Scaling Online Q&A: Funnels, High Ticket, Ads & More - Part 2 | #Marketing - Ep. 115
18 Feb 2026 · 37 min
In this 90‑minute Q&A recap from the Scaling Online event, Russell Brunson answers a series of live questions from attendees about building and scaling high‑ticket funnels, restructuring offers, and optimizing traffic sources. He repeatedly emphasizes funnel‑hacking proven models (e.g., the One Comma Club Challenge), converting coaching programs into certification products, and using 5‑day challenges to drive urgency. For a London‑based travel‑newsletter pivot, he advises against one‑time‑only offers and recommends researching level‑10 opportunities, leveraging Dream 100 research, and using AI tools (Perplexity, Claude) to find and model successful funnels. He walks through the MIFKI (Mini‑Information‑Free‑Key‑Item) concept as a bridge‑offer for energy‑healing coaches, and stresses getting on podcasts/YouTube to harvest video clips for ads. For a diabetes‑reversal membership, he details bridge‑page structures (advertorial, listicle, PR), split‑testing headlines, and using AI (Claude, Manus) to script VSLs, then iterating creative to combat ad fatigue. He also shows how to boost low‑conversion website calls by rebuilding the book‑a‑call VSL using swipe‑files and AI‑generated scripts. For a high‑ticket workshop, he suggests adding upsells/downsells, creating VIP upgrades, and constantly rotating VSL angles (propaganda, MK‑Ultra) to keep CPA low. Finally, for an AI‑SaaS startup, he recommends turning webinars into live software demos that force trial sign‑ups, testing multiple avatar hooks ("make money with AI" vs. founder‑focused), and mass‑producing ad creatives with AI. Throughout, Russell promotes the 2CCX/Prime Mover programs, the importance of continuity offers, and the use of AI tools for copy, research, and ad creation.
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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 wanna 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. What's up everybody? Welcome back to the show. I hope you enjoyed the Q&A session from our last episode. As I told you, I was doing a Q&A for the Scaling Online event that we did and did about 90 minutes of Q&A at the end and had so much fun and so many cool questions. And so I thought I'd share them with you guys here. So if you, hopefully you enjoyed the last set of questions. This is kind of the conclusion of the questions from the event. And I hope you get a lot from it. So hopefully in the future you have a chance to join one of our challenges. I usually do live Q&As at the end of the challenges like this, and it's just so much fun to have a chance to hang out and talk to you guys. So, all right, with that said, I'm gonna go back to the conclusion of the Q&A from the Scaling Online event. This is the Russell Brunson Show.
So up next we have Chris and Chris Irwin Davis. Yes, Chris Irwin Davis. Uh, he is a university professor, AI research scientist. His offer is tech career coaching plus coding level AI education for Gen X mid-career pros who want to stay relevant in six-figure jobs. His plan is to run YouTube ads to a webinar to a consult call. So the question is, what funnel would you build first and what would you skip?
Cool. Price point is $6,000 basically. Cool.
Uh, correct.
Okay, great question. Um, I would do exactly what— like, literally you should just funnel hack the One Comma Club Challenge. Because on the One Comma Club Challenge, we sold an offer. It was $5,500, so basically $6,000. So basically same price. Um, You are teaching a career on tech coaching, so I would look at like, how do you restructure your offer from being just coaching to certification? I mentioned earlier today, certification is the easiest thing that we sell, especially for people who want career, like career pros who wanna stay relevant. The best way to stay relevant is to be certified in a thing, okay? I'm working on another certification program right now because certification programs sell so well. It's in a very similar industry to what you're talking about here, but not exactly the same, but very similar. And so someone who is in a career, who wants to stay relevant, the best way for them to stay relevant, even if they never actually learn the thing, is to add something else to their thing, like their little initials after their name, you know what I mean? Like the BA, da da da, like whatever it is. And so what someone in this role wants, they want certification more than they want coaching, 'cause certification means they can go to their employer or to a future boss or someone they're trying to get hired, like, I am certified in, in coding-level AI education, whatever your thing is, right? So if you just structure it differently from a coaching to a certification, that's one of the biggest things. It's just restructuring how you make the offer. The difference between coaching program and certification program is not a lot different. Coaching program, you tell them what to do. Certification, you tell them what to do and then you have them go through the process to see if they actually know how to do it and then you certify them, right? And so that would be the biggest shift I would make is how you structure the offer and then I would do a 5-day challenge just like One Calm Clip Challenge. I would go funnel hack it, I would model it, look how we do everything, And I would do that exact same thing. So yeah, like I said, just for context, the One Calm Club funnel is, in my career now, I've been doing this game 25 years, the highest converting funnel I've had so far. And so I would look at that, 'cause your offer would plug into that framework flawlessly. So there you go. Chris, just model what we just did, 'cause we perfected it. Hope that helps.
All right. Nice job, Russell. Up next, we have Sophia, and Sophia runs a London family events site/newsletter. Monetization with locals is tough, so she's pivoting to international tourists with premium trip planning products. So I think the question, since tourists only buy once, should she start with a $100 scalable product, high volume, or a $1,000 premium service, lower volume, higher delivery cost? And how would you structure the funnel email in a mostly one-time purchase market?
Okay, so a London family, so they have an email newsletter for people who— we're pivoting to international tourists with premium trip planning. Okay. So it's almost like a travel agency? Is that what it sounds like, Miles?
It kind of sounds like a travel agency.
So tourists are coming in—
Or thinking of shifting to a travel agency. So right now, a newsletter for local Londonites.
Okay.
And looking to having a hard time monetizing locals and trying to branch out into people traveling to London and doing higher ticket packages.
