, "You know what? Let's go this way. You know what? Let's go this way. You know what? I think that we've got ... there's probably a gas station this way, let's go refuel up supply chain guy, right? Finance guy, you take note of that, I'm going to go over this way." You know what I mean? The marketer is the one who drives the company. Not always. I guess in that area, that other podcaster was right, but he said, "Entrepreneurs aren't marketers." It's just so freaking false, I can't even believe it. Every time and entrepreneur goes out, and is entrepreneuring, what is he entrepreneuring? Something that is either brand new, or his own version of it, or something. Well, what does that entail? How does he know that the business is actually working? By selling. What does that mean? It means you're a freaking marketer, you know what I mean? A lot of times people are like, "Oh, what is marketing, marketing seems so elusive, the term of it." Just think of it as educating, all right? You're educating, and you're pulling people in with a form of education. That doesn't mean teaching, but you're teaching people how cool your product is, you're breaking and rebuilding belief patterns, you're getting people out, you're getting out there and you're saying, "Hey, check out this product, right? Change your current pattern of behavior, and go check out my product or my service. Change your view on the world, and go check out what I have." Anyways, I could not believe ... Anyway. I don't know how much we want to beat this dead horse, I just want you guys to know that entrepreneurs are definitely marketers, and if you think you're not a marketer, I don't know what to tell you. Hard reality, you got to learn some sales, you know what I mean? That doesn't mean ... you know what, let me rephrase that. I don't like to do sales face-to-face. I used to do that when I did door-to-door sales, I learned a lot, I got good at it, but then one of the things I learned, is this is not the thing that I want to be doing, right? An entrepreneur does not have to be good at sales, I should say, but they do have to be good at marketing. They've got to be out there, they've got to be showing their thing. People have got to gain belief in the product, therefore yes, you are a marketer, and feel excited about that. What's funny, is that way back in the day, I used to think ... I remember going through just tons of angst over what I should do, like, "What's my major, what's my ..." And you know, what's funny is now realizing how little that actually matters, unless you're going to be a doctor or a lawyer, or something like that. Oh gosh, anyway. It's funny, this same professor who's the charge of marketing for Denny's and all this stuff, he would sit me down, and we'd have these big long discussions, and I'd be like, "I don't know what I want to do, I feel like I could be good at that, I feel like I could be good a supply chain, I feel like I could be good at finance." For a while, my major was CIT, I was learning programming, and all this stuff, you know? Then I went to finance, and I jumped around all over the place. I was going to go to financial economics, I really liked that stuff, I think it's fascinating, but the problem was I didn't know what I would actually have at the end of financial economics classes. Oddly enough, economists typically don't make that much money, and that's something to take into account of. What's funny, is I used to sit down with this teacher, and I'd be like, "Hey, I really don't know what I want to do." And he goes, "You know what? Bar none, marketers are problem solvers." And I was like, "Yeah, but come on, marketers are like the guys ... That's like the major that people do when they're just trying to skip out, and not have it be an actual challenge or learn anything." I mean, that's what I thought, it's such a false belief, and he called it out on me. He's like, "No, that's not how that works at all." He's like, "The reason is because marketers are problem solvers, it's not that anyone else isn't, but marketers are problem solvers. What's an entrepreneur? They solve problems, okay? Marketers are problem solvers." They go through and they said, "Okay, you know what? Look at my second OTO, my second upsale, it looks like it's not working very well. I wonder what's wrong with it? You know what? Why don't I take it out, I'm going to switch it in with this new offer, let's plug it in, let's see if we get a higher conversion rate from it, right?" Or, "Let's tweak this," or, "Let's tweak that, and let's see if we get a better result from it." They're problem solvers, they're a scientist of sorts. They go and they say, "It's like adult legos, they pick out pieces and say, 'What works here? What works here?' And they experiment, and they go put things out there." I mean, that's what a marketer is, that's what an entrepreneur is. When I think about what is most related to an entrepreneur, it is marketers. They're so related, they're so related. What I've learned most by sitting next to the man, Mr. Russell Brunson, is that when a person takes charge of that emotionally, and they say, "Yes, I'm going to be the marketer, I'm going to try and make sales improve in this company," and they're the person who's also in charge of the company, who owns it, or runs it, or whatever? Man, great things happen. That's why I stopped taking ... It's just miles of red tape whenever somebody goes ... You know how I can tell when the marketer is also not the CEO? When something needs to be changed, and it runs through so many legal people that it ends up not happening, you know? Or people start freaking out over a certain word, like, "Well, maybe we shouldn't say that exact phrase, because it could mean X, Y, and Z." Now, obviously be legal, be ethical, but there are some tall tale signs to see whether or not the entrepreneur is also the person in charge of marketing, and you hope that's the case, otherwise ... I'm not saying that they're not an entrepreneur, but you know, sorts. Marketing helps sales, you know? Entrepreneurs, that's their only job, is to get sales and to prove their concepts. Anyway, beating the dead horse now. Guys, go out there, take charge of it, and super excited for all the things you guys are going to be doing, and love hearing about it. Okay guys, talk to you later, bye. Thanks for listening to Sales Funnel Radio. Please remember to subscribe and leave feedback. Want to get one of today's best internet sales funnel for free? Go to salesfunnelbroker.com/freefunnels to download your pre-built sales funnel today.Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands

You're not alone, but it'll sure feel like it sometimes. Here's how to deal with it... What's going on guys? You guys ready for the greatest episode of Sales Funnel Radio ever, until the next one comes out? Me too, let's get started. Welcome to Sales Funnel Radio, where you'll learn marketing strategies to grow your online business, using today's best internet sales funnels. And now, here's your host, Steve Larsen. Hey guys, I'm super excited for today, this is going to be awesome. A lot of you guys know we just got a house recently, we just got a house, and my wife and I were getting used to the new chores that come with home ownership, you know what I mean? There's yard work, there's all sorts of stuff that you would not think about until you actually own your actual house, which is awesome, and it's been a whole lot of fun to do so. Funnels certainly have played a role in our ability to do this and be this. We know that realistically, we'll probably pay the house off in just a couple years here, and we're super excited about that. It's not a mansion, but it's much larger than we actually need, but it's very fun. I'm not bragging, but I just want you guys to know what's possible out there if you guys are just barely getting started, which I know a lot of you guys who listen to this are. So anyways, I was outside the backyard, and I was doing yard work. Actually, I really enjoy yard work, it's therapeutic for me, mostly because I'll toss on some podcasts, and I'll just lose myself a little bit while I'm doing stuff. I was in the backyard, and I was doing a few things, and I always like to find new podcasts, I don't know why, I just really like podcasts. I've personally gained a lot from them. Anyway, I like podcasts a lot, and so I'll go download tons of them. I have a huge list of them, and sometimes I'll just go open up my phone, and just start looking at random ones, and I always binge listen to someone's podcast, I'll listen to like 15 episodes at once, and decide if I want to keep going on it, you know what I mean? Well, there was this new podcast, and it will remain nameless, but it was so funny. I don't know if it was just episode number one, or what, it sounded like it was a podcast that was just barely starting, but it was this guy who was getting up ... And again, I'm not badmouthing him, but I am blatantly disagreeing with him, okay? If anyone's offended by that, whatever. Anyway, so this guy gets on and he's like, "Hey, thanks so much ... Thanks for joining my podcast." And he starts going into a few little pieces and tips, things like that, and he was extremely ... It always bothers me when people just get up, and they just try and prove how awesome they are. It's like, "Okay, let your content prove that," you know what I mean? Anyway, so he gets up, and he starts naming all these stats, and it's very professional, and I can tell he probably starches his shirts, you know what I mean, you know what I mean? I was like, "Okay, you know, this doesn't ... Already I don't really want to keep listening to this." But he said one line that about made me hit the floor. I couldn't believe that he made this statement that he did, and when he said it, I actually rewound the podcast, because I was listening to him at two times speed, and you know, because you can listen faster than you can talk and read and all that stuff, or you know, out loud anyway. I re-listened to it, and I was like, "Oh my gosh, he actually said it." He just listed all these stats out about himself. Is he just full of it, or is this a real thing, you know? It's not my podcast nature to typically go badmouth somebody else, so I'm so sorry if this is ... It's not the normal culture, but it's just, ah, what he said really threw me off. What he said was, "Entrepreneurs are not marketers." And I was like, "What the heck did you just say? Wait, what?" I went and I rewound it, and he said, "Entrepreneurs aren't marketers." I would like everyone on this podcast to know that yes, yes they are marketers by nature, because an entrepreneur is somebody who's proving an idea, therefore that means they're selling. What is selling? It's an arm of marketing, right? It's marketing, it's all marketing. Me doing this podcast right now, whether or not I want it to be, is a form of marketing, does that make sense? We've gone over the difference before, between what sales and marketing is, right? Sales is what happens when it's face-to-face, what you're actually saying to the person, right? What are you saying on the webinar, what are you saying when they're inside the funnel, what's on your sales video? That's why it's called a sales video. However, marketing is the act of getting people to your face, so it's all the other pieces that go into actually getting them to walk up to you, right? What actually gets them to your funnel, what actually gets them to your webinar, or whatever it is. That's the act of marketing, and it doesn't stop when sales start. Marketing continues to go all the way through the fulfillment of the product, as well as teaching them to consume the product, right? I think it was Dan Kennedy that said, "Marketing only has two ..." No, no, "A business only has really two responsibilities. The first is to innovate, and the second is to market." That's it, those are the only two things that you really have to do, those are the only actual two responsibilities that the entrepreneur has, to innovate and to market, and all marketing is, is education, right? It's a form of education that actually gets people to cause belief in your product, you know? That's basically what it is. And so this guy's coming out, and he's like, "Yeah, entrepreneurs are not marketers, and that's why my stuff's so good, and that's why I'm so amazing." I was like, "Holy crap, this is episode one for you, you're a brand new podcast, but I cannot listen to you anymore, that's pure crap, pure crap." You know what's funny? I've got this rule now, I never work with a business when the CEO, or entrepreneur, or person in charge of the business in general, whoever it is, president, whatever you want to call it. If the person who's in charge of the business is also not ... if he's not also the person who's in charge of marketing, I 100% already just do not ever work with them, ever. That comes from a lot of experience, that comes from a lot of places of me going, "Oh my gosh," it is so frustrating for me to go out and go, "Hey, person who's not in charge of the business, but who does marketing, but that makes no sense. How about we build a funnel?" Well, then they got to go clear it with this guy, and then they got to go over to this guy, and they got to go over to this guy, and then finally the guy comes back, "No." And you're like, "What? Are you kidding me? Hey, you know what would be cool, what if we added an order bump?" "All right, well let me clear that through legal, let me clear that through this person, let me go through here." I'm like, "Are you kidding me? It's an order bump, like what else is there to think about? Are you running through the benefits? Why are we not doing an order bump?" You know what I mean? It actually came to such a point that for a phase there, for Funnel Hacker TV, I was building a lot of funnels with Russell for all these people, and it was a lot of fun, lots and lots of fun. The challenge was that most the time, the person who was in charge of the business was not also the person in charge of marketing. Oh my gosh, it was so hard. It was like eating sand, I mean, it was so, so tough to get anything done. I think I told you guys before, I think I told you this here ... I can't remember. He said, "Is one of my ..." I'm pretty sure I did. I told you about a professor that I had, who was a CMO of Denny's, right? He was in charge of all the marketing for Denny's, he was in charge of all the marketing for Pizza Hut, so maybe in gigantic corporate businesses that are Fortune 500 companies, maybe sometimes that guy's not also in charge of marketing, but I mean, okay, can you not argue with the fact that, okay, Steve Jobs was very much in charge of marketing, but also in charge of Apple, does that make sense? Russell Brunson, very much in charge of marketing, in charge of ClickFunnels, all right? Most of the time when a business is doing prolific things, it's because there is an entrepreneur who is in charge of marketing also at the same time, does that make sense? I'm sorry I always reference Russell so much in this podcast, it's just that I literally spend more time around him per day than in my family, you know what I mean? So that's where I work. Anyways, it's so funny, he always makes fun of people, he's like, "Why would you outsource your marketing, that's like outsourcing your sex life," okay? If you're going and you're outsourcing your marketing, you're literally outsourcing your sex life. Selling is the sex of business, and the fulfillment is the remainder of what comes with the relationship, that's what he always says. Anyway, it's true though. I had this teacher, right? This CMO of Denny's, and I spent a lot of time with him, a lot of one-on-one time, and he taught me a lot of stuff, and it was great. I truly learned probably the most from him in college than anybody else. What he told me was like, "Look, think of business as a car, and you're driving down the road, and you got the guy who's in charge of supply chain. He's the guy who's got the oil dipstick, and he's saying, 'Oh yeah, we could go this far, because our resources are this far.' You know, he's the guy in the supply chain. 'Oh yeah, we can go this far, let me order as much as we can.' That's the supply chain guy. Well, the finance guy, he's looking at the rest of the gauges at the dashboard, he's sitting next to the marketer who is the driver. Right? The finance guy is sitting to the side, and he's like, 'Yeah, we could do this, we could go this far at this space, at this speed, I advise you to turn this way, advise you ...' But who's actually in the driver's seat? Right? Whoever is in charge of sales." Nothing happens until somebody sells something, right? The person who's actually in the driver's seat is the marketer, and he's the one who's driving the car, pointing out the directions, "You know what? Let's go this way. You know what? Let's go this way. You know what? I think that we've got ... there's probably a gas station this way, let's go refuel up supply chain guy, right? Finance guy, you take note of that, I'm going to go over this way." You know what I mean? The marketer is the one who drives the company. Not always. I guess in that area, that other podcaster was right, but he said, "Entrepreneurs aren't marketers." It's just so freaking false, I can't even believe it. Every time and entrepreneur goes out, and is entrepreneuring, what is he entrepreneuring? Something that is either brand new, or his own version of it, or something. Well, what does that entail? How does he know that the business is actually working? By selling. What does that mean? It means you're a freaking marketer, you know what I mean? A lot of times people are like, "Oh, what is marketing, marketing seems so elusive, the term of it." Just think of it as educating, all right? You're educating, and you're pulling people in with a form of education. That doesn't mean teaching, but you're teaching people how cool your product is, you're breaking and rebuilding belief patterns, you're getting people out, you're getting out there and you're saying, "Hey, check out this product, right? Change your current pattern of behavior, and go check out my product or my service. Change your view on the world, and go check out what I have." Anyways, I could not believe ... Anyway. I don't know how much we want to beat this dead horse, I just want you guys to know that entrepreneurs are definitely marketers, and if you think you're not a marketer, I don't know what to tell you. Hard reality, you got to learn some sales, you know what I mean? That doesn't mean ... you know what, let me rephrase that. I don't like to do sales face-to-face. I used to do that when I did door-to-door sales, I learned a lot, I got good at it, but then one of the things I learned, is this is not the thing that I want to be doing, right? An entrepreneur does not have to be good at sales, I should say, but they do have to be good at marketing. They've got to be out there, they've got to be showing their thing. People have got to gain belief in the product, therefore yes, you are a marketer, and feel excited about that. What's funny, is that way back in the day, I used to think ... I remember going through just tons of angst over what I should do, like, "What's my major, what's my ..." And you know, what's funny is now realizing how little that actually matters, unless you're going to be a doctor or a lawyer, or something like that. Oh gosh, anyway. It's funny, this same professor who's the charge of marketing for Denny's and all this stuff, he would sit me down, and we'd have these big long discussions, and I'd be like, "I don't know what I want to do, I feel like I could be good at that, I feel like I could be good a supply chain, I feel like I could be good at finance." For a while, my major was CIT, I was learning programming, and all this stuff, you know? Then I went to finance, and I jumped around all over the place. I was going to go to financial economics, I really liked that stuff, I think it's fascinating, but the problem was I didn't know what I would actually have at the end of financial economics classes. Oddly enough, economists typically don't make that much money, and that's something to take into account of. What's funny, is I used to sit down with this teacher, and I'd be like, "Hey, I really don't know what I want to do." And he goes, "You know what? Bar none, marketers are problem solvers." And I was like, "Yeah, but come on, marketers are like the guys ... That's like the major that people do when they're just trying to skip out, and not have it be an actual challenge or learn anything." I mean, that's what I thought, it's such a false belief, and he called it out on me. He's like, "No, that's not how that works at all." He's like, "The reason is because marketers are problem solvers, it's not that anyone else isn't, but marketers are problem solvers. What's an entrepreneur? They solve problems, okay? Marketers are problem solvers." They go through and they said, "Okay, you know what? Look at my second OTO, my second upsale, it looks like it's not working very well. I wonder what's wrong with it? You know what? Why don't I take it out, I'm going to switch it in with this new offer, let's plug it in, let's see if we get a higher conversion rate from it, right?" Or, "Let's tweak this," or, "Let's tweak that, and let's see if we get a better result from it." They're problem solvers, they're a scientist of sorts. They go and they say, "It's like adult legos, they pick out pieces and say, 'What works here? What works here?' And they experiment, and they go put things out there." I mean, that's what a marketer is, that's what an entrepreneur is. When I think about what is most related to an entrepreneur, it is marketers. They're so related, they're so related. What I've learned most by sitting next to the man, Mr. Russell Brunson, is that when a person takes charge of that emotionally, and they say, "Yes, I'm going to be the marketer, I'm going to try and make sales improve in this company," and they're the person who's also in charge of the company, who owns it, or runs it, or whatever? Man, great things happen. That's why I stopped taking ... It's just miles of red tape whenever somebody goes ... You know how I can tell when the marketer is also not the CEO? When something needs to be changed, and it runs through so many legal people that it ends up not happening, you know? Or people start freaking out over a certain word, like, "Well, maybe we shouldn't say that exact phrase, because it could mean X, Y, and Z." Now, obviously be legal, be ethical, but there are some tall tale signs to see whether or not the entrepreneur is also the person in charge of marketing, and you hope that's the case, otherwise ... I'm not saying that they're not an entrepreneur, but you know, sorts. Marketing helps sales, you know? Entrepreneurs, that's their only job, is to get sales and to prove their concepts. Anyway, beating the dead horse now. Guys, go out there, take charge of it, and super excited for all the things you guys are going to be doing, and love hearing about it. Okay guys, talk to you later, bye. Thanks for listening to Sales Funnel Radio. Please remember to subscribe and leave feedback. Want to get one of today's best internet sales funnel for free? Go to salesfunnelbroker.com/freefunnels to download your pre-built sales funnel today.Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands

