Ep 13 - Fill Your Funnel With PAID ADS! (Buy Your Way In...)

Welcome to the Traffic Secrets Podcast. Here you will learn the secrets to get tons of your dream customers, AKA traffic, to any website or funnel. It'll also help you to massively grow your fans, followers, and customers. I'm your host Russell Brunson. Now let's get started. Hey, looks like we are live. What's up everybody? Welcome back to Traffic Secrets Show. While we wait for everybody to come in, what do you guys think about my new shirt? It says Secrets for Sale by Copywriters. So there you go, for all of my internet marketing, copywriting friends who are writing stuff, this shirt is for you. Anyway, it fits since we're talking more about secrets today as we're going deeper into Traffic Secrets. We've been doing this for the last little while, having so much fun with it. Hope you guys are enjoying as well. Also, as of today, we finally put all these episodes on a podcast. So if you go to the iTunes directory and search Traffic Secrets, there's an official Traffic Secrets podcast that has all of the past episodes of this show. They're all on there right now, so you can go back and start binge listening to them if you missed any of them in the past. 'Cause right now we are diving into page 142, so we are almost halfway through this book so far, these podcast episodes, which has been really fun. Talking about, sharing stories and things like that. So I hope you guys are enjoying it so far. If you are, please let me know down below. 'Cause if not, I can just take a break and not do these. This is for you, not for me. All right, you guys loving it. Someone said, can I get the podcast on Spotify? Yeah, Spotify takes longer to approve. We did post it everywhere, but iTunes got live yesterday. Or last night, so it is officially live, so you can start diving into there. And if you do like it, please rate and review it, go in there, like it, put some stars, rate and review it if you like it, because something cool is gonna be happening. I'm gonna be picking in the next week somebody who reviews the Traffic Secrets podcast and sending them out a huge box set, not just a box set, a signed box set, where I will sign each and every one of the books and the box up here with the shiny silver marker. I did it once for somebody before, and it's kinda cool. So if you want a signed copy of the box set, There's only one in existence right now, this will be the second one. The secret is right now you gotta go to iTunes, or to Apple Podcasts, I don't know what they're called nowadays. Go find the Traffic Secrets Podcast, go subscribe, go listen to a bunch of episodes, and then write and leave a review, and you get a chance at winning the signed box set, which would be cool. So, someone said, how do I get the audiobook? Well, thank you for asking, actually. If you go to trafficsecrets.com right now and preorder the book, which these books ship May 5th, the order form bump is the audiobook, which is available right now. You can start listening to it tonight. In fact, hundreds of you guys have already listened to the book, and so hopefully you enjoyed it, and if you haven't yet, now is the time while we're sitting in quarantine time, studying and learning and all sorts of stuff like that. So, that's kinda the game plan right now. So good morning, guys, I'm excited. Alright, you guys ready for this? So again, if you don't have the book yet, we're in pre-order, now is the time, go to trafficsecrets.com and go get your copy of the book, and then, and like I said, the order form bumps the audiobook, which you can get right now, and then the upsell is the entire box set, I'm telling you guys about the secrets of the funnel already, and the audiobooks of all the books in the box set and stuff like that, so it's all there, just go hang out, go have some fun over there, How do I get the box? Go to trafficsecrets.com, get your book, and then you'll be made a special offer for the box set as well. Anyway, so that's the game plan. Alright, you guys ready for this? Should we dive into the Traffic Secrets book today? Alright, we are moving into secret number 9, which is filling your funnel with paid ads, buying your way in. It's been interesting as I started doing these, the circus talking about Traffic Secrets. It's funny 'cause there's some people who are like, I do not wanna buy paid ads Russell, like how do I get free traffic? I just want free traffic, give me all the free traffic strategies. And there are, there are a whole bunch of traffic strategies for free traffic, right? And there's another group like, I don't want to publish a show, Russell, I don't wanna be Russell Brunson or Gary Vee, I don't wanna publish anything, I just want to buy ads. And for them, don't worry, we talk about paid ads as well, you can just buy ads as well. The reality though is the people that are most successful are people who do 'em both. And so that's really the key, having a very holistic traffic because if your paid ads get shut down and you have nothing else, you're screwed. If your organic stuff gets shut down and you got no paid ads, you're screwed. So I probably shouldn't have said that word. I apologize in advance. That's as dirty as my language will ever get. I promise you