Marketing From An Airplane

Welcome to Marketing in Your Car, the podcast for funnel hackers everywhere. You are now part of a small group of underground entrepreneurs who are trying to change the world through the products and the services that we believe in. But because we don't rely on venture capitalists, we don't have financial safety nets. So we have to do things differently. We have to do things smarter. We do that through an art and a science we call funnel hacking. This podcast will give you a glimpse at the daily life of a funnel hacker. So let's get started.

Hey everyone, this is Russell Brunson. I want to welcome you guys today to— it's actually marketing in— marketing your airplane. So hopefully you guys can hear me. It's kind of loud in here, but I'm literally in my own private airplane right now. So let me tell you the backstory. So earlier yesterday, Actually, it goes back a couple weeks ago. A couple weeks ago I went to a mastermind meeting at Dean Graziosi's office and a bunch of cool people were there. And one of the cool people was Brandon Bouchard. Brandon and I met probably 10 years ago and always respected him and kind of talked a few times but never really, really got to know each other. And that was the first mastermind we sat together for a full day and towards the end of it I was just like, man, if you look at like our industry industry and then the personal development industry. I mean, outside of obviously Tony Robbins, but in our world, me and him definitely have the biggest companies. It was just like, we never hung out. We never shared notes and talked about what's working, what didn't work, things like that. I messaged him a couple days later and was like, "Hey, we should get together and just hang out and just, again, share notes on what we're both doing and hopefully get some ideas." He was like, "Well," he gave me like 3 dates, like, "This day, this day, this day." and they're different parts of the country. I was like, "Vegas sounds perfect." 'Cause it's an easy flight out of Boise. So booked the thing and then yesterday morning I woke up like at 4 o'clock in the morning, flew out to hang out with them. We hung out all day and then I'll talk about what we talked about here in a minute but then at the end of the day I get a message from Melanie, my assistant. She boxed me and she was like, "Hey, your flight got delayed and there's a connecting flight and so that one you're gonna miss and so I'm trying to find you another flight." Everything direct sold out and all sorts of stuff. She couldn't get me out that day. And then Brandon's like, "Oh, don't worry, man, I'll take care of you." I'm like, "What does that mean?" He's like, "Hold on." He calls a couple numbers. He's like, "Okay, there's a jet picking you up in the morning and they'll fly you back to Boise." I'm like, "Are you kidding me?" Oh, hey, look at that. Oh, you guys can't see it. There's like a— I'm looking out the window and there's a jet flying past this jet. These are like those jet streams.

Cool.

Anyway, um, and yeah, literally he's got a— he's got an account with JetSuite and he just called them up and they flew to Vegas and they picked me up this morning and now we're flying, flying back to Boise and I'm literally the only person in this plane. There's 4 seats, 2 pilots, and it's the coolest thing in the world. So, uh, also by the way, we, we started— we're starting a vlog and so like I'm, I'm recording this so you guys in the future can go to our vlog. It'll be episode 3, which show this whole story behind the scenes and show me the flights. If you guys want to see the visuals and probably just see that thing that I just saw, that's where you can go check it out. Um, anyway, but, uh, so that's what's happening right now. I'm flying back home, uh, and you know, I was trying to fly in the morning, out at night, so I get back home for, uh, Ellie's soccer game tomorrow, but I missed it unfortunately. But same time I'm flying Friday, I'm flying the flight home, which is insane. Um, so I'm doing that right now. And, um, anyway, so what did On the flight home, I've been kind of taking notes on the cool stuff that Brendan and I talked about. I obviously can't share everything. Some things are just, I don't know, I just can't share because they were things he shared at the conference. And so there are some things I definitely can't share. So number 1 cool thing is this thing called JetSuite, which is what I'm on right now. Literally, they pick you up, they fly you, they, anyway, I don't know if they have it, if it's possible to get in Boise. That's definitely one of the first things I figure out. 'Cause like honestly, I walked right up, we jumped on a plane, we took off, there's no waiting. Like, and it's funny 'cause like I bill my time, like if someone wants to hire me for an hour, I don't even know what it would be right now. The last time I did it was $5,000 an hour, but since then I've had like 5 or 6 people try to do it and I've turned down 'cause I haven't had time for it. Let's just say it's $5,000 an hour. So I saved an hour that I wouldn't be in airports, probably 2 if you look at landing and coming. So that's 2 hours, that's $10,000 right there I just saved. Then on the flight, there's Wi-Fi, there's nobody here coughing on me and sneezing on me. If I had business partners or my wife or kids, I could have this cool connection time on the plane as opposed to sitting on a plane normally where you're cramped and miserable. That right there is awesome, so I'm going to look into that. Let's see. Okay, so another thing. What's interesting is Brent and I were talking, we have different superpowers