Ep 16 - Today We're Going GOOGLE!

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. Looks like I'm live everywhere. What's up everybody? This is Russell. Right now we are on like 25 bajillion platforms. I'm now in my own work-at-home, broadcast-from-home studio broadcasting everywhere. So, man, this whole quarantine thing has got us all much more creative. I used to just do things halfway, and now I'm like, I gotta do this perfectly 'cause I wanna make sure I get this message out to as many people as possible. So we're live on Instagram, what's up IG? We're live on Facebook, what's up Facebook? We are also live in my Facebook group. We're also live on Periscope, which hits up Twitter and a bunch of other places as well. Hope you guys enjoyed the weekend. We are coming back and we are going hard and heavy back here into the Traffic Seekers book. But first off, I wanna thank everybody. We have officially finished the pre-launch for the Traffic Seekers book. We did a 3-week affiliate pre-launch, which was happening in the middle of the corona lockdown craziness, which has been, it's been intense for obviously for everybody. And we ended up, drum roll, at the end of the pre-launch we sold over 44,000 books. Through the funnel, which is amazing. So thank you so much for all your help, anticipation, all you guys who bought books. We also have sold, we don't know the exact number, but like, if you look at the funnel, there's an exit pop that pushed to Amazon, things like that. We sold over 1,000 copies on Amazon, I know, through that, plus I don't know about the other ones. So anyway, we sold a lot of books in the last 3 weeks, which is amazing. Today is the day I'm recording this and making this video. It's April 6th, which means we're less than a month away from the book starting shipping. They start shipping May 5th, which is so exciting. I cannot wait for all you guys to get it. Even though most of you guys got the audiobook and you've been pouring this stuff into your brain and you know it all anyway, which is awesome, or you've been listening to the brand new Traffic Secrets podcast where I've been reading these things and going through chapter by chapter with you. If you haven't yet, make sure you go to iTunes and search Traffic Secrets and go subscribe to the new podcast. But it's been really fun. But don't worry, it doesn't mean I'm gonna stop talking about traffic. I'm gonna continue to keep reading every single chapter in this book. I'm gonna keep talking about it. I got tons of more interviews and Facebook Lives and everything because 44,000 copies of the book is good, when your goal is to sell a million, it's actually not that good. I still got a long, long, long way to go, so I'm gonna keep talking about it, keep talking about it, keep coming back and talking about it for the next year or 2 years or 3 years. So hopefully this helps all of you guys who are entrepreneurs who are trying to figure out how to sell your product to realize that the key is not just going live once and, you know, doing a launch and stopping. The launch is just the kickoff, and now you gotta start talking about your product. It's funny because when we launched ClickFunnels, Prior to that, I'd spent, before ClickFunnels, I'd been doing this business for over a decade, and what was interesting is when I would do this, I would like launch a product, I'd spend 2 or 3 months talking about it, and then I'd move to the next product, and the next product, and every quarter I was launching a new product, 'cause it took about a quarter to create a funnel, and I kept shifting from thing to thing to thing, and nothing ever compounded or grew, and it wasn't until ClickFunnels came, and I was like, this is something special, I need to really focus on this, we started focusing on it, and for 5 and a half, now years, that's all I've really talked about. And because of that, because of the consistency of the message, it compounds, it keeps compounding, it keeps compounding, and now 5 years later we got 100,000 members and it continues to grow. So I want you guys to understand that the launch is the beginning, it's not the end. Keep talking about your product, keep talking about it, keep talking about it, keep talking about it. So I'm gonna keep talking about Traffic Secrets. But today we are going into the Google-y chapter. How many of you guys are excited about Google? If you don't have a copy of your book, by the way, I would offend myself if I didn't ask you to go get your copy if you haven't yet. Again, you go to trafficseekers.com and get a free copy, or you can go to Amazon and pay for one full price, and they ship in less than a month from now, yay! So, it's exciting. Alright, so Google. Let me talk about Google for a little bit before we dive into this. So Google, I've got such a love-hate relationship with. When I got started on the internet, Google was the thing, that's all, like it was Google, like that was it. And so, when I first, if you guys have heard my potato gun story, like I started with Google Ads, and it was so simple back then. There's this dude named Chris Carpenter who wrote a book called Google Cash, and we all bought