Gotcha. Okay. Um, all right, step number 1, I would say some businesses are really easy to make money with and some are a lot harder, right? Um, and so you're at a spot now where you can pick any business you want. There's a billion different ways you can make money. And so it's like, should, like, you gotta rebuild whatever it is anyway. Should you rebuild in a business where someone's only gonna purchase once? I would say no. So if you were here and I was your best friend, I'd be like, you know what, that does seem pretty sexy and cool. The event newsletter seemed pretty cool. This seems kind of cool, but the problem is like, people are just gonna buy once. So it's gonna be really hard to grow and to scale. And the only people who are gonna buy are people who want to come to London, There are international tourists who want to come to London, right? And so it's like, that's a good business, but it's probably like a level 1 or level 2 opportunity, right? Versus you're gonna put in the exact same amount of effort to build level 10 opportunity if you just think about this bigger, right? So there's a lot of money in trip planning, things like that, but if you shrink it down to a spot where you're only focusing on one area, man, it significantly stifles your ability to grow and to scale. And so I'd be coming back thinking like, is this the right business to be in? 'Cause you did the event newsletter, you found that's a hard business. So here's another one, I'm gonna, pivoting to international tours with premium trip plan products. In a market where customers are only likely to buy once. So how do you change that? It's like, instead of doing it, instead of picking a market where the customers are only likely to buy once, how do you find something where a customer's likely to buy over and over and over and over and over again? 'Cause you gotta pick your business, so pick one that's gonna be the easiest to be successful with, not the hardest to be successful with. Does that make sense? I remember, man, this was probably, it's probably a decade ago now. It was New Year's Day, no, it was more than a decade, dang, it was way pre-ClickFunnels, so pre-ClickFunnels, pre-everything. I had a business that I didn't love. It made some money, but I was like miserable. And I remember it was New Year's Day, and Tony Robbins posted a video, him and Sage were out there on the beach or something, and they're like, hey, it's New Year's, and obviously you can change any time you want, but New Year's, a lot of people think they can change now, so, he's like, I wanna invite you to change. If you're in a relationship you're not happy with, Change. If you're in a business you don't love, change. And then he just kind of went through like 10 different things. And I was sitting there, I was like, but I can't change, I put so much time and effort into this, I was like freaking out. But then like, I was just like, I'm not happy. What if I just changed? And I was like, but I can't 'cause like, this mental battle all day New Year's Day. You're like, but I'm gonna improve this, I'm gonna make it better, and like, da da da, it's like, or what if I just legitimately just said, I don't like this, let me change and figure out something amazing.
Right?
And so if you have like, why would you pick a market where the only customers are gonna buy once? You're just putting yourself under undue stress and pressure, and I'm not sure why. Versus like, if I wanna be in the travel business, cool. Like, who are the travel, like, this goes back to Funnel Hacking 101, who are the people in the travel business who are crushing right now, doing something I would love to do, having a ton of money, and they're having fun, and they're like, look at that, like where's that little segment of the market happening, and go find that and funnel hack it. So I'd go back to the research phase and like, okay, that, like, again, I don't know how much research you put into the family events newsletter ahead of time, but if you did a lot of research ahead of time before you ever jumped in that, you would've known that like, this is really hard to sell, monetization, like, the companies who are doing, like, who's making a million dollars a year doing this? Is there anybody? If not, like, why would you get in that business? Like, I wanna be able to see like, hey, there's 100 people who are crushing it in this model, therefore I will pursue that model. And if not, don't do it, okay? So I recommend, if I was you, step number 1, I'm not sure if you've used Perplexity yet. There's a lot of different AI out there. Perplexity is the best for research. I go on perplexity.ai probably, I don't know, Google Perplexity AI. It's the one that Rogan uses now on all the Rogan podcasts. They sponsor him. But I go there and be like, hey, I'm thinking about— actually, I would start with your existing business. I would type in like, I'm running a local family event studio. I sell things. I'm struggling with monetization. Can you show me 10 people who are successfully doing this model and making over $1 million a year? And you'll go research, pull back, like no one's doing that. You're like, dang, I shouldn't have built my business there. Then like, hey, I'm thinking about doing this, is there anybody out there who's doing $5-10 million a year in this model with one location? Let me know. And he's gonna find out, probably like, nope. And be like, huh, here's what I'm really good at, can you find somebody else who's doing this right now, doing $5-10 million a year that I could funnel hack, I could model, who's having success, because I'm only gonna build a business if there's a proven, pathway ahead of me where I can model and make it work immediately. And he'll go out there and find a bunch of research and bring it back. Like, that's what I'd be looking for. Like, if you're gonna be rebuilding anyway, build on a solid foundation that gives you the ability to grow and to scale. Don't build on something where you have all these limitations already happening. It's like if someone comes to me like, hey, I'm a chiropractor. I'm like, why would you do that? I love chiropractors, but like, you're in a local area, you're in Boise, Idaho, there's 2,000 chiropractors in our valley here. Best case scenario, you're making, I don't know what they make, not that much, 'cause like, you have so many constraints, so you have to be people, your customers have to find you within this local radius, You're not gonna drive too much further, there's 22 other people just like you. Why would you start that business? Why? It's insane. Take your skill set and start a business that's global. You can do a heck of a lot less work and make a whole bunch more money by just taking your skill set and applying it to a business that's a level 10 opportunity versus a level 1 opportunity. And so for you, that'd be my biggest recommendation. Think through this ahead of time because you're gonna spend the exact same amount of work building on a level 1 opportunity versus level 10. Only difference is you're gonna make 10 times more money, 10 times simpler, 10 times easier if you pick the right business ahead of time. So that'd be my feedback for you and for— yeah, hopefully that helps. And obviously, honestly, for all you guys, make sure you're building a business you actually want long-term. 'Cause it's gonna be the same amount of work to build a business that does $100 grand a year as it does $10 million a year. It's just about the opportunity you pick up front.
Awesome. And, you know, the 2CCX program and Prime Mover Foundations, that's one of the first focus is building a level 10 offer.
