Are You Watching The Magician's Hands?

Welcome to Marketing in Your Car, the podcast for funnel hackers everywhere. You're now part of a small group of underground entrepreneurs who are trying to change the world through the products and the services that we believe in. But because we don't rely on venture capitalists, we don't have financial safety nets. So we have to do things differently. We have to do things smarter. We do that through an art and a science we call funnel hacking. This podcast will give you a glimpse at the daily life of a funnel hacker. So let's get started. What's up everybody, this is Russell. Welcome to Marketing Your Car. Now this is a special episode because I'm not in my car. In fact, I'm at the brand new office. We moved in this week and it's insanely cool. And I'm not only in the office, I'm in the actual conference room, which this is the first thing I've done in the conference room is actually talk on this podcast. I'm looking out and everybody is working. We all have like standing, sitting desks. So there's everybody out here working, standing, and sitting. It's so exciting. Anyway, if you haven't seen yet, I've been Snapchatting and I'll probably Facebook Live Friday. Friday we get the big ClickFunnels sign in the office, which looks so cool. So as soon as that's here, I'll Facebook Live this whole place, you guys can see it and see the bookshelves and everything. What's cool is Monday and Tuesday we had our certification event here in Boise, and we're supposed to do it here at the office initially, but then we didn't think we were gonna get the office done in time, and so we moved it back to a hotel. And then Tuesday, I knew that certification, we make everyone do a hackathon, which means they stay up all night building funnels, which is part of the culture that we're trying to build is that like, you need to get crap done, you just pull an all-nighter and get it done. So we taught them that, and they did it. And then on Tuesday, they went and presented all their funnels and everything, and we gave away awards, and it's cool. And Tuesday morning, I woke up and I was like, man, these guys have been killing themselves. Like, how cool would it be if they actually got to come see the office? So we chartered a bus, had them do the bus ride down to downtown— excuse me, downtown Boise, pick them up and bring them back. And now we— now they're— anyway, they came to the office last night. It was so much fun having them here and showing them off the new stuff. And people were like, is that really your bookshelf? Are those all your books? And I'm like, yeah, I'm kind of a nerd, sorry about that. Anyway, so it was so much fun. And so now today we're here, this is like, it's probably the first day that we'll actually work the whole day. Everybody's here and it's exciting. One big fear I have is we have our FAD event coming up Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday next week, and in the big conference room, which is amazing, but it's got echo. I don't know if you guys can hear the echo in here, this is the conference room, it's kind of echoing here as well. So we have a sound engineer coming to like figure out how to like put up paneling and stuff so that we won't have those issues, but the problem is that it's like 2 to 4 weeks to get those things fixed. And so that kind of stresses me out a little bit on, on, on that side. But hopefully we get something figured out. We got some people coming in, they're going to be hanging up lighting panels and/or sound panels and things like that in the conference room. So anyway, so I'm just in the conference room, so I'm going to walk out here. Now I'm going into the kitchen. The kitchen also has got a lot of echo in here as well. But we designed this because we do a lot of videos like in kitchen, so we've made a really nice-looking kitchen so we can do videos and stuff in here. And anyway, it should be pretty awesome. So now I'm wandering— so fun wandering throughout the office. Now I'm in the conference room. Anyway, so what I wanted— anyway, I wish you guys could like see what I'm doing, probably more interesting than hearing me talk about it, but it's so exciting. So what I'm talking about today is yesterday, the, the Marketing in Your Car free MP3 player offer— we were paying affiliates $20 to give away free MP3 player, and I think it ended last night at midnight. And so it's been fun watching a lot of our affiliates promote it it and then seeing people's feedback. And Tim Castleman, one of my buddies, he's been promoting it. And he's like, "Just go buy it, you guys. Why are you not buying it?" And people are like commenting why, you know, why they're not buying it. And it made me laugh so hard. These are all people trying to learn marketing, right? And they're trying to figure this whole thing out and they're studying, they're learning, they're following Tim, they're following me, they're following people. And they're like, "And you know, that offer just didn't make sense to me." Like, I don't really want an MP3 player, like, I can just subscribe for free on iTunes, and all these things. And it was all these reasons why they didn't buy. And it made me laugh because we sold a lot of them. I think we've sold, we're almost at 4,000 of them sold, which is cool. And what we're finding is for every single person who's buying an MP3 player, probably 5 or 6 people are subscribing to the podcast, even if they're not buying it. And so if you watch, I don't know if you guys are watching, but if you go to iTunes right now, and you look at the business section, We've been in the top 10 ever since this thing has launched, which business section is hard to get the top 10. I mean, look at Tony Robbins is not in the top 10, Eric Worre is not in the top 10, like all these like legends are not in the top 10. Neil Patel is not in the top 10. We've been in the top 10 for the last, you know, 2 or 3 weeks now, and it's like, I want, and since you guys are, you're my best people, right? You're hanging out here listening. I want to like reveal, like show the curtain, you know, behind the scenes what's happening. And you always say magicians, like magicians doing a trick, right? And like he's distracting you with stuff so you don't see what's actually happening. So you don't see his hands moving and doing like whatever that thing is that makes the trick possible. So he's doing misdirection stuff and like leading you places and stuff like that. And with marketing, like it's kind of fun, my job, like most businesses is, you know, it's like you're doing marketing, selling your product, whereas I'm doing marketing, selling my stuff. But like for those who are watching, like I'm hoping you're watching, like watching my