it for $37, and it was like, hey, go to Google and buy an ad, and then drive it to a landing page, and you just make free money. And we all did that, and it was amazing. And so that was like literally my business, and everybody's business for the first year or so. And so I had this Potato Gun DVD, I was making money going back and forth, and it was amazing until the first, the infamous, the Google slap happened. I'm curious how many of you guys listening right now actually went through the Google slap, you felt that whoosh. It's funny because the premise of this book, when you read the introduction, I talk about how we're moving into the era where Facebook is about, in their history, about the spot where they're gonna start doing the Facebook slaps, and you're already seeing it, they're shutting down people's ads accounts like crazy. But with Google it happened overnight. Everyone was killing it, and then literally overnight the first Google slap happened and AdWords stopped being amazing. And it went from literally, if you knew how to read, you could read a book and be rich, to it got hard really fast. And I watched overnight as the first Google slap or Zaino snap, whatever you want to call it, right? And I watched as the majority of the people I knew back then who had thriving businesses disappeared. And most of them never recovered. They never came back. Which is again another big reason why I'm writing this book, or I wrote this book, is because I wanna give you guys stability. But Google shifted that day. And like I said, most people died. Most people's businesses died. I remember in fact Dagan Smith, talking to him about this later, he's like, I was in all these mastermind groups and trying to figure out what's the next thing, and I ask everybody and everyone's like, I don't know, nobody knew, nobody knew how to get traffic. And it was this window where everyone was kind of stuck. And everyone was figuring things out and then the next little phase came in and it was SEO, and SEO became the thing. And SEO at first was actually really, really easy. And I talk about, I go through the history, in fact, if you've been following the Failure Front Funnel framework, we talk about like understand the history of the network and the goal and where they're going, all sorts of things like that, right? But it used to be really simple. In fact, here's this image on page 211. Like SEO initially was so simple, it was like, it was a linking game, like whoever had the most links won, right? So it's like, if you had, right, what's this area here? If the number 2 ranked website had 100 backlinks, if you got 101, you'd all of a sudden be the number 1. And first it was like, that's, in fact Google's whole algorithm, I talk about, if you read Google's history in here, talk about the very first search engine was called Backpage, or Backrub. That Google launched. Larry and Sergey, they were at Stanford University and they created their first search engine called BackRub. Their first search engine. It was based off this concept of like, let's do this linking thing, right? Like, we think that whoever, whatever website gets the most links to it should be the best website. That was their theory going into this. So they created BackRub and it turns out they were right. It blew up so much so that Stanford servers couldn't host it anymore, so they moved it off Stanford servers onto their own and they called it Google. Google, and that became the thing. Now this is the interesting pattern, okay? This is what us entrepreneurs do, right? We find out this thing and then we're always looking for the loophole. What's the loophole? How does this work? Okay, because especially when Google took over and like became the search engine, man, if you can get ranked for a keyword, some people like, if you get ranked on page 1 for a certain keyword, you can make millions of dollars a month or more. And so because of that, it became this like, this thing like we all kind of figured like, how do you win this game? Like if I win this game, it equals millions and millions of dollars. So I gotta figure out how to play and how to win this game. And so initially it was really easy, 'cause like as soon as somebody cracked the thing, they're like, this is what it is, it's just links. If you get more links than the other dude, you're on top. We're like, what? That's it? How do we get more links then? And so we literally, we built software to spam links. We built so many things, and link farms, and there were things called FFA pages back in the day where you could just like drop links. And so like, if you just wanted to win, like that's all it was, was a link game. It's like, hey, the dude number 1 spot's got 1,000 links, I need 1,001. And as soon as you got 1,001, boom, you'd switch spots with them. And it was so simple, so we just like got really good at spamming the search engines. Like in all honesty, that's what it was, that's how the game was played. And what happens, at first Google was winning, 'cause it was like, man, the best stuff rose to the top, 'cause it had the best links. But then it shifted to where the most spammed pages came to the top, which