Damon Burton’s 3-Part SEO Strategy Funnel Builders Are Missing | #Marketing - Ep. 32
5 May 2025 · 33 min
In this episode of The Russell Brunson Show, host Russell Brunson interviews SEO veteran Damon Burton (recorded live at an Inner Circle event in Boise) to explore how SEO and ClickFunnels can be combined for sustainable traffic. The conversation starts with the myth that “SEO is dead” and quickly pivots to how AI has accelerated the demand for SEO, turning AI search into another layer of traditional optimization. Damon outlines his three‑pillar SEO framework—site structure, high‑quality content, and credibility (reviews, backlinks, schema)—and stresses that focusing on fundamentals protects clients from algorithm penalties. He walks through a practical workflow: using keyword‑research tools like Also Asked and AnswerThe Public to discover buyer‑intent queries, mapping a 52‑week content calendar, leveraging ClickFunnels’ blog, sitemap, and schema features to scale content, and ensuring fast, simple site design (using GTmetrix). The discussion covers the evolving role of backlinks (now less critical, often replaced by passive, value‑driven links), the impact of AI‑generated content (useful but lacking personal storytelling), and technical nuances such as subdomains versus subfolders. Damon also shares his experience launching an SEO‑for‑funnels training program for agencies, describing the iterative product‑development process, audience segmentation (agencies, solopreneurs, 9‑to‑5 marketers), and the financial results of his recent launches. Throughout, Russell and Damon compare paid ads to SEO, noting that ads can affect bounce rate but generally operate independently, and they advise using both channels synergistically. The episode is interspersed with sponsor reads (Kayak, Denny’s, ClickFunnels, Nespresso, Toyota, Nordstrom Rack, Indeed).
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What's up everybody? Welcome to the show. Um, I am here right now with one of my friends, Damon Burton, who has been an Inner Circle member now for 4 and a half years. We're here in Boise, uh, doing the Inner Circle. I've grabbed a couple of cool people in and I wanted him to come in because, um, there are two things that don't— a lot of people don't think they go together and that is funnels and SEO. And Damon's been doing SEO for all of my funnels and my brands now for, for quite a long time. And so I thought we'd geek out and have some fun talking about SEO and, uh, and funnels. But my first question, isn't SEO dead? That's what I heard. Is that true?
Yeah, it dies. Um, you know, before AI it was about every 2 weeks, but now with AI it's about every 2 minutes.
Yeah.
It is different though, right? Or how, how does it affecting what you guys are doing at all? Or is it better?
Well, it's, it's increased the demand, right? So the way that I've thought about it is AI has kind of increased the viability of SEO into infinity because AI is largely just another search engine. So, you know, we'll probably get into the technical stuff and kind of deliverables of SEO, but to do AI optimization is really just traditional SEO.
So for your answers to get pulled into AI, it's just SEO.
That's cool. Yeah. Um, how—
what do you think about—
this is something just more so, like, I've noticed that my wife specifically, like, she used to Google everything and now she ChatGPTs everything. Is that— I think ChatGPT is going to open up a platform. Is that going to open up something where we can get traffic or paid ads or anything in the future, you think?
Yeah, you know, there's two things come to mind on that. One is usually what I hear is kind of what you said before, that is, is SEO dead or is AI going to kill SEO? And so there's this really cool study that came out just 3 or 4 weeks ago by SEMrush. I think it was SEMrush and Rand Fishkin. If you know anything about SEO, he was talking about that study. And what it said is Google actually grew by, I think it was 21.64% last year. So it's not going down, it's going up. And obviously ChatGPT has done amazing and had a huge adoption rate, but I might be off a little bit on the statistics, but ChatGPT or Google is 800% bigger than ChatGPT. But back to your second question, what was even more interesting is out of the adoption of ChatGPT, GPT, only 30% of the queries are commercial, right? Because if you think about how most people use ChatGPT, it's like, write a thing for me, or make a thing for me. It's not, how do I find a thing to buy? So I think that's skewed for Q&A-based sites. Those have probably been more impacted. But my commerce and retail clients has had no impact at all other than positive, because now we can get them into another source of, of audience.
