Todd Brown Reveals The Secrets Of Successful Marketing Funnels, Big Ideas And Converting Browsers Into Buyers

How do you make business problems disappear? Wrap them in bacon. For business owners, marketing execs, and anyone trying to grow your business, pump your profits and make more while doing less. Welcome to Bacon Wrapped Business with Brad Costanzo. Sizzling hot business advice guaranteed to make you fat profits. Every week, our chefs will serve you proven recipes for ramping up your revenue. Now here's your host, Brad Costanzo.

Alright, welcome back to the show. This is Brad. I've got a great episode for you guys today and gotta tell you right away that if you have very little marketing knowledge or very little business experience and you're just getting started, well, I may geek out on you with my guest here on this show a little bit because we're gonna be talking about marketing funnels and customer value, increasing customer value and back end marketing and front end acquisition and all these other buzzwords that you may or may not be familiar with. But really what today's episode is all about is how to build what's called a marketing funnel, also referred to as a sales funnel. And kind of taking this basic. A marketing funnel or a sales funnel is simply the, the path or process that a prospective customer takes when they first come across you, your information, your website, your store, etc. And the path they take from being a prospect to a customer and all the steps in between, which increases how much they spend or how often they spend money with you, or the price or the frequency. That's kind of the essence of a marketing funnel. It's not that complex. It's simply, it's the same thing as when you walk into a clothing store and a salesperson greets you and says, hi, can I help you? And then the next thing you know, they're helping you a little bit. They're helping you add more clothes to your purchases. By the time you get up to the checkout counter, you know you're spending probably a lot more money than you may have went in to do in the first place, especially if you're somebody like me. But that's what marketing funnels and sales funnels are. Today I'm bringing on a guest named Tod Brown. Now, Todd is one of the foremost experts in creating marketing funnels that are highly profitable and primarily online. So we're going to talk about online marketing funnels. And one of the things that Todd is an expert in is the automation of these. Because if you try to manage these manually, they can be an absolute nightmare. If you learn how to use tools and strategies to automate the process, you can set it up, manage it tweak it, but it just churns out money on autopilot. Now, Todd has been in the trenches for probably a dozen years. He's a direct response marketing consultant and expert. He's worked with some of the top entrepreneurs and business minds out there, people that I consider either mentors or folks that I've read and studied everything they've put out, from Rich Sheffrin to Jay Abraham, Clayton Makepeace, John Carlton and many others. His client list consists of students from over 23 countries around the globe, many of which are the most well known marketers in the online marketing community today. Todd's strategies, tactics, copy hacks have been used literally to create tens of millions of dollars for not only himself, his coaching students and his clients. So I want to take a moment to welcome you, Todd, here, if you're on the line. And welcome to Bacon Wrap Business, where we're going to share some of those sizzling hot business ideas of yours.

I love it, man. Well, thanks so much for having me. I'm super excited to be here and really honored man to be a guest.

Cool. Well, as I told the folks, we're gonna geek out a little bit and I've got a lot of questions that, you know, that I just have personally, both whether it's my own funnels or for some of my clients as well. And I followed your work quite a bit. I think I told you offline. I remember when, when my, my first introduction to you is when you partnered up with Rich Sheffrin. And when was that? How long ago did you start working with him at strategic profits?

Oh, my gosh. That was. I don't remember the exact year, but that was, that was many years ago. Let me see, that could be.

Six. Six years ago or so, give or take. Yeah.

Yeah. So I've been in the business for about eight years. And I say in the business, I mean, really kind of online and direct response digital entrepreneurship. That's where, when I got into the business, I found Rich pretty soon. And then I noticed when you started working with him, I'd start to hear your voice on the video, sales letters and other stuff. So it made me kind of really pay attention to what you were doing there. Now, were you. What was your role there? Were you pretty much in charge of implementing all of Rich's wild ideas or what was your.

So, yeah, that was kind of an awesome. That was an awesome period in my, in my professional life. You know, I met Rich prior to moving to South Florida. So I, I grew up in Central Jersey. And I was working full time for a company that owns several upscale health clubs in New Jersey. And I ended up, you know, making this decision that I was gonna, you know, gonna go out on my own and finally really work full time on my intern business. And at the time, I was selling, let me think, I was selling marketing and business building products at the time to massage therapists. I decided it was time for me to really go full time. And that's when I decided that I was going to move Rich a few thousand dollars to have him coach me, because he is. That's his forte. That's his area of expertise. So I met him through that program, through having him mentor me and coach me in the area of business systemization. And then I told him, look, I'm moving to South Florida. Turns out that where I moved was 15 minutes away from the original Strategic Profits office. We became friends. He started to ask me to kind of come in and lend a hand when he was working on some reports and some projects, just as a friend. And then during one of these meetings, I said to him, hey, I'm thinking of sharing some of the stuff that I'm doing in my companies. I had started a couple different companies and a couple different niches. I said, I'm thinking of sharing some of the stuff that we're doing that's working with the main Internet marketing community. And he said to me, well, look, he said, look, come aboard at Strategic Profits as a partner, run the marketing department, and then you can release whatever products, whatever programs it is that you want to release. You'll be able to do it under the Strategic Profits brand. You'll have the entire marketing team. All I ask is that you run and guide the marketing team. And so that's what I did. And it was an incredible experience. That's when.

To work alongside of guys like Jay Abraham.

Jay coming in or flying out for the day to meet with Jay. We had copy that was being reviewed by Clayton Makepeace, even John Carlton. That's when I first met Mark, Mark Ford, or most people know him under his pen name, Michael Masterson. And then he and I became friends. And yeah, it was an awesome, awesome time.

That's really cool.

Yeah.

And it's actually, there's a parallel with my life and what you did there. So, you know, I had a. I had multiple different products and multiple different niches. I sold my info product business a couple years ago, actually maybe about three years ago now, and I started. I had a few consulting clients, actually. They were somewhat. They were started off as friends. They became clients just because I started helping them out a little bit. First started off as free, then they started saying, listen, I'd love you to come and work with me. One of my clients, Kent Clothier, in the real estate investment niche, so he's got a very large software training coaching business in that area, did the very same thing. We were brainstorming and masterminding, sharing ideas a lot. He said, listen, I'd love to have you come on and kind of direct my marketing strategies and help me manage my marketing team, implement kind of this stuff based on your knowledge. And it's been great. I still work with him as well as my other stuff, but it's been just a tremendous opportunity myself to work with somebody else, spend their money on all of my harebrained marketing schemes and funnel ideas. You get to learn quite a bit, test quite a bit, see what works, deploy that with other clients, etc. And it led to my growth tremendously by being able to work with folks that just like with you and Rich. And it's awesome to see some of the stuff that you're doing on your own. You've got some amazing products out there and you can tell that none of that education and experience was wasted on you.

Yeah, it was amazing, man. And look, you know, in all fairness, there were peaks and valleys. There were ups and downs. I mean, I can tell you, you know, today, Rich is one of my dearest friends. You know, we were just texting earlier. We were meeting on Tuesday. I've done some, you know, consulting for strategic profits. But throughout that time together, man, I could, I could share some stories with you of, you know, from moments of, you know, hugging it out, to moments of almost coming to blows hugging it.

Out, to slugging it out, ye.

And everything in between. And so, yeah, it was, it was quite an adventure, man.

All right.

To say the least.

All right, so let's scrap the rest of this interview and just talk about all the bad times.

Believe me. Listen, I could, I could, I'm sure we could fill up several podcast episodes with, with those. And you know what? There's a lesson in that for everybody, you know, and I know that this is a little bit off topic, but I think that it might be valuable and that is that like, you know, oftentimes you've got to be care when you as, let's say, a student of marketing, especially within the, you know, typical, you know, IM community, Internet marketing community, you've got to be so careful that you don't get Sucked into what is presented to the market. Like, everything is great, life is dandy. I'm working an hour a day and we're making millions of dollars, you know, every day, day in and day out, because in, I've never seen that. And I've worked with the biggest, the baddest, the best, the most successful. And you know, it's, you know, you've just got to be careful and you've got to recognize that, you know, business is peaks and valleys. It's not a straight shot up to the top. And that's okay. You know, we ran many campaigns, more than most people would, you know, care to admit, that didn't. It didn't work, you know, or didn't work well. And we had to go back to the drawing board and tweak and then it still didn't work well and we had to go back to the drawing board and there was, you know, like, it wasn't like, oh, I'm at strategic profits now and everything is a grand slam. That's what I thought going in.