that are different I think what I'm really, really, really good at is building out amazing front-end funnels that are profitable from day one. I look at every one of the funnels that we've been— especially 3+1 shipping funnels. All those ones are optimally designed so that when we put a dollar into advertising, we're getting $2 or $3 back out immediately during the point of sale. You guys have seen that. I talk a lot about that, all of our break-even funnels and things like that. I'm really good at that. Then I look at Brandon, and Brandon's not quite as good at the front end funnels. What he's really good at is somebody comes into his funnel, then for the next 400 days there's a sequence he goes through. He takes them through the 16 or whatever different courses he sells and pushes people to his events and does everything. He does 9 events a year. He never promotes any of them outside of the follow-up sequence that happens. He brings somebody in his funnel and then the sequence goes for 400+ days. Fills 9 events a year, sells all his info products, all his courses. I'm not really looking to share his revenues, but well over 8 figures, multiple 8 figures in this process. For him, he's got these starter funnels that aren't profitable up front. He drives the same amount of traffic. He says by day 60, he breaks even. 60 days to break even. He knows that, so because of that, he just goes and spends tons of money on Facebook ads, YouTube ads, and radio. Those are There's 3 big traffic sources right now, which is cool. I'm gonna be trying radio with my book, which I cannot even wait to do. And I look at my business, I'm really good at breaking into profit or being profitable right out of the gate, then my long-term funnels aren't that long. I think it's because like, and I talk about this with Inner Circle members, right? I think I had a podcast talk about this too, but like my creativity in our business for a long time was creating new offers and new businesses And then we got to $3 or $4 million a year, and then we transitioned from that to like having one focus, ClickFunnels, and creating offers to get people into ClickFunnels. We went from $3 million to $30 million, and then my goal from going $30 million to $100 million is focusing on new traffic sources. And I look at Brendan, that's what he's done, is he's just, he has these funnels and he's just focusing on traffic sources that he can bring in and then they break even after, hopefully within 60 days of bringing people in. And so that's kind of my big, My biggest takeaway honestly is that. So what he does typically, someone comes in his funnel and they'll be 2 or 3 weeks promoting one of his courses and they'll have a 2-week buffer time, which is 2 weeks of him sending amazing videos that just tell stories, build relationships, don't sell anything. And after 2 weeks of buffer then he brings people back into another 2 or 3 period where he's selling the next course. He's got a 2-week buffer, back and forth, back and forth for 400-something days, which is insanely cool. And I think that My problem why I haven't done that in the past is because I'm so excited about the new offer I'm creating all the time that like I don't want to put people in long sequences because like then I don't know how to tell them about the next offer. He was like, why do you keep creating offers? He's like, that's my problem, I got 16 courses. Why don't you just stop creating courses and just plug them into a sequence and then you can just focus on driving traffic and that becomes your focal point. And the interesting thing about traffic is traffic is like the one part of my business that doesn't require me. Which is interesting. The funnel part requires me, 'cause all my creativity, my voice, my videos, my, all that kind of stuff, but traffic is like, I can step back and it's John on my team and his team underneath him who drives the ads. That becomes the focal point, essentially because I love and I'm so good at creating blogs and publishing over and over and over again that I spend insane amounts of time, way too much time. Brandon told me, I think he takes, he takes 17 weeks off a year I think is what he said. 17, 17 weeks. That's like, is that 4 months? That's more than 4 months. Over 4 months a year he takes off. Which I can't do that, I don't do that. I'm always in hustle mode and I think it's because I'm always creating the next funnel and then we're using, creating funnel to push all the ads into that funnel and sell it as opposed to all these amazing funnels we've created, let's just put them into a killer long sequence and then focus on the traffic. Machine in the traffic park does not take my full time. Anyway, that was a big takeaway for me. That was a huge aha. So I started working with Brendan like, man, imagine if you took your funnels, you broke even, you 3x'd day 1 like we do on all of our funnels, and then you assume you break even day 60, you tripled over day 1, and then from there you kept doing what you were doing. So he was excited about that. So I was showing him all our ninja hacks to be 3x'd on day 1, and he showed me all my ninja hacks he can basically not work because he's got all his courses lined up in sequential— and it's interesting, it's like the logical sequential order of things. I always thought that Experts Academy was his biggest business, but it's not. In fact, High Performance Academy is his thing. That's his biggest— that's his mission. That's his date with destiny. Tony Robbins' date with destiny, which is his pinnacle. For him, High Performance Academy is his pinnacle event he's trying to get people to. And so all his funnels are focused