Yep, and when you jump into CCX, that's, we, module 1, deep in that, like, a level 2 opportunity versus level 10. In fact, fun fact, he doesn't like to give credit to anybody, so, but there's public podcasts of him telling this story, but there's a guy you guys know, probably one of the biggest influencers right now, and he came into my coaching program, and at the time, he was, he owned 3 gyms, right? And he's like, why can't I grow? I said, well, you're in, you have a level 10 skill set in a level 1 opportunity. Right, like that's it. Like you're stuck, like no matter how good you get, you own gyms, you can't grow beyond, like that's your level 10, like that's it. And they shifted from there, and he's like, hey, what if we coach gyms, help them launch gyms instead? I was like, cool, that's like a level 8 opportunity with your level 10 skill set. And he blew it up. And they sold that business and created a new one, it's a level 10 opportunity, help them, you know, and then from there, and he's blown up, he's the biggest influencer in the world. But he was broke coming into my world because he was, Using his level 10 skill set in a level 1 opportunity. And that's what I told him, right? He shifted, done that twice now, and rolled up, and he's got one of the biggest businesses right now. So, everyone's like, we know who that is. Yeah, he doesn't like to give credit where credit is due, so I'm not gonna, but yeah, there it is. It's kind of funny. But he definitely was broke when he showed up in my world, so we'll leave it there. We showed him how to sell online, then we showed him how to scale online. So, yeah, if you know, you know. Who we got next?
All right, up next we have Silvana Reed, and she sells energy healing sessions and music to help women move out of survival mode and into creating the life they want. She's currently working on messaging through short-form content to drive people into a MIFG and a newsletter and plans to run ads soon. So the question is, is that the best foundation to start making sales quickly Or what would you do/change/add to get traction?
Cool. Do you think the energy healing session is like a coaching program or is it like a course, you think? We don't know.
I'll see if she posts in the chat and maybe we can find out a little more there.
All right, if you're in the chat, how do you say this, Savannah? Oh, okay, course plus group coaching. Thank you for, okay, that helps, Kev. Very cool. Okay, so I sell energy healing sessions and music to women to help them get out of survival mode and create the life they want. I'm working on a resistance program, Mifkey, plus newsletter, and plan to run ads soon. Cool. One other question, do you have an existing audience, Savannah, or not yet? Savannah. Savannah. No audience, okay, cool. All right, so what I would say is, yes, I think the structure's correct. So what I would do, Mifkeys are a great thing to do when you're on your virtual book tour. 'Cause it's hard to like go to, let's say you're on a podcast or YouTube channel and they're interviewing you and they're like, where can we get more information about you? And you're like, yeah, go sign up for my $3,000 coaching program. Doesn't work very well, right? The reason, not the reason, one of the reasons why I write books and I give them away for free plus shipping is 'cause when I'm on a podcast, someone's like, hey Russell, where can people learn more about you? I'm like, oh, well actually if they want a free copy of my book, if they go to dotcomsecrets.com, they can get a free copy of my book and it's just free, you know, they just gotta cover shipping and handling, but that's how they can learn more about me. It's an easy thing to drop, and the host's like, wait, you're giving the book for free? That's amazing. Yeah, so like, a MIFKI is a great thing you can do on a podcast, and when someone interviews you, at the end of time, they're like, so where can someone learn more about you? You're like, oh, actually, I have a really cool offer, a really cool thing where someone can come and they get a 14-day trial, I'm gonna give them a free da-da-da-da-da, just for testing, you know, test driving out, all you gotta do is go to russellsmifki.com or whatever, right? It's an easy thing to promote. So I would say yes, right out of the gate, get your MIFKI, get your continuity in place, you know what I mean? With your course and your coaching program. And then again, the first thing I would do, even before ads, I mentioned that a little earlier today if you heard that part of it, before I do ads, I would go figure out what are 10, 20, 30 podcasts I can get on? 10, 20, 30 YouTube videos I can get on? Starting there, putting yourself out there, and what's cool about this, this is one of the big secrets, okay? The highest converting ads that I have for almost everything that I sell are the video clips of me on someone's podcast, or the YouTube video. And so what happens is you go out there and you go on these podcasts and people interview you and then you have a chance to talk about your free offer that someone's gonna come and get and you start promoting and getting people in there, right? And then you can take the video clips and you can chop those things up and then when you are ready to start running ads, those become the ads that drive people back into here leveraging credibility of the podcast, YouTube post, whatever that might be. But I think, yeah, for you, I think that'd be 100%, I would do that. I would set the MIFT key, set the newsletter, and getting people into the course and the coaching program, and then go out there and start getting your free media, start earning the traffic, getting people coming back there, and that's where I would start for sure. So hope that helps. Anything else that I missed? Yeah, so the question is, what's the foundation to start making sales quickly? So that's the quickest way, is getting out there. If you haven't read Traffic Secrets yet, go read that book. Read about Dream 100. I'll show you exactly how to do it, how to find the people, all that kind of stuff, so you can get on the shows. But that'd be the fastest way to start going and start running really, really quickly. So, very cool. Thanks, Savannah. Hope I said it close to correct. Alright, Jeff Gundry.
Jeff Grundy, Grundy, Grundy. This is— I'm the worst at this, so I apologize. I can't even say my own name. Alright, so the context for Jeff is he runs a $49 a month diabetes reversal membership. Traffic is native ads on diabetes sites to a bridge page offering a roadmap guide, which is the first 3 chapters of his book, to a funnel. Funnel includes a $7.95 audiobook, a $1 bump for a 10-day trial, and then upsells to coaching. So the question is, how would you improve the transition from native ad to bridge page to funnel to increase opt-ins and conversions?