was good for people like us, Bad for the rest of the world. And so Google's like, we have to change this. And so they started shifting their algorithm and they shifted it to where now it wasn't just the number of links but it was the quality of links. And then it was this other, and so if you ever heard about all the Google slaps that happened, there's like Panda and Hummingbird and like all these Google slaps. I walk you through what most of them were in here. They're all about basically Google trying to beat out us marketers because we were trying to find what's the loophole, how do we exploit it? What's the loophole, how do we exploit it? And I tell you what, it was a fun game for a long time for those of us who had a chance to play it. And I walked through the 4 phases of Google here so you can understand where they came from. If you remember my Affiliate Funda Framework, first step is understanding the history and then the goal. Because for years my whole business model was like, how do we exploit the loophole that's there? But the problem with that is you get short-term gains, but then it's always shifting and changing. We would spend, I mean, we had at a time, we had a team of like 80 people, a whole college university in Peru that one of my buddies had set up that we were hiring people for. So we were like, I wanna rank number 1 for make money and work from home and all these things. And we had a team of people out there just mass producing links like crazy. And we'd get to page number 1 for like the most competitive keywords and we're like, this is amazing. And it would happen, right? We'd get page number 1, it'd be amazing, and then unfortunately it would shift, right? So you spend months and months of work, we get there, we'd start getting tons of traffic for a window, maybe a week, maybe 2 weeks, maybe a month, And then we'd shift and then we'd lose it again. And it was just this, you're always like chasing your tail. And that's when I realized, I'm like, man, if I wanna be successful in this game, especially like after we launched ClickFunnels, I'm like, I don't wanna be the guy like finding the newest loophole and exploiting it. I wanna be the guy who figures out what do the platforms actually want and how do I align myself with them? 'Cause if I can align myself with them and do it the way that they like, then they'll give us traffic for free. So we stopped looking for the loophole and started looking for alignment. And that's really the big secret. I mean, this whole book we talk about that. And there's, like, the Google and YouTube chapters are heavy, 'cause we go deep into keyword research, we go deep into the publishing strategies, and there's so many publishing strategies you can use. I talk about Brian Dean, who's one of my favorite SEO guys right now, he has a concept called the skyscraper, and I'm not gonna talk about that today, but he has this whole skyscraper model I go through on page 222, which is brilliant, it's what we're doing right now on ClickFunnels SEO, and we're killing it, which has been really, really fun. And we go through publishing plans. Again, this is one of the heavier chapters, but I wanted to share just one big idea from this chapter that I think will get you guys thinking differently, okay? And will be an easy, simple way for you guys to get traffic, especially in this time of chaos, okay? Do you guys want that? You guys okay if I were to deliver and just give you one solid gold nugget that'll just blow your minds? If you guys want that, just message down below, be like, give me the gold nugget, okay? Alright, so here is the gold nugget that I'm gonna share with you guys from Traffic Seekers today, okay? So this is something back in the day, before we learned the SEO game, before we had any success at all, I was like, man, I would go to Google and I'd type in my dream keyword, right? I'd type in work from home or sales funnels, whatever yours is, like lose weight, right? And I would type it in and I would like dream, like man, if I could be on page number 1, this is like the most ideal real estate in the world, right? But I was like, but it's so hard. There's so many good people. How in the world am I going to get up there? And a lot of people teach SEO or like show you like, well, just go for the long-tail keywords and things like that because they're easier to get. And I agree with some of the strategy, but I always like, I just, I don't know. I'm just like, I want to be the number one guy or else why even try, right? And so I remember looking at all these sites and I was like, and we had these teams, like I was telling you, we were doing all the mass spamming stuff back in the day to like get our links up. I say spamming, they weren't anything illegal or unethical. They were just getting links like crazy, just mass dropping links all over the internet to get our pages ranked back when that's how the game was played. And I was like, well, why I'm waiting for these things to come up? Like, is there any other way I can get traffic today? 