People always ask, "WHERE SHOULD I START"? Well... here you go :) What's going on everyone? This is Steve Larsen and you're listening to Sales Funnel Radio. Now, I don't know about you guys, but I would love to hear maybe a new podcast intro. Now, I've not made one. However, I do want to know if you want to have a new podcast intro. If you wouldn't mind, reach out to me and let me know. We're almost to Episode 60, which is crazy, but I honestly, I wouldn't be ... There's been many times I fall asleep and the podcast intro that I currently have right now just keeps running through my head so anyway, super excited for this episode. Welcome to Sales Funnel Radio. Welcome to Sales Funnel Radio where you'll learn marketing strategies to grow your online business using today's best internet sales funnels. Now here's your host, Steve Larsen. All right, all right, all right. Hey, and I'm so excited for today and for what I'm going to share with you because I got some really huge news. Hope you guys had a great weekend. It was Memorial Day Weekend recently and my family was all out. We were having fun. We got up early. We went on a run. We went to the park. We hiked just a little, small little ... It was really steep for my little girls. I have a 1-year-old and a 3-year-old so whatever they can handle, but it was really fun. It was awesome. After we went on this hike, right, a park was nearby and what we did is we went down to this park. We're playing and having fun and my little girl's 3 years old, she's running around and there's tons of people there, right. As a parent, you're on red alert. You're looking around like crazy all over the place, making sure everything's fine, making sure there's no creepers around. You know what I mean? Now, I am all for my kids getting their own scrapes and bumps in life. You know what I mean? I'm not going to let them get hurt on purpose, but it's going to happen anyway so, I might as well not be helicopter parent and rather actually go and just prepare them for those experiences. You know what I mean? There's a point to this story, I promise. I wasn't too surprised when there was some kid politics that started and these kids started getting in my little girl's face and just screaming at her. At first, I sit forward, I'm sitting on the side and it was crazy hot out so I was sitting in the shade, but I was watching her. I was watching closely, seeing what's happening, and this little kid starts getting off on my little's girl's face. She's 3, right. She's 3 years old. What are you going to do? She's a little girl. She barely understands what's going around her still. You know what I mean? She's barely becoming self-aware kind of. You know what I mean? My resting state is nice guy personally. Steve Larsen, I'm a nice guy. That's my resting state. That's how I currently am. However, there was this ... Man, there's few things that will set me off and make Papa Bear come out and I have no ... I actually like when Papa Bear comes out. I invite Papa Bear to come out whenever it can. It's kind of fun. Anyway, this kid starts almost physically getting at ... His brother was standing nearby and he started getting really close to my little girl. Suddenly, the brother is holding back this younger kid from, I don't know, hitting or tackling whatever my girl. My little girl is so funny. She's so much like me. In the face of danger whenever there's high stress or whatever, I tend to laugh and it's not always that it's a funny experience or whatever that's going on. It's literally just that sometimes there's nothing you can do about it so you just laugh like whatever and it makes really serious things calm down. That just egged on this kid, right. My little girl starts laughing. It just egged him on and I was ... Anyway, he starts getting too aggressive though with her. I'm watching from across the playground. I stood up real fast and I walked over there because he was trying to push her and shove her really hard and there wasn't anything behind her. She would've fallen off the playground pretty far into the ground. Papa Bear comes out, right, and I come out and I start getting out and I'm hoosh, I'm trying to be cool, but at the same time, I want to throw this kid through a window. You know what I mean? I get really pissed off about that kind of stuff. There's no reason to be a jerk in life. Anyway, I go over and I walk up to this kid and I was like, "Hey, chump, why don't you stop throwing my girl around, huh?" The kid started bawling and it shocked him so much that I was standing there and I guess you would say I was calling him names. I called him a chump, all right, whatever. There's worse things I could probably say to him, but the kid starts bawling loudly. I was like, "Uh, whatever," and I just walked around, I was like, "Come on, Brinley," and I took my little girls and we went into another part of the playground. It was a big playground. Two seconds later and I'm like, "Crap," and I can feel parents eyes on me and I'm like, "Uh, whatever," like I don't ... Anyway, whatever. We're playing around over this other part of the playground and pretty soon, this really heated mom comes walking up to me and she goes, "Excuse me. Did you just call my kid a chump?" I turned around and I was like, "Yes, I did." She's like, "Why?" It's like, "Because he's pushing my little girl around. He can't do that. You understand?" She just stood there for a little while and then, she just turned around and walked away. Look, there's no room to be a chump in this life, all right... If you're going to be a chump and if you're a chump and you're on my podcast, you can get out of my community. You know what I mean? That's my attitude about it. Life's too dang short to be a chump. Don't be a chump. Don't be a chump in business. Don't try and be all sneaky. I got people who steal from me. I can't stand people like that. If I ever find people who's stealing from me, I just block them out immediately and I ... I was talking to Russell about this, you guys. My mentality is to give and give and give and give and give as much as I possibly can, overdeliver every freaking time I launch anything, every time I put anything out, any time I do anything so that when somebody turns around and they come back to me and they say, "Hey, you know what, I think that you should've done this or you're not doing enough here or you're not doing this or you're not ... " I'm like holy crap, I am bleeding, bending over backwards, giving way more than I should, that sets me off. You know what I mean? I know that probably a lot of you guys are probably the exact same way if you're in this community with me, right, the Sales Funnel Broker, Sales Funnel Radio, stevejlarsen.com community. You know what I mean? If you're in this, we're very similar people is what I've noticed. Birds of a feather flock together. I actually truly believe that and it's one of the major reasons that I wanted to start a podcast thing was because I was tired of the people I was hanging around and I wanted other people who thought like I did in my community. You know what I mean? Anyways, the types of people out there who are going to steal from me and stuff like that, I do believe in an element of karma. It's going to come around. It's going to nip you in the butt. You know what I mean? The other part is that man, if that parent and the same is true for you as an entrepreneur, if you're not bridled enough to function in society or let's say parent ... Anyways, I'm not trying to get into parenting stuff, but what I feel like is that if my little girl goes out and she's doing something that's stupid, it's my job to correct it or else society is going to correct it for me later on down the line and they're going to be way less nice about it. You know what I mean? I feel like those kinds of thing ... Anyways, I'm not trying to get into a big ranting thing about that, but my gosh, I was laughing so hard. Finally, I was like man ... I was talking to my wife, like, "Alyssa, we should probably get out of here because these parents are going to rage at the fact that I just called this kid a chump and made him bawl." I don't really freaking care. Anyway, I think it's funny. It's the same attitude when people come to me like, "What? You gave all this stuff to me and it's super, super cheap, but you're not bending over backwards to make sure that I'm successful with it." I'm like, "Dude, it is not my fault if you can't figure it out. I have overdelivered. I've given tons of walkthrough guides. I have given so much stuff like crazy. If you can't figure it out, I'm sorry. You can hire me as a coach, but I'm not going to keep giving stuff away to you for free. My time is more valuable than your feelings." You know what I mean? It was weird for me to cross that threshold as an entrepreneur and as a business guy just because in the past, I was all about just giving and giving and giving and I still am, but eventually, I was like, "My gosh, I got to self-preserve here. I've got to create a way for me to still live, still have a family life." You know what I mean? Still do the things I want to in life or I will literally spend all day every day ... I had 100 notifications in Facebook just two days ago. It was in a single day. My email was at 200 a week ago. It's at 900 now in a week. You guys know what I mean? You all are going to be there. I know especially, you all are going to be there for sure if you're not already. Anyway, don't be a chump. Hey, I got some good news though. That wasn't the good news. I told you I had good news at the beginning of this episode. I got great news. I've been working ... Over Christmas, my dad and I, we got together and I flew over there a few days early and I did it for the explicit reason of sitting down with him and beginning to build out his webinar. He's got this cool software that lets him trade the futures market, E-mini specifically, and he's been doing it for about six years. He learned that basically for him to be successful, he's got to create this thing that didn't exist before and he's a software engineer so he could create it. He created this cool software that sits on top of a trading platform and it tells him whenever to get in and out of a trade and he wins like crazy on the thing. I can't tell you legally because I can't make any kind of income claims, but he wins a lot. He's like, "Do you think anyone would ever buy this?" I was like, "Oh, my gosh, Dad, yes." He showed it to me and my jaw dropped. I did some stocks and options trading for a while and I definitely understand what he was showing. When he showed it, I was like, "Oh, my gosh, that's amazing." Anyways, fast-forward, so over Christmas, we were building out a webinar, putting all stuff together. He ended coming to what Russell and I are calling the FHAT event, the Funnel Hack-A-Thon, FHAT event. It's F-H-A-T. He came to this for a three-day intensive and he figured all this stuff out and then he's like, "Okay, Stephen, at the very last Saturday in May, I want to launch this thing." I said, "Cool. Let me help you." I slept probably three, maybe four, sometimes five hours every single night for the last week and we got this thing put together. It was really cool. If you want to check it out, you can. I'm not promoting it. It's just so you can check it out if you want to and actually, I know there's quite a few of you guys that are stock traders or financial markets traders in my community as well, which I think is really cool, super, super awesome industry there. Anyways, you can go to financialinvestingsecrets.com. It was a good webinar and I was so proud of him. We got out there and he went and he just launched it and made money and it was his first webinar ever. You know what? He did half of it wrong. You know what I mean? He just did it though. He just did it. He got out. He executed. He just did it. I was so proud of him. It was so cool. He wasn't expecting to make any money. I was wondering. It was his first time ever doing anything like this. He's just barely launching his own podcast, barely getting these things up and running. Super smart. You know what I mean? He's not a salesman, he's not ... but he's, oh, my gosh, such a smart engineer. He's created a lot of industry standards in the software world, anything from watches to NASA rockets. He's very smart. Much of how things are coded and as far as on a code sense architected is because of the way he has put stuff together. He's very, very smart... Anyway, he ... I'm just really pumped for him. He went out. We had 55 people register and about 13 showed up, which actually for the metrics that Russell always teaches is the exact same metrics that always will happen, about a fourth show up and we had ... I haven't looked at the final numbers yet, but then we had people buy. It was really exciting. His first webinar ever, it's so cool. A lot of people will sit at this point and go, "Okay, now what do we do next?" You know what I mean? It was from you guys, I asked you guys if you wanted to come and 50 of you guys signed up and 12 of you showed up or 13 of you showed up, which is what I was expecting. We were expecting. We're just testing it to see how it worked, right. What do you do next at this point? You do what we call the Dream 100. I don't know if you guys have ever been doing this. If you haven't been doing it and you've been actively driving ads, you are leaving so much freaking money on the table. I can't even believe it. At the last Funnel Hack-A-Thon event, it was the third day. I was on stage the whole day. I was speaking. It was really, really exciting and I really, really loved it, but one of the whole things we teach you guys about is this concept called the Dream 100 and we hope you guys go through it. What I'm having my dad do right now is he's got his webinar and we're continuing to make tweaks. We're continuing to make little adjustments here and there, but honestly, the thing that I'm having him do now is writing out a list of all the people who are podcasting in the financial market world, all the people who have blogs in the financial market world, all the people who have YouTube channels, who have live trading rooms, anybody who has an audience, anybody who has any kind of list or a following where my dad would want to sell to them. While we're getting Facebook ads up and running, we are starting to "date" or "court" these people on this Dream 100 list. We're starting to reach out to them. We'll probably send a package out to them soon. We got to smoosh them up just a little bit. You know what I mean? This is a relationship business. Internet marketing is still a relationship business especially, especially for the way you do sales funnels and the way we teach because what we're going to go do is we're going to go ... we want them to promote his webinar. He's got a great software that he personally wrote that helps him trade the E-minis with great success. You know what I mean? Anyway, that's what we're doing right now though. When you think about this ... I'm trying to think where to start on this because when you think about where we came from and this whole journey that he's currently on right now, a lot of times what people will start doing is they're like, "Okay, I've got this webinar, and I'm going to go build this webinar." Let's say they're just starting out, brand spanking new. They haven't done anything yet. They've never even put anything together. They've never even sold anything. They've never ... You know what I mean? Brand new. What a lot of people do we've noticed is they'll create what we call the value letter, right. They'll go, "Okay, first, we'll have low ticket items and it'll be in this whole funnel. Then I'm going to send them to this mid-range funnel and there's a whole funnel for that. Then I'm going to send them to this really high ticket thing and then the whole funnel for that as well." The tendency for people is to turn around and build a tripwire funnel or a low ticket funnel first, and I will tell you that is not the way we do it. That is not the way we do it whenever Russell and I build for a client. That's not the way I personally do it whenever I build for a client. There's very few circumstances where we actually start with a low ticket front end funnel, very, very, very few scenarios. The reason is because it's so much harder to make the numbers work. If I'm selling a $50 knickknack versus a $1,000 product, I can spend so much more money to acquire a customer, right. Now that my dad needs some sales, he can spend a good chunk of money to get one person to buy and I doubt it's going to cost us $1,000 to sell a $1,000 product, right. Now it's just the big rinse and repeat game... How much can we tweak it? How much can we get more traffic into it? How can we fill it up? Does that make sense? That's the reason ... I don't know if you guys have heard of the Two Comma Club Coaching Program that Russell and I are doing. It's so, so fun. My gosh, just oh, I absolutely love what I do on that thing. Anyways, we teach people though how to make $1 million funnel and we help them hit what we call the Two Comma Club, right, $1 million. We don't actually start with a tripwire funnel and I've had a few people reach out and ask that like "Cool, I got this sweet webinar. You guys help me plan. When do I start the tripwire funnel?" Like you know what? Probably not 'til like six months of it being successful are you even going to start thinking about that. People are like, "What? That's so crazy. Oh, my gosh. That's nuts. How is it that you can do that? How is that you ... You know what I mean? People will start to do that and they'll start to think that. I understand why that would be a temptation because as you read a book like DotCom Secrets or you read other books where it talks about increasing value or monetizing your audience, things like that, the tendency is to think I must start with this low ticket item and then I will go to this mid range item and then I'll go to this really high ticket item. I will tell you that the majority of the time when we actually build funnels, it's actually the opposite. We start at the top and we work down. Here's the reason why. It's funny. We had this four-hour Q&A last Friday with the Two Comma Club Coaching Program and a lot of these guys are out there and they're asking this very same question. They're like, "Why would you do it that way?" Let me take you through it. Here's why. Here's why. Number one, I already told you that the numbers are going to work better, right. You're just going to do better just simply by starting at the top because if you start with a high ticket item, how many people does it take to really start turning some revenue? One? Two? You know what I mean? You probably know where to find those kinds of people. You know where those communities are. If people aren't willing to give you that money yet, it means you haven't proven yourself yet. Go do it for free for a few people, all right. I'm talking about high ticket application style funnels where it's 10,000 to 15,000 to 25,000 to 50,000. You know what I mean? Higher than 10,000 is usually what I'm talking about when I say high ticket application funnels. People are applying to work with you, right. You got to go get crazy results, lots of great results, right. Either you're starting at that spot or you're starting one step down, which is what we teach at the Two Comma Club Coaching level, which is the webinar funnel, right. At the webinar funnel, what you can do is you start to get all these people in, right, tons of people, and you start tweaking the offering, you start tweaking the message and you start tweaking your traffic sources and you start finding out which ads convert the best. You know what I mean? You start figuring this whole thing out. What happens after a while, right? What happens after a while? What happens after a while is you're going to start getting a ton of questions, lots of questions. Man, you know what, I wish that the products from your webinar, I wish it did this. Or you know what, I wish it was this? What if it had this capability? Or how come this isn't here? You know what I mean? You're going to start to get questions. You'll start to get support questions. As those come in, document them because what's going to happen is very, very slowly, sometimes slowly or suddenly, whatever it is, but clearly, there will be this area that starts to rise up and you'll be like, "Oh, my gosh. You know what, I wish that I was selling something like that," right, and you'll go over ... What's happening is the market is showing you which product to create next. Does that make sense? If you are able to go through and massage out a $1,000 to $2,000 product offer and actually get it converting, get it selling, you've already laid so much groundwork for a smaller low ticket front end product funnels in the future. It's just the way it works. Because all of a sudden, what's going to happen is you're going to turn around and people are going to say, "Oh, my gosh, I wish I had X, Y and Z." What are they doing? They're telling you what they want and then all you do is you go create it. Why did Russell go make something like Funnel Scripts? Because people asked for it. He didn't start with Funnel Scripts, right. He made Click Funnels. He figured out his $1,000 webinar. He figured out how to sell something for $1,000 that sold Click Funnels, that got continuity going, right. That was the hard part. Once he got this hard part down, then he can turn around and he starts going, "What are all these [funnel 00:19:47] things? You know what? Let's build this thing called Funnel Immersion, Funnel Scripts. You know what? How about Funnel Graffiti." It's all these things related to the core offer, right, that eventually ascend somebody up into the Click Funnels level. It's the exact same thing that I'm trying to tell you to do. It's the exact same thing I was trying to tell my dad to do. Don't worry about small ticket stuff at first. That would be my advice. Now, other people would tell you different, that's totally fine, but my advice, do not start with something small. Start with something at least $1,000. There was a lot of people on the call who were like, "A thousand dollars? You really think people are going to give me $1,000?" I can hear your questions right now as I'm saying that. The answer is it depends on if you charge $1,000. What's easier to do is simply just put down the price point, 997 and then figure out how you can justify that price point. What is an offer that is so ridiculously cool that someone would give you $1,000 for it? Does that make sense? Instead of thinking, "Oh, no one will ever do that," and killing yourself the other way around. Start with $1,000 product. What's funny is at one of the last events ... Actually, I'm sorry, not one of the last, the last Funnel Hacking Live Event, beforehand ... I think it's okay if I tell you this. Beforehand, Russell was trying to figure out something he could sell at the Funnel Hacking Live Event. What's fun for me is to sit back and watch ... You know when you're so good at something, you don't realize you're that good at it? I think that happens a lot for Russell and it's understandable why it would because he's been doing it for so long. It's fun with my fresh eyes to sit back on the side and be like, "Oh, my gosh, what a cool process you're going through." You know what I mean? Anyways, he's preparing for the event. He's putting together different presentations and he's about to put together a presentation and here's how he starts it. "Gosh, I just wish I had something I could see for like $3,500." That's how he started it. Guess what came from that? The Fill Your Funnel Program. It's okay to start with the dollar amount. I know it must feel like I'm all over the place right now, but the only reason I'm hitting this really hard is because there's been several people who reach out saying, "Where do is start, Stephen, where do I start," right? I've had tons of people come ... I don't know why, but definitely in the last month, there's been a lot of people that ask that, "Where do I start?" What I would tell you to do is to start by figuring out how you can charge $1,000 for something, turn it into a webinar or an invisible funnel or black box funnel. Then what I would do is I would move to high, high ticket, right, because there's going to be a percentage of the people that buy my dad's $1,000 product who want more one-on-one coaching, right. I would not put yourself in the fulfillment or inside of the offer of the $1,000 product. Rather make them pay you more to work with you more. Does that make sense? I would start with this $1,000 product in the middle and then I would go put you into this implementation and coaching area where it's done-for-you services, but it's more high ticket, like 5, maybe 10% of the people who buy your $1,000 product are going to be interested in that kind of thing. That's great. You're only going to sell one or two of them to really make a huge difference. You know what I mean? A really easy way to do that. You guys see what I'm saying? Should I trial close you? Are you guys getting this? Are you guys seeing this could work for your business? What would your spouse say when this actually works for you? Can you imagine what it's going to be like when you walk out and you've made that kind of money? You imagine when it's automated? Should I keep trial closing you guys? That's true though. Does that make sense? Then what happens is then we go out and we start going on tripwire funnels and we start going for breakeven funnels and we start to ... When you do it the other way around, you're totally guessing. It's so much harder to make a tripwire funnel breakeven if you do it the other way around. Instead, do it the other way where you start at the top or in the middle, right, and make the tripwire funnel last or last-ish. People will tell you what they want so then just go make that