Interesting. Yeah, it's, it's definitely a weird a weird game. I started playing SEO way back in the day when it was like, you know, you had just the top 10, you had a little couple ads, pay-per-click ads, that was it. And it was like just spamming the search engines. And that's how we had a lot of fun with it. But when it started getting more complex after, I can't remember which update it was, Hummingbird or Panda or something, some update that slapped where I gave up and I walked away from SEO and I was like, all right, I'm not going to keep playing this game. Um, but you've gotten obviously keep on playing. When did you start?
2007.
2007. How many updates have you—
I don't even pay attention, you know, the— all these updates. So out of, out of all these updates, I've never had a client get a penalty in 18 years. Yeah. So my clients are either neutral or up. And this goes back to one of the things that you kind of open the conversation up with is, has SEO changed a lot? So the problem with like a lot of other people that get into SEO or agencies that crash and burn, or their clients crash and burn, is because the agencies get caught in looking for ways to cut corners. But if you just look at the fundamentals, which are really just 3 things, it's 1 is how good or bad is your website built, so structure. 2 is content, how good or bad is your content. And 3 is credibility, how good or bad is your— you know, that's why reviews are important and backlinks and things like that. And every algorithm today might change in the future, but everyone today falls under one or multiples of those 3. So if you just focus on the fundamentals and play the long game, then you don't have to worry about all these little corner-cutting things that might work for a short term but just crush you long term.
Yeah, we was talking about for those who were not a search engine spammer, we would just like mass create articles, spin them, post them, and get 8 billion links coming from everywhere. It was amazing. You'd rank for every— I was ranking for like make money online and get rich quick and like we ranked for everything. And then one day they all disappeared. So Damon does it the white hat long-term way, which is way better, which is why he does all of our projects now because I trust him and I'm not nervous about, you know, the effort and work you put in that's gonna last. It's not something that's gonna disappear. Penalize you in the future. So, all right, so I wanna talk about the crossover between funnels and SEO because obviously, I talk about funnels all day and for a long time, I'd assume that people invest in funnels and then you start coming in a circle and started doing presentations for everyone like, hey, there's a couple of things we can do to actually do SEO and to optimize your funnels. And so anyway, I'd love to go down that path of just tying those, the two worlds, my world and your world together. How does it work? What do you look for?
Yeah, the big adoption or opportunity came same with the new release of ClickFunnels because within it you have extra things, right? Largely it's the ability to scale content through the blog feature. There's a couple other things like the sitemaps and stuff that you guys have added as well. But when we just kind of briefly mentioned those 3 core pillars of SEO, the second one is content. And so you can only show up on Google for what Google can read. And so now that you guys have all these extra features in ClickFunnels, how you can build out content, interconnect things, that's really what leveled it out. And there's some there's some ways that you could kind of get around that in the original version of ClickFunnels, but now it's just like so much easier to scale your content. And so that was what closed that gap. And so now anytime anybody says that, it's really just they're not familiar with how to do it properly.
Yeah.
So what's this model look like? Someone's building a funnel, like they go through my training, they build a funnel. How— what should they be like? What does that look like? Because they got to build out a content structure, there's a plan, there's stuff like Like, let's say you, you are, I'm a brand new client. You're taking me through like, what, what, how's it look? What do we do?
Yeah. Well, the first thing is you gotta go find the money, right? So it's like, what is your audience already searching? And so a lot of people know that content's important, but they write for the sake of writing instead of actually writing to attract a pre-qualified buyer. And so first you want to spend all your time looking into the audience and go, you know, there's tools out there that show what people are already asking, what they're already searching online. And so what you want to do is look for those buyer intent-based keywords. So a lot of people are familiar with maybe Also Asked, or actually Answer the Public. Um, Also Asked is my favorite tool that I like to use.
Also Asked?