There's no Midas touch out there.

Yeah. No. Not at all. Nope.

It's, you know, and it's, it's one of the biggest frustrations I see for a lot of people myself when I started, you know, including included where. Yeah, you do. In order for, especially if you're selling how to, you know, how to create a business online or how to be an entrepreneur, etc. You. Nobody, your sales copy is not going to work well if you sell it the way you just said it, right? Like if you're, if you're too real. And it's, it's a shame that.

It'S a shame that we can't be really real saying, listen, there's gonna be a whole lot of work. And that four hour sleep, that four hour work week. I'm convinced that the, that the, you know, Tim meant it to be the four hour sleep week because that's what it turns into. And it is the ups and downs and it' you know, we've all faced them and entrepreneurship is not, it's not for everybody. It's not easy. You have to have the, you know, the guts to go on that roller coaster ride. And I've heard many people say, I don't remember who said it first, but marketing is nothing but guessing and testing. And you wouldn't have to guess and test if everything worked out right the first time.

And it usually doesn't. And that's what really, it's a, you know, that's why we take a marketing funnel, for instance, and we have to constantly try new things, test new things, tweak them. And as you know, probably better than most, you can start off with a marketing funnel and it's humming along and then all of a sudden it stops working. And there's nothing more gut wrenching than watching something stop working nearly overnight. And you have no idea why.

Yeah, yeah, I think, yeah, no, you're so on the money. I think there's a couple things that you said in there that are worth kind of talking about a little bit in terms of marketing. And so I'll kind of lay them out and then if they're. There's one that jumps out at you that you really want to dig in, you know, dig deeper into. Let's do it. But you know, number one, you know, it's kind of interesting that you mention Tim Ferriss. And you know, I was fortunate. Before Tim got, got really big, I jumped on the phone with him and for like an hour I had the opportunity to really pick his brain. And the thing that was, is really kind of is really interesting and has so much application to the development of marketing funnels is that the who Four Hour Work Week was this big idea that Tim really, that Tim came up with and kind of tested in the marketplace with his Google AdWords to kind of see what resonated with the audience. Like, if you think about the Four Hour Workweek, it is really a book on outsourcing, how to outsource, how to leverage, you know, how to leverage other people. But yet, you know, there was, there have been, both prior to Tim and after Tim, lots of folks that have tried to roll out training products, courses, presentations on outsourcing and that didn't and don't resonate the way the Four Hour Workweek does. And it's an example of. Right, it's an example of a big idea. Packaging your message under the umbrella of a big idea that stands out in the marketplace, that captures the market's attention. That's compelling. That's interesting. That's, you know, that' and that's what, you know, that's what, that's what Tim did. The other thing very quickly that I just wanted to touch on, you know, was this idea of, you know, like when you said, you know, look, you can't present this message.

To the market if you're selling how to. If you're selling an information product, you're selling guidance advice, you can't go to the marketplace and you can't say, you know, it's going to be tough work. It's going to, you know, blah, blah, blah, you know, because it's not palatable to the, to the, to the market. It's not exciting, it's not, it's not, you know, compelling. Well, I think, and this is something that we can talk about a whole bunch, but you know, I think this is where a lot of new marketers get hung up when they're trying to figure out what is the best way to articulate my message through my marketing funnel, through my marketing campaign. And they, the default ends up being this hyperbolic, hypey adjective and adverb laden copy that just reeks of.

Exaggeration.

Yeah.

And so.

It'S almost like if you want to go all the way to the other end of the spectrum, man, the million dollar and multimillion dollar marketing campaigns, the million dollar and multi million dollar marketing funnels. If there was two major things that they. And you know, the first two that I would say, number one, they're all built off the back of a big idea. And that I first learned and had drilled into me from Mark Ford, from Michael Masterson and, and the second, and let me tell you that Agora, the, you know, $600 million a year information marketing, you know, behemoth has become that behemoth because of the big idea, come up with big ideas.

It's remarkable how, how they do that.

It is. And I've studied that so extensively because of how critical it's been based on what Mark has shared. The other thing is just that I was going to say is so big idea. The second thing is that their copy.

Is not hyperbolic. It's not laden with adjectives and adverbs. It's based on claims and proof, claims and proof. And yeah, so I love that stuff.

You're so right. And I noticed because I'd asked you prior to this and just a little questionnaire which, you know, do you have any favorite books, et cetera. And you said you're one of the only people to have said one of my favorite books. I came across great leads. You put that down. Oh my God, that's such a good book by. And did Mark write that? That was Mark.

And yeah, that was that couple of them. Right. Michael Masterson and John Ford, no relation to. But yeah, that is one of those books. That's one of two books. The other book being Breakthrough Advertising by Gene Schwartz, that every marketer should have those two books and every single marketer should be reading those books at least once a Year, every single year. Breakthrough Advertising, in my opinion, is hands down, bar none, the single most valuable book as it relates to marketing that's ever been published. I don't think that he comes close.

I've got that book so highlighted, and I can't. That is the. I heard you so shout out to my buddy Sweeney's podcast, Digital Triggers, which you guys should go check out. But I. You were just on there, and I heard you bring up what I don't think is brought up enough, which is the levels of. What is it? Levels of market sophistication. Is that what he calls it? Yeah, sophistication, right. Not the. Yeah, cool. I've parroted that to my clients so many times, it has become such a foundational principle of, you know, how do I sell this? Well, let's talk about where your market is. I want you to. Because I know you know that really well. Let's. And my listeners may not, but expound on that a little bit.

It's five levels, am I right?

Yeah. Five levels of marketplace sophistication. And to me, this is so freaking valuable. Like, you get this, and this should be the starting point of every marketing funnel, every marketing campaign. And so the five levels of marketplace sophistication, so first and foremost, it was really made popular or popularized this, this, this, this idea by Gene Schwartz. And the idea behind these different levels of marketplace sophistication is that as your prospects are exposed to more and more advertising messages, to more and more advertising promises, to more and more advertising claims and benefits, what happens is they become less and less responsive over time to those same claims, promises, and benefits. And in order to continue to generate response, in order to continue to move prospects, and I'll give an example in just a second, your market marketing message needs to evolve as the sophistication level of your prospects increases. So again, five different levels. And the easiest way to explain it is I typically use this example of a fat burner, right? The fat burning pills that you can take. And so at one point in time, there were, you know, there were no fat burners on the market. There were. People were still overweight. People still wanted to lose weight. There were no, you know, there were other options for weird crazy exercise equipment and whatnot.

There were no fat burners. And then some entrepreneur, some company came out with the very first fat burner. Now, when that company first came out with their. Their fat burner because there were no other competing messages, because the market wasn't. Hadn't been hammered yet with other advertisements, all that first supplement. But like, what happens in every market, competitors saw that, wow, this is, you know, this is working. You know, like, you know, companies saw, hey, maybe we should come out with our fat burner. And, and so more, and came into the market and more and more companies, like, what happens always, you know, the marketing, the marketing message becomes kind of incestuous. And you know, everybody's saying the same thing. And, and then what happens is the prospects, they, they go, if you will, to the next level of marketplace sophistication. They no longer are responding to the same, you know, in the same level to that original message. Now, at the second level of marketplace sophistication, this is when you typically see the expansion of the claim. So this is when, and this is where you will see, listen to this because this is so important. This is where you will see the majority of marketers in terms of crafting their marketing message operating. And so at level two, what you see is marketers will expand the promise. They'll blow up the promise, the claim even more. So instead of take this pill and you'll lose weight, it's take this pill and you'll lose seven pounds. Take this pill and you'll lose 20 pounds. Take this pill and, and you'll lose 30 inches.

Yeah, the hype just explodes at this point.

It's just, you know what, it's, one guy says, hey, he said, you know, it's like that old, you know, it's like, yeah, it's like the old, oh, he's got seven minute abs. Let's come out with six minute abs. Let's like, you know, right, like, and, you know, oh, they are saying you can lose 15 pounds. We're gonna say you can lose 20 pounds. Well, what happens is that eventually you, the market reaches a point where the bigger expanded claim is no longer believable. It's no long credible. Right. Like if today we rolled out with a marketing message that said, take this pill and you'll lose £100 there, no one's going to believe it. It's not going to get bought because it lacks credibility. That's when the market goes on to the next level of marketplace efficiency.

Level three.