and the chance of success is so much greater. It is so much less risky to do it that way. It's pretty funny when I sat back and realized what was going on with that and that's the way we do it that it just blew me away because I remember the first funnel that I built, it was low ticket continuity. That's the hardest category I can even think of to sell ever. Continuity stuff in the front, that's wicked hard. That was crazy. It's more challenging as a category usually to sell continuity, especially low ticket, anyway, upfront. Anyway, so it just reminded me of all these different funnels that I put together and I think part of the reason why they would fail and stuff like that. What's funny is I have really low ticket free plus shipping funnels right now. I have also ... You know what's funny? It is just as much work for me to sell the mid-range stuff than it is for me to sell the low ticket stuff. The support tickets that come in are almost the exact same. It's so funny. When I actually go out and start selling $1,000 stuff, it's easier for me to do that than it is the lower ticket thing. For whatever reason, it brings in a higher level customer. It brings in somebody who's in a different position in their life, someone who I want to work with. Anyways, I don't know how to sell you on this. When I was thinking about my dad's webinar, when I was thinking about all the stuff going on, and those of you who are trying to make this business succeed, I'm not trying to tell you to abandon everything if you already have a funnel, a tripwire funnel on the front end. What I am trying to tell you to do is charge more money, just charge more money. Then what you do is have some person in the back end after someone buys your mid range product, your $1,000, $2,000 product, have somebody calling them up in the back end saying, "Hey, you want to work with Grant Larsen for 15,000 or whatever? He'll give you one-on-one coaching for six months," or something like that. You know what I mean? You only close two of those a month, that is seriously massive revenue boosters right there. Anyway, guys, I hope that what I'm trying to say is coming across clearly because the type of question that I've been getting recently, which by the way, I've been loving the questions. I hope you like the mass Q&A sessions I just did, the last two podcast episodes. Those were a lot of fun. As a by product of that, people have been asking more and more questions. It's been a whole lot of fun. Really, really enjoy that. Usually, the type of question is like, "Hey, where do I start?" I'm trying to tell you please for the love, from a guy who did it for years at the low ticket price thinking that he was serving better or thinking that he was making it more affordable, but in reality causing a harder headache and I actually had to sell it harder sometimes. It's not fun. I'm telling you, please start with something that's at least $1,000... I'm saying that over and over and over again because it doesn't take many of them to really change your life. It does not take many of them to have seed cash for your next ad campaign. It doesn't take many of them to really start figuring out also what people want in the next tripwire funnel. Start with something high ticket. It's so funny. There was a few people I was coaching this last week and they're like ... I kept telling them $1,000 price point, they're like, "Awesome. I'm selling for 497." I said, "Why? I keep telling you," and it came down to it ... Now if you have a legitimate reason like sometimes there's a legitimate reason and that's fine, but most of the time, there isn't one. You literally are just afraid to charge more money and I'm begging you not to do that... I'm begging you to get out and actually say, "You know what, I'm going to charge $1,000. I'm going to figure out how I can charge $1,000. I'm going to figure out how to sell at that price point," and when that becomes your focus, oh, man, it's so rewarding when $1,000 comes in. It's like, "Whoa." Just emotionally, it's so nice. Holy crap. How many of those does it take to actually cover the mortgage or rent? Not many. You know what I mean? I guess it depends where you live, but still even then, not many. That could fit a really wide range of households, but I guess it's on my mind because we're in a house now. Anyways, guys, hopefully that helps. Super excited for this week and what's going on here and I appreciate you all like crazy. Just gosh, I just love our community. It's so, so, so fun. I remember I was posting different pictures, what we were doing and things like that and just the engagement, I just really, really enjoyed it and I really appreciate all you guys are doing. Anyways, keep at it. Funnel on, my friends and I will see you at the next one. Thanks for listening to Sales Funnel Radio. Please remember to subscribe and leave feedback. Want to get one of today's best internet sales funnel for free, go to salesfunnelbroker.com/freefunnels to download your prebuilt sales funnel today.Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands

Ha, well there was so many questions (which I LOVE) that I needed to break up the episodes. Here's round two! Hey, hey, hey, what's going on everyone? This is Steve Larsen, you're listening to Sales Funnel Radio. Welcome to Sales Funnel Radio, where you'll learn marketing strategies to grow your online business, using today's best internet sales funnels. And now, here's your host, Steve Larsen. Hey, what's going on, this is the second part of my mass Q&A kind of segment. This is a segment of the show I called "Hey Steve". I haven't done one in a long time, so I'm doing part two right now because there were so many questions stacked up, I want to make sure that I get to a lot of the questions that are out there. I had to break it up into two different sections and even then I'm still leaving a lot of questions behind just 'cause they didn't fit for the broad listener, you know what I mean? I want to get into details, but at the same time we get a lot of people listening now. I was laughing because so we just moved into this house about six weeks ago and it was right before spring started and there's a whole bunch of stuff we want to do in the backyard. I did sprinkler systems for a while. It was one of my summer jobs growing up and we didn't have a trencher so I'd had to hand dig massive trenches for sprinklers. Anyways, it was a lot of fun, which a lot of people might be confused when I say that, but it is. I like working with my hands. I like working outside so one of the things I was excited about owning a house for was the fact that we were gonna get to do yard work, which again I know a lot of guys might be like, dude, your weird, but I don't care, man. It's fun. There's a therapeutic aspect to work yard for me. I was excited about it and it's summer now. It's been raining a lot, but that's slowed down. It's gotten really hot. It's time for me to turn the sprinklers on, getting the sprinkler system up and going. I went and I was like, cool, I've done this before and for some reason, I could not figure out how to turn on our dumb sprinkler system and get it running. I was like, I did this for a while. I hand dug these. Why am I not figuring this thing out? Luckily, at the same time, there was this company at our neighbor's house here who had lawn guys there and they were doing sprinkler stuff. I walked over I was like, hey, how do I? Where is? Is this a special kind of? The normal places that I look on houses that turn water on things like that, it's not there. I don't know where it is. He's like okay, you know, well, give me a little bit and I'll come help. After a little while, they ring on the door bell and they come over and I was like, sweet, awesome. We went to the backyard and like three seconds they found it. I was like, oh, sweet, well. I'm totally willing to pay. I'm not here to just freeload on anybody. I paid him and he was awesome. They did a walk through, the entire sprinkler system. Well, there's this whole section that we want to go resod and I have been pulling out tons of weeds that were as high as me. You couldn't even see the fence. There were so many of 'em. I've been de-shrubbing, de-weeding, you know what I mean? Doing a whole bunch of stuff. When I saw that they were literally sodding the neighbor's ground. I had to ask. I was like hey, how much is it to, for you guys to come sod, just so I just know. I had to ask the dude. Like, oh, my gosh. I ask the guy probably six or seven times. I was like, hey, how much is it to do this? He's like, "Oh, it's really, really expensive right now." I was like, okay. I'm asking how much. How much is it? He's like, "Oh, well, it's like $140 per pallet of sod." I was like, oh, it's not bad at all. It's more of a time thing. I don't want to go spend the time to do it. I'd rather spend time with my family or building a product or what. You know something. I like doing yard work, but I don't. That would be. That would talk me two or three Saturdays and I am moving way to fast right now to spend the kind of time to do that. I had to ask this guy. There were. That was not the first time I asked him to please sell me your thing. I asked him several times. Hey, how does this work? How much is that? How much is that? We walk in the backyard and there's all these blank spots. Why did you not put two and two together and try and freaking close me. I'm walking around holding a checkbook. I didn't know how else to pay him. So, I was like, ah. Anyway. It drives me nuts. When people are asking you buying questions, you have to know the difference between a normal question and then there's buying questions, right? Questions are questions. There's just questions. Hey, how are you guys doing? That's just a normal question... There's a whole bunch of different questions out there, but the buying questions are questions that turn into. The questions where they start to put themselves in a scenario mentally where they see themselves owning or doing or being the thing that you have. Hopefully, that made sense what I just said, but the moment they switch into this mode of like I could see myself doing that or gosh, I really wish that we could do that. How does that not throw red flags up going like, well, hey, shoot, if you want. I mean, we do this for you. Is this something that you're wanting done? Here why don't you just show me. What do you got going on in the backyard? You know what I mean? I don't. Anyway. I love being sold and so I critique the process like crazy, especially since I was a door to door sales guy for a bit and I did telemarketing and I did you know. I like sales. I don't necessarily like it that much face to face. I'd rather automate it through marketing onlines now, but it at least taught me the principles of what to look for and what to do online. Anyway. Sorry for the little side rant, it just, it made me laugh so hard 'cause finally he was like, well, it costed maybe 15, $1600 for us to do this and put these things in. I was like, great, cool. Just tell me. Like what. Anyway. I seriously. I asked him. He didn't say anything. He just kind of started walking away. I was like hello and I didn't know that he was looking at what we have. He just kind of just. I don't even know how to describe it. He just kind of came back and was like, well, maybe the. I mean, I blatantly had to ask the guy at least four times how much money is it to do this? I don't know if it's, anyway. Whatever. But don't do that, okay? If someone's asking you questions and you can tell they've switched into buying questions, man, just start closing 'em. They're asking you to sell them. They may not even know it, but what they want is they want you to answer their problem, which is your product. Just, anyway. Anyway, let me get back to this. This is part two. This episode is part two of the mass Q&A I've been doing. I got another three or four questions lined up for you guys in this one. They're great questions and anyway, I'm gonna dive right in here and go person by person. I'm gonna play your message and then I'll give you my response on how I would do that or ... please know, I don't know. I feel like I should put a disclaimer in this sometimes like please know that is, I'm not a lawyer and this is not legal advice and please, you know what I mean? But, this is. I'm gonna answer right now as to how I would do it or how I am doing it or how we have done the thing that you're asking about. Anyways. Hopefully that helps. Let me jump right here. All right, here the next question here is coming from T.J. "Hey, Steve, just wanted to follow up with you and ask you about a funnel that you mentioned that you did for a school that automates fundraising. I was wondering if you've ever covered that in any of your podcasts or if you're willing to, to basically just set you on a funnel for a non-profit or school to automate fundraising. This is Tamar, also known as T.J. We met at Ad Con 2017. It was a pleasure meeting you and I hope to hear from you soon. Thanks." Hey, man, great question here. Yep. There's a funnels that I've done that for. One of the funnels that I wanted to prove myself with. It was a few years ago actually. Was a funnel for, it was a mud run that we were doing. It's ... I'm in the army and we were trying to do some fundraising for this, it's called the Fisher House Foundation. The Fisher House Foundation is, it's a foundation that collects money that so when a soldier gets wounded, they can fly the family of the soldier to whatever hospital the soldier was taken to and take care of them and lodging and food and stuff like that. It was really, really cool. Anyway, that was an awesome one. What we did is we're like, hey, what ... we had a commander at the time and he's like, hey, why don't you do x, y and z. Let's put this stuff together and I started to telling him like, sir, I got this skill that I've been developing and I'm getting quite good at it. Why don't we do a little fundraising thing and you know what you could do is ... basically have upsales and things like that, you know what I mean? Anyway, it was basically an event funnel and the first page of the funnel was a page that basically said, hey, we're gonna do a 5K Mud Run. It was really fun. We had a fire pit people jumped over. It was a mud run. Army crawled through this massive vat of mud. We clothed them in all this body armor and they ran through thick forest with all these smoke bombs and massive artillery sim rounds going off around 'em. It was really fun. It was awesome, but we ended up raising seven grand... We had 650 people come. We had the news come several times. It was awesome. Got interviewed, anyway, it was great. It was a great experience, so anyways, it's cool because we first found something that was cool and attractive. It was a mud run near campus so a lot of people were already like, hey, already excited. The next thing we did though is we tied more meaning to it by telling them the story of what the money was going towards. That got it shared like crazy and that's what got us on the news and the next thing we did is we went and we started doing a raffle, as well. That was really. We raffled off AR-15's and other various stuff. It was really cool. Then we started going to these local businesses and we're like hey, we're about to do this event do you want to come and just be there and you know. Just as far as value for the person who's there. We don't care that you're there. We don't care that you self-promote ... just heck, come have a good time. It was really fun. We got other recruiters there. We got all these big blow up things. It looked like a fair. It was a huge production. It was amazing and it went so, so well. Anyway, it's just great. It was really a great experience. It was just an event funnel. It was two pages. I wish I could tell you it was more complicated than it was. All I did was when somebody came in. It told 'em about it. What it was. It was a sweet video that we shot. In fact, I might have the. I don't know if the page is still up or I still own the URL, but I still have the funnel and the video and all that stuff. That was really, really cool. Then we just said hey, buy your ticket now. Ticket prices go up in x amount of time. We did a count down clock and we said, hey, there's early bird pricing. Then the pricing went up. Then I went and got into the school newspaper and website and all this other stuff and I got us name dropped all over the place and the word got spread. That's really all we did. It really wasn't that much work. There was more work on actually setting up the course itself and all the things that we had to do. It was super fun. All these hail bails you had to jump over and all these massive towers to go climb. It was just a cool experience and we did that. It was great. The other one. I think I know the one you're referencing, though. I've built for several fundraising style companies. One was Flex Watches that got on that TV show, "The Profit." I built 11 funnels for that. The day of the show that it was going nationals, a long story behind that, but it was crazy. They turned out so well and that was honestly just a normal trip wire funnel with some upsales and down sales. What's funny is it's still a funnel. Don't think that because ... what's the fundraising funnel style. Well, it's the same thing as any other kind of funnel. You just change the message to let people know hey, this is for fundraising. The thing that I was teaching on stage to all those DECA kids. DECA asked me to come. I don't know if it was DECA directly or a contractor, but anyway, I ended up speaking on DECA. There was 3,000 kids at an event. They asked me to come teach on stage and teach 'em how to automate the fundraising for their school and their DECA programs. All I did is, there was a company that said hey, we would like to donate all of the water bottles, all of the materials, all the whatever it is that you're gonna put inside that funnel, we're gonna donate 'em and we'll just put our logo on 'em and there'll be a portion of the profits that gets sent over back to the DECA. I was like sweet. You guys realize that you're gonna automate your fundraising. Who likes going door to door? Not that many people. I was like so here. Here's how you can do it. How many guys been going to door? What's the strategy you guys been collecting money? Oh, door to door. Okay. Well, you should probably listen then. I went through and I showed 'em. Basically, it was a trip wire funnel. It was a free plus shipping water bottle that they got with a cool logo on there. That had a cool story behind it. Then the next thing was a upsale for two of 'em. The next thing was a upsale for something else. The next thing was a upsale and there was two or three up sales, like a normal trip wire funnel and all it was a normal product. It looked like a normal product funnel. Then, we just changed the messaging so people knew, hey, here is a super cool product, but at the same time, there's a cool message and meaning behind these things that we're doing. Anyway... Hopefully that helps. Don't overthink it. It's just a normal funnel. You just change the messaging and tell people why you're doing what you're doing. That was it. Super cool. I mean, they work well. All right, here the next question here comes from Micen Jones. "Hey, Steve. It's Micen Jones here and a quick question about contracting. On page 46 of "DotCom Secrets," Russell talks about the entrepreneur's role and how he should be or she should be a contractor, not a person putting up the sheet rock or framing the house.... My question for you is have you hired from freelancer.com on more than a project basis? For me personally, I can build the majority of my funnels except for the graphics portion, some little minuet details and custom portions. I want to move a lot faster like I said and have help with that, but instead of waiting for a week and a contest, I'm feeling on freelancer.com, I would like to have a day or two days turnaround time. Do you have any suggestions. Would you suggest Upwork and if so, what kind of language would you use in the job description to make sure that I attract the right kind of person to help build these funnels faster? Thanks for your answer, man and be blessed." Hey, dude, so yeah. I got a few. I definitely have some (sharply inhales), anyway. I've got some opinions on this. All right, so when you're first starting out, I understand the need to do things on your own because you have no cash flow or very little cash flow. The thing that we always stand by, what I always tell people to do is hire when it hurts. Don't just jump out and start grabbing people just because other people are saying to. It's like when people say diversify your portfolio. It's like you don't do it for the sake of doing it. Focus on one thing. You do want to make sense. You know I mean? I know you know I mean, but anyway so as far as freelancer tactics, hire one at Hertz. I know you said you don't like the seven day contest thing, but my gosh, it is one of the coolest strategies and if you take the time to do it, you'll find some of the rock stars who are the V.A's that just are amazing. I recommend Freelancer. I've used Upwork a little bit. I've used Fiver a lot. I've used Freelancer a lot. Those are the main ones that I've used and that I still use. I gotta a surprise here soon for all you guys. I'll have to show you guys here soon, but I had guy in Lebanon code something for me that is so cool. Anyway, in a future episode here, I'll tell you guys to go get it and it's awesome, but anyway, it totally makes fun of our competitors. Russell's dying. You guys 'ill see it on his vlog here soon. Hopefully, you guys have been following his vlog on YouTube. Anyway, side tangent. Over. All right, with freelancer tactics just for those of you guys who don't know, the thing that I like to do and the thing that I like to recommend is to create a contest and it doesn't have to be seven days. You can do it in three days, but then inside Freelancer what you do is you make the contest boosted. You can boost it and it will stay in front of all the freelancers more like it'll invite the good ones. It'll stay on top of all their feed so all the freelancers are seeing your thing. I always do that. I always press yes on those options, not all of 'em otherwise you spend an extra $100 bucks, but I go through and I choose the ones that highlight, feature, ping the very top freelancers, stuff like that. Then what I do is I sit back and I create that contest and I wait usually two or three days and I wait and to see. There's always like, please be aware that I'm trying to be sensitive right here, but there's always a huge number of people that will spam back to you tons of responses and try and get you to hire them all the time. You gotta be aware of that, okay? The moment that you and you can always tell when it happens because the moment you submit some contest or the moment you submit a job out there, you're gonna get a lot of people who just immediately respond to you and you're like okay, there's no way you even read the details or saw the video that I shot to tell you how to do it or what I need done. There's no way and you're already begging me. It's like okay. Those are spam.com comments so I always wait two or three days to wait for all of those to leave and I see who the really hungry people are. I go through and I read carefully each one of 'em and I try to view and measure intentions. I try and measure what they want and what they're trying to do. Anyway, it works. It works really, really well when I do that... Then the next thing I do is I will go, delete out all the ones that I know that are the immediate no's ... and again trying to be sensitive here, but I only speak English and so if they don't ... if I can't understand 'em how am I gonna go the project, you know I mean? So I go out and I delete out all the ones that I know that I won't be able to work with regardless if they could get it done really well. I can't talk to them so it's gonna be a hard thing. So anyway, then I create the contest and I go launch the contest and then I publicly criticize the comments and you can set your comments to public. I'm actually pretty harsh and I go through and I publicly criticize every single submission as I do the contest. For a second there I was talking about contests and also for a second I was talking about hiring specific people for one task, one person for one task so I go through and I vet out all the individuals that are like, okay, I'm not, I just know I can't work with you, but if it's a contest, then what I do is I make sure the things featured and I put it out there and I'll go and I publicly