Also Asked, yeah. And these tools are great for paid ads too, because a lot of times when you run paid ads, right, you're trying to, to get in front of the intent of what the audience is. So you can use this for all sorts of marketing, whether it's paid ads or SEO or email. You can figure out what's kind of already in the mind of your buyer. And so what you first want to do is your SEO strategy is going to be as good or as bad as that trajectory that you, that you first identify, right? And so you want to figure out where all that money is because you're going to build the foundation of your campaign around that. So first you want to go identify where the buyers are. Now after that, you can only show up for what Google can read. And so it's mapping out this content calendar. So we like to map out a big 52-week content calendar because, you know, let's be honest, writing sucks, right? And so it's like, if you're going to write, then at least know what the game plan is. And when you want to put on your writer's cap for that day, be super productive and crank out a ton of content. So, um, now a good example— people want to like see an example would be secretsofsucces.com. And so where funnels and paid ads and SEO kind of overlap is if you look at Secrets of Success, there's the top level of the website which looks very traditional, right? And so it's like, here's the value propositions, here's the navigation, traditional looking kind of website. But all the calls to action go to the funnel. And so on the SEO side, you need that top level domain for Google to look at, but then on paid ads you can direct them wherever you want. So you can still run your paid ads to the funnel and then you just build up the SEO on the, on the top-level domain and then that's how they overlap. Mm-hmm.
Um, so by the way, he just said go to secretsofsuccess.com. So this is one of the sites that Damon's working out with me. And like he said, I created a couple of good funnels and then we built the, we use the ClickFunnels, um, you know, website feature. And then, uh, Damon's team's been going through and like building out the, What do you call it? Not the width, the bulk of the building out the site, making it— I don't know, what's the word in your world? More pages, more stuff.
Yeah, Secrets of Success is gangster. That one's got so much. How do you balance sharing all the technical stuff without going super nerdy? That one has a lot of stuff. So Secret Success has the value of what the program delivers, and so there's a lot of talk about that. But then we're trying to identify people that are already familiar with or have an interest the authors that are featured, Napoleon Hill or whoever. Yeah. And so then you can go, um, I'll just go, I'll just try and throw out a couple random examples, right? So, um, some people might really like Napoleon Hill quotes, and so they, they want to go search for other Napoleon Hill quotes. And so that could be a potential target is Napoleon Hill's best quotes. And then you can build out a content piece about that, bring them in, and then you answer the question or deliver the value, and then you have a call to action in there, right? And so your goal is to establish yourself as the authority or the website that has the answers, not sell them as— not directly sell them, right? We're not just vomiting sales on every page. It's actually establishing value, trust. Then after you've delivered that, then you can have a call to action to the funnel.
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So in our— my example, obviously we did— we did authors, and inside the authors then there's their books. Like, is that kind of— you're structuring like that? I'm trying for other people thinking through this on their own side, how they Yours goes categories, so it's like book types, right?
So motivational entrepreneur books as a general example. So there's a hierarchy where it gets more granular. So it'd be book types and then it'd be authors within that book category, book categories, authors within that category, then books from that author. And then within all those, then we— there's a bunch of stuff on the back end that you add. I don't know if we'll get into it because it starts to get more technical, but if anybody's familiar with schema, we've gone super heavy on schema on website and So the short answer of what schema is, is like when Google goes to a website, it makes educated guesses and it goes, I think this is about Napoleon Hill. And then schema will say, Google, you don't have to guess anymore. I'm going to tell you definitively, this is about Napoleon Hill, who by the way is an author. And then these are his books and this is the book ISBN number. This is the date that the book was published. And now all of a sudden Google has clarity on all these little things about the products or the books. And then because it has clarity, it trusts it more because it trusts it more. That's willing to position that website higher.
Interesting. So I'm thinking, let's say somebody who's listening to this, they're in our world, they're a coach, they're a weight loss coach or fitness coach or I don't know, some yoga coach, whatever it is. How, because again, most of those aren't going to be like me where you have authors and books and stuff like that. Like how would you structure something like that if it's somebody who's a, yeah, like a guru in their space, how would you build out that? Categories, things like that for somebody in that world?