Cool. Um, so native ads are one of the harder platforms to get to work. Um, usually native ads are coming out to cold, just so you guys know. Those who don't know what native ads are, it's like Taboola and sites like that where it's like you're going for cold traffic. And so because of that, you have to warm somebody up because there's like, it's, you have to get them from cold to warm before they're gonna be willing to buy from you. So a bridge page, this is context for those of you who don't know, so a bridge page is basically, if you have TubeBuddy, you're gonna be getting your site on like CNN.com, right? So it's like those little banner ads at the bottom, like the lady pulling her face like 6 inches, you know, or like holding the weird worm, and you're like, what is that? Or this magic fruit. Someone clicks on that, it goes to a bridge page, it tells a story to try to warm them up, and then the bridge page tells a story about so-and-so, and then they go over to there, and that's where you get someone to opt in and get into that person's funnel. So the biggest thing is just, you know, with conversions on that kind of stuff, it's so much of just like a lot of different, like the bridge page, there's different bridge page structures, right? There's like the advertorial, it's like a long-form, you know, story type thing. There's also like the top 10 list, like top 10 ways to da da da, and the answer's like always back to your thing, right? Or there's like a lot of different advertorial or bridge page structure to look at. And so I'm not sure exactly what your bridge page looks like. That'd be the first thing I'd look at is I'd go try to find like 10 different versions of advertorial style bridge pages and just testing a bunch of those, right? That'd be my first, my first pass is structure. 'Cause when I'm testing something initially, there's different layers of testing. Like my first test is really like just test these two different headlines. It's like, let's look at radical different structures, right? So again, with bridge pages, there's probably a dozen different structural ways you can structure a bridge page. So I'd look at a bunch of versions of that. I would be test driving like different ones, so again, advertising, advertorial, article, PR version, listicle, yeah, like those kind of things. If you don't know what those are, just go to the Taboola sites and go find them and just click on a million different ads. You'll start seeing a whole bunch of variations of it. So I'll be trying a bunch of different versions of that until you find like which one's gonna be the winner. And then from there, it's like, hey, now let's dig down deeper into the messaging. Claude is insanely good at writing. If you guys aren't using Claude for writing, like, it's insane. And so I'd go, like, after you go start finding all these different bridge pages, is like building out a swipe file of it, especially ones you see a lot, ones that people are spending a lot of money behind, and I'd be feeding those into Claude and be like, hey, we decided we're gonna do a listicle, here's 30 cool listicles that we found, go analyze all these listicles, tell us what they worked, why they worked, da da da, and it would build like a structure for how listicles work, and say, okay, now based on what you know about my offer, write me a listicle based on my offer, and then 30 seconds later, bust out like an insane version that you can go and test, okay? So for me, it's testing. Bridge type, bridge page types, and after you find out the winner, then coming in and then mastering copy, going deep on the copy, that's gonna help you to figure out like the best version of that to run, and that's what I'd be looking at. So, and then also like, I would just keep putting people, like, we're getting better and better conversions just by putting our existing pages through Quad and just being like, alright, give me 3 more headlines, give me 2 different ways to structure stuff, and like, just keep coming out with like just ways to keep beating it and keep beating it. It's just playing that game of split testing and conversion and just kinda going from there. That'd be my main things, and then also, Jeff, I'd also look at, I'm assuming you're doing native ads, 'cause it's hard to get diabetes reversal stuff on Facebook, Instagram, things like that. So I'd be looking at who are the people that have your dream clients in other places, right? So I had a neuropathy supplement a decade ago, and so we kept getting shut down on Facebook and Meta, and like we couldn't, it wasn't Meta back then, it was Facebook, but we couldn't get, most things to work there. We did native ads, which worked, but then for us it was email newsletters. Email newsletters to conservative sites crushed for us. It was where we had most of our growth coming from. It was just tons and tons of email newsletters. So I'd be looking at those kind of things as well, 'cause email newsletters you can usually, most times bypass the bridge page, go directly to funnel. But conservative Republican news sites are, those are people that are buyers. They skew older demographics, so diabetes stuff works really good to those kind of lists. Like Newsmax, Arcomax, Newsmax, Arcomax, um, yeah, like that's the rabbit hole I go down. So I would just like take what I just said, plug it into Perplexity, like give me 50 newsletters like this, it'll pull them all out, and you have a whole bunch of places to go start buying ads on. So hope that helps. Jeff Gundry.
Jeff Gundry, great job.
That's the last one?
Uh, we have one more left. Oh, and this is from Sherwin. Sherwin states that my website sells $60,000 a year and I've made over a million dollars with it. So congratulations, that's fantastic. Sells to individuals and not to businesses. Sherwin teaches two technical design programs, one for $4.5K or $4,500, or both for $8,000. Only 1% of people who visit schedule a call, and 25% of callers buy. So what do you suggest Sherwin does with the website to increase sales and convert more visitors? Also, what do you recommend as a continuity offer?
Awesome, alright, easy. This is so fun, okay. Your gap is only 1% of people who visit schedule a call. 25% of callers buy, so that number's insane, so don't jack with that one. Whatever you're doing there, keep doing that. 1% is what sucks, okay, so the biggest thing it means, your copy on your landing page is not good. So it's funny, 'cause I literally just did this last week. So we're working on a new book-a-call VSL. So I did what Russell always does. I am a funnel hacker to my soul, to the core. So what did I do? Before I decided to write the VSL for my book-a-call, step number one is go find every single VSL book-a-call that's actively running and people are paying a lot of money on ads on. So I spent 2 or 3 weeks, me, Ben Moote, we were going through and just like searching for book-a-call VSL funnels, right? And so I did that. We went and found, I don't know, a dozen or so VSL book-a-call funnels that had really good copy. And they weren't my industry, some were, some weren't, important, so it doesn't have to be in your industry, but it's just finding like what is the scripting on a really good VSL that's getting someone to book a call. Okay, so I find those, step number 1. Step number 2, the AI that I use to transcribe, I use Manus. So I take all these VSLs, I go to Manus.ai probably, I don't know, I say Manus, can you go and just transcribe all these? So it transcribes all the videos for me. Okay, so after we got the videos back, I get transcripts, then I go into Claude, because Claude's the best writer, I say Claude, here's all these VSL transcripts, go and analyze them all and tell me, like, what's the structure of all these VSLs, okay? And my guess is most of the successful VSLs, their video structure is like 90% the same. They're all gonna have their deviations of 10%, but 90% of the structure's gonna be identical. It was for me when we did this process, right? I'm like, cool, now I have that. I said, now here's all the context of the thing that I'm trying to sell. Take what I sell and weave it into that structure you just found, and it writes a new version, and then boom, now you got a winner. You go back, record the VSL, replace it with the one you already have, and I bet you go from 1% to 5% or to 10% or to 20%. But that'd be my thing, is just keep redoing that VSL process until you've got something that's gonna crush on it, right? Because that's the bottleneck in your business, is just getting that thing to work, right? If you got from 1% to 5% and you keep 25% of callers buying, like, you just 5x'd your business by doing a new VSL. Which should, I mean, honestly, that, the research phase could take you a couple days, the writing phase take you 20 minutes in Claude, and then you recording it and getting back out there. So that'd be the biggest thing I would do. I mean, exactly what I did. We have a book called VSL that's gonna be going live here in probably a week or so, and that's exactly what I did. And yeah. And then second question is, how do you suggest as continuity offer? So what I would do is that after someone books the call, you can place a MIFKI on the thank you page of a book a call. Hey, thanks so much for booking the call. Before you jump on, I highly recommend taking this offer. It's gonna give you some of the core foundational stuff that we do. Go check that out right out of the gate, and then that way, between them registering for the call and then picking up the call, they have a chance to take the MIFKI, and you get a lot of people who already, who just jump in right there. So, I hope that helps, but yeah, I would just be, I mean, if it was me, I mean, you literally could do, every week, test a new VSL, 'cause if you get 1%, only 1% is booking a call, I mean, the book of calls should be high. Book of calls, I don't know the exact numbers, but I mean, I would guess 20-something percent is where you should be at. So if you can get from 1% to 10 or 20, your business doubles, triples very, very quickly. So I mean, it'd be worth testing a new VSL every week, right? Until you want it 10%, then 12%, then 15%. And if you keep the 25% callers buying, you're off to the races. So, very cool. Looks like we had another question just popped up here.