that. But it's understanding that like the mixture of both is what builds a solid foundation for you and for your business and your company. So I'm a big believer in focusing on both. And so yeah, that's what we do. Someone's asking when will the book be on Audible? I think like in a month from now. I don't know. I think the same time the book, like probably May 5th when the book publishes, I think they put it on Audible. So, I decided in my contract with the publisher, I was like, I want to make sure that people can get the audiobook early so they can start geeking out, and so that's why it's available as the order form up. Anyway, so today we're going to be diving, you know, so far as we've been going through all these episodes, we've talked a lot about who's your dream customer, where are they congregating, what's the hook, the story, the offer you can use to grab their attention and pull them into your funnels. After you have them in your funnels, how do you turn them into traffic that you own, and from there, what do the follow-up funnels look like?, and then how do you infiltrate your Dream 100, how do you use your own publishing platform so you can get in good with your Dream 100 so you can, makes it easier to work your way in, right? And then we jumped into section number 2 which is called the Fill Your Funnel Framework which is like, I showed you guys the framework for how to go into any network and dominate it and get all the traffic and the leads from it, and then we talked about yesterday traffic that you earn, right? We talked about social networks and like how to go in there and network and all that kind of stuff, and today we're transitioning out to paid ads. Now full disclosure on this, I don't buy the paid ads, my company. One of my genius friends and business partners, Jon Parks, does. And Jon, you know, when we were launching ClickFunnels, we were trying to like divvy up responsibilities, 'cause there was like 5 of us, and we're like, okay, Todd, we know Todd's programming, Russell's gonna do the marketing nerdy stuff, and Brent, do you wanna be in charge of support, and Jon, do you wanna like learn paid ads? And he's like, alright, I'll learn paid ads. And so he raised his hand and then he died, dived in and started figuring out. And because of that, we now spend about $1 million a month on paid ads in all sorts of platforms and networks. It's not just Instagram or Facebook or YouTube or Google, it's all over the place. And so when I was writing this book, I was like, I don't wanna be the one that writes the paid ad section 'cause I don't know it that well. And so I asked Jon if he'd help me with it. And he did, and it was really cool because we're trying to figure out, you know, we could go and write a whole chapter, a whole book on like how to do paid ads on this platform and this platform and this platform. But again, it shifts and it changes so often. And so I was like talking to John, I'm like, we need to figure out what's the overarching strategy that's true today, tomorrow, and will be true forever. If we can help people understand that core strategy, then they can go apply it to any market. And so that's really what we did, and he spent a ton of time writing this chapter, me and him went back and forth and back and forth and back and forth until we got it, and we figured out how to explain it in a way that'll help everybody. So again, inside the book, chapter, secret number 9, it goes in much more detail than I'll go in here, but I wanna share these things with you just to get the wheels in your head spinning, so you can understand it. Okay, to begin with, he starts by asking like, what is my advertising budget? And I think it's a question a lot of people ask, like, well Russell, what should my budget be? Like, you spend $1 million in ads, it's not fair, like you have $1 million ad budget. And I'm like, no, no, no, you don't understand. If you've been following this process, you understand that we don't spend money unless it's profitable immediately, point of sale, break even, right? So the $1 million a month we spend, we make that $1 million a month from the front end funnels, right? And we talked about front end funnels earlier back here, and if you geek out on the new version of the DotCom Secrets book, We talk a lot about front-end funnels and how to use them, how to make it so that you make all your profit up front before you send people up your value ladder. So it's getting a little deep into marketing doctrine here, but when you have a funnel that converts, you don't have an advertising budget. You know, if you had a funnel that you put $1 in advertising in, you get $1.50 back out, what is your budget? It's unlimited, you just dump in more dollars 'cause you get $1.50 back, right? So you just keep doing it. And so like, that's to understand is like, When you do these things right, you don't have an advertising budget. I think a lot of people mistake that, 'cause like, 'cause I think like the big brands who don't care about return on investment, they're just trying to like get exposure and things like that, they just, like they've got a million dollar a month ad budget and they just blow it and they don't even track it or notice what's happening. But for me and you, for