So you'd want to dig into those, the research first. So I'd go somewhere like Also Asked. And if we want to address this for the listening audience and kind of keep it actionable, I would focus on two things. So the first thing is make your website load quickly and the design really simplistic. Everybody overcomplicates designs and I consistently see the most simplistic designs outperform the most visually stunning because the most visually stunning are either distracting or they load slow because they have all these fancy videos and all these moving animations. So really simplify the design and make sure it loads quickly. There's a really free— there's a free tool called GTmetrix. It's the go-to tool that we use where it'll just tell you very specifically how do you make your website load faster. So just start there with that structure. After you fix the structure, then go all in on content. Use those two sites, Answer the Public, Also Asked, and then in there type in— so if it's like yoga instructor, you can type in, you can just type in yoga instructor. And what it'll what it'll do is it'll create this visual tree branch and then you can start to identify topics. And what you're looking for is buyer intent. And so what a great opportunity to look for buyer intent is, are people asking for time commitments or financial commitments? And so when you're clicking through the also asked and you got these queries or example targets for yoga instructor, look for the ones that might say something like, how much does it cost to hire a yoga instructor? How long does it take to get certified in yoga? How long does it take to lose 10 pounds in yoga? Whatever it might be. So look for those intent-based based topics, and that is what you're going to build your content calendar around. So just make it a really simple, efficient website and then double down on content.
Very cool. Um, what are— what's it look like now with AI and content? I've heard for a while, I was like, you can't use it because they know and they'll slap you. And then I've heard other people who are like, the new, the new AI is so good, it doesn't matter. Like, yeah, what are your thoughts on using AI for content, or do you just need to get back to actually writing?
A little bit of both, right? Yeah. Uh, who— I, I wear that tin hat sometimes on like, if Google's gonna, you know, I'm not so much worried about Bing since they're the bigger investor on ChatGPT, and so it's less likely that Bing's sharing that data with Google, but who knows. So I'm okay, um, selectively using AI. Like, the, the biggest thing— we don't have to explain why AI is attractive to integrate into your systems, but what people don't think about is— let's go back to— you mentioned you used to be an SEO back in the day and you got hit by one of these, these algorithms. So one of the old algorithms was called Panda, and Panda focused on mass produce low-quality content. And so back then we had these things called content spinners where you could just type in, scrape some content from Wikipedia or your competitor, and then it'll shuffle around the paragraphs and synonyms. Well, AI is largely just a way bigger content spinner. It's more glorified, it's more efficient, but it's still sourcing content from somewhere else. So one, how accurate is the content? Two, are there any liabilities in the content? But I think what's most important is AI misses the opportunity to be as relatable or personal, right? So most people might follow your content for your expertise, but they convert when they relate to you as a human. And so the example I always give in AI is, you know, AI doesn't know what it's like to smell grandma's cookies in the holidays. You know, only you can write that compelling piece of content. Or AI doesn't know what it's like to get your heart broken, right? So only you can convey that. So it's not that you don't necessarily have to use, it's not that you don't use AI, but how can you weave in those relatable personal stories that only you can tell that make people relate to your unique hero's journey, right?
Yeah, interesting. And I keep thinking back in the article spinner days. It's funny, 'cause that's how Todd, when I met Todd, he had built an article spinner software that literally was spinning articles and then ranked him, he was like number 1 ranked for the word article spinner. And so then people started signing up for it. And that's, and he took 4 years off and just like lived off of that for a long time, which is kind of funny that now that's what AI basically is. I never thought of it as a complex version of an article spinner, but that's, that's interesting. Okay, exciting thing now again, this SEO spammer Russell from back in the days going back, I'm like, we could use AI, we could pump out like 500,000 sites a day. Like it would be insane. I wish we had these tools back then, but obviously they don't work that way anymore. Um, okay. So those are the onsite things. Is back in the day, the second thing you talked about was like reputation and trust and things like that. And you used to be back in the day, links is what, what created that, what caused that. Is that still part of the algorithm or is it not so much anymore?
It is, but in my opinion, I mean, SEOs will throw rocks at each other over this all day, every day and have a different opinion. Um, I'm of the opinion that they become less important. I think Google is always looking for ways to identify credibility in websites that are less likely to be manipulated by SEOs or webmasters. So backlinks have been manipulated as soon as SEOs kind of figured it out, right? I think they're still part of the algorithm, but it's been diluted in value. Some of our clients, we've actually phased out backlinks entirely and they're still competitive with all the others. Then going back to what we talked about, when algorithms come out, do people get hit? Every time there are these new algorithm updates, we haven't had anybody hit because we're not in there playing this mass-produced backlink game. For the listeners who might not be familiar with backlinks, it's when another website hyperlinks to yours. So each one of those links counts as a vote in the search engine popularity contest. We largely are not aggressive on backlinks anymore. We try to attract them passively through value-added content. The only time we do backlinks is if a client understands the risk-reward and wants to be more aggressive with it.