We did. So this one's from Elaine, and the context is that Elaine runs paid workshop that converts 27% of people into an $18,000 high-ticket offer. ROAS of 11x.
Okay, so if your ROAS— before we get too deep, if your ROAS is 11 times, that is insane. Okay, you should just spend more money.
Hopefully I read that right. Maybe it's 1.1 because 11 is insane, but it looks like 11. Uh, the real constraint is ticket acquisition. Cost per $47 ticket is around $429, but that performance only holds when doing heavy organic promotion alongside the ads. When organic effort decreases, paid traffic alone does not convert. Ads by themselves simply don't carry the front end. So structurally, my model is dependent on high-intensity organic energy to make paid acquisition work. This creates two problems: it's not repeatable at scale, and it requires significant personal effort and limits frequency. So the question is, if you were looking at this purely from a business architecture standpoint, how would you redesign the front end so ticket sales become consistent and scalable without requiring heavy ongoing effort to warm the traffic? What structural shift would you implement so the workshop can run regularly and predictably independent of my personal organic push?
Cool. Love it. Alright, scroll up a little bit so I can see it. Okay, so it sounds like your event crushes, so 27%, $18K, which is amazing. $47 a ticket and your acquisition's $429. So my first thing I would do is I would make sure, 'cause I don't know what else happened in that funnel, but I'd have some upsells and downsells, 'cause for us right now, selling a line ticket is $100. It costs us $350 to sell a ticket, but we get about $140, 150 of that back from the funnel, right? So for upsell, one upsell, all kinds of stuff. So my guess is from $47, you could probably, you know, $47, I bet you probably get $80 or $90 should be what you're getting back on the ticket sale if you've got the right upsell, downsell sequence, okay? If you look at how we did it for this event or how we did it for the Selling Online event, it's very similar. Basically, we have a VIP upgrade which is, this one's different than Selling Online, but basically, you know, it's a, We have a fly-on-the-wall version for like, I think something like, is it $97 fly-on-the-wall? $97 for VIP night fly-on-the-wall, and then we had like $497 for ask a question, which the very first time we did live is that way, now that option's sold out because it's evergreen now, so we don't have that, but the VIP day is still, we have $97, and then we have another version upsell for like $497, which is, it'd be worth you just funnel hacking selling a line funnel to see how it works, but we have a $497 offer where basically after the event's done, they get a call from one of our coaches, to answer any questions they had from the challenge, and then our coach has a chance to upsell them. So it does great, 'cause it's like a presale call, but also it's a $497 offer, so it gives back a lot of contribution back to the ticket cost. So that's one thing I would do is to increase that. The second thing though is over time, your CPA's gonna go up no matter what, right? So if you look at Selling Online, we ran it for a year, and at first, you know, this is the sad part, you really wish like the ad costs would stay the same over time. What happens is the more people see it, warmer, the colder traffic, you know, like the cost just goes up. So for us, like the first month of selling online, it was like, it was a $100 ticket, we were paid $100 a ticket. I'm like, I'm a genius, I'm the smartest man in the world, right? And then it got, then the next month we ran it, it went from $100 a ticket to $150 a ticket. But I'm like, I'm still pretty smart. Then it went from $150 to $200, then $200 to $250, then $250 to $300, $350 to, you know, $300 to $350. And I'm like, I'm not as smart as I used to be. And it kept getting up to like $500, $550, $600, right? And so for me, and what most people do is that like, when it hits like $500 or $600, like, ah, it sounds like we got $249, you're like, ah, this sucks. And so that's where we came up with that $500 upsell, which helped contribute back to it, but it was still like, it got $500, $600, $700, and just like, dang, do we shut the whole thing down? Like we have a machine that's working, converting, like everything's perfect, I don't wanna screw this thing up. So what do we do, how do we fix this? Okay, so for me, what I did is like, I need a new way to sell this. I need a way that's gonna speak more to the colder audience, right? 'Cause again, I was speaking to warm traffic, like selling online, how to write your own webinar, how to like, that was the messaging here and it worked. But over time, more and more people see it, and so there's ad fatigue, people see the messaging, people already registered, so the costs go up, up, up, up, right? So for me, it's like I had to transition to cold, like how do I get a new message that's cold, that's new, that's unique, that's different, okay? So what I did is 3 months ago, I wrote a new VSL, actually let me pull it up. Can you pull up secretsofpropaganda.com? I'll show you, but I wrote a VSL. I used Claude AI to write the thing. We had a team design it. It wouldn't have to be as intense as the one that I made, but it could be, right? It could be very much similar, but it's a new VSL that's got a colder message, okay? And this VSL, it's a 50-minute-long VSL. Yeah, cool, they can show you guys the page. You've probably seen the ads for this, okay? But we've been running this now for the last 3 months or so. Sorry, I need to give my team a heads up. They're going to pull back here in a second. We can do screen to screen if that's easier, whatever's Okay, cool. So if you go to secretspropaganda.com, you'll see this right now. Scroll up to the very top. I think we're missing the headline. Oh yeah, here it is. Okay, so this is like propaganda secrets exposed. It's telling the story about Edward Bernays and Sigmund Freud, and it's like this kind of a cool story, different angle, right? And so there's the video. And actually, do you want to click play and just watch it for like 5 seconds? Can we pull the audio in or no?