Right, that's level three. Yeah, exactly. That's the introduction of what we typically call the unique mechanism. And the unique mechanism is just the unique part, piece or component of your product or service that delivers the result, delivers the benefit to prospects. And so you see this all the time in infomercials. And in the infomercial where they say, this Thing cuts through cement and soda cans and everything that you can imagine. And the secret is in the German steel. Anytime they say the secret is in the X. That's the quote unquote unique mechanism. And so in our supplement example, it's, you know, the example that I like to give is Garcinia Cambogia.

I knew you were gonna go there. That's great.

Yeah, you know, right. At one point there were, you know, there were fat burners, tons of fat burners on the market. And then just a handful of years ago, some, you know, company came out with the first Garcinia Cambogia supplement and the market went wild because at the time it was the unique mechanism. It's like, take this pill and you'll lose £7 because the garcinia cambogia, blah, blah, blah, prevents the absorption of fat in your intestinal tract or something like that. And. Right. And so that unique mechanism now is what gives the claim and the promise legs makes it believable. It gives the prospect hope that, well, maybe this is true because of the unique mechanism, because of the garcinia. And so then what happens is, you know, after look, after a while, the simply having garcinia, it's no longer a unique mechanism, it's a mechanism. It's just not a unique mechanism because other competitors come along and now there's a dozen different Garcinia Cambogia products. You just go to Amazon and you'll see that right away. And so now the market reaches level four. And level four is where you expand the unique mechanism. It's very similar to.

Level two. Now it's, you know, ours has, you know, it's Garcinia Cambogia. That's, it's pharmaceutical grade, it's cold pressed, it contains two times the dosage, blah.

Blah blah, it's more powerful or you add a colon cleanse to it to really pike up the efficacy. And it's, yeah, it's that leapfrog. First you're leapfrogging the claims or the benefits. Now you're leapfrogging the mechanisms until you've got. I always use the example in online marketing. They say, you know, first you can, hey, did you know you can make money online? Wow, that's cool. Next, do you know you can make millions online? Did you know you can make millions and work only four hours a week online? And then it's like, hey, we've got a software that helps you make money online? No, now we've got push button software that all you've got to do is buy our software, push a button, and now you're making money online and you can't get any easier than that. So, so it's true, the level of cynicism, I know it's like market sophistication gets up, but it's also the more sophisticated they are, the more cynical they are about calling BS on what you're doing.

That's a great point. That really is a great point. That's a great point. Because as marketers.

You need to be aware of the psychology, that psychological state that your prospects are bringing to the table, right? Like you, you can't talk to, like, if you're selling, let's say, Internet, you know, how to make money with the Internet type of stuff. You know, you can't design a message as if these people are all just totally thrilled, you know, and excited and they've never seen anything before and they're not skeptical in any way. You know, you've got to, you've got to design a message for an individual that is absolutely looking to find a crack in your armor, to find a, to find a little hint of, ah, I caught this an exaggeration or that's bogus, or that's bs so that they can, that they can bail. And so I think that that's a, you know, a great point. The other thing really quick about, you know, the how to make money online is, it's kind of funny. A perfect example of this whole marketplace sophistication, you know, in action, is that if you go back, you know, 15 years, 20 years into the biz op arena and you look at, at old ads, like, I love to look at old time swipe files, right? You'll see that there are ads like how to make money with your computer, you know, and like, things that, like today you would just get killed. Like, right. Like again, if we, if we came out with a supplement and we were like, today we said, you know, hey, take this pill and you'll lose weight. Like, it'd be like, what, you don't.

Have to exercise anymore? Just take this pill, right?

And then, of course, just to wrap up this at level 5, it's no longer about the product, it's now about the prospect experience. So it becomes like, you know, are you sick of dieting, exercising, popping pills and never lose weight? You know, are you ready to throw in the towel on losing weight? And blah, blah, blah. So it becomes more about the psychological state of the.

Of the prospect. And so, yeah, man, I want to.

Drill down more on that and in your experience? Because this is always the part I know with myself and some of my clients have tried to or are building products or whether it's information products or whatever, around that exact. They're in that fifth level of market sophistication where like you said, it's about the customer experience, sometimes about personalizing it to the customer himself. I've got one of my clients is, he is creating a product for the dating niche. And.

It'S more designed like everybody's heard, listen, oh yeah.

You can pick up girls, you can pick up girls with this advice. And now, oh no, you can pick up a lot of girls with the best looking girls with this advice. Or there's all of these little tricks and mechanisms out there that, that work, etc. But now. So he's switching it to primarily for, you know, men recovering from divorce, like divorced men who are going through that, that dip and they've got the lack of confidence and you know, just giving them dating advice doesn't work because they're like, oh, this is for everybody else. But who, who understands what I'm going through, who understands that I have to start over from scratch.

That's pretty brilliant, man. That's pretty. I mean, that's such a great. That is a lesson in and of itself for everybody. That's.

That's all right. So it was. But you start to see that natural evolution because everybody starts to tune out what's being said in the market until somebody says, hey, I've got something just for you. And that's, you know, I definitely wanted to cover that. This is one of my favorite subjects. Eugene Schwartz is, you know, I would love to have been able to sit down with him and, you know, pick his brain. But it's so important as we're talking about marketing funnels because like you said, it starts with a big idea. It starts with, what is this all about? And I know that this is one of the first things that you look at when you're designing and building out a marketing funnel for either yourself or somebody else.

Let me kind of sidetrack here. So I know you've got products that you sell online, so home study courses and things that people can access your brain as you've memorialized it in an information product. Do you work with clients as well?

Yeah, very little today.

Yeah, well, yeah, it typically today is if it's a client that I'd be like really excited to work with just because, you know, I'm fascinated by either them, like the way they work or something that They've accomplished.

But outside of that, I don't take on a whole lot of clients anymore.

Okay, well, and one of the reasons I asked, because I was gonna ask, and you can answer this anyway.

If somebody was sitting down with you and you're gonna help them with their funnel, do you prefer to optimize what's already there or start over completely from scratch? Or when you're looking at people's funnels, do you think that most people have it completely wrong or do you think most people just need a little bit of tweaking? God, this is such a loaded question. I don't know if this is.

No, that's a great, It's a great question, man. I love it. And I'll tell you, I think as a whole, I would lean in favor of starting over. And I'll tell you exactly why it's not because, and this is something that, man, we could talk about, gosh, for hours, but it's not because, you know, the majority of like, like, like, look, the tactical stuff that makes up a funnel, you know, especially an online funnel. The, you know, the, the, the opt in page or, you know, it's sometimes called the squeeze page. The, you know, are using a VSL or you sales letter. Do you have, you know, one click upsells the tactical stuff most people, you know, most people have in place, you know, and, and there's not one set of, of tactics that work and everything else doesn't work. So it's, it's almost never the fact that like, oh my gosh, you know, you're, you know, they don't have one critical tactic. What typically I find to be missing is or lacking is that, that the overall messaging behind their sales argument, starting with the big idea and then how they are actually presenting their message to a prospect in order to get them to get them to buy or to get them to desire their product. That is typically what's lacking. So, you know, rather than, you know, it's rare that.

I say, hey, you know, so you're only missing, you know, let's put in this step or this step or this step. That's a rarity most of the time. It's like, hey, look, you know, if we go take a step back, we identify a big idea, we build a.

Message off of the foundation of that big idea with a solid sales argument that is loaded with, you know, benefits fit, you know, claims and proof, you know, and we plug that into the existing tactical steps that you have that you're going to do infinitely, infinitely better and so it's why like, like, look, man. And there's so much to talk about, man. I'm sorry if I'm rambling over. I get so excited about this stuff, you know, it's why like, like, look, you know, in the, in the IM world, people get enamored with tax tactics, with new plugins, with, you know, all these, you know, weird bells and whistles on a page and whatnot. Yet if you look at a company like agora, again, a $600 million a year information marketing, you know, giant, what you'll find is that they don't get caught up in any of that. Right? They, but why are they able to continue to just crank and put up disgusting numbers, like disgustingly huge numbers?

Focus on the foundation first.

That's it. Because they've got a dialed message, right? They've got a dialed message. They've got their copy. You know, they strive to. Before any copy goes out the door, they strive to, they strive to make sure that it has a, you know, has a big idea. In fact, there's a book, it's, it's, it's an obscure book, but it's for, for the serious marketer. Everybody should have it. And this book, it's called Copy Logic.

Oh my God. That's one of my favorite books of all time.