Interesting. So for the most part, then you're focusing 100% on content schema, site load design, and then from that, waiting for Google to find it and hopefully, hopefully rank it.
Yeah, we go super heavy in structure for the first 1 to 3 months, depending on how big the site is. And then after that, it's a giant content machine.
So how do you get from— because back in the day, if we were on page 2 or page 3, it was, it was just a game where we're trying to get more and more links to move us up the rankings. Eventually hit page 1 and then, you know, spot 3, then 2, then 1. Are there things you can do actively to increase the ranking, or do you kind of create the best version, put out there, then you move the next one and just kind of hope that, hope it lands? Or how does that part work?
You can, you can introduce a couple extra things. So there's different content types that you might be more aggressive with, or content volume. So there's no such thing as too much good content. But when you, when you're an agency and you bring SEO to a client, it's like, how do you economically balance what's the best fit for the budget? And so on the agency side, there's a little bit of, of dancing with what's the best, the maximum ROI for the budget. Because if you double the budget, it doesn't mean you're going to compress time by, you know, cut it in half. And so there's a little balance of that. And there are some ways, like the thing with backlinks is there's no real good scalable, affordable way to backlinks. So they're either scalable and easy and garbage, or they're way expensive and unscalable but good, but expensive. So depending on the campaign, like you can come in and do some, high-priced backlinks, which are good, but you would do it in the case that you gave where it's like, okay, what can we just use to get over the edge? And you wouldn't necessarily integrate it into like the recurring part of the campaign.
Yeah. As you're adding more and more pages, more content every single week, will that naturally help others? Is it like a rising tide rises all ships? Like other ones, they all start rising as well? Or is it kind of each piece stands in and of itself?
No, that's, that's a great comment because, um, A lot of people get caught up in, you know, I need to optimize this page and this page. This is the money page. This is the money page, which might be true, but SEO is now about the credibility of the entire domain. And so is there a little bit of value spread throughout? And so, yeah, you want to— the more value you bring and aggregate good content, it lifts the entirety of the site.
So good, so good, so good.
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I'm curious because on YouTube we have an issue where if we're buying ads on the same channel we're trying to get organic views, it messes up the algorithm, right? Because it's like you're paying for ads, someone comes, they see the ad, they leave, and then YouTube doesn't separate that this is ad traffic versus someone viewing it. And it's like, oh, this— these videos aren't good. And then like your whole channel suffers, at least for us, like a year before you're able to fix it. Do you have a similar thing with SEO where it's like we're also driving paid ads to secretsuccess.com/whatever, people are coming, they're bouncing faster than they would if they were organically finding? Does it affect the site as a whole, or is it—
it can. Yeah, the, the one thing you said, the bounce rate. Yeah, so we've had some clients where we'll be crushing on organic, and then all of a sudden we'll have thousands of visitors We'll get visitors that come in and they stay for 5 seconds and we'll hit up the client and they'll be like, "Oh yeah, that was our ad guy." Well, like, what's your ad guy doing? And they're not paying attention. So yeah, you can, largely SEO and paid ads and social media don't directly influence each other. SEO can influence it, which maybe I'll come back to in a minute, but paid ads and social don't largely influence SEO other than bounce rate. Yeah, so you can send a ton of visitors and if people are just bouncing, then Google's gonna go, Maybe this isn't the best site because people aren't sticking around.
So would it be smart to put your funnels on a subdomain or different domain altogether, do you think?
You could, yeah. I mean, because that's the beauty of paid ads is you can direct that wherever you want. So unless you have it dialed in and, or if you want to, you know, A/B test something pretty significantly that could impact your SEO if you already have a good SEO foundation established, that's something to consider.
Interesting.
If you were to put the pages on a subdomain, would it be separate or does it look at the subdomain the same as the rest of the domain?
A little bit of both. Subdomains are technically separate domains, but search engines are obviously smart enough to know that they're related. I have seen some weird nuances where, you know, you and I and most users would just consider it the same thing, but you'd be surprised at how the anomalies that can show up in the data.