We should be able to, yes.
How many of you guys, by the way, have seen this VSL or seen these ads? Right now, as you watch this, your brain is being hijacked. You think you're in control, but there's a backdoor to your mind that 99% of people don't know exists. In 1914, a discovery was made that should have stayed buried. The hidden switches that control human behavior were exposed. Exposed. For over a century, a select few have used this knowledge to manipulate millions. They've made women smoke, nations fight, and complete strangers stampede to buy things that they never even wanted. The man who started it all wrote, "We are governed, our minds molded, our ideas suggested by men we have never heard of." He called it the engineering of consent, and it's being used on you right now, every day. The ad that read your mind, that video that made you buy that That post that made you furious? It's the same playbook, same psychological triggers, same invisible string. In the next few minutes, you're going to discover the exact system that's been hidden for over 100 years. The same dark psychology that built empires, toppled governments, and created billionaires. The question is, do you want to remain the puppet or learn to become the puppet master? Alright, some of you guys are like, I saw that, I watched part of it, I watched the whole thing. Okay, yeah, so that VSL we put out there 3 months ago, and what happened is the ad costs dropped again. It went from like $700 or $800 an ad thing to like $200, and then it was like $250, $275, $280, so right now the last, man, the last 60 days, we've been kind of settling in about $350 CPA. And it's working good. And it's nice because it's scaling too, really well, to cold traffic. Because it's not saying how to write a webinar, it's like, this mind control, persuasion, like, I tried to make a colder message, right? Again, think about me, oh, here's my, here at the food court, I'm like, who wants to learn about how you're being persuaded and mind controlled, like, da da da, like, and people in the food court be like, that's actually interesting, right? It's a bigger thing, so I'm thinking like colder traffic messaging. But if you watch that, it's a 50-minute-long VSL, that at the end of it, sells a $100 selling online ticket, okay? And so that's running right now, so what's happening? That's running, and it's good, we're leveled out at $350, but I know within, I don't know, 2 months, 3 months, 4 months, the costs are gonna start creeping up again, 'cause so many people have seen it, right? Okay, you get ad fatigue. And so then I'm like, okay, how do I do this? So right now I'm in the behind the scenes working on a new VSL, okay? So I have a new VSL, the angle, so cool, using how the CIA uses MKUltra to mind control people, I have an ex-CIA agent who's actually gonna be doing the voiceover for it, And so that's, I'm working on that one, then that one will come out when this ad cost gets too high, boom, next one comes out, we run that one until it goes, so it's just like always making new creative on the front end. Now again, you don't have to be insane Russell where I produce a 50-minute-long video where I'm just, you know, going crazy, but you could. Or you can make a VSL where you're just talking to camera, right? You know, nowadays that, I don't know, now that AI can write such good scripts, like we bought a, Where's that big teleprompter? Can I show it to you? Is it hard to show? So I bought this, oh yeah, okay, we'll pull it back. So we'd just write a VSL, okay, have Claude write a really good VSL for my market, put it out, and then we have a teleprompter. I hate teleprompters, so I bought this big one, it's like a big screen TV, and they put it on and I speak at it, right, and I do my entire, you know, 20, 30, 40, 50 minute VSL in front of it. Sorry, I didn't even warn them ahead of time. This is what you get. This is like the VIP day stuff, okay? So this is the one we bought. You guys see this? It's huge, but I can see the whole thing. I see the whole entire script, and so they have like a teleprompter, and they go through, and I just sit at a desk and I read it. Actually, will you pull up one, Driven67, just to show them like literally what we did, right? And so like, if you don't have a teleprompter, you can get smaller ones, but anyway, it's really cool. And so we set this whole thing up. And then they put it on there, and I sit at my desk, and I just read the script, the whole thing, and then we take that, and then from there, like this is a good example of one. So this was much cheaper and much easier to produce. So push play on this one for a second if we can. You wake up and your inbox pings. Your browser opens, you start scrolling through social media. The top diets, the best business plans, productivity hacks, the universe of information is endless. With one good prompt, you can ask AI to create a hyper-personalized tactical plan for you to succeed. And yet you're not at your dreams yet. You're not living with the body, the bank account, or the freedom that you want. The one that you know is possible but feels just out of reach. So what's missing? It's not the strategy, it's not the blueprint, it's not the gym membership or the course or the magic tool. It's you. And here's the thing that nobody will talk about. You are— Okay, so that one was like much easier to produce. It was 90% of me just talking to the teleprompter and we put in like B-roll and some music and some stuff afterwards, make it engaging, but it's a lot easier. And this one I did on a treadmill because I thought that would be interesting. So I was literally on a treadmill reading a script. It was hard. For the most part, you guys will notice, I, again, we're writing, again, last week I wrote 3 50-page-long VSL scripts, and then we came in and recorded them the next day, and now they're being produced. But it's like, you can produce really good copy so fast nowadays, and so it's just like, knowing that like, ad costs are gonna go up, so let me make a new VSL to sell this thing, and then do it hitting different angles, right? One angle is how to do webinar, one angle is, for me, secrets of propaganda, one of them is CIA MKUltra mind control things, right? And just picking different angles, different ways to hit the same message from there. So, anyway, someone said, have you ever run a 50-minute-long video as a Facebook ad? Yes, we 100% run it right now. So we have the short version of the ads that run through the VSL, we have the entire hour-long one on there. I started doing it because if you look at, Vishen Lakhani has a 90-minute-long VSL that he's running as an ad for Mindvalley and it's insane. And so we ran the Secrets Propaganda as a 90-minute ad and it's crushing. So anyway, that's just the way to start thinking of this. As your ad costs start going up, it's new creative, new landing pages, new messaging, and that'll help you get that $400 back down to $200, $250, right? And it's just playing this game. It's like ad cost keeps going up, okay, I need new creative, boom, new one comes in. Ad costs go up, And a lot of it's just like rotating all your creative as well. Like selling online, we hired a new team to start writing ads for it. In month number 1, they rolled out 1,100 new ads for us, right? And it dropped the CPA directly. So it's like a lot of creative, a lot of ads, a lot of things. And so you gotta learn how to leverage AI to start mass-producing creatives and mass-producing VSLs, 'cause that's how you can start lowering all the costs across the board. So anyway, there you go. We're geeking out, you guys. Hopefully having fun. I heard there's one more question, is that true?