Yeah, right. And that book is, that book is written by also Michael Masterson, Mark Ford and.

And Michael Palmer. Mike Palmer. And now Mike Palmer is the, he's arguably the best.

Financial newsletter copywriter alive today. He is the guy that really wrote the copy for what's called the End of America promotion, which was a promotion for Stansberry, right, For Stansberry Research, which is kind of a division of Agora that generated like, that was worth Some like $250 million, some absurd number in terms of arguably front end acquisition and back end. And that book details their process for scoring copy before it goes out the door. And one of the things that they talk about in that book is that like, if it doesn't have a big idea and that's not agreed upon by multiple people on the team, they don't use it, don't matter, Forget what the headline is, forget the offer, forget the body copy, forget all that. If it doesn't have a big idea, it does not go out the door. It gets handed back to the copywriter and they say no, they like don't even work on it if it, you know, it's amazing.

You know. You know what I love about that book so much? So like I'm a copy geek. You know, I have a love hate relationship with copy like I think any copywriter does. We love it but we, if you sit down with a blank page it's like, yeah, it's, there's nothing more excruciating. And I've probably done this in the past, although I think I've been just cognizant of it more so than other people who've given me copy. And has anybody ever given you copy? Say Todd, like here's my 15 page sales page or here's my VSL. Can you tell me what you think? Are you kidding me? About what? If this has ever happened to you or if you've ever written copy or have some copy and are thinking about getting it critiqued, especially by somebody.

Who knows copy. Read this book yesterday because it is not only an efficient process but it'll stop you from just asking the broadest, most impossible question ever to answer, which is what do you think? Because you know, the first thing I'm thinking is okay, I'm going to tell you everything that's wrong with it, right? And that's exactly what copy logic helps prevent is every one of us from going into okay, let me tell you why you suck. Yeah. But yeah, copy logic and great leads, those two. If I probably only had two market or copywriting resources, you could get the whole 80, 20 principle with that, that right there, you know. And I was talking to Porter Stansberry back in August and he was even revealing one of the things where he said when he got, when he was writing his very first sales letter and I forget, I think it was his railroad letter that really launched his business. And he said he sat down and you know, he wrote it all out and then he went to, I think he sat in Mark Ford's office and they took turns reading it like every other paragraph or every other, I guess micro paragraph back and forth. Next, next, next deciding is it confusing, is it unbelievable or boring? Every single paragraph and he rewrote it and I'm not talking about tweaked it like revised it but rewrote it 18 times and just really, really hammered down that especially the big idea because the rest of it gets the proof and you know, all those little points, the proof and the claims and proof, those are easier to do because it's more factual based. But I was just really amazed at how much effort really goes into creating a winning piece of copy. The other thing that I realized, I think it was last. It's only been like a year and a half. But I've been told because one of my close friends and clients is actually.

Works at Stansberry, really high up, works with Porter. And he said, yeah, you'd be amazed. We just started to put in upsells on our $49 a year newsletter like I don't know, a year ago or something like that. He goes, you would be amazed at how unsophisticated our marketing funnel is. And yet it's actually.

You're so right. You are so right. It's funny because, well, two things and you know, that should be exciting for everybody listening to know that. Right? Like you're absolutely right. A buddy of mine, Joe Schreifer is the copy chief for Agora Financial. And I invite, invited him to like a Mastermind meeting in Baltimore and which is where his all their office is. And he shared with the group almost the very same thing. Like, you know, yeah, we're kind of just getting stuff in place right now and like, you know, one of their big, one of their big ahas. Which is amazing because you're talking, you know, a multi million dollar, you know, multi million dollar. Yeah. Well I'm talking even about Agora Financial. Not even. Forget Stansberry. He's knocking it, you know, 100 plus. You know, they're, you know, their big aha was like we just implemented down sells.

Yeah.

You know, off of, off of upsells. The funny thing too is, and this is abs, this is completely true. It was maybe, I don't know, maybe five years ago, I don't, maybe four years ago.

Rich Sheffrin shared with Mark. We were at this little local cigar bar and, and Rich shared with Mark VSLs. The ugly VSL. Yeah, you know, the, the, the typical John Benson. And you know, Mark was enamored with it and went back and told Bill Bonner and they ended up implementing, maybe it was six years ago they ended up implementing the whole Ugly video sales letter actually at Agora totally obviously changed the game for them. And you know, then Bill Bonner wrote Rich a letter saying like, you know, thanks to what you, you know, last year we, you know, generated another, some ridiculous amount of money like 150 million because these VSLs. And it's just so funny. I sat there like, wow, you know, we're, you know, we're getting often, you know, enamored with these little nitty gritty myopic tact things when the thing that, you know, I learned from Mark on so many levels is like the big idea you got or, and, or you Know, like, you know, when you're testing, test the things that scream, not the things that whisper. You know, like, when people are like, I test. You know, I'm testing the button color. You know, I remember when Rich and I were having a conversation about testing, and Mark was there, and he was writing away on his laptop, and he looked, you know, like, took his little reading glasses off, looked up from his laptop, and basically, like, laughed at us. And. And he said, like, that's, you know, he said, test the things that. That have the potential to double response. Right? Test the things that have the potential. Test the. The. Test the. The big idea. Test the promise. Test the offer. Right. Don't get caught up in the background color on the web page. You know, he's like, test the things that have the potential to double response. The things that scream, not the things that. That whisper. And on so many levels, he just.

That requires too much work, though, Todd. I mean, I have to work only four hours a week. I have scheduled four hours, and now the button color. That's an easy decision to make. I can't be working on all these big ideas, but. No, you do. You're so right. And I love how we actually. There's a lot of little tactical things that we went into, and I actually still want to. But I love that we're talking about this really strategically, because I think it's what other folks need to know, and it's the stuff that we really need to be reminded of as well.

Because it's really easy to get caught up when you do this for a living, when you build these things, it's really easy to get caught up in the little fun toys and plugins and gadgets and things that can help tweak our conversion. But at the end of the day, it's not the most important thing, which is putting something valuable in the hands of somebody who needs.

Needs it.

And that's really what the whole sales funnel process should be all about.

One of the things you brought up. Oh, what was it? Because it made me think about something really kind of big. And I know the second I get off of this.

It'S one of those things, the minute I'm off, it'll come back to me. But.

Let'S talk about marketing funnels now. Let's actually, I guess, get into some of the nitty gritty.

So.

So there's been a lot, and I'm going to kind of go back to, oh, this is exactly what it was. So you talked about this on Sweeney's podcast Digital Triggers, right. And so I want to kind of build upon that. I'll give people the premise and they go back and listen to it if they want, but because I want to take this to the next step. So.

For folks who follow online marketing, et cetera, there's the trend to start with from, you know, the lowest end offer and ascend people through the funnel, from, you know, the lead magnet to the low dollar offer, sometimes called the tripwire, through the, you know, your main offering, then your upsells, etc. And it's a, it works, you know, just get somebody in the door, get them pulling their credit card out because if they, if they buy something little, it's a lot easier to upsell them and then sell them other stuff if you get them, you know, a little on the front. And one of the things that you mentioned with Sweeney on that, and I agree with is yeah, that can work. And a lot of it depends. But so many people end up thinking, okay, well I'm going to put this low dollar offer out a free plus shipping offer. And they don't pay that much attention to it. They work on the back end way more than the front end product and they end up putting out a crappy little front end product. And it really should be the, the almost exact opposite. And going back to Mark for Michael Masterson in his book I Remember Ready, Fire, Aim. And this was a big epiphany that I took out of there is, you know, that tip of the spear product, that very first product should be your best most, what did he call it? Epiphany producing moment. That should be the stuff that just blows people away. It's your front end product because if you can get them with that, it's always harder to get something somebody's money the first time than it is once you've got it. But if you can get them and razzle them and dazzle them with your best stuff up front, the back end can be relatively generic. It doesn't have to be as cutting edge as the front end stuff. So do you want to let. I kind of got that you felt the same way, that the front end stuff should be really remarkable.

Yeah, I think absolutely. I 100% agree with that. And that's because, you know, if, when, you know, for the, for when it comes to direct response. Right. You know, just for your audience, you know, there's the marketing. Your marketing activities get divided under two umbrellas. The first is what we call the front end. And the front end is all the marketing that you do to prospects in an attempt to convert them into first time customers. So all the marketing that you are doing with prospects that have yet to buy something from you, that's what we call the front end. The back end is all the marketing that you do with existing customers. The purpose of the back end.