criticize the comments because all the other people who are submitting can see them ... I will take a $100. I just did this and I was like, okay, I got a cool idea for a logo, but I want to see what other people can come up with also. How I did it is I went out to freelancer.com and I was like, hey, here's $100 bucks whoever wins can get it. I got 323 submissions over seven days. I was very active. All I do is just once per day during that week I just log in real quick, I publicly criticize what I like and don't like on each one of them, and then I come back ... just piece by piece by piece and basically, the submissions start to improve. The quality goes up by about day three, four or five. Then you will start to see who is immediately following you and I'm like, hey, I really want this though ... an hour later, there's all these other submissions with the exact thing that you asked for and you're like, okay, I'm starting to see who the rock stars are so I know it kind of stinks a little bit to go, gosh, that takes a week to do it, but honestly my speed is increased like crazy as I do that. I now know who exactly to go for great voiceovers and I use 'em over and over now with the same tactics. I know several people who are very, very good at graphics. People who are very good with some video stuff. People who are very good, You know I mean? Then the parts that need to be creative that I'm not personally creative at ... I mean, I will make up projects just to find who those people are and find the rock stars. Anyway, I still would do that and just know that that seven days is gonna do great things for you in the future. Just make a list of 'em. Keep a list of 'em and let 'em know, hey, you know what I do also to increase all submissions is I say inside the project details for the contest, hey, you know what? If this works out, I would love to think about doing some future stuff with you 'cause I have more projects that need to be done, I just want to see who really wants this. It's like (explosion sound) these people go crazy. They get out there. They go oh, my gosh, I want this so bad. It's really, really fun when that happens 'cause there's some veracity and you can tell that they want it and they get out there and they really start crushing it. Okay, so what do you do though if you need to hire somebody internally as well. I just got a guy whose doing amazing with support. What I do is I find the people would work for me for free. I find the people who want to be in doing things with my brand so strongly that they're willing to do things for me for free. It's not that I'm not gonna pay them. I just need to know that they believe in the message, that they believe in my mission. They believe exactly what I'm trying to do and accomplish before money because I've gone a long time without getting paid before just to get this going. It's not true anymore at all, but you know I mean? I got know do you really want to get in this because I move at a crazy pace and I need you to do the same and you know I mean. What I do is I wait. There's always people who will reach out and go, hey, what can I help you with? The people who do that and don't ask for money who ... I can tell they're genuine, I say, hey, that's so nice of you, I appreciate it and I say nothing back to 'em. Well, the ones who reach back out and say, "Hey, I'm being serious. I really want to work with you." Then I go, "Okay, hey, there's really, really awesome, what kind of thing do you see yourself doing? I don't want to take you out from something if you know that you're really good a certain tag, a certain thing. Tell me what your super power is." If they keep coming back at me, well, I'm this. Like cool ... take what I'm about to say also with a grain of salt. I don't give them something crappy on purpose, but I give them a task that is not easy, that is challenging because I need to see how they'll react to it. It's a test. It's totally a test. I'm doing this with one guy right now and he is killing it. I'm absolutely loving working with him. He's so, so cool, but he's done, I mean, he's done this. He's grabbed my attention by giving value first and I can tell you, I can't wait till the time for my next project to come up 'cause ... I wanna hire the guy. I'm gonna do it so long as everything keeps going awesome with him. I'm actually the weak link in this relationship now. He's dancing circles around me, getting all this stuff done that I didn't even know that I should be doing, like that kind of guy. Anyway, let me jump to the next question here, all right? "Hey, Steve. This is Matt Kaple. I have a question for you. I wanted to see if you could teach us all how to do a ninja way to do a favicon icon so we could import that and use that into our funnels and clip funnels. I figured you're the guy that could teach us how to do that. Thank so much." Hey, what's up, Matt. Thanks so much for the question. I'm laughing because Russell always makes fun of me for how much I love favicons. I just hate it when there's at the top of the page in the tab there, there's just like. There's either nothing up there and then just a whole bunch of words or there's like that blank piece of paper little icon. It's funny. He'll send me some funnels some times, be like, dude, what do you thinks wrong with this funnel? I'll write back. Dude, there's no favicon that's why the whole page isn't converting well and he'll be like whatever, that's not it. Anyway. They do nothing for conversions. I don't think so. Well, they might little bit. I feel like they do for authority when you actually see a favicon, you see something up there. You see a logos. Well, like again, logos, they do nothing for conversion. They're just for our own egos, but I like it as far as keeping the same branding for the page. Honestly, they don't matter that much, but for me what I do is I will go into Adobe Illustrator or Photoshop and all I do is I create a 40 pixel by 40 pixel so it's wicked tiny. 40 pixel by 40 pixel and what I do is favicons are something to make after logos so I'll go grab whatever icon or something like that is inside of the actual logo. I'll grab the logo and put it inside of the 40 pixel by 40 pixels. The name of the game on favicons is simplicity. Just, you gotta be so simple with them. Don't try and have more than one letter or a couple of letters if you are doing letters and if you do they gotta be really, really simple. Second thing is that make 'em transparent backgrounds so that it doesn't export. You gotta export 'em as a png and then upload them. If you click on settings up in the top right inside your click funnels account, and then you'll click on digital assets. If you upload it as a digital asset and then right click on the download button, copy the link address and you can actually go paste it inside of a favicon area underneath the funnel settings. Hopefully, that makes sense. I usually don't get to technical inside a podcast because some of you guys who have never used click funnels are like what the heck is he talking about? He just totally lost me. Anyways, that's what I do though. Keep 'em very simple, transparent background, 40 pixels by 40 pixels and I usually just make it out of the logo, a smaller version of it or something like that. When you do it to a funnel inside of click funnels, it does it to every page. You don't have to do it to each page individually. It'll globally do it the pages inside of that funnel so anyways, great question, man. Next one. "Hey, Steve, this is Grant Tanner. Question is for the podcast that I started listening to. Good work. Question is I have a client who is trying to drive traffic to her website and get people to sign up for her digital magazine. It's actually a print magazine as well, but the whole point of her website is to drive subscriptions to a magazine so it's kind of a model that I'm having a hard time figuring out a good sales model to try to drive people to a certain landing page. What sales funnel do I use to get people interested in signing up for a magazine subscription essentially. Wanted to get your thoughts. Thanks. Bye." Hey, what's up, Grant. Hey, great question. Honestly, I get that question more frequently that you would expect. Not so much on magazines themselves, but on selling continuity right out of the gate. That's not an easy thing to do and it's actually something that I usually don't suggest, not that you can't do it, but personally I don't do that. The reason is because when you. It is easier to sell a $5,000 one thing than it is to sell a monthly continuity $60 a month thing, you know what I mean? You're just. I don't know. How should I say this? The mind is so funny because if we just ask for five grand one time on a high ticket thing a lot of times, people are gonna be like, yeah, sure, I'll go ahead and do that because I have five grand right now, but if I start to say, hey, it's gonna be a couple $100 every month, indefinitely. Immediately there's this long because it's associated with time, work immediately becomes this secondary emotion that comes in the side of it. I don't typically suggest that you go and sell magazines subscriptions right off the bat, but if you are, which you are and that's great so this is what I would do. If you've ever seen Funnel University, model how we do that. It's very strategic. Every single time we offer anything continuity based ever, it is always with something else. Like this okay? Magazines. Who does this? Sports Illustrated does. Have you ever seen this TV infomercials or whatever, they're talking about Sports Illustrated Magazine. You don't just get the magazine when you actually get a subscription set up, do you? What you do is you actually get a clock, a football clock. You actually get an actual football with someone's fake signature on it and then you get this. You get a blanket. Then you'll get a foam finger. Then you get, you know what I mean? They make an offer out of it. If you're selling straight just subscription, it's very, very challenging. It's hard to do it. Watch how Frank Kern sells his memberships. Watch how Russell sells click funnels. Watch how. It's always bundled with something else. What's funny about that especially when the subscription based product is actually digital, they always ship something physical. That's the pattern. That's the model. That's how we do it and so when you go back and you start looking at. How is that whole thing actually works, don't think in terms of how can I just sell magazines? Turn the thing into an offer and be like how can turn this physical that they get in the mail when they get a magazine subscription, right? The magazine subscription also we don't sell it. We don't sell subscription as the main thing. We give it away as a bonus. When you get click funnels or when you get the funnel acts course, I'm gonna give you funnel acts, but I'm also just as a thank you, I'm gonna give you six months free of click funnels, right? That's how Russell does it... When you go and get this clock and football and foam finger or whatever, then we're gonna give you three months free on your subscription to Sports Illustrated Magazine, right? They give away the physical thing. Sorry. When you get the physical thing, they give you as a bonus, the continuity thing, which is really what they want you to buy. Does that make sense? That's how I would do it. That is how we do it. Funnel University usually would cost us $120 out of the gate, typically, in ad spend just to get somebody to join. That's the numbers when I saw it a long time ago so I don't know what they are now, but there's a lot of money just to get one person just to. You don't even know if they're gonna stay that long and so how do you actually recoup that cost? Well, first, we have 'em get. We actually sell the package of the other stuff. We sell the offer not the subscription. Does that make sense? When you do it that way, you're profitable off the bat far faster so anyway, hopefully that helps. Guys, this has been a long podcast. I had to break this into two different episodes because there's so many questions and I still didn't get to about 10 of 'em. If you want to keep asking questions, go for it. I just make sure that the ones I put on here are not so particular to your business so that they'll be advantageous for everyone to hear. If you don't hear your question on there, please don't get offended just know that sometimes the question may not be advantageous for the whole group. Anyway, thanks so much guys. Thanks so much for listening to Sales Funnel Radio and anyway, super excited for all of the great things go. There's so many awesome things going on here. Go get the free website funnel that I created if you want at salesfunnelbroker.com. Also, I have a whole bunch of free funnels there you can go download and a whole bunch of the little helps as well. That's literally the entire reason I built that entire thing. I do broker funnels, but not that often anymore. I should probably change the name of that place to sometime, but anyways, guys, thanks so much and I will talk to you later. Thanks for listening to Sales Funnel Radio. Please remember to subscribe and leave feedback. Wanna get one of today's best internet sales funnel for free? Go to salesfunnelbroker.com/freefunnels to download your pre-built sales funnel today.  Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands

It's been awhile since I've done any Q&A on "HeySteve"... I'm kinda already in the Q&A zone this week so I just kept on goin'. Woo! What's up, everyone, good morning. My name's Steve Larsen and you're listening to Sales Funnel Radio. Welcome to Sales Funnel Radio where you'll learn marketing strategies to grow your online business using today's best internet sales funnels. Now here's your host, Steve Larsen. All right, all right, all right. Man, I'm kind of just a happy, excited individual in general but particularly this last week has just been such a personal win, it's just been so awesome. Many of you guys know I went and I got to speak on Russell's stage for three days, it was crazy. Oh my gosh, it was so much fun, I had a lot of fun with it. It was ... A lot of guys know we just launched the Two Comma Club Coaching Program and it's been awesome, it's been a lot of fun. We had hundreds, and hundreds, and hundreds of people join in and ask for Two Comma Club Coaching training, all the material. Those people who also purchased it they came for ... The last time we opened it, just this last week they came for three days. We went through their messaging, we went through their webinars, we built a funnel out, we built the sales portion, we indexed stores, it's really intense. The first day we went from I think was about 8:30 in the morning and then we'd leave at about six. Not bad, right? There's no breaks, we don't take breaks the entire day. We let everyone out for lunch once just to grab some food but besides that there's no breaks, there's nothing else. The second day what happens is we get up and at 8:30 everyone's back in there and then it was me. I went from 9 am to midnight. It was crazy. Russell came in and he taught a segment of it but man, we were on there for 17 hours. That's a ton of energy. I've always thought, "Oh my gosh, this is going to be such a ... I'm going to be exhausted," but I didn't realize how much. At the end of the day I was like ... The whole day is built around just us trying to help you get your slides done so you can do a webinar. It's very intensive and we stop slide by slide, by slide by slide... We walk around the room, we're like, "Hey, that doesn't look right or switch this or change the messaging to this or switch this word around or okay now pitch it to that guy over there," you know what I mean? It's like, it's intense and it was a whole lot of fun. What I wasn't expecting is how incredibly sore my body would be just being on stage keeping high energy, keeping big, loud, and proud, and keeping my hands all over the place. You know what I mean?... I didn't expect that part of it. I remember I laid that night at about 1:30 in the morning by Russell and I did a little strategy session for the next day. I laid down to go to sleep and my feet just started throbbing, not like, "Oh, they're sore," they actually hurt. I said, "Oh my gosh, I truly am an indoor animal now because I'm not used to ... that would not phase me in the past." Anyway, it was great. The next day I got and we went again from about 9 am to about six, five or 6 pm. It was great. We went through and people had all their stuff done. Anyway, last time we did this the people who actually implemented it and got out there, they'd make 19 grand on their first webinar. Another lady, she already did 700 grand, $700,000 in the last two months since she launched it, when we did this event last time. Anyway, this was a great event... When Russell invited me to come teach part of it, it was really honoring. I was shocked he asked. I was like, "Are you talking to me?" He's like, "Yeah dude, you know this stuff so well come teach it with me side-by-side." I was like, "Okay, cool." It was a lot of fun, just super honoring, very, very honoring... Anyways, that's what's been going on... My dad flew out and we had him over and he was doing that also for his webinar. Anyways, it was just a really, really good experience but I feel like I've been in recovery mode. It's Saturday right now and this all just happened just this last week. Then Friday we had all these people who joined the Two Comma Club Program. There's a two week program that we put you through before that you can even come to Boise so that you can be prepared for it. I had my first Q&A session over the phone, it was over Instant Tele-seminar. These guys went in, they got ... It was about 70 people on the phone with me and I was on for three hours straight. It was crazy. It was so funny because at the end of the day I walked back into the room where Russell was and I sat down at my desk there. Russell was like, I think he started laughing, he goes, "Hey, how you doing?" I was like, "It's going really, really well." I didn't expect ... I was like, "I have so much more empathy for how you feel after your events, that was really intense." A solid 17 hour day, another eight hours after it, I only slept ... I went to bed at 5:30 in the morning a few days before the event started just because I was preparing, I was trying to get ready.  I got a pretty big home office here, at least floor space-wise. Man, I was walking around and I was teaching as if people were in the room. I was getting really intense, really animated. I got whiteboards all over the place, I was drawing stuff out, doing all the things that I would to help concepts sink in deeply for when I was going to actually be on stage and teach. One thing to note, it's another totally different thing to teach it... Anyway, so that's what's been going on with me. I'm so sorry, I feel like I haven't been, I guess I have launched a few podcasts lately but I realized after I was doing the Q&A session I was like, "Wait, I have a Q&A session of my podcast and I haven't done that in probably ..." I don't know, it's been probably 30 episodes at least. I went and I looked at the app that I use for people to ask questions to me. Now, if you guys don't know what I'm talking about go to salesfunnelbroker ... Sorry, salesfunnelradio ... salesfunnelradio.com. Scroll down a little bit, there's going to be a green button on the right that says record voicemail. You can record a voicemail question and it'll be straight across your browser, it's really awesome. It'll email the copy to me and what I do is I kind of vet the questions to see which questions could apply to everybody. Those are the ones that I place inside the podcast. I'm going to do that. I lined up about one, two, three, four, five, six, seven. I lined up about seven questions so I'm going to play the questions so you guys all hear it and then I'm going to answer them real fast, does that sound good? This podcast might go a little bit longer than normal but it's only because I have not done a hasty segment of this podcast for a very long time and I'm so sorry. It just hit me while ... I got so tired in the middle of my three hour Q&A session yesterday I actually sat on the floor for a while with my laptop answering questions. Russell came in and Melanie came in and they were handing me snacks and treats because I was just going, and going, and going. It was really fun. We had people from all across the world on there, it was so fun. Anyway, so let me play this first question here. I'm just going to kind of shotgun fire over several of these questions, that sound good? Cool. Al right, that's the plan. Let me put the first question here. "Hey Steve, how's it going, it's Adam here, 20-year-old college student out of U Mass. I just had a quick question for you. You had mentioned before how you started off by providing a free service where you would build sales funnels for companies that were already established. I kind of want to take that same approach as I have a pretty in depth knowledge of how to use ClickFunnels. I've been using it for a while now, I know all the tools inside of ClickFunnels. I use actionetics setting up email sequences, all that fun stuff. I kind of want to take the same approach where I provide a free service to go into a company and build a sales funnel for them. I was just wondering if you can give me some insights on what approach I should take. I feel like that would be really beneficial for a lot of others out there. Thanks for your time, I really appreciate it." Hey Adam, that's a great question. There's a lot of ways to do it. If you don't have any ... Okay, let's start with this. It's all about results. If you've never built for anybody ever then you need to do it for free. You got to get out there and you have to do it for free. That kind of sucks a little bit but that's how it's going to work. Do it for free because this is now very much a results based economy. What you 100 other people can do in their immediate area. They may not know it but the moment they realize it, it's like, "Oh my gosh, why are you different?" The way I actually got started was I just started ... I was like, "Okay, what industries do I want to work in?" There's a little bit of a checklist I used to actually get started with the stuff. The thing that I started doing was I said, "Okay, number one. I want to work in an industry where there's a lot of money that flows into it and it's a normal thing to do so." You think real estate or cars, people expect to spend a lot of money in those areas. I wanted to spend ... What's nice is if I was to get them an extra two or three sales a month that would change their whole business. Rather than going for something worth really low ticket eCommerce drop-ship style where there's hardly any margin in it. If I was going to go choose and try and prove myself to a market like that I'd really have to increase volume to show massive improvement. Does that make sense? It's the power of the high ticket. That was the first criteria that I was looking for. The second criteria that I was looking for was that they already needed to be in business with a customer base. I did not ... I did the startup game for so long just going person to person, startup to startup. Great, super, awesome to do that but you know what? It was really, really hard because if for some reason the sales funnel didn't work the first time we launched, and half the time Russell and I launch a funnel it doesn't work the first time. We have to see what happens and we make tweaks and then launch it again. Usually that's when it starts to really make money. Does that make sense? These guys would come back and be like, "Oh my gosh, you must not know how to build funnels." I'm like, "Actually no, you're a startup and you haven't proven your market, you haven't proven your model, you haven't proven your product, your business isn't proven. You don't even know what you're doing." They thought the funnel was the business and that's not true at all. Anyways, if you're going to go do that, what I did is I just started making a list of the industries I wanted to go do that stuff in to fit those criteria. Then all I did is I ... Go to Google, search locally different businesses with those industries. I literally started shotgunning this email out or I'd go find them on Facebook. I'd be like, "Hey, I know this is weird ..." If you say that then people for some reason put their walls down. If you don't say that then they're going to be like, "This is weird," so you just call it out. "I know this is weird but I build these things online called sales funnels and I just wanted to know if I could