That is actually very true.
People keep, I, people are like, keep buying so they can get their questions answered. Like, you guys just bought right over here.
Um, anyway, we love it. So this is from Clint Rogers, and the context is our AI SaaS converts once people try it, but webinars flop. We're launching a Techstars-backed AI SaaS that creates AI digital twins, AI brand ambassadors, hyper-realistic spokespeople that generate content, ads, selling assets 24/7. We have 84 paying customers at $99 to $599 a month. Cold outreach plus paid ads work once people try the product, but 2 live webinars flopped— low show rate, poor conversion. So the question: should we keep iterating live webinars or switch to automated webinars to test hooks, offers faster? And should we pivot the avatar, stop pitching the make money with AI opportunity, and go straight to founders, businesses with a direct software offer, or run both paths?
Cool. Alright, Clinton, great question. So, when we first launched ClickFunnels, you guys know the model. We did the webinar, thank you page, get them for a trial, webinar, I'd show them the software, and we'd sell something. And that worked for us for a decade. It stopped working as good. So Anthony Morrison started doing this with one of his Shopify offers. Where he shifted his webinar from just like showing a demo how the software works, like we're gonna build it together. And so he does the first 30 minutes of his webinar and then he's like, alright, go get a trial right now. And he's like, if you don't get a trial right now, you need to leave, 'cause there's no purpose for you to be here. It only works if you get a trial. And he puts a 10-minute countdown clock and he waits. He's like, whenever he gets a trial, we'll go. Okay, everyone got a trial? Alright, everyone else, if you didn't get a trial, hang up. There's no purpose for you to be here. You don't need, like, just hang up, like, anyway. So he ended up going from like, you know, a couple percent of people signing up for a trial, it's like 70% of people who are on his webinar end up creating a trial, right? And then he does the demo with them, so they're actually in the software using it. So you say when somebody's using the software, you win, right? So when we did the One Comma Club Challenge, you notice I did the exact same thing. What happened was day number 1, we talked about the new opportunity. Day number 2, we got them in the software. So it's like you actually create, I did the exact same thing Anthony did, I was like, hey, in 10 minutes now, we are building a funnel. In ClickFunnels, you have to have it open on the screen, we're gonna be doing it together, so you have to have an account, so like go set up, and so people had to go actually go get a trial and then come back and then we actually built together. And that's how we ended up getting 1,800 people through the trial, or the thing to create a trial, then they actually use the software and then they stick longer. So for you, I would do some version of that, like don't look at a webinar, you're gonna get a quick demo, but look at this webinar where like they're actually doing it with them, right? And so like getting them to open the software and use it, and like look at the live webinar from like just, just pitching something, but like using the, if you're doing the perfect webinar structure where secret number 2 is literally like them with the software and you guys working together doing something, like getting something so they get the result while they're actually live on. So that'd be the first shift. Second one is, is just if people, if you have a low show up rate, my guess is Make Money with AI is gonna also attract like, you know, the broke people who wanna make money with AI who are gonna register, those ones are less likely to show up. They're easier and cheaper to get to register, but they're less likely to show up. And so it could be shifting the market, or it could be shifting both. Like having a landing page talking about making money with AI, having a landing page talking about founders, and the webinar could be exactly the same, right? It's similar to selling online. Like we can go to sellingonline.com and buy tickets to selling online, or we can go to secrets— or secretsofpersuasion.com and learn about Edward Bernays and Sigmund Freud, and then sign up for— like there's different things all coming to the exact same thing, right? Just try a different version, try pitch money with AI, try another one, different reg page, the same webinar, and it's gonna attract different people, right? And so it's putting out more different hooks out there to grab more people. So that's what I work at, is shift the webinar to get people to actually build with you live, and then try a couple different hooks, different landing pages on the front end to bring different avatars into it. And from there you'll find out which avatars are the best, not just like the cheapest, but like which ones which ones actually show up and which ones actually buy, and then you can cut the ones that don't and just focus on like going deep on the ones that are most likely to buy from you. So, yeah. There you go, Clint. Is that everybody then? You guys, what a fun VIP day. In my head, I was like, it's probably about 3 hours long, but I had no idea. I was like, I don't know how many questions we got, but I had 3 hours. But hopefully between like showing you guys all the examples, the first 90 minutes was fun, Q&A last 90 minutes was fun, there were a lot of unique questions from different perspectives. Hopefully all you guys got something really, really cool with that. So, with 1,000 ads with AI, what will this look like going forward? I don't know, I don't run the ads manager, but whoever runs ads, like, it's mass ads. It's, you gotta create a lot of ads nowadays, because that's who you're competing against. People like me are creating 1,000 ads a month, right? So, anyway, alright, really quick before we break for today, Let me know, what is your guys' biggest aha or takeaway from the last couple days? Or maybe just this session. I'm curious, like, what were the things that you guys got that, like, that was the thing that, like, your biggest aha, your biggest breakthrough? Whoa, someone posted a big long question. Anyway, I like seeing that. Obviously, everyone's coming through here from a different lens when you come in this training and come into the program, so just curious what which ones that you guys are— like your biggest aha, your biggest takeaway was. I hope all you guys got something really, really cool. As you guys are typing those things in, using perplexity to search for