Is to deliver more value to customers through additional transactions in an attempt to grow the lifetime value of a customer, meaning what the average customer is worth to your company over the life of their patronage. That's the back end. Now the purpose of the front end is to acquire maximum number of new customers. Now one of the things that I teach my clients, and there's a couple different levels of this, but I think it's beyond the scope of this conversation, is that on the front end, ultimately you want to acquire as many customers as possible all the way down to break even. And what I mean by that is that if you invest $1,000 in, let's say in Facebook advertising, for example, our goal is to acquire $1,000 worth of new customers. Our goal is to acquire enough customers from that thousand dollar ad spend to recoup.

All of that thousand dollars. And so when we do that on the front end, that's our goal, right? So our goal is not to invest that thousand and then make a profit. And I'll explain why in just a second. Our goal is to invest that thousand dol and make back the thousand plus customers and additional prospects. Well, when you do that, when you are able to break even, you're acquiring customers for free, right? It's not an expense like your telephone or your lights, it's an investment. You're putting out a thousand, then you're getting that thousand back. Plus you're getting customers and you're getting prospects that you can market other products and services to. Well, based on that, what you should see is. Well, you know the question that I get from like let's say friends who are small business owners, they always ask me, well like why would I want to break even? I'm in this business to make money. Like when do I make the money then? And the way the savviest direct response marketers approach it is that all of the money comes on the back end. All the money comes from the, all the profit comes from the marketing that you do with existing customers. And the reason for that is that the most expensive activity in any is customer acquisition. Right? It's expensive to acquire customers in some markets. In some niches, it's a lot more expensive than in others. But it's an extremely expensive activity. Whereas so when you're able to absorb all of those customer acquisition costs on the front end, when you actually acquire those customers for the first time, all the back end end transactions are, you know, are all of your profit and if you're in the information business, it's the overwhelming majority is profit on the, on the back end. And so to just get to the answer why I really completely agree with your statement of on the front end you should be delivering the goods is because, you know, part of that front end is acquiring new customers, right? And acquiring maximum new customers. But it's also to acquire customers that you then prep to buy your first back end product, that where you exceed their expectations, you over deliver value, you deliver a product to them that first and foremost in the way you deliver it, it turns them into a fan and the actual product itself turns them into a raving fan where they are through thrilled with your front end product because that substantially increases the likelihood that they're going to buy your next product, which is where you start to generate profit.

When a direct response company understands the difference between front end and back end, but on the front end they're delivering a little shoddy product. Well, yes, you're acquiring new customers and yes, you might even be acquiring maximum new customers at break even because of your front end marketing. But the problem is that, that you're not converting.

Nearly enough of those front end customers of those new customers into back end transactions because you're not exceeding their expectations with that front end product.

No, that's perfect. And that's so I think so important for people to know. I keep this in mind at all times. I think I heard Perry Belcher say it one time which was, and it's never been harder to get somebody to buy to spend money with you the first time, but it's never been easier to get them to continue to spend money with you. Especially because there's so much crap out in the marketplace if they get something and you dazzle them the first time, just make it easy for them to. It's actually very easy with all this online and automated from autoresponders to you name it, that we can continue to sell people. It's never been easier to get them to continue to purchase one with you. And especially you know, kind of going back to that idea that it's never been harder to get people to spend money with you the first time.

Unlike our direct response ancestors way way back in the days, 10 years ago or more, before social media and everything else, you can't afford to. You cannot fool people anymore because before people buy, I guarantee they're googling you, they're finding out if there's reviews about you, you, etc, online. And it just means that, you know, you can't just bring the hype and expect to have a, an ongoing business. You actually have to deliver on that and it's.

Okay. So I want to, I want to digress or not digress. I want to rabbit trail over to a couple of the questions I've got when it comes to actual, you know, building these marketing funnels, etc. I may ask you some tools and some technical tips. These are some stuff that I want to know and hopefully my, hopefully my, my listeners do as well. So quick, here's my biggest question. And this has eluded me because I'm not, I'm just techie enough to get in trouble. I've become an accidental expert in a lot of stuff. But you know, because I end up breaking it and then I have to figure it out myself as opposed to just hiring the best of the best to figure it out for me.

Funnel analytics myself, some of my business partners, some of my mastermind partners have had a hell of a time really locking down the way to, you know, or I guess the most efficient way to track.

You know, what I want to say, conversion analytics and customer value throughout the funnel. So I've used from Google Analytics to PattyTrack to, you name it. Is there anything you do do that has been to track the customer value from traffic source to conversion throughout the entire sales process and customer value?

Yeah, I'll tell you what we do and then I'll kind of explain an easier or easy, somewhat easy way for your listeners to do it. So.

I happen to use infusionsoft at our company. I've used infusionsoft for what, wow, for probably eight years or something like that. And so inside of infusionsoft, which is a pretty extensive and robust CRM for your listeners.

You'Re able to run a lot of reports based on lead source. So where is the lead coming from?

And even there are reports that you can run based on front end product that customers bought and an average lifetime customer value. But a couple things I think for the new marketer.

Oh wait a minute, wait, no, no, no, no, sorry new marketer. This question is for me because one of my primary clients that I do this uses infusionsoft. So I want you to solve this problem for me. Let's start with the infusionsoft user because this is very pertinent.

Oh, so well, for you, for your, for your client, I'll, I get the report. So I'm not sure exactly how the report is run. But you know, after this episode, I'll, you know, I'll make a note and I'll get you the instructions on exactly how we set up infusionsoft and then the report that is, that's run for me. But yeah. And even inside of infusionsoft, well, there are, there are also a couple tools that I'll share with you for infusionsoft that allow you to run reports that aren't native to infusionsoft. So there are certain things that infusionsoft doesn't do that there's a third party plugin that I'll give you that you can do. But I think for the newer marketer, what's most important, number one, for the new marketer, you know, don't get caught up in.

Measuring and monitoring every metric that either you've heard you should measure or that you've heard other marketers talk about. When you're initially starting off with a funnel, number one, let me say this, that because this ties in, number one, the goal is to create a funnel that allows you to leverage paid traffic, that allows you to leverage cold traffic, media buying, if you will. And under the umbrella of media buying is Facebook advertising, Google AdWords, all paid traffic. The reason for that is that with media buying, it's totally under your control. You can scale it up, you can scale it down. You don't have to worry about algorithm changes. You don't have to worry about partners flaking out and disappearing. You don't have to worry about, you know, rankings disappearing in the search engines. And so fully scalable source of customer acquisition. So that's your goal, to create a funnel that allows you to tap into paid traffic. Now when you're leveraging paid traffic, you need to monitor your metrics from each paid traffic source as well as each, let's call it ad under each source. Meaning that one of the mistakes that I see a lot of marketers do, especially you know, more.

Your typical mom and pop marketers that then end up coming online is a big mistake, is tracking your total ad spend, your total traffic, your total investment in traffic under one umbrella, whether you spend $500, 5,000 or 50,000amonth tracking that all like, hey, we spent, let's say we spent 10 grand this month on Facebook advertising, Google AdWords and Twitter advertising.

And yeah, we made back 10 grand in the form of New customers. That's a mistake to track your advertising that way because it doesn't tell you if maybe Twitter is bombing. It's costing you money to use Twitter Twitter, whereas Facebook is really producing exceptionally well for you. So you need to track conversions throughout the funnel and return on investment from each of those different sources. Facebook, Twitter, in this example, Google AdWords as well as if you're running a different campaign, two different campaigns within Facebook, you need to track those separately. Now, when you're at and when you are starting out, when you're just starting out, the most important number that you want to look at is return on investment. Numbers like opt in rate and numbers like sales conversion rate. Those are only valuable when you are optimizing your funnel, when you are looking to improve the results. Because the reality is you could have a 50%, you could have a 60% optimization in rate on your, on your, on your squeeze page and not make any money yet. You could have a 10% opt in rate and be making bank. Right, right. Same thing with your conversion rate. Like you could be, you could have a, you know, a 15% conversion rate and be losing money, yet you can have a 2% conversion rate, a 1% conversion rate and be making better bank, right? Because it goes back to what is the average visitor to your site worth and what is it costing you to get the average visitor to your site? And so in essence, it's return on investment for every dollar that you spend to get a visitor to your site, how much money.