do it for you. I know it's totally out of left field but I love the industry, I love ..." You can talk about their business specifically so they know that it's not spam. This works really well on Facebook Messenger by the way also... "Hey, I really, really want to be able to show the market that I know what I'm doing in this area. Let me build what I call an internet sales funnel for you for free, it'll come out of my pocket. I'm literally just trying to get results as big as possible for anybody right now. Could I do it for you? It will be completely free to you. The only thing I ask is that when it works, only pay me if it works. If so, I would love to get a video testimonial." That's how I did it and I shotgun blasted that style of message to tons of people and I started getting a response. It's funny, any time I wanted to get into a new industry, I still do that. I did that probably a couple months ago. It was before I moved to our new office but I was thinking about going into the real estate area. I was like, "Okay, who can I go build for for free?" I just started blasting the same message across so many platforms that I think Facebook thought I was spamming people, which I kind of was because I was trying to get my message out there and ask who I could build for for free. That was basically it. I got back great people. A few days later I was building for free for a lady who was a realtor to prove myself in the real estate niche. Anyways, that's how I would do it. Hopefully I answered your question, Adam... All right, and there's the next question. "Hey Steve! I just wanted to know do you do your own graphics or do you outsource it? If you outsource it what's your process, how do you do it? Thanks, have a great one. Love your podcast." That question was coming from Greg Grimsley and that is a great question. Graphics-wise, if you've been in any kind of funnel building you know that graphics is a heavy part of it, graphics, and video, and copy, which is pretty much all web pages in general. Yeah, you got to solve that problem. I do my own graphics. I 'm pretty sure you're talking about those little funnel box graphics that I made. Yeah, I made those, I used the Adobe Illustrator for that. One of the things that I learned from Russell sitting next to him is he is so good at taking complex things and turning it into a simple picture. When you can do that your ability to teach is going to go through the roof. Sometimes what I'll do is .. I still do it. I got whiteboards up here over on the side and if there's something that I need to explain better I will draw a picture. It's one of the major reasons why half of his ... He's got a lot of pictures in his books and that's why he does it. It's on purpose, it's not just because ... It's so that we can explain things that otherwise would be very hard to see without a visual. A lot of times what I'll do is I'll sit down and I'll draw the picture. If you're not personally a graphics guy, man you can go on Fiver or Freelance.com or whatever and go and pay someone to make a little graphic out of it. If they charge you more than 50 bucks they're probably charging too much money for you. Anyway, that's how I do it though and that's how I do it. I use Adobe Illustrator. I was a layout head editor and designer in high school and I've kind of always just liked layout and design so I do it myself. If you don't have that skill that's fine, that should not stop your progress. All right, this next question comes from Art Boyd. "Hey Steve, Art Boyd here! I do have a question for you. First off I want to say you're amazing, I listen to all your podcasts. You bring tremendous value to the marketplace and I just appreciate all that you share with us. My question is this, how come you give away your free click funnels website that you spend over 200 hours on? Why are you giving that away for free and not charging for it? What's the real marketing ninja tactic that you're using that pays you on the back end? Let me know, I appreciate it man. Talk to you soon, thanks." Hey, that's a huge, huge ... Thanks for bringing that up. The reason I do it is because of, well really two different things. Okay, how many times do you go to a ... Have you ever been to a used car salesman? You go to a used car place or a new car place or any place where there's supposed to be sale happening. You walk up and the biggest thing you know that you're going to run into is the moment you pull up somebody is going to be there as you open the car door and just hounding you. They're going to be hounding you, that sucks. I hate that. Anyway, I love to be sold but I do not like to be bullied. That makes me feel bullied. I feel like I'm being backed into a corner like, "So do you want it? You gonna get it? Okay, we could buy this." People who will jump out and immediately show you how your objections are worth nothing rather than actually valuing the objection and dealing with it. The reason I do that is because I read ... Anyway, the free thing ... A lot of you guys get hung up on the free thing. "Well, I got to have a free thing in the front." Not always but it really helps to have something free on the front end to start building your list. I haven't been doing this podcast that long, I've barely spent any kind of advertising dollars behind it but because I do that I gained like 2,000 people on my list in the last little bit. It gets shared. The reason I do it is because it gets shared and it's something that I should be charging for. When you guys are starting to come up with the free thing, the bait to pull people into funnels or pull people into your world or whatever it is, the thing that you're doing do it for free for somebody else. Also do, maybe if you can, depends on the industry, depends on to make sense what you're doing but man, I would take something that should be paid for, especially for branding yourself. Especially if this is a coaching, author, speaker, consultant, whatever it is. Myself, man take something that's free or something that people should pay a lot of money for, help them feel that they should be paying for it, which is the reason I reference the fact I spent 200 hours on it. I'll charge 20 grand for funnels now, however I don't usually take any kind of funnel ... build products anymore. Got my own stuff going on which is awesome... Anyway, take something that should be paid for, something that's crazy so that when people like, "Oh my gosh, this is crazy. I get it for free? Oh my gosh." That reaction right there, that's what I'm trying to cause inside of them, inside of their psyche because they'll go share it. If they go share it, it means I won. How do I grow a business almost completely organically while working on the side for one of the most intense entrepreneurs that is even out there? Like that, that's how I do it. What happens is I know that if there's ever a product in the future I have delivered so much freakin' value. Personally I just know. I have delivered so much value. My goal is to deliver so much value. If I can deliver so, so much value and turn around and say, "Hey, you know what? For months I have helped answer questions, I have helped give things away that you should have paid a lot of money for. The next that I do come out with a product ..." I say, "You know what? This product, I actually can stand behind it. It took me a long time to make it but it's going to help you do this. Here you go." There's going to be a lot of people who are fine paying me money for that. It's completely the law of reciprocity. The book "Launch" by Jeff Walker, I really like that book. There's a section or chapter in there that talks about the nine ... There's nine principles of persuasion or something like that. Nine principles ... Gosh, I can't remember the name of it. Anyways, it's any of those categories. One of them is reciprocity. If I give you something for free or ... This happens all the time. Oh, here's a good example. This happens all the time during Christmas or holidays or whenever. If you're in a spot where there's all these neighbors and you walk up to someone ... Someone rings your doorbell, let's say in the middle of dinner time. You're like, "Who's at the door?" You walk up to the door and there's a neighbor there and they've got a plate of cookies for you and a card. They walk in they're like, "Hey, Merry Christmas or Happy Holidays or whatever." What's your immediate gut reaction? "Oh my gosh, thank you so much. I wish I had something for you. I wish there was something I could give you back. Stay right there, stay right there." How many guys would turn around, run back into the kitchen and you grab a can of beans or something to give them to try and show appreciation back. You feel the need to reciprocate, that's literally the reason why I do it. I want to pump value in the marketplace and it also sets me apart like crazy. I get tagged all over the internet for being a resource for people to go get things they need to in order to be successful with funnels. "Well shoot, if you just want to get started right off the bat I got a really great funnel for you and it's free. It took me a long time to build it. Well there you go, you can have it, it's yours. It's a template, I took it out of my content, you can go grab it." Anyway, that's why I do it. That's why I'm a little bit bossy about it. I have an exit pop. If you go to salesfunnelbroker.com it's at the bottom but there's also an exit pop. Some people feel like exit pops are a little bit aggressive but I know that what I'm asking for in the exit pop is such ridiculous value for the funnel and what it gives you that I don't feel bad. I feel like it's totally fine. I don't feel like it taints my image at all by being annoying one more time before somebody leaves the site. Anyway, that's the answer to that one, that's why I do it. I thought about it a lot, there's a lot of strategy behind that and there's a lot more that I'm about to put into that as well. Great question man. Right now what I'm going to do is I'm actually going to break this into a second podcast because there are so many questions. I don't want this to go, it's going to go like 40 or 50 minutes if I keep going here. Let me break this into another episode here. I want to thank you guys. Go ahead and tune into the next one, I'll make a part two on this. Anyways, if you guys got a question though please go ahead and ask me. If you go to salesfunnelradio.com, scroll down to the bottom, green button on the right, you can go and ask one. Just make sure the question is something that can be advantageous for the entire group and no so specific to your business that I can't answer it in a broad way. You want to be detailed as possible but also ... I've had 8,000 downloads in the last ... This podcast has taken off guys and I really want to thank you all for being avid listeners and for being supportive with it. That being said, I've got to make it still applicable for everybody and funnels in general. All right guys, thanks so much and I'll see you in the next episode. Bye.Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands

  Click above to listen in iTunes... One of the biggest questions I get is how to run my ask campaigns. Welp... here ya go! Hey, what's going on everyone? This is Steve Larson and you're listening to a kind of late-night Sales Funnel Radio. Welcome to Sales Funnel Radio, where you'll learn marketing strategies to grow your online business using today's best internet sales funnels. And now, here's your host, Steve Larson. Hey, I'm super excited to be here today. Gosh I'm kinda freaking out just a little bit, I'm not gonna lie. In two days, I am speaking on Russell's stage, for two days. And I'm excited about it. Gosh I love stage. I absolutely love it, but I'm kinda stressing out a little bit. I went and got my hair cut, and getting all the things ready that I need to, writing my slides right now. It's like 250 slides. It's nuts, but I'm kinda ... Anyway, I'm stressing out a little bit, I'm not gonna lie. I did a lot of stage growing up, tons of stage, lots of stage, and I really enjoyed it. I sang a lot, I was in a band. I've said this stuff to you guy before, okay. Me being on stage is not the scary part. I actually love it, it's a special kind of rush and I ... Anyway I crave it... I love it when people ask me to speak, because I get really stoked about it. Well, this is Russell Brunson's stage, though. It's like, "What the heck. Holy Cow." It's a bigger deal for sure. So, anyway, I know that I'm probably not going to sleep much tonight or the night next also because I need to just keep preparing and I want to be awesome, you know. Russell's changed my life, he's changed a lot of people's lives. I'm going to speak for two days at an event that he's putting on, and I'm really excited for it. It's just ... Anyway ... What's funny is I'm actually more nervous about him and other people that know me ... like seeing me on stage like turn on. You know what I mean? When we talk to each other back and forth there's a certain presence we have personally. But then there's another presence we have when we go talk to someone when we are actually presenting. When we are actually teaching. You know what I mean? I'm a different person when I get on this podcast than when I'm talking to my mom or dad. You know what I mean? And it's not that I'm a different person, I shouldn't say it that way. But my energy level's different. Usually when I talk to my mom or talk to my dad or talk to any family or my brothers or sister or anything like that, I'm not on there going, "What's up guys? Whoa!" You know what I mean? For me to come out, that's my normal stage-on presence and I'm going to be that way for like 20 hours. I'm actually more nervous about that part of it than I am any of the content- I know the content. I'm just organizing it now- than anything else. Anyway, I know it'll be good. Anyway, it's just a different side of me that many of the people that I work with over there have not seen from me. So I'm actually more nervous about that part than anything else. All right, I want to address a question real quick that I continue to get asked over and over and over again. Real quick, though, I just want to tell you guys a quick story, though. I went and I started building Sales Funnels for companies well before I worked for ClickFunnels, well before I worked for Russell, and I started putting all these pieces together. If you read a book from one person and you think you know it all, let me just tell you real quick that you don't. What's best is to go find a subject and then read all the books you can on that subject from all the different experts because each of the quote unquote experts is going to give you a different take. Does that make sense?... You're gonna be able to get all these different pieces from these people that you may not have gotten before if you just read one book, took one course. So what I started doing is I started learning about product creation. I actually didn't realize that that's what I was doing, now looking back, but that's what I was doing. I was learning how to create products. I was learning how to put together offers and things that are attractive that would make others want to give me money and I needed to prove myself to the market. You know what I mean? I felt I knew how to do this stuff. I had done it on small scales with other people and my own stuff. I'd done it. But I wanted to get a big shot, you know, "Hey everyone! Look, I do know how to do this, you know? Please pay me for what I feel I'm worth." You know what I mean... And I know a lot of you guys probably feel that way. I'm sure you guys know what that feels like, right? To not get paid what you feel you are, right? What you're worth. What I did is I went and this was about three years ago, I started shotgun sending emails to tons of different companies saying, "Hey, I want to build a funnel for you. I know you don't know what that is. I'll do it for free. If it makes money, will you hire me?" Right? And I started doing that to tons of different companies. Well, one of them stuck. One of them caught and he came out. He was like, "I don't know what that is but, I mean, if you want to build something that's going to be potentially cool for free, that's a great proposition." So I jumped out there and all I did is I honestly just used Google forms. Google forms is free and what you do is you write- In the book "Ask" by Ryan Levesque, he basically has six different questions that you have, six or seven, but it's a few different questions that you go and you put together and the very first question is like this big, wide open net. Basically, the first question is something along the lines, "Hey, what's your biggest question with X?" Or, "What's been your biggest challenge with X?" And you just leave it blank, totally open. That's it. That's the whole question. And you let them answer as much as they want to. The second question starts to get more narrow. And there's more like multiple choice things. And the next question gets more narrow and the next one gets more and more narrow. And each question is capturing the data, regardless if they actually finish the entire survey. I was like, "Cool." I think I could do that. Basically what happens is, after you collect all this data, you pool in all this data and then you'll start to see the top concerns. You'll see the top questions, the top main buckets where people are struggling in and then you run another one with just that topic in mind. I didn't even get as far as that. Typically, I don't. We've run that before just for the ClickFunnels community so that we could help and know what people needed help with. I have hardly ever gotten that deep into it. I've really just asked that first set of six questions and that's it. If you don't know what I'm talking about, I'd go get the book "Ask" by Ryan Levesque and seriously read it. It's a great one. And you read that in companion with "Expert Secrets". Those two together? You'll know exactly how to create offers. It's amazing. More clarity and how to create an offer in those two books than anything else I'd ever read before. Anyway. So I went and I was like, "Well, shoot." I didn't know what Wufoo was. I didn't know what all the different form builders were out there. I didn't know any of that stuff. All I did is I went and I used Google forms because it was free. And I went and I put together this "Ask" campaign and I was doing it for a company that sold water machine, like hydrogen water machines, things like that. So extremely health conscious, very homeopathic conscious minded type person and I basically put the question, "Hey, what's your number one health challenge right now?" And that's kind of a pointed question but I wanted to do that. I wanted the question to be forward enough that the people who actually answered it would give me results and it would be very valuable data. Here's what ended up happening. He had a list of a couple thousand people. It wasn't that big of a list, to be honest. But I went and dropped out the email to his list and I said, "Hey everyone!" I put the title in there "quick announcement and a favor". That was my email subject title, my email subject line. Quick announcement and a favor. I learned that by the book "Launch" by Jeff Walker. It's a great headline by the way. I've used that many times and I always get great results from it. This is far more of a tactile podcast than I usually do but I just wanted to show you guys what I actually do in my "Ask" campaigns because I've been getting asked this question a lot. "Hey, how do I actually run an "ask" campaign? How do I get this out there?" The first step: I made it in Google forms, then I went and I blasted it out there with an email and then I put a link to the Google form in the email, and then what happened was, there was about 150 people that responded to it over about a week. When people didn't respond to it, I captured all those people who didn't. I resent it again. And I asked it again on the Facebook page and I asked it in several places. It wasn't just a one and done kind of thing. I dug. And I was like, "Cool! Wow! That's more people than I actually thought it would be in the first place." What I did is I started reading all of the different pieces. I started reading all the responses with all the responses on one side of the screen and then a blank sheet on the other. And if something happened that I just did not expect ... I expected that I would start to see the commonalities and I did. That was three years ago. I can't remember what they were now but it was extremely valuable. But I started reading through all of these different responses and people telling us, "What's the number one challenge with your health that you're struggling with right now?" That's basically what the question was... And number two was, "How much are you spending per month your health? Supplements or prescriptions or whatever it is- How much are you currently spending right now?" And then number three, "Did you personally diagnose your own disease or did a doctor do it?" I needed to get down to the, "Who am I really talking to? Are these people who are kind of skittish and they self-diagnose and now they're medicating over it? Or is this actually a legitimate disease, not that that says a disease is legitimate, but you know what I mean. I needed to know that kind of stuff in my marketing and my messaging. What ended up happening, this totally shocking thing started happening because, as I actually sat down and I started reading all these questions, I started crying. Actually crying. It was really really intense. I was not expecting it. I was not expecting it. Because here's what was happening. People were answering the number one question with so much vulnerability, it took me off guard. It was nuts. I couldn't believe it. And what ended up happening is I sat down and I started reading these questions and people were saying things like, "Hey, what's the number one challenge you're having with your health right now?" People were writing things like, "I'm sitting next to my spouse right now who is dying in bed and should die at any day. What can you do to help us?" Stuff like that. I was like, "Oh my gosh!" "Hey, I just lost one of my kids to cancer. I wish we had more of an answer about that." Holy crap! And it was really really in depth, long answers... And I had to stop three times because it was so intense. I gained so much affinity for my customer and the people that I was trying to go and learn about that I literally had to stop. I didn't expect any of that. I did not expect that I would have to go do that. I didn't expect that I would need to step back. I didn't expect that, not that I didn't love the customer before or really care about the customer before, but my affinity for them, for what they were feeling, what they're going through, shot through the roof. It was so powerful, you guys. Oh my gosh. I went and I just started putting into a bucket of, "Well, this is more of a question about this." "Okay, so is that one." "This is kind of a new category. Let's make a new category." Does that make sense? And I started tallying together all these different things, both one what I thought people's beliefs were and then also their biggest question as well. So I started learning... "Oh my gosh, these people are all wanting something like this." Do they actually want this or is it more like a Henry Ford thing and they think they want that but really, I'm going to give them this and it'll also solve the problem better. You know what I mean like with the car and horse and buggy thing. It took me probably three or four hours just to go through the 150 questions and start to make little buckets with it. What ended up happening is I knew now how to speak to the person. I knew what their pain points were. I knew. They gave me the headline. Does that make sense? They gave me the copy. They gave me exactly what it was that they were going to go and buy. Again, you can use this for good or bad, but I went and I created a little campaign. I made a trip wire funnel with the things that we knew that they'd go buy and then we launched it. And it made them like 50 grand. And 50 grand came through that funnel in the next couple weeks there. 