people, doing the funnels, very cool. Reminder to double down on the Dream 100, great. Focus on continuity, levels of continuity, mass ads, mini VSL angles, perfect. Email list is everything. Grab the pile of cash in front of you. Clint had 20 takeaways, cool, cool, cool. Using AI to talk to people as well. That's smart. Oh yeah, AI, like, anyway, I love our copywriting team, but we let go of our copywriting team because I'm able to write with AI. I can write such good, such fast copy when you learn how to use it. It's really cool. And like I said, those of you guys from 2CCX, when you come out here in a month or two, like, at the event, I'm literally teaching my process, showing you my swipe files, what I'm doing, how I'm doing it. So if you're in 2CCX, you're gonna backstage pass all that kind of stuff, which would be cool. "Let's see, understand the big picture." "Big breakthrough, I already do everything but it's like a draft for excellence, it's not done yet, that's all." Very cool. "Focus on email lists, more creatives." "The nifty continuity is customers gathering and paying for ads." "Scaling Online 2.0." "Selling Online, great sequel." "The list is pile of cash." Yeah. "You did 10 drag demonstrations for one book, do more." Yes, do more drag demonstrations. They're fun to do, it's like the coolest part, you get to hang out with your audience, share cool things. It's really, really fun. I think that, you know, my plan is we're putting out a lot of front-end offers and stuff right now as a business, just during Q1, Q2, you know, throughout. And then when everything's in place, my plan is just for me not to create any more products at all. It's just like doing more dramatic demonstrations, putting people in the same book, same product, same everything. I need FHL to return. Looking for my Level 10 opportunity. Very cool, very cool. All right, you guys, I appreciate you all. Thanks for hanging out for the last 3 hours. And honestly, the last last 3, 4 days. I hope you had a great experience scaling online. If you did, send us testimonials, post it on Facebook, tag me in it. It's fun for us to see the results and ideas you guys got from it. Have my team pull up the page again one more time just so if you guys haven't yet. Again, a bunch of you guys joined 266 in the last 2 days. We're excited to have you guys here. Excited to have you out here in Boise. We're gonna go deeper on some of the AI stuff. But if you haven't yet, join 266. It's the upgrade from here, right? You guys know this is a level 2 dramatic demonstration. We practice what we preach. We served you guys like crazy for the last 3, 3 and a half days, but if you haven't yet, I would recommend joining us in the 2CCX program. It's really, really good. It's the next step. It's gonna help you guys. Again, 2CCX is going from where you are today to $1 million in sales. Like, that's the window where this program is for. And then from there, you know, after that, we'll get you in a circle and keep on growing, keep on scaling along with you. Again, I'm not gonna go through the whole offer. You can see it on slides here. But it's gonna be helping you to implement the linchpin, getting all these pieces done in place so you can grow and you can scale. You know, having an offer is really good. Again, selling online is about creating an offer, creating a webinar, sell that offer, getting a funnel and getting traffic. I was like, now you have an offer, you're making money, you have cash flow coming in, scaling online's next. And how do you take that? We're building out the value ladder and we're structuring it through the linchpin, and then we can start growing and start scaling. So if that's the phase you're in right now, where you're like, you've got an offer, it's working, cool, come to the linchpin, now it's gonna restructure it, build out the value ladder, put it in the right space, and start growing and scaling it. That's the next phase for all of you guys. So the way to upgrade, again, go to scalingonline.com/go. If you are already in the Prime Mover program, the $10,000 you guys paid for Prime Mover gets applied towards this, which is really cool. And so, yeah, so if you invest in that, you're getting a huge discount because we're rolling it in. If you haven't done that one yet, then come in here, you know, sign up right now for $2,500 a month or $25,000 for the year and jump right in. And if you have any questions, again, we have an AI assistant line set up. This is our first test with this. Hopefully it worked really good. You can call 1-208-248- 800-800-8726 and talk to an AI person, and if you get stuck or you have a question, they can book you a call with one of our coaches and they can walk you through. Or if you're like, this is cool, but I think I need to do the Prime Mover coaching program first, like, they can hook that up with you. If you're like, I'm already past a million dollars in sales, I wanna jump into Inner Circle, they can hook that up with you. Or for most of you guys, just come into CCX and plug in and have some fun with us. Let's run from where you are today to your one comma club award. And get you to the next tier and the next level. So, very, very cool. So, alright guys, I appreciate you all. If you have any other questions, again, hit up our team, there's the phone number. If you're ready to get started, scalingonline.com/go. I hope you guys enjoyed this experience, it was really fun to put on for you. It's just fun for me to talk about scaling stuff. I don't get to talk about this stuff very often, and so thanks for geeking out with me at a fun level, and hopefully you guys got ideas and insights to help change your business and change your life. Appreciate you guys all, and we'll see you guys all on the next training, the next event. All right, see you guys. You guys know I've written a few books and people always ask me, how do you stay focused long enough to actually finish? Because let's be honest, writing isn't hard. Staying in the zone is hard. Email pops up, texts come in, you open one tab and 45 minutes later you're watching something random on YouTube. That's why I use Freewrite. It's a distraction-free writing device built for one purpose: to help you get words out of your head and onto the page. No notifications, no internet, no browser tabs, just you and the draft. When I sit down with my Freewrite, my brain knows it's time to create. If you've got a book in you or a sales letter or the next big idea you've been putting off, go to www.getfreewrite.com/russell and grab yours. Turn off the noise, turn on the words. Your future bestseller is waiting.
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