'Cause traffic in the future is good, but traffic today is always better, right? And so I'd go to Google and I'd type in, I'd see these, I'd see all the pages that ranked on page number 1. And I was like, what are they doing? So I started going to them. I'd go to the first one, and I'd go to the second one, and I'd go to the third one. And what I found interesting is that typically in the top 10 for most keywords, there's gonna be like, The one that's like some brand that's just amazing, just owns it, you're like, ah, bow to them, they own this thing, they've been around for 50 years and they just, they deserve that traffic, right, so they're there. And then you look at other ones and I started seeing this pattern where like, there are these blogs or these sites that were just like, they weren't amazing sites, they were structured in a certain way, they ranked really well, but I started looking and I was like, these aren't sites run by marketers like me. These are sites run by SEO people who are really good at ranking in the search engines. And so I remember specifically it was the keyword at the time that I was trying to get was work at home or work from home or work at— yeah, something like that. So I clicked on one of them and I saw this guy's page. It was a page and I saw a big old banner ad on top and then an article and like that was it. He wasn't selling anything. I'm like, how is he not selling something? He's on page number 1 for like the best keyword ever. And so I messaged the guy. I was like, dude, Like, I don't understand this. You're on page 1 for my dream keyword and you're not selling anything. And I started getting to know this guy and I was talking to him and he's like, oh yeah, I'm an SEO guy. I'm like, okay, like does that mean you hate money? He's like, no, no, no, no. He's like, my model is just different than yours. He's like, I get pages ranked really high on Google and I sell ads to people on these pages. And I was like, are you kidding me? I was like, how much would you get, how much would you, like would it cost for this ad? And he was like, oh, well this banner right up here, you're gonna pay X amount. And he had different ad placements and stuff like that. I was like, are you kidding me? So I bought the whole top block of his page, and I was like, what else can I buy? I'm like, can I put a popup on your site? He's like, I've never done that before. I'm like, well, I would love if every single person who came here saw my popup and joined my list. And so we negotiated back and forth, and he's like, sure. So he gave me, I can't remember what we paid, this is like 7 or 8 years ago, but we negotiated for a popup on his page, and a couple things like that, and soon like, It was his article, he was ranking page number 1, but it was all, everything was leading back to me, right? And so within an hour of talking back and forth with this human being, no SEO, no keywords, no ranking, no nothing, I had it where like my, basically my funnel was number 1 for work at home. Does that make sense? So what happens sometimes with work at home, they'd see his article, they click on it, they go there, they'd read his article, but then they see big old banner ad for get Russell's free book, that wasn't the offer at the time, but go to Russell's free book, and then pop up like, hey, give me your email, I'll just like give you the first free chapter, read chapters for free of Russell's brand new book. And all of a sudden, overnight, boom, I was getting this huge surge of traffic. I was getting tons of leads and opt-ins and traffic and sales for the keyword that I was working for to try to hopefully someday rank for. And it instantly came into me that fast. Do you guys get that? So, in fact, if you go to page 230, I talk about the strategy a little bit. So, the other thing that's amazing is like, the quality of the clicks, right? Like, the person showing up, I got, if I'm buying ads, or I'm buying pay-per-click, like I'm paying for every single person that clicks. And they can get expensive, especially for the good keywords, right?. But here it's like somebody else ranked here, they got the first click, then they went to the person's thing, and then they saw my ad and then they clicked. So they're like 1, 2, 3 clicks in before they come to my world, which means, which means if you look at the funnel, right, like all the people come and then like the really qualified people, then the hyper-qualified people come, and then like I'm just getting the cream of the crop. I'm coming, I'm just scooping the cream off the top of it, and that's what I get, uh, is the best traffic of all. It's just the cream on the top of it, right? And that's how this whole game is played. Okay, so that's one of the things I teach inside the Google strategy. It's just like, it's so simple, it's so easy, and you don't have to buy ads, you're not doing pay-per-click, you're not doing SEO, and we talk about those, how to do those in here. So like, those strategies are in here, but there's stuff that's just easier. And it's understanding that, like, how do I find the people already ranked, and then I go to those directly there and get the traffic from there. Does that make sense? And so, I'm reading all your comments right now. Awesome, so that's just one idea. So