What Shania Twain Taught Me About Being Relevant

Hey, this is Russell Brunson. I want to welcome you to today's Marketing in Your Car. Welcome to the Marketing in Your Car podcast, where you can increase your traffic, conversions, and sales in just 10 minutes a day. And now, here's your host, Russell Brunson. Hey guys and gals, everybody out there driving either to or from work, or hanging out in your cubicle, or at home, or in bed, or wherever you are hanging out with me tonight or today. Appreciate you guys. I'm heading home from the office right now, and I was just Had a long day. We did a, we have a thing called Deck in a Day we do for all of our Inner Circle members where they get to come in and we do a full day consult. Well, an hour-long consult with them but then with like 8 people throughout the day. So it was like 8 hours and I'm a little bit fried and I'm heading home right now to go to the Boise State game. We got a cute little handicapped kid we're taking with us so we gotta get there early to get him into the stadium and it's a lot of work but it's gonna be a lot of fun. So really excited for that. Hopefully my energy level will stay up 'cause I am beat right now. But wanted to talk to you guys about Something interesting I learned from Shania Twain. Now I need to admit, first off, I'm a huge Shania Twain fan. I've had a crush on her since I was 18 years old. I was actually at a, my senior year in high school we went to a wrestling tournament and the wrestling tournament was out in Florida and our parents didn't come with us. It was like a whole bunch of wrestlers with our, I can't believe our poor coaches did that and took us on that. We went there and so we were all in this, you know, in a hotel room like jammed in like 20 wrestlers in one hotel room and anyway MTV was cool back then. I don't think it is anymore, but it might be for young kids, but I don't think it's cool. But it definitely back then was still cool. So every day, every morning they'd turn it on and every morning this song came on from this beautiful girl named Shania Twain and it was the song "Looks Like We Made It." Anyway, I fell in love with Shania back then and it's been awesome ever since. Anyway, so fast forward and it was interesting. We went to her concert and it was fun. We had a great time. But what was weird to me is like, first time I'd ever seen her live in person, and I, like my distinct thought in my head was like, hey, it looks like Shania Twain's mom. That's what it felt like. And I'm like, oh, I'm not 18 years old anymore. She's no longer 30 years old or whatever she was back then. And you know, we're all getting older and it's different. And I think that they were saying this like, Shania's like her last tour ever and all this stuff. And we're reading online and even though like first time I heard about her was in 1998, I guess she'd been touring and doing stuff since 1992. So 1992 till today, which is, I don't know how many years that is. About 20 years? It's a long time, right? A long, long time. And it's interesting that people hear Schneid Twins coming in town and they still pack the house, tons of people. And it was really, really cool. So maybe start thinking about a question that I think is important for me specifically and for you and for everyone who's trying to sell stuff. And the question is how do we remain relevant? You know? It's interesting. I got started in this business 12 years ago. And in that time, I could list off pages and pages of people who came in who were like the hot stuff in a couple different markets that I've been in. And they come in and they come in with a lot of energy, a lot of like fanfare. They come in, it's like, "Wow, these guys are amazing." Within a year, year and a half, 2 years, these guys disappear and they're no longer relevant. Okay, you see it with celebrities all the time as well. I remember I had a guy write a sales letter for me a couple years ago and one of the cases he talks about in it was And we had a sketch and it was like, this is hotter than tickets to a Justin Bieber concert or something. We never launched that sales video. In the future I was always going to. And now I look at like Justin Bieber's whole career's dead and I'm like, crap, I could never use that sales video 'cause that's no longer relevant, right? He's no longer relevant. Like the whole concept. So if I ever do launch that sales video, I gotta resketch it with someone else who's cool. Which I just thought was kind of funny but yeah, I should just post the, the hand sketch out to Justin Bieber because it's funny. Anyway, so that's a good question. How do you stay relevant? Like, how do you stay? I've been grateful that, you know, in the 12 years I've been in this business, one that you guys would be familiar with, I've been in a lot of businesses, but one that my face is on the front of it, like, how do you stay relevant? And it's scary because I've gone through sessions or seasons or whatever you want to call them in my life, in my career, where I wasn't anymore. Okay, and it's like I felt that where like one minute you're the hottest thing on earth and next minute like nobody cares. And then you work really hard and then all of a sudden you become relevant again and then it goes away and it's like, man, how do you do that? How do you stay that way? It's funny, I had a talk, call, or what do you want to call it? Mike Filsaime, one of my closest marketing buddies, one of the first guys I met when I got online, and he came to Boise a couple years ago and we spent a couple days here just talking about business and stuff. And I asked him, like he was doing the Marketer's Cruise every year, and I was like, why do you still do that, man? Like you don't make any money, it's like a week away of your life. And he said, the real reason I do it is to stay relevant. He's like, that's what keeps me in the mind of my customers, my JV partners, my prospects all the time. He's like, if I stopped doing that, there's a chance I would slip and not be relevant anymore. And that was the first time I ever thought about like, wow, that's interesting. Like how do you stay relevant? Okay, and that's a question I don't know if I can answer today on this podcast, but I might, give you some hints or some ideas of things I've thought through and things I think have helped me in the times that I've been able to stay relevant. I hope I can continue to stay relevant for a long time until I'm ready to disappear into the night, which is gonna happen, you guys, mark my word. One day Russell will disappear and I'll keep doing the marketing of CARF for you guys 'cause I love you, but the rest of the world will not know I exist. No, but a couple things. So first off, I think a big part of it is you've gotta be like a ferocious learner. Because not only does whatever market you're in change a lot, even if things don't