small entrepreneurs who like, this money's coming out of our own pocket, our own wallets, we have to be smarter, we have to think differently, right? And so for us, we create profitable front end funnels where every dollar spent in ads breaks even and we make the money back immediately, right? Like that's the big secret, that's the big aha. And so I want you guys to understand that. So then, what John wanted to do is he wanted to explain to people the difference between prospecting ads and retargeting ads. Okay, so prospecting ad is the ad where you're going out there into the world, into the ether, and you're trying to grab people and get their attention, right? You're throwing hooks out there to get their attention to see if they're interested in what you have to do, right? Those are called prospecting ads. And then after someone has seen a prospecting ad and engaged with it somehow, they watched the video, they clicked on the link, they did something, then you move them from a prospecting ad into a retargeting ad, okay? So prospecting is you're going after cold people, the cold unwashed masses, I can't say that right. You're going out there and I'm trying to like, it's like I'm going to the food court in the mall and I'm just screaming trying to get people's attention. And whoever like looks at me and like pays attention for a minute, it's like okay, that person's actually interested in what I'm talking about. Now I'm gonna move them from this cold prospecting pool into a warm retargeting pool because now they're warmer. So if you look at the doodle that's gonna be on page 145 in the book here, You'll see that it's interesting, like the prospecting ad, the cold traffic, we spend 80% of our money is in prospecting. So 80% of the spend comes there, but then only 20% of the results come from those people. So it's kind of frustrating at first, like when you first start buying ads, it's like, this sucks, like I'm not, like it's not profitable at first, right? 'Cause you're spending money to get people's attention to find out who may be interested, right? So that's what's happening over here, is you're fishing in this pond right here, and you're trying to get people to be interested. And it's expensive and it's not very profitable, so first, Advertising paid ads kinda suck because you're losing money at first, right? But then the people who are interested, they raise their hand, and you pull them into these buckets over here, and now over here, you only spend 20% of the money, but you get 80% of the results, okay? So here, in the prospecting spot, you're spending 80% of the money, only getting 20% of the results, 'cause the majority of people don't buy on the very first time they see your ad, right? But they engage with it, they pay attention, and then you move them over here, and then this is where you spend 20% of the money, but you get 80% of the results. And so when you traditionally start a paid advertising campaign in any network, whether it be Facebook, Google, YouTube, any of them, it's more expensive up front because you're trying to figure out who's actually interested. And then after you've got these people to raise their hands and they move over here into these buckets, then over here is where now it's cheaper because you have a smaller group that you're marketing to. They're people who are already engaged, they've warmed up, they're interested, and I market to them differently, okay? So that's kind of the difference here. You have this prospecting pool here, And you see in my image here there's hooks and we're throwing out tons of hooks. Hook after hook after hook, trying to throw 'em in and try to figure things out. Right, like when we launched the Traffic Secrets book and tried to send people to trafficsecrets.com to get their free copy, we have like hundreds of different ads, tons of 'em out there. All are different hooks they're throwing out trying to grab people's attention different ways, right? And so that's happening over here. But then after someone raises their hand, like right now, right now we got 155 of you guys who are live on Instagram, we got 204 who are live on Facebook, so you guys have engaged. Ah, I got you, I got you to pay attention for a second, right? And over the next, you know, 48 hours we'll drive paid ads to these videos to see who, you know, we can get to pay attention, to engage with it, right? And we may end up in the next 24 to 48 hours with 20 or 30,000 people who have engaged with this video right now, right? Which means they push play, they watch for a little bit, maybe they watch for a minute, maybe they watch for 30 minutes, like who knows how long, but they're engaged and they're kind of paying attention for a little bit, right? So after you've engaged, then you drop over here into my retargeting bucket. If you look at these, there's 3 buckets we have. We have the Engaged bucket, right, that means you engaged with the ad, we kinda hung out for a little bit. Now here we got the Landed, which means you clicked, you landed on my landing page, you may have opted in, things like that, and then you move over here to the 3rd bucket, which is Owned, like now I own you, like you bought something from me, you are traffic that I own, right? So these are the