Yeah, interesting. Okay, last thing we talked about is, I know you've got a program now where you're helping agencies to start doing SEO for funnels and things like that. We talk about that as an opportunity because I think it's a unique opportunity a lot of people aren't doing or heard about or thought about and something you've been capitalizing a lot over the last little bit.
Yeah, it's been fun. You were kind enough to give me a deadline last year and it's true. I think I told you at the FHL International that I got more done in that 60 days than I probably would have done in a year. Yeah, it's been fun. So why don't I share a little bit of that journey? Because when I got into Inner Circle, there's so many cool things going on, but there was nothing wrong. I didn't want to get distracted. I didn't want to accidentally mess up the agency.
Like the head of shiny objects here. More shiny objects.
Well, for the first year, there was a little part of me where like, this place is so cool, but everybody's just launching every day. I was used to just recurring revenue and the agency side. And so there was a little bit of time where there was some insecurity about it, where I was like, am I missing this opportunity here? And then when I got talking to other people, they're like, no, you probably made the right decision because I did chase both and then I kind of lost both. Right. And so focus on whatever your most immediate opportunity is. But I couldn't not think about doing training because I've been doing this for so long and I get asked for so long. But more importantly, that was where the personal reward was in me is like I wanted to help those type of people. But that's the total opposite of my agency. Like the agency is established business and people that want to learn SEO, they, you know, it's a difference of who values time over money or money over time. And so there are different audiences. And so I mapped out the course years ago. I didn't launch it though because I knew I didn't have the time to support it. It. And so I didn't want to take people's money. And so for years it was in the back of my mind. And then you see all these people in Inner Circle doing all these things. I'm like, ah. And so I finally got a COO a while ago, got him over the learning curve. And then now I feel comfortable whose hands the agency are in. And so I could come back to launching that. Now back to, I think it was Decade in a Day last summer. And you know, when I came up for the hot seat, you're like, dude, when are you going to launch this? And in my mind I'm thinking end of the year. But I didn't say that because I knew that was like 6 months. I'm like, Russell's not going to let me say 6 months. And I can't remember what I said after that, but you're like, you know, 3 months or something. So we agreed on Halloween. And that deadline was okay because I had a couple of weeks that I had to wrap up some stuff, but then that would give me like 4 to 6 weeks to figure this out. And so then I did a live event. So I did a 2-day live event to validate the curriculum. Now, a couple of things happened from that, you know, you and Inner Circle are always talking about bring your product to the market first and then get that feedback. And so you hear that and you like, you think you know that, but until you actually do that, you don't realize how much value that actually brings. So in my mind it was like, okay, I'm gonna do SEO training and there's 3 types of people that might buy this. One was existing agencies that want to do it better or add it. Two was, you know, an entrepreneur that wants to a solopreneur or freelancer, or 3 was a 9-to-5er that might want more job security and they do marketing and so they want to establish that. I thought the agencies would have been on the bottom. And when I started posting about it, it was almost all agencies. The other 2 were nonexistent. And so then that, you know, the market started to give that feedback. Yeah. And so then I said, hey, who would be interested? I'm gonna do it for $1,000. And I was just wanting 5, 10 people, right? Just to validate it. And I sold $8,000, 8 seats like that day. And so I went and found an event space. I was gonna just do, you know, a small, nice room. And then I booked a space for like 10 people. I'm like, yeah, I got like 2 extra seats just in case. And then I made a follow-up post and then I had 15 seats. So I was like, crap. Okay, so what's still close? Place that is nice, and then I found this other place that held like 20 people. And then I made another post and eventually ended up getting to— it was like just shy of 50 people, right? And so that validated the demand, but then it also highlighted that agencies were the main audience. So then as I started to bring it— as it started to get closer to the event, and I'm kind of dripping some of the curriculum of what we're going to talk about, then I got more feedback. And what I realized was in addition to people wanting to learn SEO, a lot of them didn't know how to run a business. And so it wasn't just about SEO, it was like, how do I actually run a business? You know, SOPs and how do you communicate with your client? And so then I shifted like 50% of the curriculum to here's how you run a business, here's how you communicate to clients, here's how you onboard them, here's how you set expectations. So sold that, validated the curriculum, then got tied up for a little bit, and then Got back to focusing on transferring all that, transitioning all that into a course. And then by bringing it to the market, it was the same thing. More feedback, more feedback, more feedback. So I finally did my first launch just about a month ago. Just did organic the first time, posted about it for 2 weeks and had 60-something people register. 40 showed up, held all 40 for an hour. Last 5 minutes when I pitched, 5 dropped off, 35 heard the offer and 13 closed. Done a few more small launches since then, and as of now, I'm just shy of $100,000 off of like 2.5, 3 hours.