Are you making back? So at the beginning, when you're rolling out a new funnel and in essence you're testing the funnel in the market market, the sole number that you want to look at is roi. You don't begin to look at opt in rate, sales conversion rate, the take rate on your different upsells until you've proven that your funnel is viable enough to then optimize. Right now.

Once you say, okay, we're going to start to scale this funnel up, invest more, invest more, more dollars and cents into driving more traffic, then you need to make sure that you are able to track every step of the funnel. Meaning here is where you need to be able to track. What is the opt in rate, what is the sales conversion rate, what is the order form abandonment rate, what is the take rate on, let's say your first upsell and your second upsell upsell. You need to know what it is that those numbers are because those numbers will tell you what the constraint is in the funnel. Meaning like think of it like this. In every chain there is one weakest link, right? There's one weakest link. It does not matter. And that weakest link determines the strength, if you will, of that chain. If you strengthen any other link on that chain, you will not increase that chain's strength. The chain strength is based on the weakest link. And so what we are trying to identify when it comes time to okay, like, all right, we're getting decent results. But now let's see how we can improve this funnel. You don't arbitrarily go in and say hey, I'm going to work on the opt in page or hey, hey, I'm going to work on the sales conversion rate or hey, I'm going to work on the, you know, the upsell rate. You look for that weakest link, that constraint and that's determined by those what I call optimization metrics. Like again, opt in rate, sales conversion rate, order form, abandonment rate, take rate.

On the upsell, even refund rate. And that's how you begin that whole process. There is, believe it or not, I've searched high and low for one tool that would allow you to do that. Unfortunately there isn't one tool that allows you to do that. But as absurd as this is going to sound, right, Being that we're in a tech, as absurd as this is going to sound, I continue to recommend to clients one of the oldest, most basic tracking applications that you will find on the entire net. And that's Hypertracker. What I like about Hyper tracker, don't judge me by the user interface. This is from 1988.

I think Al Gore launched this. Nice. No, but the beautiful thing about it is that it's a $19 monthly gig and it allows you to create, it allows you to track an unlimited number of campaigns and it allows you to see everything from how many clicks, meaning how many visitors.

How much in sales, how much is each customer worth? What did it cost you to generate a sale? What did it cost you to get a click? How many opt in ins, what's the percentage of visitors to opt ins? What's the average sale? And you can track.

You can track the sales from your upsells in there like so you can, excuse me, you can see what is the average customer worth that goes through your funnel. And so that is, that's like an essential foundational tool that's just brain dead simple to use. There's others that are much more complex but, but that tool and just a couple of other stats, a couple of other applications and it's a great start.

Yeah, that's fantastic. I've heard of Hypertracker. I'm on their website right now and like you said, it looks like it's something out of 1998.

Yeah.

Yeah, but that's really cool. And that's been elusive for me because Google Analytics, I have a love hate relationship with because it can be really confusing and they give you so much data about everything that's going on in your site. And so sometimes, hey, I just want to know did this ad or this traffic source, how did it do all the way throughout the, throughout the funnel we do use infusionsoft. There's a software we've used called Paddy P a d I track.com. it gives a kind of a cool visualization. But you know, I've had a, there's been a couple of confusing points where things don't quite make sense. I've tried to have this custom coded because before and I've just tried to get like you said, those decision points because number one, okay, I know this funnel is working on an overall roi. I've spent X and I've made Y. But yeah, where are those, where are those little optimization points that I can make decisions on? And it's funny that everybody I talk to. Yeah, nobody, nobody has that. There's no one simple answer. And I'm surprised. I've got a friend doing about $40 million with his business and it's completely an online funnel and they do a lot of it manually. They just have to kind of go, go in and back out a handful of the statistics and look at it. Really interested in hearing what infusionsoft reports that you said or plugins that aren't native that are, that are helping you out. Because this is one of the things that my tech team is doing for one of my clients right now. So I would love to hear about.

Yeah, you remind me and I'll send you over. I'll find out from the team team exactly how some of the both, some of the, the native reports that they run, which ones they are that they give me and also which third party plugin we use to run some additional reports that aren't native to infusionsoft. And it's funny because you're absolutely right. I had a meeting yesterday with a, with a company, I won't even mention the name of the company. But I, I, you know, they were a company that I guess you could say generates reports for all different, all different aspects of your marketing and does.

The name of the company start With a G or no.

Yes.

Okay, gotcha.

Yeah, yeah, yes. If we're talking about yes, gm. Yes. You got it. Absolutely. And I was floored at what they, what they wanted to charge, charge us monthly. I, I said to the guy, like, I've got to be honest with you, you know, the, the, the upfront. I can, I, I can see. But the monthly is like, you want to charge me more than what we pay for almost all of our applications combined, you know, like why? You know, like crazy. But.

But nevertheless. Yeah. And you, you know, you'll, you'll be amazed with. Like I said, for everybody listening, Hyper Tracker is a visual disaster when you look at it. But it's so easy to use and it gives you such essential metrics that. Yeah, like the key, you know, like, like look, this is my opinion. Many years ago, many, many years ago, I dove deep into Google Analytics. I even went as far as to go to like a two day workshop and it was insane. What you can do with Google Analytics is insane. However.

It'S complicated and if you have the wrong bit of code on the wrong page, you could virtually botch all of your analytics. Today we use Google Analytics for just that, for analytics for page views and what are our most popular pages and time on site and what percentage of our visitors are coming from what geographic areas and on what devices. When it comes to ad tracking, when it comes to tracking, how much money are we spending on a particular ad and how well that ad is working, we always use.

Third party tracking and yeah, I love the simplicity of hypertracker.

Yeah, that's really cool. I like that. Any other tools that you have.

When you build your sales funnels visually or whatnot, do you build these all in HTML? WordPress? Do you optimize press? Are there any tools that you tend to. Yeah, there's some new ones out there as well.

Yeah, I'll tell you three that we, we utilize. The bulk of our stuff today is done in optimized press. Two, I'm a big believer in, you know, I am a big believer in, in out of the box solutions. I, I mean I remember I could tell you when I was at strategic profit Profits running the marketing, we had, you know, tons of custom stuff designed against. I didn't want to have those custom things designed, but we had custom things designed and it was a beast. It was just a beast. And having it designed, it was a beast in, you know, you know, everything that we wanted to add to it had to be again, custom coded. No go. No, not my recommendation so the bulk of what we utilize is OptimizePress 2 and there's a ton that you can do with OptimizePress 2.

We also use LeadPages a little bit. LeadPages. Clay is a friend. Great company, great application, great guy. I think for me, the reason why internally we use it, we've been using it less and less is because, one, it doesn't.

It doesn't give as many customization options as optimized press does. And I think this is the biggie. And so many people in the markets that I operate in use leadpages that I don't want to have the same looking pages as everybody else because it gives prospects the ability to judge it fairly quickly. The third application that we're using more and more, and we're actually going to be doing something a little formal with this application is ClickFunnels.

I was going to go that way. I've been really diving deep into ClickFunnels recently.

Lot of potential.

They've really come quite a distance. I was chatting with Russell on Skype the other day and I've communicated with, with one of their programmers about some integration things that they, that they've changed since and it is really shaping up to be a phenomenal, a phenomenal application. I still think there are a couple things that they need to tweak, but I think it's going to be a serious. It's virtually like, you know, it's almost like, you know, every tool that you need under one umbrella. Umbrella, yeah.

So it's kind of really impressed with it. It was funny. I interviewed Russell for the show back in, I think, July or August, and it was when I was still on the beta version. Did you ever get in on the beta version of ClickFunnels 1.0?

Yeah. Russell, yeah. I was like, yeah. That scared the bejesus out of me. When I was in there, I couldn't get like anything to work at the time, but, you know, I was patient and I. And, you know. And yeah, now it's really funny.

Then he changed it and it was completely new and then they, you know, they launched it out and I was blown away by how good this new version is versus. And I liked the first version, but. And I saw it had a lot of potential but a lot of work to do. This new one's been killer. And it was funny. I saw Russell and his support, some of his support team at an event that Mike Philsaim and Andy Jenkins were having here in San Diego about a few weeks ago, and his support guys came out from behind. The thing is like, we got to take a picture with you because you are. Because I'm so vocal in a good way. Like I'm always saying, hey, guys, here's either ideas, here's some bugs, here's some things. And I was really impressed at how quickly they move on making feature requests and fixing bugs and making this thing roll out, because I've been slowly moving everything over to clickfunnels as quickly as I can.