on getting people in. He has no salespeople, no nothing. He also has a $30,000 a year mastermind and a $60,000 a year mastermind and a $250,000 a year. And all those masterminds, he doesn't have any salespeople to sell them. They all just come through funnels, which is insane. He's like, yeah, well, he's like, I'm like, well, the salesperson's really easy. You can consistently converse with people. He's like, yeah, I don't worry about that. I just put it out there and some people buy. And I just have enough traffic in the front that like one out of every 5,000, 10,000 will buy, like it still all works like crazy. Anyway, it was just fun to see this whole business through a different lens than my own, you know what I mean? Which was really, really cool. So yeah, that was one of my biggest takeaways. So for you guys, if you're all like me and you work too hard, I think that's the key is quit creating tons of new funnels, which I know we all love, it's so exciting. But focus on, it comes back to the follow-up funnels, the action funnels like we talked about Funnel Hacking Live. It's interesting, I think I did a presentation showing in December how for every dollar we made in our break-even funnels, we made $16.73 in our follow-up funnels. That was like with a short, like a 30-day follow-up funnel window as opposed to what Brendon's doing where it's like 400 days. Ah, it's okay. So anyway, that's what I'm doing now is I am literally sketching out my my notes from on my private plane. So crazy. On the plane, trying to figure out like how I'm gonna do that. What are the sequential order of my products? Like someone comes in, like my first thing I wanna have is Expert Secrets, right? And then from there it's like the DotCom Secrets, and then from there like what now is the sequential order? Like what are the pieces they need in the order they need them? And then what's the, like how can I do it in a cool way where we spend a couple weeks getting people into the program, a couple weeks now telling stories, building value, just making them Love Us, then transition back and forth and back and forth. I think my biggest fear when I look at this, I'm always like, you know, how am I gonna create a 400-day follow-up sequence? And I look at Brendon, he didn't do a 400-day follow-up sequence, right? He like built out one and then he built out another one. So I think I'm gonna do, this is my thought, and I may change it, but I'll share with you guys 'cause maybe it'll give you guys some ideas on your own, is I'm going to spend the next 30 days building out a 30-day funnel. So someone buys the book or anything, whatever they buy, what's the first thing I want to introduce them to? So they buy the book, they go through the initial book sequence or whatever, and then all those people from all my front-end offers, I'm looking at, I think we have like 10 or 11 different front-end offers to bring people into, right? All my breaking funnels I love. So I have a breaking funnel, they go through the initial sequence there, and if they do, then we dump them from there into, I'll probably call it an action funnel, call it like the first 30 days. And the first 30 days will be like, okay, here's the process for the first 30 days. Our number 1 goal, first 30 days, is get them to buy ClickFunnels. So boom, we'll take them through the sequence of this process and they'll buy ClickFunnels, you know, they'll watch the webinar, they'll get indoctrinated, we'll tell the story, all that kind of stuff, right? And from there we share a bunch of content, maybe some fun, like, live videos and just give them value. Then number 2 is like, okay, now they got that, now what's the next thing you want to take? And so then I'll probably call it like this, the second 30 days and then the third 30 days and I'll probably create action funnel for each one at the end of the first 30 days after I build out the second 30 days and I'll go back to the end of the first 30 days and I'll add in just a step in the action sequence that says when they finish day 30, move them to the second 30-day sequence. Then everyone, once they finish past that, then they'll be automatically added to the second sequence and that way I can just build out 30 days at a time. I'm not stressed out about like, not stressed out about like how many to go 400 days. Like, no, I'm just going 30 days at a time. Then everyone buys, they get dumped in the first 30 days. Here's the sequence they go through. Everyone will go through the same sequence, same everything. And then the end of that, then I'll start going the next 30 days. Whenever I get it done, then I'll dump all leads into the second 30 days and I'll hook it up so that anyone new coming through, when they pass day 30, they're going to be automatically shifted to the next action funnel. So it'll be kind of cool. So maybe after I do this whole This is actually a cool product. Oh crap, that reminded me of something else. Okay, so this might be a cool product I do is after I get like the first 365, like here's the first 365-day follow-up sequence. Like how many of you guys would wanna buy that book? It's just like here's every email for the first 365 days someone comes through our funnels. Anyway, so maybe I'll do that. Yeah, that'd be a cool product. So a year from now I'll sell that to you guys if you want it. And so that'll, Kind of cool. So this is a cool thing I got from Brandon, which is crazy. So this is a couple years ago. He did his— I can't remember which course it was, Experts Academy or— one of his products. He ended up selling— and they sold like 2,500 of them at like $2,000 apiece. So he made a lot of money. But then