buckets here, and so what happens is like, I'll throw these ads out here, I'll try to get someone's attention, boom, they fall in here into this 1st bucket here, right? So this 1st bucket is called Engaged, means you engaged with me, so for 3 to 5 days, when you're in this engaged bucket, I'm gonna be spending more money to target you, 'cause like you already watched the video, it means you're hot, it means you paid attention to me, so I'm gonna be having specific ads to try to get you to move from here now to the next bucket, right? I'm trying to move you and send you across these little buckets here. So for 3 to 5 days I'll spend a bunch of money, and if you don't respond again, you don't move, you don't act, and nothing happens, then you get dumped back into the pool over here, and then I'll try to recapture your attention later, okay? But if I do in 3 to 5 days that I'm targeting you and I'm showing you messaging and that, If you engage and you click on an ad and you come to my landing page, you opt in, then boom, I move you to this bucket, right? So there's different ads happening in all three of these different buckets, right? These are my ads trying to get you moved to here. After you come here, you opted in or whatever, now I have a whole different ad campaign that's goal is to get you now to come over here and to buy. And after you buy, then I have an ad campaign that's getting you to ascend to the next funnel, right? So what's interesting if you look at this, these three buckets here, the ads that come in here, like we go and we craft an ad campaign where it's like, hey, day one, show them this ad, day two, show them this ad, day three, Day 4, day 5, after 5 days they haven't responded, then dump them back over here. Okay, so what's interesting, if you look at like how we set up these campaigns, in fact this is very true if you listen to, in DotCom Secrets they talk a lot about this. I'll talk about it a little bit in the follow-up funnel section here. But we have 2 kind of email campaigns, right? We've got our soap opera sequences, and our daily sign-filled emails. So soap opera sequence, we write once, right? It's a story, it's like, you know, who knows, 3 to 5 emails that are taking somebody through a story, it's pulling them through, a journey through messaging that's, I need them to have part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, right? And so these are very similar, it's like you create the retargeting campaign once, it's like a Seinfeld, or a soap opera sequence where when they come in, everyone comes in this box and gets message 1, and then message 2, and they move through the sequence, and then hopefully move into here, into here. But these messages you write once and you never touch 'em again, right? Unless they don't work, then you can tweak 'em and convert 'em, but these are in here once and then you don't really touch 'em again. Okay, now the hooks, this is where you're always creating new creative. Okay, you're creating new ads all the time, like you are an ad creation machine. You should be getting your phone and doing ads of you on the trampoline with your product. You should be doing ads of you running down the street, ads of you at different locations. Like, for example, one of our best-selling ads to this day, it's crazy, for the Expert Secrets book, we were in Amsterdam and we were walking by this hotel and in the lobby of the hotel there's this big green rhino. And John, who was with me at the time, he's like, hey, come stand by the rhino. I'm like, okay. He's like, hold the book. He's like, go tell people to buy the book. So there's a video of me standing next to this big green rhino, I'm like, hey, this is Russell, there's a big green rhino, you should buy a copy of my book. Like that little, that was a hook we threw out there, for some reason has converted amazingly well for like 3 years. John asked me, he's like, can you go buy a big green rhino and put it in your backyard? He's like, that ad did amazing. But like that's just one hook, so over here you throw out tons of hooks, you're making ads, making videos, making different creative, like you're putting in tons of stuff trying to grab people's attention, right? But after you get 'em, then they come over here and it's like, now these ones are very set up and structured where, They follow the same follow-up funnel, the same sequencing, so these parts don't change after you set them up once, okay? So like I said, strategically when you're building, you build out these right here, you build out the soap opera sequence in each of these different buckets here, and then you come back here and now it's like, now let's throw as many hooks as we can, let's have fun, let's be creative, like what can we do to get people's attention and bring them in and pull them in so we can get them over here, okay? So that's how this ad, this paid ad game works. And it works the same way on basically any network. This is how I do it on Facebook, on Instagram, on YouTube, like it's the same thing, right? So the strategy, you have to understand, if you understand the strategy, this is how it works. 