Yeah. So cool. I hope everyone's listening, like, just the process of creating a product too. I think a lot of people think it's the other way around, like, okay, I'm gonna create it all and then launch it, versus what you talked about, the iterative process, including the people. Then you find out what people actually want, which is the magic behind it, you know what I mean? In fact, it's one of the main reasons why I do Inner Circle, is because I had a chance to see everybody, hear people who are doing this game, and then it's like, oh, The ideas come from there, the iterations, the changes, the tweak, all that stuff comes from sitting in a room of your dream customers talking about what they're doing and what they're not doing and what their pain points are. Whereas a lot of times we try to create things in secret and launch them and then you just miss the mark.
That's me. I overthink it big time.
I know, because when we had first conversations, that wasn't the direction at all. And it's crazy that's what it's become and where it all landed at, which is really cool.
Yeah, it's been fun.
That's awesome, man. Well, I appreciate you coming and being part of Inner Circle this long and hanging out and all the SEO work you're doing for us. And hopefully this gets any of you guys who are listening understand there's a whole nother world of traffic. Because in my world, we don't talk about SEO hardly at all. You know, we talk about paid ads and we focus on social and those kind of things. But, you know, it's funny, you rewind back 15 years ago, like there were only Google ads, paid ads and SEO. That was the two things. That's all we drove traffic with initially, you know. And now people don't talk about those very much. And there's this huge untapped opportunity for people who will dive into it, which is why, you know, you're doing it for most of my core businesses right now. And we keep adding, you know, every 2 months we add you to another one of our businesses. It's like, take it to the next one, the next one, the next one. Because it's the long tail. I always think about this with ads. Like people ask me, what should I do? Should I do ads or SEO? I'm like, you should do both. 'Cause ads will get you traffic immediately. But if you're doing the SEO in the backside, eventually you can taper down or turn off ads, but the SEO will continue to grow over time. And that's the thing I think people miss is like, you know, they want to just flip on SEO like they flip on ads. It's like, no, you gotta, you gotta start planting the seeds now. It's a lot of harvest, right? You plant seeds, plant seeds, and eventually it can surpass the traffic you're getting from, from paid if you do it right.
Yeah. So yeah, most, most our clients, if they give it long enough runway, uh, SEO ends up becoming 50 to 80% of their revenue.
Yeah. Even if they say that SEO is dead, they're still getting that.
So that's, that's good to know.
So anyway, man, I appreciate you coming out and sharing. Uh, if people want to follow you and hire you and all kinds of stuff, where do they go?
DamonBurton.com.
Everything's there. DamonBurton.com. And who are some of your clients? Just let people know you're legit.
Uh, Russell, uh, Tony Robbins, uh, we worked with Utah Jazz, Rael Salt Lake, um, lots of cool, cool businesses. But I think my favorite are mom-and-pops. We've got a lot of mom-and-pops that we've taken from, you know, little kitchen tables into multi-million dollar warehouses. And, you know, I still have my first client, first 2 or 3 clients from 18 years ago still with me, 18 years Yeah, they haven't dropped any of the updates because you weren't spamming the search engines.
I could have helped you out back then. Glad I didn't.
I would have ruined everything.
Hey man, grateful for you. Thanks so much. And yeah, everyone, SEO and funnels, they do go together. Start working on it, add it to your traffic, and it'll change your life, change your business. So thanks, man.
Appreciate it.
Do you have a funnel but it's not converting? The problem 99.9% of the time is that your funnel is good, but you suck at selling. If you want to learn how to sell so your funnels will actually convert, then get a ticket to my next selling online event by going to sellingonline.com/podcast. That's sellingonline.com/podcast.
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