what I recommend for you guys to do today, this is your homework assignment for today, is go to Google and think like, what's the dream keyword? Like if I could have any keyword phrase, what would it be? Make money, work from home, lose weight, Boise dentist, I don't know, figure out whatever your thing is, and then look at the top 10, go to click on every single page, and see which one of these people do you think would allow me to actually buy ads on these pages? And then contact them and just be like, "Hey, what would it take?" It's funny, my man Dave Gambrill just said, "It's like SEO Dream 100." It is 100%. In fact, I believe that's what we talked about in here. It's going through and like, "Hey, so what are the Dream 100 pages that you wish you could rank for?" So what I tell you guys to do here in the book is like pick 10 keywords, right? So we talked about one, we pick 10 keywords, okay? And then each keyword, there's 10 pages. So 10 times 10 equals what? 100! Now you have your dream 100. Now let's go into the dream 100 and say, okay, boom, how do I work my way and how do I buy my way? Like the same, yeah, so the same stuff we've been talking about, just using it at the SEO standpoint. So anyway, just start thinking about that, you guys. Get the wheels in your head spinning. So go find your keyword, again, find 10 of your dream keywords, go to those pages, look at the top 10, click on all of them, look at those things, and then start contacting people and say, hey man, I love your blog, I saw, like, it's awesome. I'm just curious if you sell ad space. Can I get an ad up here? Can I get a popup? Can I get a whatever? Do you have an email list? Can I buy an ad in your email list? You've been collecting all, you've been harvesting these leads for the last 6 months you've been ranked here. Can I have you email your list for my thing? And so on and so forth. So anyway, and there's so much more in the Google chapter, but that was just, I wanted to give you guys something tangible today you could grab and you could like start using. So if you guys wanna learn more about how to use Google, both paid and free, and all the other stuff plus other tips strategies, things we're doing, uh, it's all here inside of your free book called Traffic Secrets. Um, if you haven't gotten yet, all you gotta do is go to trafficsecrets.com. Um, again, you cover the cost of the shipping. I already paid for the book, um, and then we'll ship one out to you ASAP. Um, and in the last 3 weeks we sold 44,000. So you know what that means? 44,000 entrepreneurs can't be wrong. This book is something that you need to get, and so now is your time to go and get your copy ASAP. Again, when books start shipping on May 5th, so less than a month away we start shipping the books. But the audiobook is in the upsell available right now, so you can get the audiobooks and listen to it today. Also, if you've missed, I've been going live every single day since the quarantine started, reading chapter by chapter. If you missed any of these, they are all on our podcast, the brand new Traffic Secrets podcast. Right now it's only in the iTunes directory, eventually it'll be everywhere, but if you go to iTunes, if you go to iTunes and then search Traffic Secrets, you have a podcast where I've read, basically I've told stories like this on the first 200-something pages. And they're all in there. And we're doing a contest right now where someone who rates and reviews the podcast is gonna be winning a signed copy of the Secrets Trilogy box set. So if you want a signed copy of this entire thing, the only way to get that is to rate the Travis Seekers Podcast and leave a review. And if you do that, you have a chance of winning it. So anyway, that's, I don't know how to say it, send those books out. I know, it's killing me too. I'm just hoping and praying that like, shipping gets back in place, you know, from Amazon and all the places in the next 30 days. I think it will. Anyway, so where's the link for the book? The link is simple, it's trafficsecrets.com. So that's kind of the game plan. Anyway, so that said, you guys, thanks for hanging out today. I appreciate you all. We had a great show up between all the different channels and everywhere we're at. So thanks for hanging out live. If you enjoyed this, please comment down below, please share this. Again, I'm going free for you. The payment in return would be to share this with other people you think would benefit from it. Either tag them down below or share it with them. Anyway, with that said, you guys, I appreciate you all for hanging out today. Thank you for everything. If you don't have your copy of the Traffic Secrets book yet, now is the time. Go to trafficseekers.com and start listening to the audiobook tonight. Tomorrow, we're coming back. Tomorrow we're going to talk about YouTube. I'll go through the YouTube chapter here, and then we're moving into some other fun things. This week's going to be a fun week in the Traffic Secrets book. Alright, that said, I appreciate y'all. Thanks for everything, you guys, and I will talk to you all soon. Alright, 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.