80% of my money's gonna be prospecting, throwing out tons of different hooks to get people's attention, and after I get them to engage, and then boom, they move into my engage bucket and retargeting, right? And again, there's retargeting on Facebook, in fact they all call them different names. There's retargeting, there's remarketing, but the concept's the same. They've got different names for it, but the principle's the same. Is you get someone to raise your hand with your prospecting ads, you spend 80% of your money, you only get 20% of the results. Then as soon as someone engages, they move over into your retargeting buckets, and then over in the retargeting buckets is where you only, you spend 20% of the money, but you get 80% of the results, and we're taking people through follow-up, like certain sequences of retargeting messages, right? So they'll see this ad day one, then the next day they'll see this ad, and then the next day this ad. It's all moving them and pushing them towards where we need them to go. Okay, alright, and then as we move over here, step number one, this is what we're talking about, you need to have lots of different hooks. I think I tell the story about Dean. Yeah, so Dean Graziosi, who wrote the foreword for this book, When he was selling his book, Millionaire Mindset, and I was selling Expert Secrets, we were on this competition to see who could sell more books. And I'm embarrassed to say, but Dean was thrashing me. He was selling 4 times more books than me. And I'm like, we're pushing really hard, like how are you selling more books than me? And I remember I asked him, and he didn't know either, like we don't really know. I was like, how about I fly down to Arizona and we spend a day and we kind of cross-consult each other? I'll consult you on like my funnel stuff, you consult me on your ads, and we'll see if we can figure out how to help each other. So we flew down there to Arizona and we're hanging out and trying to figure out what he's doing that I'm not doing and what I'm doing that he's not doing and we're going back and forth and it took us a while and then as John was looking at their ads account, he's like, wait a minute, he's like, how many ads do you have? And it was funny, I started talking to Dean and I'm like, Dean, how many ads do you make? And he was like, oh, we make, I don't know, a couple ads a day. I was like, a couple ads a day? Like I thought it was just like a couple ads a month. He's like, no, yeah, a couple ads a day. He's like, it's funny, 'cause Dean's background, he was in infomercials And he was like, when I was in infomercials, we'd make one infomercial and it would last about 18 months until it fatigued and it would die. And he's like, so I got really good making one perfect infomercial. He's like, online we found it's different. He's like, ads fatigue fast. And so he's like, I have no idea what ad's gonna work, so he's like, I'll pump out 2 or 3 a day, and I post to my team and they'll run and run and they'll have one that hits, and then it'll run for a while and then it fatigues and dies, and then I need another one, another one. So what he does is he carries around his phone, and everywhere he's going he's finding a weird spot. Hey, I'm here at my kid's soccer game, and by the way, the reason I'm here and not working is because I got a millionaire mindset. You need to buy the book, you know, whatever. And just doing little ads like that to grab people's attention everywhere he's going. And so that was something big that I learned. The reason why he's selling more ads than me is because he had more creative than me, more ads he was putting out there. And so that's the same thing back here when you guys are looking at this prospecting pool. It's all about putting out tons of different creative, tons of different ads. So step number 1 of this process is create lots of prospecting ads to hook your dream customers. And then targeting for prospecting, yeah, John goes deep in that. I'm not gonna explain it 'cause I don't explain it as well as he does. But like if you look at my little Venn diagram here, it's like you don't just target Tony Robbins audience, you don't just target business owners, you don't just target women, for example. You look at the cross-section of all three, right? So like who are the Tony Robbins fans who are interested in business, right? Are the Tony Robbins fans interested in health? Or like you figure out what the cross-section is and then in there's your sweet spot. That's where you're spending the money to target those people. That's how you decrease your costs as well. So you target your prospecting ads, use retargeting campaigns, and in this book he shows some actual examples. I hope you guys love this, we show tons of examples in the book so you get an idea of what it actually looks like. If we spent $2,000, how many people should we get from that? And then from each step in the process, how many people from that should engage with the ad, how many go in the opt-in, how many buy, and what happens along the way as you look at people going through this funnel, right? The funnel, if you look at a funnel, it's always like, at the top there's a bunch of people and every step in the funnel, like, it drops less and less people down to the bottom, right? And so what we're doing is we're taking that funnel, tipping it on its side, and