change a lot in your market, which is true with some things, people that are in that market, like there's cycles of things that are happening, things that are hot, things that are exciting. And if you, like I remember in the internet marketing space for a long time, membership sites was the thing, it was the hot topic. And I luckily came in and rode that wave. I came out with a concept called micro-content about that time and it blew up and made insane amounts of money. It was super relevant then. But then the buzz and excitement of membership sites went away. I had to transition away from microcontinuity. That product, if I launched it today, would not do a fraction of what it did when we launched it. I hit it at a time it was hot. One of my very first products I had success with was a public domain thing. For whatever reason, public domain, 1 or 2 years into my career, became this hot topic and everyone was talking about it. Yannick Silver is launching products. All these things were happening and I was like, "Huh." "All these people are talking about public domain. I'm going to make a public domain membership site." I came out and it was right timing and it worked and it was relevant. It kept me focused. I think that if I wasn't like a voracious— voracious, I don't want to say that word, but learning all the time and seeing what the trends are and learning and trying to be at the top of my game so that whatever was hot and relevant that I was in that conversation, I understood it, I could keep up with it and I could help expand those conversations and take concept like membership sites or recurring and like, how can I make this better? What can I do? How can I expand that thought or that concept, right? I think that that's one really, really big thing. I think that, you know, that kind of leads to another thing is like, is being prolific. Like, you know, again, how do you teach being prolific, right? It's hard. It's not something that you can just teach, I don't think, but it's understanding like, I have this thing called the prolific index. Some of you guys may have seen it where In the middle is like the sane zone, right? This is like when you go to high school and they teach you about the 4 food groups, right? I think that's in the middle. And then on both ends of it, I call the crazy zone. And the crazy zone is like where people are, you know, like crazy, like, "Hey, liposuction, you should just chop off your fat and you'll lose weight that way," right? And then somewhere between the crazy zone and the boring mid-zone is the prolific zone. And this is where like for me, I think I talk about like guys like Dave Asprey, I was talking about last week, like putting butter in your coffee to lose weight. That's the prolific zone. It's not mainstream where no one's gonna give you money. It's not crazy where people are gonna think you're insane, but in between there, right? And that's the sweet spot. That's where you gotta be living. That's where you gotta be thinking. I have friends that are amazing at helping people lose weight, but they're so mainstream that nobody— it's hard for them to get a message out because their message is the same as everybody else's message, right? If you want your message to grow and to expand and to be shared and to go viral or whatever you want to call that, it's got to fall in between there. It cannot be in the boring zone or the crazy zone. It's got to be in the prolific. Even if you don't believe in the crazier part of things, you got to find the things you do and you got to tell stories and create things so that becomes exciting. That is the key. That is a big key to it. The next thing I think is, I don't know, there's so many things. I think it's being relevant not just to customers but to partners, right? Like how do you serve people that could potentially extend your message, right? I've spent a lot of time, especially over the last 12 months, trying to put a lot of time and energy into building relationships with with other people who I feel are very, very relevant so that I can ride on their coattails or I can leverage some of those things as well. Learning how to speak, learning how to sell, learning how to be good on camera so people are excited. This Periscope thing for me has been evolving a lot lately. It's been interesting to me. I love my podcast. I love this, but it's hard for me to grow this audience. It grows organically. And luckily there's a lot of word of mouth from you guys who I appreciate, like sharing this with other people. In fact, if you like this episode, share it please. But it's hard for me to inherently promote it. There's not good tools to like build your podcast, right? I mean, there's things you can do but it's not as easy. Whereas with Periscope, I've got a lot more things, a lot more tools I can use to grow that following. And it's growing, not super fast, but right now we're averaging, I think about 300 or 400 people are watching my webinar, or watching my Periscopes when they're live, which has been awesome, and then another 500 or 600, so almost 1,000 people are watching each one, which is cool. But it's been evolving, and I'm figuring, first I was doing these long ones, they were 15, 20 minutes long, and they were good, but I was losing people really, really fast, and I did one a couple days ago, I just called it a marketing quickie, and I shared it, and it was awesome, engagement, Sharing, everything was like way better. And so now I'm getting my platform down so that I've done 3 in a row, it's called Marketing Quickies, and they're quick like 5-minute long Periscopes that are fast, that are awesome, then I'm taking that, I can push it and it's growing and it's growing and I think that finding some of that and then being very, very consistent is key as well. And anyway, there's a lot of little things and so I don't know if I know the answer, but I wanted to kind of start the conversation, get you guys thinking and running that through your heads, 'cause I think it's important 'Cause just 'cause you're making money today, you might not be making money tomorrow. So be grateful for what you have right now. Be grateful for whatever platform you have 'cause it can go away. I've seen mine go up and down through the years and I'm very aware of that. I'm very grateful for what I do have and I want to stress for you guys that you understand that and be grateful for it. Do things you can to stay relevant because that's a big key. Again, I have friends who thought they would be forever and I watch them and most of them, they're not doing what they were 5, 10 years ago and that's kind of, it's a big deal. So hope that helps, hope it helps at least get your thoughts in that direction and yeah, I'm tired, I'm beat up, I'm gonna go home, go to the football game and have some fun. So thanks you guys, appreciate you and I'll talk to you soon.