20 grand in two days and then another 30 trickled in after that. And I was like, "Holy crap! That Ask campaign worked! This is nuts! It's so crazy!" The only reason I'm bringing this up is, like I said, a lot of people have been asking me how does this work? How do you actually do an Ask campaign? Here's some of the faults that I've seen from many people as they start to do this. One, they only ask once. They only ask one time. Sometimes my wife has to ask me three times just to take the trash out, you know what I mean? You're asking for some personal data and you might need to ask a couple times. Does that make sense? I wouldn't just stick with one medium either. I would email it out and then I put it on Facebook. Then I'd do a Facebook live. Then I might put it on YouTube. Then I might go and do a periscope shoot about it. And then I might take some of the responses that are coming in and just anonymously read some of them. "Man, I can't- This is so touching. I have to read these." Because that'll make other people want to go answer and tell their story since they know they're being heard. Does that make sense? A lot of people that I'm watching, what they going and doing is they're asking just one question, which is fine, but you can ask the full six that Ryan Levesque talks about in the book which, by the way, I'd go get it. They're not paying me to talk about the "Ask" book. There's no promotion thing going on here but I just have it right in front of me and it's a great book. But I wouldn't just ask one question, meaning, I wouldn't just ask, "Hey, what's your number one challenge with X?", email it out one time, and then do nothing else. Do you know what I mean? I would also try to get as much as you can. I like what Russell suggested. Get at least a hundred responses if you can. Now, for me, that has meant that I have to boost the post. I actually had to put a little money behind it. I am data digging like a beast. Does that make sense? The other thing I do is I'll go read reviews on other people's products that are indirect or direct competitors to what it is I'm selling and then I'll go make a list of all those things. I'll go read reviews on the product, whether it's on Amazon Top Seller's List, whether it's on- And I'll start digging. The whole point of the Ask campaign is not just for you to ask and have answers come to you. Which it is but you have got to dig. It is a period of market research. It is a period of where you figure out really in depth what someone actually is thinking. The thing, too, is you gotta look beyond the surface level... I wish I'd pulled up the actual Ask campaign itself that I did. In fact, I might do that here while I'm ... You might hear some clicking sounds. I'm on my computer. But I would go and, when you start reading the responses, what they're going to tell you is, first of all, they're going to tell you some surface level stuff and that's fine but you need to start looking at the underlying beliefs they have because of that. That's what Russell tells you to do, right? Go look at the underlying- Sweet, I found it. Cool. Hey, I'm going to read you the questions that I wrote so that you guys have somewhat of a framework for when you actually go do your Ask campaign, whether or not you've actually read the book "Ask". My very first question was, like I said, a water company. What I said was, "Please be as"- This is all in Google forms, totally free and what's nice is Google forms also, in the responses section, they've got a tab there where it makes all these cool graphs for you so you can see the responses, the percentages that people are answering one or the other, whatever it is. Anyway, there's only six questions. And I said, "Please be as detailed and specific as possible. Please go beyond saying, 'I want to be more healthy.' The more specific and detailed, the more likely I'll be able to cover your topic." So the first thing I asked is, "What's your number one single biggest health concern or challenge right now?" All right? And I put in an example. "Example: I'm sick of blank and blank and I've tried blank for too long." And I just put a little primer question in there for them. Second question was, I said, "Which of the following best describes you? I have a currently diagnosed health challenge or I don't have a health challenge but I'm careful about the potential of future health issues." The hard part is that you're going to want to load it like make any kind of bias as well. Number three, I wrote, "I mostly take remedies and medicines, a, only prescribed from doctors, b, which are only homeopathic, c, from over the counter or, d, I rarely take any remedies or medicines of any kind." Right? Number four said, "Roughly how much money are you spending on your health products or remedies and medicines, including supplements, each month?" And that was nice. I put some ranges in there. The reason I asked the price point because now I know, hey, if these guys are spending like $500 a month on their own health supplements or prescriptions that they're already currently buying, they're probably not going to have an issue if I just go asking for another 50 or $100 purchase. Does that make sense?... Mentally, that's not a price block for them because they're already spending a huge chunk. And I needed to know that kind of data. It was pretty interesting. Most people answered ... where am I? Most people answered that they spend between 50 and $200 a month on their current health supplements and remedies and things like that. Number five, "What is your primary health goal?" The reason I asked that question is so that now that when I go talk to them, I can say, "Hey, you guys! I know that you want to do X." How do I know that? It's because they told me. Does that make sense? And the copy speaks directly to them by asking them what their challenge is and their main concern is, you will now know exactly how to speak to them. And I said, lastly, "I may follow up with a few people personally to learn a little bit more about your situation. If you'd be open to chatting for a few on the condition I promise not to try to sell you anything, please leave me your name and email below." The reason I do that is so that is- Let's say someone put something really intense in there or something it just kind of makes me curious. Man, pick up the phone and call the person and be like, "Hey! Could you tell me a little more about that?" The reason I'm going over this is because over and over and over again, I have seen people stand back and go, "Oh, you know what? I don't like Teletubbies or I don't like Beanie Babies, therefore, I am not going to make them." Okay, those are huge products. I don't like them either but I don't fill my own wallet. You do not fill- You are not your target market. You're not. So put aside what you really like, you know? There's this whole area where you stop caring what you actually want to sell and realize what people are buying, okay? What's nice about the Ask campaign and things like that and what Russell teaches is that you're going to get beyond what things you really really like. You might be really really good at stock trading. You might be really really good at some specific talent. Some skill. Something that you spent a lot of time getting really really good at. That's good and you need to have that but the way that you sell it, the actual marketing behind the sale is what you're trying to figure out. What tag lines or what things are people actually saying right now. Can I use that exact phrase inside my actually copy? Can I use what they're saying in my headline? It's so funny. When I first realized what retargeting was, retargeting campaigns, first of all I didn't know what it was but it was funny because I would go to a few websites and put in a few pieces of data in there and then I'd go over to some other site, say YouTube or whatever where they've sold ad space, and then all of a sudden, I've got all these ads that are saying directly what I put into the last website and it was like, "What the heck? How do they know this?" Ohhh. Retargeting campaign. Interesting. This is crazy cool! So you can use this on front end targeting. You can use it on background as retargeting campaigns. You can use this in your email. Use it everywhere. The whole point is for people to feel like that you are completing the conversation that's already happening inside their head. Before I keep going, let that sink in... You need to figure out what's already going on inside their head and use the same vernacular, use the same vocab, use the same phrases, the train of thought, the similes and symbolisms. The same things over and over again that's already going on inside their head. If you can do that then they'll feel like you know them. They'll feel like you were there for them even more. And I want you to be. Right?... Be truthful. Be honest. I want you to be ethical in this business and you are but it will also help you get the sale faster because you are joining the conversation that's already going on in their head. If you don't do that, you're guessing. The whole point that I'm trying to make here is that if you get out there and you start making these campaigns, you start putting things together, you gotta realize that the creativity that you need to actually make money, 90% of the time is not actually inside of you. It's in the market. All you're doing is you're harvesting from the market and the market's telling you, "Hey, you know what? I really like Teletubbies. I really like Beanie Babies." Personally, I hate that stuff. I imagine you do, too. That's probably not the market for the type of person listening to this podcast but that's not the point either. Man, if I knew that freaking Beanie Babies were something that was going to sell, I wouldn't care. People are buying it. You know what I mean? And I would go and I would sell it. I'm not telling you to get away from your main task or your main skill or the thing that you're good at or the thing you're going to sell, but what I am telling you is go ask what people are wanting and give that to them. That's all it is. Find a hot market. You're going to ask them what they want and number three, you're going to give it to them. That's really all it is. Those are the three things. And it's as simple as that. And people go make it too complicated and they'll start guessing. It's good to go deep. It's good to go find some awesome deep research and go really really hardcore and funnel hacking and things like that and you should do that. But you also need to realize that sometimes making things up on your own, man, that's gambling. I'm not a gambler. I think gambling's dumb. I don't understand why someone would play poker. I would rather gamble my money, quote unquote gamble, in a business. You know what I mean? On ad spend- Anyway, whatever. I won't get on that tangent. Anyway. That's what I'm trying to tell you guys. In order to actually go create the product, stop guessing. You don't need to guess. Just go ask and if you don't have a clear picture of what your offer is, it means you've not asked enough so go ask more. And go get your message out there and be like, "Hey, I'm trying to think of ... I really want to go have this product be out there." Look, man. When we were in ... I'm sorry I tell so many college stories but, I've only been out of college for a year, okay? When I was in college, though, we had this business we ran and made three grand a week, this student ran business. We built it from the ground up and it was awesome and super cool and I was the CEO of it and it went really really good. The only reason we stopped it is because they made us. That's another story but anyway, we literally walked around campus asking people to fill out surveys. It was super embarrassing for a little bit. It was kind of annoying. "Hey could you fill this out?" "Hey, could I ask you just a few questions?" You know, "Hey!" Obviously in anything, you get a lot of people who are jerks, but at the same time, a lot of people really were helpful. Well, I'm terrible at cooking but we ended up starting a cooking business because that's what people wanted to buy. I hate it so much. I don't know that I really ever cooked. Maybe one time. I was like, "Cool. Food." What kind of food do you want? And they went through and they told us. I was like, "Cool! What flavor do you want?" They went through and told us. Awesome. "About how much would you pay for this?" And so we did about a week of just hardcore research, day after day after day after day. And after a day, we'd sit back and go, "Hey, cool." Well, that's what people want, all right, let's dive in one more step. Let's dive in one more step. Let's dive in one more step. And that's how I run the Ask campaign. There's a lot of ways to run it. It's not just automatically electronically. We are literally asking people, getting into the emotions behind it. And getting into the reasons, "Why do you want food?" "Why do you want this?" "How come with us health challenged?" What really is making me say that? And if you can go one more level deep, that's really where Russell's book gets into. Go one more level deep. And what it'll do is it'll start to show you all the false belief patterns that people have about your product. Now you know what your goal is. Now you know what the marketing is you have to go create. You guys know that I always tell people, "A product and an offer are not the same thing." It's dangerous to have a product. It's really cool to have an offer. Go get an offer. Well, number two on that is, "Marketing and sales is not the same thing." There's really four categories. Number one, what's the product? Well, I found out, because I asked people like crazy that people want this food thing. All right, cool, I've got three more categories I've got to go find out about. All right, well, what's the offer? What do they really want with it? And that's what we did. We're like, "Hey, what do you want with it?" You know what? I really like chips and a drink. Cool. What kinds of chips and drink? They are literally building the offer that we're going to go sell them later. Does that make sense? I'm sorry, this is a long podcast. I'm so sorry but I hope you're getting this. Number three, what I did is I went, "Okay, well what's the marketing behind it? How are people going to [inaudible 00:26:16]? Cool. Well, what times do you want to get sold this stuff? About what time- How much money are you keeping with you at all times?" You know what I mean? You just work piece by piece by piece through those four things. What's the product? Cool. We found that out. What's the offer? How are they actually packaging it and what do they want to buy with it? Number three, what's the marketing behind it? And number four, what's the sales behind it? Meaning, what do they want to have happen face to face? Turns out, they just wanted package deals. You know what I mean? Marketing is what brought them to our counter. Sales is what happened when they were at the counter. Anyway, I could keep going and going and going. I'm so sorry but I just hope that this helps with the Ask campaign. I hope that it's helpful what I'm telling you. The Ask campaign is such a crucial thing. I didn't realize that that's what we were doing when I was doing all that stuff but that's exactly, it was the same principles. We asked questions like crazy and then, after people bought, we asked them more questions. And we found out things like, "Ugh, you know what? Christmas is coming up. I sure wish there was some hot chocolate around." Well, shoot, we just made hot chocolate and we charged a couple bucks for it. Actually, we brought it from $1500 a week from then up to $2000 a week and then it was up to $3000 a week. And then we started catering because people told us they wanted it. Your whole business is this way. First, Ask campaign your way to find a product if you don't already know what that is. Number two, go Ask campaign your way to find out what offer people are willing to purchase. And if you don't know, make the offer. Hand it to them. And when they're holding the offer, or when they're looking at the offer, don't look at it with them. Look at their face. What reactions did they give? Why did they do that? And then ask them, "Why did you do that? Why'd your face go that way?" And don't fall in love with your product ever because they'll come back and say, "I wish you'd done this." And if you fall in love with your product, people will stand back and, "I'm in love with my product. It's perfect how it is. You don't know what you're talking about." It's the wrong thing. You're not filling your own wallet, remember? You're not filling your own wallet. You are not your target market, even if you participate in the thing that you're selling, you are not your target market. Number three, then you're going to Ask campaign your way to find out the marketing. That's huge what funnel hacking is. That's what funnels do, right? They're marketing pieces that bring people into your world. They're big marketing arms basically. Number four, we go find out the sales part. Okay, what are people saying in comparing or in competitive offers? That's really when you start tossing in all the different things that people are telling me from the Ask campaign. I use that in my copy. Those are the four things. You don't just Ask campaign one time and you're done. That is not the way do it. If that was the case, funnel scripts would not exist. If that was the case, I'd bet "Expert Secrets", the book, would not exist. If that's the case, ClickFunnels would not exist. By continually asking over and over and over again what the market wants, you will stay ahead of the curve and you'll stay ahead of the other guy that ends up just caring more to the money and less about the customer and starts to fizzle away and die because they're in that cutting edge anymore. Does that make sense? Anyway. Sorry, this is a long one but I just get really passionate about this topic because stop making it up. Because you don't know. And it's okay that you don't know. And the way to know is just by asking people. Just ask like crazy! Man, I ask questions to everyone. My wife used to make fun of me for it because we'd be at the grocery store and I'd just start asking questions. "Hey, when's your busiest times? Oh, cool. What are they mostly buying? What are the things you guys are most scarce in all the time?" And the cashier always looks at me weird but they answer my questions and I kind of have an idea now. And I just do that everywhere I go. I just make it a habit. I just ask questions. I suffer from insatiable curiosity and you need to do that. Suffer from insatiable curiosity. Go and just ask questions. And if you're curious, ;people like to talk about their life. They'll tell you. Some people are having a bad day and they won't tell you. Who cares? Go to the next one. You know what I mean? People like to talk about themselves. Anyway. Guys, hopefully I was helpful and these work like crazy. I just did several Ask campaigns last week for the product we just launched, ClickFunnels, which is too comical to coaching. Anyway, I gotta get back to producing my slides and getting ready for that but I thought I'd just drop this out to you guys because it's a big deal. And a lot of people do it really wrong. Anyways, guys, I will talk to you later and you're all rockstars. Bye. Thanks for listening to Sales Funnel Radio. Please, remember to subscribe and leave feedback. Want to get one of today's best internet sales funnel for free? Go to salesfunnelbroker.com/freefunnels to download your pre-billed sales funnel today.Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands

There was a foundational error being taught in my college classes when it came to making money. It all revolves around the "product big-bang" theory.. Oh, baby. What's going on guys? It's Steve Larsen, and you're listening to Sales Funnel Radio. Welcome to Sales Funnel Radio, where you'll learn marketing strategies to grow your online business using today's best internet sales funnels. And now, here's your host, Steven Larsen. Hey, how you guys doing? I'm so grateful that you guys are tuned in. Let me just say that, first off. Thanks so much, I really appreciate it. This podcast, last month, got 8,000 downloads, which is nuts. And then this month, we're only half way through the month right now, right? Yeah, about half way through. And we're already at about 8,000 again. It's awesome. It just continues to grown and grow and grow. And I just really appreciate it, so thanks to all you guys. You guys are all rock stars. About three or four years ago, I was talking to somewhat of a mentor, but he's also a professor. And I was like, "Man, I don't know what I want to do." Was this three? Yeah, it was about three or four years ago. I was like, "I don't know what I want to do." He's like, "Well, currently you're major is selected as finance." I was like, "Yeah, but it's so boring." And it's not that ... Please don't misunderstand what I'm saying. Finance is awesome, you guys are awesome. But it just wasn't interesting me ... To me, that much. And I was like, "I don't know if I really want to do it." And he's like, "Well, you could do supply chain." I was like, "Okay, here's the problem. I could see myself doing any of the things that you're saying right now. Okay? I could see myself going out and doing this, or doing this, or doing this." And I was like, "What do I do? I don't know what I want to do with my life." I did not know what I wanted to do with my life until about two years ago; no joke. And it was a constant question in my mind all of the time; constant question. And I was always wondering that not just what should I do with my life, I was wondering product-wise, as well. Hey, what should I do with my life? What things should I sell? What's a good offer to go out there and try it? Have you guys ever felt that way? I'm sure you have. If you've ever felt that way before, give me a little nod. Okay? A little raised fist pump, or something like that. Because that's a huge question; hey, what do I sell? What do I do? And it was kind of cool because he sat back and he was like, "You know what? I think you should do marketing." And I was like, "Marketing?" And I always thought marketing was kind of the burner ... If you didn't know what to do with your life, then you went and did marketing kind of thing. And he goes, "No, no." This guy was awesome, by the way. He was the CMO of Denny's and Pizza Hut; it was Pizza Hut or Domino's. Anyway, he was the guy that invented the cheese stuffed crust pizza. Crazy story, by the way, really funny. Not that it's a huge deal, but we all have a special place in our heart for that stuff. But it was funny because I was like, "All right, fine. I'll go with the marketing route." And it ended up ... I was taken to it really, really fast. And I was like, "This is kind of cool." And what was interesting is he started mentoring me outside of class far more one-on-one that I ever expected or thought he would. It was very, very interesting what ended up happening. And at the time, I was trying to find all these products to sell, and he knew I was doing that. And there was all this stuff that I was doing outside of class. And most of my learning was not happening in the classroom, and I told him that. And he knew that. And he's like, "Yeah, I get that. No, that's fine. You're a little bit of a different cat." I was like, "All right, cool." So anyway, he was like, "Hey, go do this. Go do this. Go do this." And he was really the first guy that actually started guiding me in the path, first of all of marketing, but then second of all how to actually create products that sell. And a lot of it had to do, honestly, with this idea of the cheese stuffed crust pizza. And I know that that sounds ridiculous, but it's true. I was like, "How did you know to do that? How did you know what to go out and ... How did you get your ideas? How did you find products to go sell?" And I mean, I spent quite a bit of time with him. And I actually still talk/chat with him every once in a while. And he actually put me up for ... There was only 10 of us in the whatever thousand people graduating, nominated as distinguished entrepreneur student. You know what I mean? It was really cool. I got a trophy and everything. It was really kind of fun. But anyway, he started telling me these nuggets that were just amazing; they totally changed my life. Even just talking about it, I'm remembering all these little things he used to do. And he told me ... I was like, "Okay, well how do you get ideas for these products? Okay, you were CMO of Denny's, CMO of Pizza Hut. You were the head honcho guy of a lot of different companies." And he's generated just tons of revenue with his marketing tactics. And he honestly, along with one other guy, was by far the best teacher I had. He's just so, so good. Anyway, I really had spectacular people in my business classes, which was just ... It was really, really cool. But anyway. So I said, "Hey, how do you do this?" And he said, "You know what, ideas just come