Yeah, very cool. And the thing that excites me really quick about that, and it's funny, I was supposed to be at that event in San Diego. It's bummer. I would have loved to have met with you and spent some time with you. But I love the fact with clickfunnels that Russell is developing it for his use. And so, you know that as things, you know, as he tests things and others test things and you know, that prove to be effective, he's going to implement them into clickfunnels. And so that's kind of, you know, that's kind of cool.

Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah.

Speaking of this, and I love going off on little tangents. So Russell had one of his sales pages that I swiped, and I'm waiting for him to put the templated version in clickfunnels. I'm like, hurry up and do this because I had to custom swipe it. But did you ever buy His.com Secrets Labs?

I bought.com Secrets Labs from day one.

That was such a great publication, wasn't it?

Yeah. You know what's even better is the page that he uses to sell it.com secrets labs.com so I swiped that, and on so many levels, I can't tell you. Like, just recently, I was looking at some stats. We did a big email, a solo ad, and I don't know, ran like 5,000 clicks to it. The.

Anybody wants to see it, go to.comsecretslabs.com you're welcome, Russell. But what's neat about this is there's. There's a little order bump right there. And I know you know what I'm talking about. It's like, hey, buy this for $4.99 or whatever it was. Pay free plus shipping. And then there's a one little thing right before you buy that says, by the way, would you like to get this template for 37 bucks? It's quick and easy, two lines of copy. And I remember seeing that. And just the entire way that the entire. That the thing is built, it's, you know, For a conversion expert like yourself or whatever. I was slapping my forehead. So I got to steal this just recently. 42% take rate on that 37 bump. Same exact concept. Worst I've ever had is 25% take rate on that. So it's.

That is awesome. That's so. And it's so funny that you should mention that because, you know, and. And so, you know, just to make sure that everybody listening totally gets what you're saying. Right. So, you know, what Brad was just saying was that it. It is basically a little checkbox. And if I remember correctly, because I bought it, of course. Yeah. It was like, you know, his Crusher template. And it was like $19. Right. So the main 37.

No, it was an extra 37. Yeah.

Oh. Or whatever it was. Right. Okay. Okay. But the main offer on the page was basically, like free, but you paid the shipping of whatever it was, $6 or something like that. Whatever the price was, it was under 10. And then there was one checkbox. And like you said, I think it was literally one sentence, you know, that was like, do you want to add this? Our Crusher template, you know, blah, blah, blah. And yeah, it was just brilliant and on so many levels, strategically, like, it was one of those things that, you know, you. If I remember, like, you couldn't get it anywhere else. It wasn't offered anywhere else. That was the only opportunity that you had to get it. And so on a. On a strategic and psychological level, there were so many things going on. But look at that one little thing and have how it radically changed the front end transaction value for.

Russell and for you.

We went from having a. If we would have just had that by itself, the front end customer value would have been. Let's just say we're selling for $4.99. It was our shipping or $5.99, I can't remember. So that would not. Including all the upsells, that would have been the customer value. And it immediately made our customer value on the front end $29 on average with all the people taking it. And it was. It was such a game changer. So congruent. Yeah. Anyway, go study that if you want, like an awesome front end offer. I kind of want to use that on. On everything, but. And now I'm gonna have to ping Russell after this. Say, hey, Russell, Todd and I just blew you up and gave you a whole bunch of accolades on this stuff. So share this podcast. Get me some people.

Right. Exactly. For click funnels, go to toddbrown.com no I'm just kidding.

That's awesome. Hey, Todd, so what's a, you know, what's a nut you're trying to crack right now? You know, something else you're trying to either, you know, achieve. And I'm not talking about just, I want to sell more stuff, but I mean, obviously that could be part of it. But what's kind of a nut you're trying to crack? That either you, you don't have the time, the resources, the, you know, the people, anything, something that you're working on right now that's.

You know, either big goal or an obstacle.

Wow, that's a great. That is a tough. That's a great question. Wow, that's a tough question, I think. I don't know if this is kind of the answer or the. Or kind of where you were going with this, but I think for me.

I think for me it is.

For my business, it's really trying to figure out and nail the most efficient way to turn over the big idea copy development so that the company isn't solely relying on me to be the one to generate these marketing ideas. And it's a funny thing, man, because I think, think, like, I, you know, I say all the time that, you know, I believe, like, and this was, this was an issue for me for a long time and somewhat still is that I think a lot of marketers don't invest enough time thinking, you know, they don't invest enough time thinking, really thinking through, you know, like, their products and the positioning of those products and really think through, you know, gaps in the. The market. And I want to give you an example before we wrap up. Just, I think will be somewhat inspirational for everybody. But, you know, it's, you know, like, look, man, these I, you know, it's not an easy thing, you know, to come up with big ideas. Most of the ideas I come up with probably aren't big ideas. That's the truth, you know, but you've got to develop, nurture a lot of ideas to come up with a single big idea. And you have to do it constantly. It's not like you can sit down once a month for 20 minutes and bang out five big ideas. It just absolutely does not work that way. At least it doesn't for me or anybody that I know. But I've just found it very difficult to.

Really nail that process.

Internally here. And so that's something that we're working on, developing a bit of a big idea team, if you will, and then kind of, kind of the extension of that is the copy team. Wow.

Yeah, that's definitely a tough nut to crack because the, usually the most, the highest. It's one of the highest value activities that any person can be doing. So it's. But I like the fact that you said it's a factory, like so it's not just, you're not just trying to outsource it. You're not going to find somebody on Odesk to do it. You're not just going to bring somebody in to say here you do this. But it's. How can you, I guess, collaborate, work with others and, and turn those out quicker.

Yeah, yeah. No, and you're. I think that you, you know. Yeah, I think you said it, you know, and I think, you know, it's why, you know, like look, if you, you know, you, you talk to, you know, Porter's folks, you know, Stansberry, you know, you look at Agora as a whole, it's why they have their best, most talented marketers working on the front end. Because the front end is the most difficult because it requires, you know, the, the, the biggest, best ideas, you know, whereas like you said earlier.

Require nearly that at all. But so they allocate, you know, their best resources to the development of big ideas on the, on the front end. And I think, you know, my biggest. It's a weird thing, you know, for me just on a personal level, I think this, the whole idea of, you know, starting with a big idea before you get into the nitty gritty tactics, before you start to, you know, foster, follow, you know, headline formulas and whatnot, that's really just become my mantra. And if there was one, I'm trying to really get folks to really grasp, you know, my tribe, the foundational necessity of like, look, man, you've got to have a premise behind your, your marketing message that is viewed as new, exciting, different, compact, compelling, timely, fresh. Right. Or you know, like look controversial.

The end of America, you know, anything.

Yeah.

Stand up.

There is so much that's competing for your prospects attention. It's not like it was, you know, years ago like you said, Brad, you know, between, you know, just. People are cynical today. They're skeptical today, more so than they've ever been before. They're inundated with more marketing messages and hype and promises than ever before. They've been burned more times than ever before. They are open today because of a global economy to being burned. So they're that much more on guard. And so today you need a message that's going to stand out and captivate attention and so I think that, I think two things man with that. I think a lot of marketers just don't even understand it. They're not aware of it. They don't understand it because they've been taught this whole like it's only about the formulas and there's certainly value in formulas but it goes beyond that. The other thing I think is that, and this is my big thing is that it's not easy to sell. It's a lot easier to sell people.

On a software that generates traffic or on a 5 email sequence that'll bring you $40,000 or something like that. It's not that easy to sell people.

On, hey, you need to come up with a big idea idea. But for me I just believe so much that it is critical. From everything that I've seen and from everything that I've done, from experiences with tons of clients that have gone from, you know, your typical promise based marketing to bigger idea, you know, big idea marketing. I've seen the benefits, the transformational benefits. And so for me it's my mantra. And look for the folks that you know that don't want to hear hear it, I'm not the one for them. For the folks that get it and understand the value then, then yeah, I'm, I'm your guy.

That's awesome. Now do you. Couple quick little things. Do you teach like do you have a core, you have multiple courses online? Love your. So your website is. Dude, I just closed it. What's the best place for these folks to find you and your products so.

They can go to Mark? Well, there's two things. Marketing Funnel Automation.

Yeah, that's where I, that's where I was.

Yeah, that's, you know, if you go to marketingfunnelautomation.com blog you'll be able to read some cool articles and stuff like that. We also have a cool little free 4 part video series.