hands, watching what the magician's actually doing, because that's like, the most valuable lesson. Like, me giving my MP3 player preloaded episodes is kind of a cool little thing, but why did I do that? Why am I doing that? Like, what's, what's the magician actually doing? Like, watching that, I always tell people, like, I, I buy everybody's products, and usually I do not go through most of the products, but I'm buying because I want to see what the magicians are doing. Like, what, like, what do they learn? Like, if you saw the stuff I buy, you're like, Russell, why are you buying another weight loss course? I'm like, because the weight loss dudes are really good at funnels. Like, why are you buying a thing on stocks. Like, you don't even know what stock market is. I'm like, I know I have no idea how to do stocks. I don't even want to do stocks, but the stock guys, some of them are really good at funnels. I want to watch what they're doing. Like, I want to see what the magician's doing. And, um, and so for those who are listening and those who are paying attention, and I hope you guys are paying attention, is watch these processes. Like, don't— like, I didn't buy Russell's MP3 player because I don't want an MP3 player. Like, uh, I never listen to it anyway. I never— like, dude, There's a lesson here. There's— I'm not just doing these things for fun. I'm like, I'm laying— I'm creating things and testing things. If they're working, you'll see me keep pushing them. We keep pushing them. And I look at right now, like, our podcast has grown insanely over the last little bit. We're in the top 10. We're consistently in the top 10, which is, you know, is amazing. We're getting tons. And I mean, tens of thousands of downloads a day. Which is amazing, and it's because of these things we're doing. If you're not watching, if you're not looking, you'll miss it. It was kinda cool, I did a podcast interview last week with Paul Colligan, who's the podcasting guy, and he'll be, I think it goes live today. And he, Paul's someone who's like, he's watching The Magician, and so he messaged me, he's like, dude, he's like, I've seen your podcast funnel, I gotta know like, like what and why? And so I did this really cool, it was a really cool podcast with him just kind of explaining, His whole— all his followers are podcasters, and podcasters out there, and they're trying to create good content to organically grow. And I'm like, organic growth is good, but it's hard. Like, I did a podcast every day for like 3 years. Like, we had 300+ episodes where I was organically growing. It was good. We got followers, we got traction. But it wasn't until I created something that I could stimulate with paid ads that it grew dramatically, right? And so for you guys, it's like looking at that, like, look, I can go and I can blog all day long, but if I can't stimulate with paid ads, like I'm like, man, that's like a long time. Same with podcasting, or whatever it is for you, right? But for this funnel, for the one you guys went through, a lot of you guys to get here, like that was the vehicle, was the podcasting funnel. And it was a way for me to be able to pay for ads. And he basically is like, there's nobody that can do this. Like you're the only person that can pay for subscribers profitably. I'm like, yeah, because of the model. So anyway, I'm hoping you guys again are watching the magician's hand. Because prior to that we had tried to grow marketing in your car, and what we were doing is we were buying Facebook ads trying to get people to subscribe and I'd ask John, I'm like, so how many subscribers we got from the Facebook ads? He's like, I have no idea, there's no way to track it through iTunes. He's like, I'm basically just crossing my fingers and hoping that, you know, hoping that somebody subscribes and we have no way to track it and test it, we're just dumping money at it and crossing our fingers. Well, that's a horrible way to do business, like that's the stupidest thing in the world, that's what branding guys do, that's what companies that are backed by VC cash do, they just burn cash and they're stupid, like For funnel hackers like us, we're smarter than that, right? We are looking at the ROI, and it's like, I had to create this thing to be able to create the ROI. And so what's cool about it is right now, we're driving traffic through these funnels, and so we're paying affiliates $20 to give away a free MP3 player, but we know our metrics, we're making, we're profitable on the front end, I think we're pretty close to about $30, might be a little lower than that, but somewhere around $30 that we're making, and we're spending $20 to affiliates, but our ads are taking about $10 to $15 to sell an MP3 player, You look at that, we pay for the ads, we pay affiliates, they get the MP3 player, we're profitable, so we actually make a little money there, not a lot, but enough to cover our costs. And then after we've covered those costs, then I said a big percentage of people come to the page and they never buy the MP3 player, but they then subscribe to the podcast. And so for everyone who's— and again, iTunes doesn't give us the best numbers possible, but based on my guesstimations, for every single person that's that's subscribing to or that's buying the MP3 player, we're getting 4 or 5 people that are subscribing to the podcast as well. And so I'm paying for that growth profitably. So it doesn't cost me anything. So anyway, I just want to kind of like lay that out for those guys who are paying attention and just thinking through that. Because organic's good, but if I can stimulate that with paid and be profitable with it, that's great. That's how I build a company fast. That's how I do it without VC cash or all the other crap that we've been told you need to do to build a company. Like, you don't. If you're smart, the market will back you. They'll cover, they'll cover it for you. And that's the magic of funnel hacking, what we all do. So anyway, with that said, guys, I appreciate you. I'm gonna bounce, get back to work, and probably do some more podcasts from the office, find different cool locations, and we'll go from there. Thanks everybody, talk to you soon. Thanks so much for listening. We hope you enjoyed the behind-the-scenes look at our funnel hacking projects. You can also watch the Funnel Hacker online reality show and watch us build and launch Funnels Live at www.funnelhacker.tv. If you'd like to come hang out with your fellow funnel hackers, come join our Facebook group at www.projectclickfunnels.com. Oh yeah, and don't forget, you can get a free MP3 player with the first 257 episodes preloaded at marketinginyourcar.com. Join us next time, and remember, you're just one funnel away from your dreams.