to me." And I was like, "Okay. But come one, you got to give me more than that. You know." He's like, "Well, think about it." Okay. He's like, "Okay. When I was at Denny's, I was going to Kohl's. And as I was driving to Kohl's, I get out and I walk out. And as I'm walking up to the store, there were these posters of bands wearing the Kohl's clothing. And they were promoting the clothing; the bands were, by wearing it." And I was like, "Okay. That's interesting." That's not very direct response [markety 00:05:55], and I prefer that now. I feel like those big corporate style marketing, I don't really like that style. But anyway, direct response marketing all the way, in my opinion. Anyway. And he goes, "Okay. So I saw that poster, I saw that board." And I was like, "Okay. Well I'm going to jump out there and we should do that with Denny's." And so what he did, is he had all ... He said, "I started noticing all of these people after concerts would come into Denny's really late at night, really late. You know, 1:00, 2:00, 3:00 a.m. because the concerts were over and they were hungry, so they wanted to come in and get food. And so they came in, and he's like, "That's interesting." So what he did is instead, he started inviting some of the bands that were playing to come in and make food in the kitchens, just for fun. And they just experimented. They did whatever they wanted to. They made the craziest food, they made the coolest food, they made food that was all over the place. And it was just a bit of a research period for him. But he would have these different high-end bands come in and literally make food with him... I was like, "Wow, that's interesting. That's really crazy." And he said, "Whatever food they made, that's what we sold. We made a dish after them, and put their name on it, and sold like hot cakes." And I was like, "Interesting. Really." It's really funny. Have you guys ever been to Taco Bell? I'm sure you've been to Taco Bell... Everything on the menu is the exact same thing, just prepared a little bit of a different way. You know what I mean? Really, really interesting. But that's basically what he did, though. And he's like, " You know what? And the cheese stuffed crust pizza, the way that came about is we were trying to make up something that was new to compete with some other market shares that were being taken from us." And I was like, "Hey, let's take string cheese, and we're going to roll it into crust. And let's just see if it works. I don't know if it really, really will." And what ended up happening was it sold five times more than they expected, so they ran out of string cheese. And so, they told all of ... I think it was Pizza Hut. They told all of the Pizza Huts to get out there and buy ... It might have been that or Little Caesars. Anyway, I can't remember; one of the pizza chains. And what they ended up doing is they went out to all the different grocery stores and bought up all the string cheese that was there. Basically for weeks, string cheese was not available in the entire United States because he had told everyone to go buy it from all the grocery stores because they couldn't fulfill orders enough. And I was like, "Are you kidding me? That's how stuffed crust came about?" And he was like, "Yeah." I was like, "Okay, cool." And there was some lessons, though. So he would tell me these stories. He's tell me all the different ... It was really, really cool. And it was all just one-on-one with him in his office. And he would just teach me and teach me. He's a really, really fascinating guy. Really cool guy. I was like, "This is fascinating, though, that you knew to do that." And he goes, "You know what though?" And this is one of the key lessons of this entire podcast, and the entire reason I'm doing it right now. He said that it's less about coming up with the new products all the time. For you to get out there and actually make money, it's less about coming up with something brand new all the time; brand new, brand new, brand new, stuff that's never been thought of before. And he said, "That's not what it is. What's it's more about is taking existing products, and modifying them, and putting them out to the market because you know the previous one already sold. I was like, "Oh, that's interesting. That's very, very interesting." And for a long time, my mind just kind of rolled over this, and rolled over this, and rolled over this. And he said, "So what the game became for me", this is what he was saying, "Is I would go find something that was already successful, I would take that thing, I would tweak it, and I would put it back into the marketplace because I knew it was already selling. But my own spin on it made it something slightly new. And I was like, "Whoa. That's crazy. Oh my gosh." And it's so different than all the other business classes that I'm in that you're kind of also teaching... Most of the other classes I was into, or the other books, or any other style of entrepreneurship that was out there was very much into, "Find something brand new. Come up with an idea that has never been done before and you'll change the world." And he's like, "Yeah, that doesn't really work." "He's like, "It's such a big gamble. It doesn't really work that way. It's a great way to not win." And what does that sound like to you guys? That's funnel hacking. That's what funnel hacking is. And what's funny is that he kept teaching me, and teaching me, and teaching me just kind of one-on-one for a long time. He was kind of one of my early mentors; and he still kind of is, honestly. We haven't chatted in a while, but he's awesome. And there's a few quotes and things he told me. But I ended up writing a book, and e-book; it's about three years ago. I didn't totally finish it yet. It's a small one. It's just an e-book about the different things I had been learning, and the different steps that I took to create a several thousand dollar a week business while I college. And I was like, "Wow, this is crazy cool." And one of the things that he told me, he's like, "Hey, so it's all about finding data and then trying something. Finding data, and then trying something. But doing it on already existing, already successful products that are out there." And he was doing it with all the crazy scenarios. And he said, "Enlightened trial and error succeeds over the planning of the lone genius." Does that make sense? You don't know at all; I said that on the last podcast. You don't know at all, don't act like you do. You don't currently have the creativity that you need to be better than everyone else on the marketplace. But the market knows. And so, what do you do is go find these top products and tweak them, and go put them back out there. Find the next products, tweak them, and put them out there. And that was his awesome show; that's what he was super good at. And it was, essentially, funnel hacking. And I was like, "Man, this is really, really interesting." And I went through, and I started writing this concept in this e-book that I put together called ... Kind of in my own terms. Guys, it's less about ... I called it "Product Big-Bang Theory". You know, where something just suddenly appears out of nowhere; like brand new concepts, super new ideas, things that had never existed before. Whoa. "Product Big-Bang Theory" is a piece of ... If you're trying to change the world, that's a great thing to do. But it's more about Product Evolution. I believe in Product Evolution. I know that Product Evolution works. You guys know that MLM product that I currently sell? You guys know how I knew that that would sell? Well, because I started looking at all the other things that people are buying. And all I did was I put a twist on it, showed how it worked for a funnel world. I even took the same info product, I got it transcribed, I transcribed it, and then I put my own words and twists into it in the way I would teach it. And I put this whole spin with funnels on it, and then I just re-shot it. That's why it's so successful as a product. It came from a product and a content that was already killing it. All I did was I went and I made my own version of it. And I put things on it that I thought made it even better. And that's why it still makes a thousand dollars a week for me. It's totally on autopilot. It's super amazing. Okay, does that make sense? When you guys are making your products and your services, you're like, "I don't know what product to create." I've gotten that question a lot lately, too. "I don't know what product to make. I don't know what thing to go put out there. I can't figure this out. Oh my gosh. I can't do it." It's so much less about getting out there and trying to make something up, totally brand new. Don't do that. Go find who are the other giants inside the industry you're wishing to sell into. How is revenue being generated in that industry? Go find that person, go find that business, buy it. Follow and document the entire process, whether it's online or offline, whatever it is, record, screenshot, capture, do whatever it is so that you can go back, put it all on a whiteboard, and study it. I did that for about six months before I launched the actual product, that MLM one. And it's amazing, this whole idea of Product Evolution versus Product Big-Bang Theory, it's such a big deal to me. That's what I call it, anyway. That's my own spin on it. I even wrote on ... I actually pulled up the e-book. I haven't opened this thing for years. It's crazy. So this is a question that I asked, "How do you come up with new products all the time?" I was trying to put into words, the frustration I was feeling. After obsessing, after many ideas and trying to make many of them run, I felt like I conceptually understood what to do with a product once I had the product. But I couldn't seem to find the product or make it run. I said, "I felt like I didn't even care what the product was, so long as people wanted it and it was helping people." And this is what he said back to me. Luckily I wrote it down, what he was saying. He said, "Well, you don't need something ... That's new out there, anyway." He said, "Ideas just come to you every once in a while, while you're out looking for them." He said, "Once, when I was trying to figure out what I could do for an increased Denny's sales during nighttime hours ... " Oh, I just told you that story. But anyway, it's super powerful, guys; super, super powerful. What's funny is I went through and I ended up finding out a lot of the patent stats. And tons of patents get submitted; lots of them, people don't actually do anything with. You know what I mean? Brand new ideas that are the ... It works. It works like crazy. But all I'm trying to tell you guys, if you're trying to do a lifestyle business, if you're trying to do something that is not necessarily to change the world, but to change your world, change how you live, change your lifestyle, don't try to make stuff up. Just don't do it. And the people... "Man, I don't even know what industry to start in. I have no idea where to even begin. There's so many things out there. I truly don't care what the product is. I have no idea where to start." If you're in that boat and you really have no idea where to begin or what your interests are, you got to do what my dad told me to do. This has been really, really helpful for me, as well. What he said is, "What do you think about when you have nothing to think about? What's the thing that you think about when you don't need to be doing anything at work. You know? When you're driving home and it's silent in the car, where does your mind go? When you're talking to somebody, but you're not interested anymore, and your mind starts to drift; where does your mind go?" And for me, it was business. And more specifically, it was internet business. And more specifically, it was selling info-products. And more specifically, it was more about the automation behind it and how to build the funnel and the copy and how to put all these things together in my brain. Constantly, it was in that space. I didn't know that they were funnels I was thinking of. I didn't know that's what they were called, but that's what I was thinking of all the time, for years and year and years. And I still do, and that's all I think about. When I have nothing to think about, that's what I think about. And so, I knew, "Okay. Well, I'm naturally inclined in that area. Let me go find how revenue is generated. I'm going to start asking people what they want. But I'm going to go find products that are currently selling really, really well and asking people, 'Okay. Well, you like this product, what do you wish it did?'" You know what I mean? Start reading tons of reviews. What do you wish it did? And that helping you create products really, really fast. So anyways, Product Evolution, not Product Big-Bang Theory. Hey, guys. Thanks so much. Hopefully that was helpful. And give me a little shout out if you've liked this podcast. I really appreciate it. And I've had ... There's a lot of people listening now, which is really, really fun. But I'd love to know what you think about this. This is my ask campaign to you, right now. What do you wish you knew? What do you wish you were getting from this podcast? What do you wish I was providing for you that I'm not? If you go to salesfunnelradio.com, scroll down to the bottom. There's a green button on the right. And literally, you can ask me any question that you want. It'll record a voicemail right over your browser, right from your computer. Just start talking. Click the button and start talking, and you can ask me. And you have about 30 seconds, you can ask me a question. And I've got a segment, here, called "Hey, Steve." You start out saying, "Hey, Steve. My question is X, Y, and Z." And I'm going to queue up a whole bunch of them probably in the next episode or two here, and just start shotgun answering them. I'd love to know what it is you guysare thinking. All right, guys. I'll talk to you later. Bye. Thanks for listening to Sales Funnel Radio. Please remember to subscribe and leave feedback. Have a question you want answered on the show? Get your free T-shirt when your question gets answered on the live "Hey, Steve" show. Visit salesfunnelbroker.com now to submit your question.  Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands

Click above to listen in iTunes... The 3-Month Lesson I Learned From Russell Brunson's 3-Day Pitch... Hey, what's going on everyone? This is Steve Larsen and you're listening to the greatest podcast on the planet, Sales Funnel Radio. Welcome to Sales Funnel Radio, where you'll learn marketing strategies to grow your online business using today's best Internet sales funnels. Now, here's your host, Steve Larsen. All right, all right, all right. Maybe a little biased there. Not the best podcast, not the greatest one on the, well I think it is. I love my podcast, it's so fun. I've had a lot of fun interacting with you guys a lot lately, it's just been great. All right, well I think I just mentioned in the last podcast, we just barely finished filming, it was a three day little launch thing that Russell's been doing. We just launched the Two Comma Club Coaching Program, which is awesome. It's my baby. I get to take it under my wing and run it, and I'm really excited. I'm so excited for it. I had this really cool experience though today, so we had at the peak of it, I think it was almost like 2600 people watching live as Russell would teach during this free masterclass, right? It was really, really cool. You know what's interesting? I know I talk about Russell a lot, guys I want you to know why. It's because I sit next to the guy, all right? He's the greatest marketer, I believe, on the planet and when he asked me if I wanted to be his funnel building assistant, first of all I was in total, utter disbelief. I could not believe how amazing it was. Second of all, it was like dang. Like I better keep my ears open and my eyes open everything I can, just start writing it all down, and so I actually have a huge list on my computer just of all these lessons that he's taught me over the last year. I don't think he knows that I have it, actually, but I write a lot of the things he says. Just huge, huge lessons, right? Well there was a lesson today in selling that hit me so, so hard. We just finished this three day launch thing, and I just wanted to share the lesson with you because it's not something that I think a lot of us think about. We have a unique position from where we are, sitting at ClickFunnel, there's over 41,000 active users of ClickFunnels now. If you don't have a trial go to salesfunnelbroker.com, you can get the free trial right there. Of course it's my affiliate link, just that's how the game's played man, all right? We have a really unique spot because we sit here and we go, "Okay, we can see everything that's selling well, everything that's not selling." Hey, this works really well in this industry, that doesn't. Wow, in this industry did you know you should sell this way? Wow, don't sell that way. You know what I mean? It's really unique to see and sit where I am and see these different places and be able to get feedback that way. I've got a little tip for you, and honestly it's just because it's a personal tip. First I want to start with a quote. All right I believe this is from Frank Kearn. I think it's from Frank Kearn, I mean I can't remember. Guys I'm sorry if it's not. If it's not I'm so sorry, but just know that it's a really cool quote, okay? He says, "The popularizing of a product has relatively little to do with the product itself. It has everything to do with being cool, all right? It has to be attractive itself." That's the whole quote... I was like whoa, that's a sweet quote. I can't even remember what course I was listening to lately when I heard that. The popularizing of a product has relatively little to do with the product itself. It has everything to do with being cool and being popular and being attractive. Being something that's talkable, shareable and that's what's been so crazy cool about this Two Comma Club Coaching Program that we just launched is amazing, and it's being talked about all over the place, right? Has very little to do with the product itself... Now, keep that in the back of your mind, okay? What happened was Russell got up and he's teaching all this stuff and he's really, really cool and it's fun for me to see, because I'll see him teach the same concepts over and over and over and over, and each time there's something a little bit different. He said this a little bit different over here, and he said this a little bit different over here, which is why you guys have to continue to do webinars, publish. I urge you guys to go publish and start a podcast of your own or start a YouTube channel. Whatever, I don't care what it is, just publish. Start talking and get your voice and your message out there, right? Because you'll get better and better and better and better. What happened was day one was awesome, right? Day two was awesome. Day three was awesome. They were all awesome, but what ended up happening was on day one there was a Q and A session and I got to sit on stage on camera with Russell and do it for a little bit, and then day two we didn't, but on day three we did also, and what was funny was that on the third day we sat down and I start queuing up all these questions for Russell, I start telling him, you know, hey, people are asking this. Hey people are asking this, people are asking this. Well, eventually somebody asked, okay what actually is in the Two Comma Club Coaching modules, like what are the modules? What's in each of those things? I thought this was so clever, but it was a huge lesson to me, okay, this is so big. Turn up the volume, listen to this, okay? Russell said, "You know what? It doesn't matter that I tell you right now what are in those eight modules. What you need to know is that everything you need to become a millionaire is in those modules." That was it... That's all he said, and I was like, "Whoa. Really?" My immediate thought was like, wow, super powerful. Because of this, okay this was the context, I went though 10, 12 years of Russell's content and I found, I indexed all of it, and I went through and I found all these different pieces. Okay, this is the best video of him teaching this concept. Okay this is the best video of him teaching this concept. Okay, these pages in the book are the best of teaching this concept. Then after I indexed years of content, then what I did is I went and I laid it chronologically together and said, "Okay, when you get through these three things you should have x output ready." Does that make sense? Okay, when you go through and you read about the three secrets, or you read about your moral obligation to sell, by me going through that content, you should be able to produce x, y and z before you move on. It's super powerful. I hand hold you the whole way through all of his material, all of his content... It's massive. It takes most people 20 to 40 hours a week just to do a single module. It's incredible. Huge, huge, huge project. It has taken me three, almost four months to produce the thing. It's massive... You know to produce it, to build the whole members area inside ClickFunnels, to build the entire thing, I spent three months just building the product itself that we just sold for over three days, and guess how much he actually talked about what's in there? Like that was it. When he said, "Yeah, there's eight modules and everything you need to know in order to become a millionaire, and I have 93 other examples of that." That's all he said, and that's what he was selling though. He was selling the product but he didn't actually talk about the product that much. Now you think back, okay, why would you do that? Why would you do that? Why would you not talk about the actual product? Because when I was doing door to door sales, right, and I was doing pest control and I was going door to door to door, person to person to person, I was talking about the product and I was pitching people. I was the number two sales guy, you know, for the first years. The other guy came out like six weeks before I did. I would of had him but he had such a lead on me by six weeks, it was nuts... Anyway, anyway what ended up happening was I would go door to door to door all over the place and I was out there for about five months. For the first two months, I was crushing it. I was crushing it, you know, I'd come back with a $1,000 a day, and back then for me that was huge. I was like this is sweet, man, holy crap, this is super, super powerful stuff what I'm doing right here. I'm loving this door to door sales thing. It's hard, I'm getting rejected but I'm making money and it's been awesome. Well I started asking questions about the product, and I started learning about the product. It's not that it's a bad thing, it's not that it's a bad thing at all to know your product and know what it is, but when I learned about my product I stopped selling. I started telling, and I started walking door to door to door and saying, "Did you know that our product has this chemical in it which is safe for your kids, you could basically lick it? You know what I mean? I would tell just random facts. Yeah, it will totally take care of your wasp's nest, oh it will totally do that. It'll do this, it'll do this, because of this and I'd go into the science of it because I thought it was fascinating. I'd go into the science of this piece over here and I'd go into the science of this piece over here. It was because I thought it was really, really cool, this certain thing. It was awesome, I mean we legitimately had a great product. I thought it was awesome and super unique. It was fun stuff, but my sales plummeted, I mean plummeted. Pretty much stopped... I went from going and selling anywhere from three to five, six, seven, eight in a day to like three a week, I mean it dropped that hard. For a long time I kept going, man, what's my problem? What's my issue?... Number one I got distracted because I started thinking about online sales, stuff like that, but the real problem was that my pitch changed and I started talking myself out of the sale and I started telling too much stuff. It's not that you should try and be mischievous or keep things from being shown or trying to hide stuff, but the real problem is that you end up talking yourself out of the sale when you tell too much about the product. That is not how sales happen... So what ended up happening was I walked up to Russell afterwards and I was like, "Dude, holy crap, I just noticed man I just spent three months on this product and you didn't even talk about it. Why is that?" I think it's because