afterwards, he was like, what do I do with all these people? So he did a— and he was so proud of all the videos and the email sequence, all this stuff he had built. And so what he did is is he took all of the pre-launch videos and he burned them on a DVD and then got them all transcribed and then he took all the email swipe files, all that kind of stuff, got it all transcribed, he put them in this big book and then he sold, I think for $97 you could get the DVD and then the transcripts of the campaign. So anyway, so he sold it for $97 and from that, this is insane, he sold I think it was like Yeah, it was over 6,000 copies, 600 grand, 6,000 copies at $90 a piece of the marketing materials for people to be able to see and to model, which is crazy, insanely crazy. In fact, oh my gosh, I got an idea. So I've got funnelhackerswipefile.com, I think. What if I did that every campaign we did? Start selling swipe files. Oh, that's interesting. Or maybe I do it, maybe I just do it inside of FunnelU. I don't know, I don't know. Anyway, excuse my ideas. But I made an extra $600 grand after launch selling the launch materials to the same audience. 3 times as many people bought the marketing material as people that bought the actual product. So it's crazy that people buy the product, the $97 thing, seriously, it still sells those at events everywhere else. People buy that, then people go through all this marketing material and then they go back and they buy a $2,000 product now because they want it. And I was just like, dude, it's crazy. It's kinda like what Frank Kern does. If you look at Frank Kern's business model, he like creates a funnel, he launches it, and then afterwards he sells him showing you what he's did on that funnel. And that's it. It's like swipe files and here's the campaign plus swipe files. And it's insanely cool. So, anywho. So much cool stuff. All right, couple other cool things I learned from him. He's obviously, he's done two products with Oprah. So one of the interesting things he says is every one of his funnels he has to make sure it's Oprah-proof. He's like, 'Cause Oprah and her people literally go through all his funnels. He's like, 'It has to be clean enough that it's Oprah-proof.' I start thinking about that, like, are my funnels Oprah-proof? Or someone like Oprah that I wanna do a deal with came through and they'd be offended or they'd not like it or whatever. So, and I don't know, Oprah's obviously not someone I'm probably going after, but who is the person I'm going after? Who are the people that I wanna make sure would be, anyway, so thinking about that, like the copy and the positioning and all the stuff in your funnels, like who is the dream person you wanna go after? Like would it pass their inspection being like, oh, this is cool, not like scammy or spammy. Like I opted in one of my funnels the other day and there's some weird email that came out and I was like, ugh, I remember I hired this guy to write emails and I just like deal with that email and like it's not congruent with me or what I say. So that's something to think about. The other cool thing you showed me, how you do YouTube ads. So, they do YouTube ads. He has a YouTube ad that'll be a video of him sharing 3 tips from his book and then push people to the book. And if people watch that, then they retarget and watch video 2, which then shows 3 more tips and then pushes them to the book. And he retargets those people to video number 3, which is now a recap of here's the 6 tips I talked about before, pushes them back to the book. And then if they haven't bought the book after the 3 videos, then he puts them on a do not fix the list. Like, if they haven't bought from 3 videos, they will never buy. They have no hope, so you should just not ever follow and show ads again. It takes them to a do not pixel list, which is cool. So, it's kind of a cool strategy as well. What else? What else? Ah, so many cool things, but anyway, I hope that gives you guys some cool stuff. It was legitimately amazing, and now I'm sitting here in a huge jet, so I have a new love and respect for Brendan. I've always thought he was cool, but I just didn't know him. I didn't understand him. I think that I had kind of a misconception of him sometimes because— and it was interesting because like I always thought he positioned— like in his mind I thought he was kind of like me, like he positioned himself like a marketing dude, he's teaching marketing stuff. As I talked to him like it's completely opposite, like he thinks of himself as like first off an author and then like his goal, his whole dream in life is personal development and high performance and things like that. In fact, his next book is called High Performance as well, and it's like he spent 2 years with a whole research team creating things to be able to test and measure high performance, and that's like his huge passion. He's like, I always teach the marketing stuff. He's like, you teach marketing better than me. He's like, Frank Kern teaches marketing better than me. He's like, I'm not the best marketing teacher in the world, but all my people who come through all my high performance stuff, they wonder like, how do How did I build this company? So, you see, I do Expert Academy once a year, just like, here's how I do it. He's like, I'm not the best, but here's what I do. And he's like, it's become a big thing, but he's like, it's not my focus, my main thing. He's like, I don't promote it, I don't have any front end support. He's like, only way people even know about Expert Academy is on day like 200 in his funnels where he introduces it to people. I was like, that's really fascinating