showing, okay, step 1, here's the ad, and then here's how it goes, boom, and then here's the retargeting, the people dumped in these buckets and how we move them through. And so when you get to this book, when you get to the book and you go to page 152, you'll see that diagram and how people kinda move through the process and kinda stats and numbers each step, each phase in the process, which is kinda cool. Ah, so many cool things. So anyway, that's kind of the overarching strategy that you need to understand with paid ads. And like I said, that concept, that strategy now, it lays on top of any of the other ads or the platforms you're working on. So Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, it works the same in all those. So anyway, that's kind of how it all works. And that's secret number 19, or sorry, secret number 9 in the Traffic Secrets book. So there's 20 secrets in the book, that's secret number 9, is going deeper into how to run paid ads. So for any of you guys who love the paid ads, it's time to go get your copy of the book. Again, we're pre-ordering right now, it's at trafficseekers.com, and then I want you to get your copy, and we'll ship it out May 5th, that's when we'll start shipping, and then, but if you want the audiobook, you can go geek out and listen to the audiobook today, 'cause it is ready and it's waiting for you. So just go, but you gotta get, it's the order form bumps. The book is free, it's like, I think $9.95 shipping and handling in the US, and a little more than that international, And then the order form bump is like, would you like the audiobook? You click yes, it's a little extra money, but then you can start listening to the audiobook today and you can dump all these secrets into your brain and they'll be there for you to be able to know and to use and start leveraging your business. So anyway, I hope you guys are having a good day today, and I think now is again the most important time to really start focusing on yourself, on your businesses, and preparing yourself, because this little economic hiccup, bump, thing that's happening right now, those who are like holding on and like preparing and doing their best to gather their customers and give them support during this time, when the quarantines are lifted and things like that, they'll be the ones that are there ready to serve. So now is not the time to sleep, it's not time to take your foot off the gas, now is the time to actually put your foot on the gas. Traffic right now, ad costs have dropped down dramatically in almost every market I've heard of, outside of some of the survival and things like that where they're all killing it right now. But for most markets, ad costs have dropped dramatically and now is the best time to start playing this game and getting into it. So anyway, I appreciate you guys. Thanks for hanging out with me today and we'll be back tomorrow. Tomorrow we're gonna be going into Instagram. What? This'll be so much fun. So that's kinda the game plan tomorrow. Appreciate you guys, thanks for everything and if you got anything, any value of this, please comment down below, please share the video and don't forget, We just launched the Traffic Seekers Podcast, which has all of these different episodes in there. And if you go to iTunes, right now it's just in the iTunes directory, we'll get it in all the other ones eventually, but it takes a while to get them all approved. But right now, as of last night, it's live on iTunes, so you go to iTunes, to Apple Podcasts, whatever on your phone, you can go search Traffic Seekers, it'll pop up, you'll see an image that looks just like this, subscribe to it, and then what I would love for you guys to do, I'm gonna bribe you, but I want you to listen to it, and if you've been on any of these calls, you've heard them, like it's all the recordings from these trainings we're doing right now, is what's in it right now, but go listen to it and then rate and review it. And what I'm doing is I'm gonna be picking somebody who rated and reviewed it this week, and I'm gonna be sending them out a huge signed copy of the box set. I will sign all the books and also the top of it here in silver marker, it looks really cool, and I'll ship you guys out to one lucky person who goes and rates and reviews. And I don't care if your review's like 1 star, if you're like, ah, Russell talks too fast, I don't like him, like, that's alright, you can still win. If you don't like me, I get it, but if you do like me, I'd really appreciate it if you'd go and rate and review, that'd mean the world to me. So, now's the time, you guys, go get, subscribe to the podcast over, go to iTunes, search for Traffic Secrets, and you will find it, it is in there. Alright, thanks everybody, appreciate you all, and we'll talk to you guys all soon. Bye everybody! I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Traffic Secrets Podcast. If you wanna learn more secrets to getting traffic to your websites or your funnels, then I wanna give you a free copy of my brand new best-selling hardcover book called Traffic Secrets. Now, I already bought a copy of the book for you. I just need to know where you want me to ship it. So go to TrafficSecrets.com and let me know where to ship your free copy today.