that's not actually needed to sell and he was like, "You're absolutely correct." He said, "The reason why is because if I start talking about the modules and I start telling people in there, people will think that they know it already just from the title, they're like, "Oh, I know it already" and then they'll dismiss it and then they'll immediately will not buy it because of that. There's no more curiosity. There's no more scarcity, there's no more urgency. Curiosity, urgency, scarcity those are the tools of sales, and if you get rid of one of them, you're not going to sell. You've scratched the itch just by giving them the knowledge, right? What ends up happening is that person's not going to go off and become a Two Comma Club person. Like if he had gone out and started telling about it, all these people, because it sold like hot cakes you guys, I mean this funnel that I built basically while he was pitching it, the actual funnel itself, the product took me three months to build, but the actual funnel itself I built while he was pitching it and put it together, but this funnel itself is going to be in the Two Comma Club really, really fast. All those people who have been jumping in, if we had told them, "Hey you, it's about this, this and this." They're going to go, "You know what? I kind of already know that. Or I could go over here and learn that over here, or I could do this over here, or this other guy's product does that. I'll just stay with that." You scratch the itch and you get rid of the sale and you get rid of the ability for someone to actually give you money, because there's no reason to anymore. They're not curious, okay? So when you think of curiosity, urgency and scarcity, those are the three tools of sales. Those are the three things that make the sale happen. Anyway, so thought that was, anyway. Super, super awesome. The whole point of it is when you guys go out and you start doing your sales, if your sales are suffering, I know that we love our products. I know that they are our babies. That product that I put together, I know that it is probably one of the best products that ClickFunnel's ever put together besides ClickFunnel software itself. It is amazing. It is so, so good. Oh my gosh. We've already created millionaires basically from this, it's incredible. Just in three months some people have made $700,000 from the content and what we teach in there. It's very different than anything else because of the hand holding and what I force you to do before you can move on. It's a cool program... Really great, really, really fantastic program. What's powerful about the whole thing about it too is that the way it was sold was through epiphany bridges. I mean the exact same way that Russell teaches you in the book Expert Secrets is how we sold it, and we literally sat down and said okay, what's the one thing? What are our three secrets? What are the false beliefs? What are the stories attached to those? What are the false beliefs that people are going to have immediately when they hear the title of this presentation? We do the exact same thing we tell you guys to do, all right. We disclose all of it, that's the only difference between us and a lot of other companies. Anyways, that's all I wanted to tell you guys. Stop letting the cat out of the bag, all right, you've got to leave some curiosity and you've got to leave some urgency and you got to have some scarcity. If you can put those three elements on there, you don't even need to talk about the product, and it's not that you're hiding it, you shouldn't hide it. You can give an extremely high level overview of what's actually in the product itself, you know, but that' not how sales happen. Sales happen through causing belief which creates action. That's it. Add a little urgency, scarcity and you'll be good to go. With a lot of curiosity and that's how sales happen. It took me a long time to realize that and I did not understand that when I was doing door to door sales. I didn't get that. I didn't get that when I pitched people on stage for investors, when I thought getting investors was a good thing. I've done that many times. You pitch people, you know investors, on stuff like that. Probably been three or four different, oh I can't remember, I've asked investors for money several times and I kept letting the cat out of the bag. Too many times, I kept letting the cat out of the bag when I'd go sell this stuff, or whatever it was. Just don't let the cat out of the bag. It doesn't matter, and if someone starts complaining, "Oh, I wish I knew this. Oh I wish I knew this" that's probably not your ideal customer anyway if that's the kind of people that are not the action takers. You need people that are going to take action based on belief that they're going to get it. Obviously, be ethical all that stuff, but anyway, that's all it was. What ended up happening is we had tons of people jump in and I went and I told the story about getting your shut up cheque, which is the ability to make money enough that you can hold the cheque up to anyone who's been poo pooing on your story and what your dreams are, and hold up the cheque and go, "Hey, shut up. This is my shut up cheque." I hope you guys are all going to get your shut up cheque if you haven't got it yet. Anyway, that's it. That's all I wanted to share with you guys, is while I was talking to Russell and I watched what he was doing. He didn't not talk about the actual product. He didn't and it was so powerful. Such a powerful lesson for me to watch that, so anyway leave some curiosity there. Don't love your product so much so that you barf all over everybody and literallytalk yourself out of the sale and you'll be ready to rock. All right guys, that's it. Talk to you later. Bye. Thanks for listening to Sales Funnel Radio. Please remember to subscribe and leave feedback. Want to get one of today's best Internet sales funnel for free? Go to salesfunnelbroker.com/freefunnels to download your pre-built sales funnel today.Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands

The Pianist Makes The Music. Not The Brand Of Piano... Hey, how's it going everyone? This is Steve Larsen, and you're listening to Sales Funnel Radio. Welcome to Sales Funnel Radio, where you'll learn marketing strategies to grow your online business using today's best internet sales funnels. And now, here's your host, Steve Larson. All right, all right, so about what was this, probably, three or four years ago, a lot of you guys know I was in the Army and a lot of my stories come from the Army. I'm so sorry that it's just that way, it's just that was a lot life altering things that happen when you're in that kind of situation. Anyway, there was this guy who was, he was kind of a hotshot to be honest. He thought he was anyway, right. He gets out there and he always tries to take charge and he's trying to be the man, which is cool, there's nothing wrong with wanting to be the man and a lot of people want to be the man and that's fine if you know what I'm saying, but this guy he put his uniform on and he'd go out there and he would try and start barking orders around and stuff like that. Well one day we decided we got to go practice shooting, so we go and we get our M16s and we practice shooting and we're sitting out there at the range and it's freezing out. There's snow everywhere, so we're laying tarps on the ground and we're basically kind of laying in water again ... I've done that a lot. If you listened to my last episode at all, I talked about that a little bit. There's a point to this story that's very strong, by the way. He lays down right next to me and he starts, they're like okay ready, fires ready, take your aim, fire. We start shooting and we're practicing shooting at different distances, you know 300 meters, 200 meters, different distances and you've got to lob the bullet after 150 meters so you start aiming up just a little bit. I'm a pretty good shot, I got what was it 36 out of 40 hits, which is awesome. It's really good. I actually won a phone call home in the middle of basic training cuz of that, which is really cool. I'm a pretty good shot, I've really liked it. It's funny my mom was like, and my wife and everyone, was like "why are you such a good shot" and I was like "Honestly, halo and call of duty." I think that's, I don't why besides that. I actually did shoot quite a lot growing up... Anyway, so we're shooting and this guy he's laying down right next to me and he thinks he somewhat of a hotshot, right, and he kind of rubbed me the wrong way a little bit. I learned to become really good friends with him. I'm shooting and I'm having really tight groupings, and I'm doing really, really well I can tell. The guys next to me has still not even fired a single round, okay ... Some of you guys are probably thinking, Steven, what does that have to do with sales funnels, I promise you that there is a huge lesson because I keep getting asked this. Okay. Anyway, he goes out there and he, he's like "Larsen, dude, my weapons not firing, man, what the heck's going on with this thing?" I turn over and I look and his magazine, which is what holds the bullets holds the rounds, his magazine is in upside down. I was like what the heck, it wasn't just upside down it was also backwards. The bullets were literally facing him... I was like "Was that a joke, are you kidding me?" He's like, "No, sorry I've never really done this before. I've never really done this before." I was like okay that's kind of weird, and he turns around and he puts his magazine in the right way. He lays down and the next round of firing comes up. I've gotten really tight groupings, I start shooting again. I'm doing all the correct, you know there's five different senses and you think through all your senses. You think through different breathing patterns. There's a natural pause in your breath when you're about exhale and inhale, that break in between is when you fire. All these things are running through my head... I really do like to shoot, and again there's nothing going. The kid next to me is not shooting. I was like "Dude, what's wrong? Are you okay?" He goes, he didn't even like pull the action back and actually put a bullet in or something like that, and that round stops or whatever. I'm looking at my shots and I'm like man that's a really tight grouping. I was getting better. I was really exciting. We do this again and he starts shooting but he literally has nothing on the paper at all. He's not even ... not just on the target, his rounds are not even hitting the paper. I was like "Dude, what's wrong?" He was like "I don't know what's going on, man. I'm putting the front sight on the target." He didn't have his rear sight up and then he didn't have it set to 300 meters, he had it set to 500 meters. Anyway, it was like a ton of iterations over and over and over again that I had to coach this kid who thought he was a hot shot in the most basic function of being a solider, right, shooting. He didn't even know how to, ugh, it was so frustrating to me. From that very moment on he stopped acting like a hotshot. He stopped acting like this kid who knew everything and he became real after that. Why do I bring that up? What's the whole point of that? You can hand me pretty much any weapon and I'm going to be able to shoot it pretty consistently over and over and over again, because I have practiced the talent of shooting. We'd lay on the floor and we'd smack our elbows, bam, bam, bam, smack our elbows on concrete as hard as we could over and over and over again because it helps build up stability if you're laying the in the prone for a long time, so your arms don't start shaking. Bam, bam, bam, I'd smack my elbows into the concrete and it hurt like crazy at the beginning, then pretty much I got a whole bunch of resistance that built up inside of my elbows. I'd bam, bam, bam, smack it up. There's all these different things, these breathing patterns, all the things you do with your body, mentally what you're doing, the state you'd go into when he was about to shoot. It's very different than if you're actually in a war zone, but the same principles apply no matter what weapon you hand me. What does this have to do with building sales funnels? Everything! It has everything to do with everything. Why does this have everything to do with everything? Because, you guys, the point I'm trying to make right here, maybe I should go ... Here we go. I played piano for a very long time... This one should bring it home. I played piano for a long time. When I was eight years old, my mom started teaching me piano lessons. She taught piano lessons out of our home for a long time. I hated it. I hated the fact that it was my mom. I hated the fact that she made me practice all the time. It drove me nuts. So from ages 8 to 14 she pretty much forced me to do piano lessons and I thank her like crazy although I hated it. Well when I turned 16, 17 years old, I was like crap the ladies really like this, so I re-taught myself and I got pretty good. I haven't played for like eight years since then, but ... Now I can sit down at any piano, it didn't matter on the brand, it didn't matter on who was around me. It didn't matter if it was even completely in tune, I could still make a really cool song from the piano. Same with the drums. I play the drums, full kit, for about four or five years. It did not matter on the brand. It did not matter what kind of drumsticks I was using. I could still make really cool beats. I still keep beats. I play in a band for a little bit. I sang in a band and it was awesome. It did not matter. Now, okay, the question that I'm trying to address here is that I get asked like crazy, okay, we just finished this campaign and I get asked like crazy, can we have like, what was it 2400 people watching live this webinar that Russell was doing. I was moderating. I was reading all the comments. I was trying to answer as many questions as people had. The questions that continue to pop up and that still can pop up all the time, I still get them. I've been getting them for a long time. What webinar software should I use? What's the best, who's the best copywriter? What's the best color for my button? It's stuff like that where you're like, okay stop focusing so much on the tools. Stop it. The tools, talent is not in the tools. There's been a whole bunch of people coming to say "Okay, if I only had this kind of equipment, I would be successful. If I only had the top brand of computer or MacBook, or whatever then I would be allowed to go out and get my actual funnel done." If I only had ... the best car then I would be the best racer. It's like that's so backwards you guys. That's not true at all. Today I heard Russell ... Russell sat back and he said "hey, you know what, I'm not trying to brag, but I'm just trying to tell you that it has nothing to do with the tools." It's funny he said that because I've been thinking about this before he even brought it up. I've had this podcast planned, and I was like hey, it's cool he's talking about it. He said, "Look you could take away click funnels. You could take away any of my branding. You could put me in a market where I don't even know the product. You could put me in a spot where nobody knows me. Take away all these elements and I still would be able to make a million dollars really quickly because of the principles, because of the talent, because of the person growth that I've had in this certain area" right, this is him speaking. I was like yeah, that's really cool. It's super true. That's the way, a lot of you guys though, what I've been noticing is hey I'm going to go build a sales floor, I'm going to go build this business, I'm going to go do this, but I would actually be successful at it if I just had this. Now, the tools matter a little bit to a degree, right. Going back to the shooting thing, if I was going to shoot with something that was super rusty versus something that was nice and clean, I mean that matters like 10%, 90% of it though is seriously the talent inside of you. 90% of the time the tool really doesn't matter. Stop making the tool an excuse to not act. Now, like I said sometimes the tool really matters, like no one else does what Click Funnels does. I mean you should use Click Funnels, but what webinar software should I use? Man, just use freaking webinar software. What chat box should I use? Google chat box and click on the first one and get it. You know what I mean? Like there's this whole part that it really doesn't matter but people get caught up in it like crazy. It drives me nuts. Just choose one. A musician makes a crappy piano sound good. It has nothing to do with the brand. It could even be a little bit out of tune, and it would still sound amazing. You see what I'm, do you guys get the point? Stop blaming the tool. Stop saying, the tool is what it is. The musician makes the crappy piano sound good because he is the talent, because the person is the talent, not the piano. Not the brand, not the tool. The tool really doesn't matter that much. You can't obsess over tools. What you need to do is personally obsess over being good, being the best. Being amazing. It will just distract yourself to death with these tools. Focus on being the best. Guys one of the reasons I sit next to Russell, the reason I am Russell Brunson's funnel builder, the reason why, is because three years ago when I saw Click Funnels come out, it just barely left beta. I had been building funnels and other businesses and stuff on word press and other things like that and I was hustling, and I still am hustling, right. I slowed down a little bit to just catch my breath. I went like eight months with barely sleeping. These last few months have been awesome, but I can feel myself trying to get into another hustle mode again. I'm trying to figure whether or not I should. I know how to hustle. The reason why I sit next to Russell, is because three years ago when Click Funnels came out and left beta there was this really powerful moment for me where I was like okay, I'm going to learn this or I'm going to fail. Meaning there was this whole, I got, it's not that I wasn't serious before, but I put my pride, I put my name on the line. I decided to go out and start building funnels... What I would do is I would go stand in front of the mirror, you guys might think I'm weird for this but whatever, like it worked. I would stand in front of the mirror and I'd look myself dead in the eye and I'd get kind of psyched up and stuff like that, and I would just take my fist and I would start like punching the counter as hard as I could. Boom, boom, boom, and I'd be like I WILL BE THE BEST FUNNEL BUILDER IN THE WORLD! And I would yell at myself. The only reason I'm not yelling now is cuz it's like 1:30 in the morning and I just had to get this off my chest and my kids are sleeping like two rooms over. I would start slapping the counter as hard as I could. I would look myself dead in the ... and it's not that pain and pleasure are the only things that should motivate you, that's not true at all, but I was just trying to capture this feeling that I just needed to be the best. Now, I'm not saying I'm the best funnel builder, but I will say that I've built probably more funnels than 99% of the people on the planet. 170 in the last year. Like holy crap, man, that's a lot of funnels. Collectively they have brought millions and millions and millions of dollars. Even by themselves, there's several funnels that have brought in a million bucks just on their own. It's amazing. Super, super cool. The reason why is because I stopped blaming the freaking tool. Okay? I stopped blaming something else. I looked at myself and I started obsessing over me. My expertise. Was I the best? If someone handed me a microphone and said you have 20 minutes on stage, what would I say. Okay. Sometimes that's hard to do. Don't point the finger out. Point it back in and go okay what am I not good at yet? That is literally the reason I went and did door-to-door sales was to get better at sales and to take a crap ton of objections. That's why I did it. I didn't necessarily like, I really hated it to be honest, but that's why I did it. Look at yourself and craft your life. When you start doing that and you actually get really clear on your goals amazing things happen, you guys. It's nuts. Two things are going to happen. Number one, you're going to get a dump load of opposition. You'll get it from family, unfortunately. You'll get it from friends. You'll get a whole bunch of, unfortunate on that as well, you'll get it from people who you didn't even know. People will come out of the woodwork and just tell you that you're going to flat out fall on your face. I don't even know who you were before I started going down this path and trying to do it. They'll just, anyway they'll just run right at you and just tell you, you can't do it. Because they can't, or they've go excuses and they think that they also apply to you. The second thing that's going to happen, though, is you're going to start carving this line in the sand. You're going to draw a line in the sand, and you're going to start getting people coming over to your side saying yeah, Steven, you can do it. You can go pursue being the best funnel builder on the planet. Try it. Just go for it. See what happens. Am I? Nope. But I know I'm really good. Amazing things has happened because of that, right. Very intense, very focused, all the way through as much as I could. Studying, I mean, I can honestly say I earned where I am. I'm very proud of that. I'm very proud of that. But for a while it was, I mean I went through the same thing I'm tell you right now. It's not that I didn't go through it either. For a while I blamed the tool. Oh the market was bad. When I did real estate and I was trying to flip contracts in the closing period for ten grand more than I got them under contract for, and it worked. I got seven houses under contract, a couple multimillion dollar pieces of real estate and just, I wasn't experienced enough. I didn't know what I was doing. I had no idea. I didn't even know the vernacular of that industry. I was just taking massive action and I had tons of these people come in and try to help me and all these things going on, and it failed. I did not succeed in that... For a long time I blamed, oh it was the market. Oh it's because of this guy, because of that guy, and it was really, really easy for me to go blame and put the finger outward. All I'm trying to do is tell you guys stop blaming the tool, stop obsessing over which tools you use, and just start obsessing over you. Are you good? Be the best version you can be of your own self. To do that, you need to see, yeah, focus on my strengths, but there's also a few weaknesses that I can't progress without overcoming as well. It's like that Robert Key Saki 00 quote I was just talking about a few episodes ago, like as soon as you start down the path of entrepreneurship, there are character flaws that will blow up straight in your face and you are not going to be able to progress in business until you address them. That doesn't mean you've got to fix everything in your life, but it might mean you need to outsource, and go okay, you know what I'm not good at taking picture, let me go find some guy who's good at taking a picture. You overcame that. Does that make sense? It's the same thing. Anyways that's all I wanted to do in this podcast was just tell you guys, I hope you see, it's like ... The tool barely matters you guys. It is so much about you. Are you good? Are you passionate? What's the thing that gets you excited? Are you really, really good at it? You can either be the first or you can be the best, which one are you? Lots of time I'm not very good at being the first so I try to be the best, and you know what? If I'm number two, like I'm trying to be number one, but there's a lot of great things that come as number two also, not that I'm settling at all, cuz I'm not, but man really, really cool, anyway, I hope that makes sense, what I'm trying to say here guys. Don't distract yourself with the tool. Don't obsess over tools. They matter like 10%, the rest of you is the other 90%. You've got to personally obsess over getting good. You get to sit down and ... Anyway just don't distract yourself with tools, that's all I'm trying to say. Anyway, guys I hope you're doing well. Sorry I had to talk a little bit quiet on a few of these. It's super late. I just had this on my mind. All right, guys, I will talk to you later. Thanks for listening to Sales Funnel Radio. Please remember to subscribe and leave feedback. Want to get one of today's best internet sales funnel for free? 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