and interesting. So, anyway, I thought that was really cool. That's what I got. So that's all I wanted to share with you guys, I think, today. So I'm gonna be, I don't know when I'm landing, but I'm gonna keep taking notes and mapping this thing out. You guys will start seeing the fruits of this. My goal, my big takeaways from this whole meeting is to be able to take my amazing funnels and build out an amazing sequence that extends for, a long time and putting everything in sequential order and things like that. That's my number 1 goal. And then my number 2 goal from that is, uh, from that is to be able to take more time off. So he takes 17 weeks off a year. I don't know if I could do that. I think I would stress out. Plus he doesn't have kids, stuff like that, so his wife would go like, hey, let's go to Bali this week, let's go over here. So they book out, like, they plan out each month, like, where are they going? And it's crazy. I could direct some kids at school and all those kind of things, but same time I'd be like What if I took a good Friday off? What if I came home every day at 3 when my kids got home? What if I did that, I went to court or took a weekend with my wife or whatever those things are. So I'm gonna start playing with that. That was really inspiring for me. Oh, the other cool thing I got from it, I did a podcast the other day about how like twice in Boise that day I had people come up to me like, hey Russell, and they asked me questions about me and it caught me off guard. How to handle it. And it was cool, like we were sitting there eating lunch and some guy ran up, Russell Brunson! He's like, I'm a funnel hacker! And like, anyway, it was getting kind of awkward for me. I'm like, oh hey, and I didn't really know what to say and the guy left. And then like an hour later, Brandon and I were walking and some guy ran up to Brandon like, dude, you're Brandon Bouchard! I'm like, it's kind of cool we both had it happen to us while we were hanging out. But he approached and he handled it so much better than I did. It was so cool to see because I was just like, I was like, dang, like now I, anyway, it was cool to see that because he didn't do what I do, like act like an idiot. He turned around and was like legitimately excited, like, wow, he's like, you know who I am? Like, how did you know about my work? And the guy was like, you want to tell me? Like, oh yeah, it was cool. Like Brandon told me he learned that from Paul Abdul. Like that's what Paul Abdul did. He's like, first off, act like all excited, like whoa, and then ask him like, how do you know my work? How do you know what I do? And then they'll get excited and tell the story how they know you. And then he's really good at also, my biggest problem is I think I fear the conversation with people because I don't know how to end it, right? So I get stuck in these awkward situations like, oh, okay, and I run away. So what he does is really cool, he asks them that question and then he starts turning his body, like body language, like I gotta keep going. He's like, wow, that's really cool. And he's like, okay, well, we're in a rush. "We have to go, but thank you so much for being a follower and a fan. We're just so grateful for that." And something like that, and then was able to break away and leave. And I told him afterwards, I was like, "Dude, that was so good for me to see because I don't know how to handle it. I don't know how to take that kind of stuff. I'm not used to that, and it just freezes me up and I look like an idiot." And I was like, "That way you have it was super cool, and it was fun to see that live and in person." So that was pretty cool for me as well. Anyway, so that was the weekend. It was amazing. So now I'm sitting on a private jet and this is crazy. The only weird thing about it is like, you look behind me, there's like a little toilet seat and there's a little curtain. It's like, luckily I don't have to go to the bathroom, but if I did, that would be the only thing about private jets that are not cool because there's not like a real bathroom. It's just, it's like one of these seats, you lift up the lid and there's the potty, pooper, or whatever you wanna call it. Toilet, the crapper, whatever you want to call it, and there's a little like curtain that you like pull halfway over. And I guarantee you would stick this place up and the pilots would kill me. So I'm grateful I don't have to go to the bathroom right now. But other than that, private planes are cool. Note to self, if you take one, make sure you, uh, you go before you go. There's a practical advice. What'd you learn from parking your car? I learned if I ever fly on a private plane, you go to the bathroom before you get on, otherwise you're going to sneak out on the pilots and they'll hate you. Anyway, alright guys, appreciate you. Can't wait to implement some of the stuff. Hopefully some of you guys got some cool lessons like I did today. It was super awesome. Thank you, Brendan, if you're listening to this, taking the day with me. That was one of the cool things, like he was in the middle of editing his book, he was gonna take the whole day and just like, and he was so present and relaxed. I was like, man, if he was here, I'd be stressed out the whole entire time. Just coming back to like, he has his life structured to be able to handle this stuff, which was really impressive and cool to see. So anyway, I got something from it. Hopefully you got something as well from listening in. Appreciate you guys all, and I will talk to you guys all again when we get back on solid ground. Thanks everybody, bye!

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