That ultimately leads to the introduction of our product. One of our training courses in the end that's@6Figurefunnelformula.com to answer your question. Yeah.

I have this.

The program that kind of launched Marketing Funnel Automation. The whole brand that a bunch of, to my surprise and delight a bunch of well known marketers went through and raved about it. This eight week coaching program that's not even publicly open right now, so it's not for sale or anything. But the very first module, which is like a two and a half hour module is all about big ideas, dominant resident, emotion like and you know, remind me and I'll give you access to it so you know, you go through it.

Well and I was gonna, that's exactly what I was gonna ask you is number one do you provide any resources through any of your products, coaching etc for people to really dial in on that? Because if you're listening to this, you know you're probably thinking man, I'm worried about the little stuff. I should be worrying about the, that big idea. But so yeah, number one question was what do you provide that helps people? And second of all is what else do you suggest that people study like breakthrough advertising, Great leads, awesome for big ideas out there. But so you were just mentioning that you have part of your coaching program.

Yeah, we have a course that is like I said, it's an eight week program and during week one of that to really lay the foundation, I cover that Also I happen to have. This is only open anyway to. But we're, I'm doing a live event down here in South Florida for a tiny, tiny group of marketers in, in coming up next month. So we're, I'm sorry in January all. And it's two days just about the, just about the Big idea. So I've got my buddy Rich, you know, Sheffrin coming in, somebody from a copy chief, the copy chief from Gore that mentioned. But more importantly for your listeners. Yeah, I think number one, you know, I think Breakthrough Advertising is a great, is a great book. But specifically for the Big Idea, one of the things that I would do is pay attention to the, the marketing promotions that, that come out of Stansberry Research. So you could go to Stansberry Berry Research, that's S T A N S B E r r y research.com and subscribe to their free email list and study their promotions and you'll see multiple promotions that come out every single month. They're extremely prolific. And that's one of the other reasons Brad, why I think that it is important for us internally to develop a little bit of a big idea team and then the extension of that, the copy team. Because I think that it is so critical to be prolific today especially in the information marketing arena. And so you need to come up with a lot of ideas, a lot of big ideas over time. But study Stansberry Research Promotions because you'll see that.

They lead with big ideas. Right. Every Stansberry promotion is selling some sort of financial.

Advice service, right? Most of the time on the front end it's a newsletter, right. And so you'll see these, you know, 30, 40, 60 minute videos that are, you know, loaded with claims and proof out the wazoo that are, that are selling a $49 newsletter and $49 for the year. Not even 49amonth. Right. And you know, that's their customer acquisition.

By the way, have you. Sorry to interrupt. Dude, have you ever seen that the Stansberry alliance, the lifetime membership offer?

Oh, absolutely. Yeah.

That's one of the most brilliant things I've ever seen. The way it's phrased, etc. I've got some of this swipe and you know, just with the annual maintenance fee. Holy crap.

Yeah, it's, it's, it's, it's unbelievable. And it's funny because, you know, I'm not, you know, I'm comfortable in my manhood to admit it that like, I've read so many of their promotion. I study every that. That they do. Yeah. But I, it's why, like, I, I go into these sales letters like, you know, as a marketer and, and looking for what's this big idea and why did they say this and how, you know, like, why are they leveraging this now? And, and you know, and by the end, I'm like subscribe to, you know, a dozen newsletters. I get every newsletter because I'm like, I'm like, oh my gosh, you know, it is about gold. I need to subscribe right now. And Right.

Yeah. It's so true.

So freaking good. You know that. And that is like, Right. It's amazing when like you go. I go in knowing this is a sales letter, this is sales copy. I go in not with the intention of buying, but they suck you in, but they suck. And by the end, I'm like, holy, America is ending. I need to buy this right now. You know, like, you know what I mean? And, you know, and so. Yeah, man, but so that's, that's really the best thing to do to really study and to see that I, I share that they're selling these financial publications. I'm sharing that because I want you to understand that like, they're not leading with a headline and a promise that's like how to get rich in stocks or, you know, how to, you know, how to turn dividends into a million dollars. There, it's the, there's a new railroad in America that are going to make people rich.

Obama's getting a third, is. Obama's getting a third term.

Right. It's, you know, the end of America. It's the plague of the black dead or whatever. It's, you know, it's and, yeah, and it's just. And, you know, and it's amazing how it cuts through the clutter. It's new, it's fresh, it's different. It's both intellectually as well as emotionally compelling. And. And, yeah, that's one of the best things that you can do. And that'll start to, you know, open your eyes, get you more sensitive to the big idea. And then the last thing that I'll say is, is then when it comes time for you to begin to apply that.

To your own marketing, what you want to look for is you want to look for something in your product, something in the message that you are going to deliver to prospects. That would be startling, that would be shocking, that would be controversial, that would be different, that would be new. Whether it's, you know, a different word, a different phrase, a different way to state something. 99 out of 100 times, when I talk to either a coaching student or a consulting client, and we're kind of, you know, working on the big idea, it never comes from the superficial, standard stuff. It always comes from, like, digging deep. And they'll say one word or they'll say, you know, you know, this is like, you know, when, excuse me, I was at the mechanic, and blah, blah, blah. And there you go. It's different. It's unique. Right. It's startling, it's arresting. It's not the typical, you know, the typical, blah, blah, blah.

So it's the art behind the entire process, and that's what's great about it. So very last question for you is what can we all expect to see from Todd Brown in 2015? We're here in. This is. We're got a month and a half left of 14. So what can we expect from you in the next 12 months? If all goes according to plan, and we know that plans always go super smooth. Anything in particular?

Yeah, just live events, more intimate, live events that are more designed for.

The marketer that thinks a little differently and that understands, you know, like that. Yeah, that. That when you, you know, when. When you nail the message, you know, that you're. And I. I know I sound like a broken record, and everybody's probably like, we get it, we get it. But, yeah, just more intimate, live events to really bring marketers up an entire level in their understanding of what that means, how to do it, and. And how to do it consistently in their automated marketing funnels.

Beautiful. Beautiful. I love it. Well, folks, Todd, man, this has been. This is officially our longest podcast. But that means that, I mean, I Don't think there was a dull moment here. And that means that you brought the bacon. So definitely some sizzling hot ideas here. And I really want to thank you for being on the show, sharing all this stuff. Folks, if you're listening to this, I.

I hope you don't feel as though this was a free podcast. I mean, the stuff that we've talked about in here could easily be packed inside.

A pricey report or even to a degree, a home study course. And it's not often that you get to sit and listen to somebody like Todd or pick his brain or listen to me pick his brain and find out out.

How to create a marketing funnel, a marketing campaign, a big idea that really sells and makes a difference. I mean, Todd's responsible for tens of millions of dollars of sales online and between the two of us, we've seen a lot. And I hope you're taking away.

Just how valuable this is. And if you are, I want to ask you to do a couple things. Number one, if you've got other folks that you know, other colleagues, other people in business that you think might enjoy this, share this, share it on social media Twitter, tag me, tag Todd in it. Go over to Todd's website, marketingfunnel automation.com Sign up for his four part series, check out what he has to offer. I'm telling you, there's not many other people that I think you're in as good of hands with Todd to learn from. Then invest in his intellectual property that he's put out there there for you. Leave a review on itunes, leave a comment on the blog, share this, get this out there. The more feedback that I get from you, the more I'll do this. Now, if you are looking for a second opinion on your marketing funnel or what your big idea is or your copy or just anything else and you think that I could have an impact on you, shoot an email over to ask brad@baconratbusiness.com and I'll take a look. If I can help you, I'll help you. If I can't, I'll forward you on to somebody who may be able to or suggest a resource like one of Todd's courses for instance. And if you have any other ideas for guests, people that you'd love to see featured, love to see if they can bring home the bacon like Todd did. Let me know once more, send it to ask bradakenratbusiness.com Todd, I really appreciate your time this morning. Actually morning for me, it's afternoon for you. And I'm doing.

Sure.

You're starving. Ready for lunch. So I'm going to let you rock and roll. But.

I've really enjoyed it.

Me, too, man. That was, you know, I had a blast. I got to tell you. I had a blast. I can't believe how. How the time just flew by. And so it was, you know, it was my pleasure and my honor, and I hope to have the opportunity to do it again with you, man.

Absolutely. Look forward to seeing you in person one of these days here real soon.

Soon.

All right, guys. Love you all. Keep sharing, and I look forward to sharing the next episode with you. Thanks a lot.

Sam.