How Ethical Influence Can 10x Your Sales Feat. Dr. Benjamin Hardy & Jason Fladlien

I'm going to start with just showing you two quick pictures. I'm going to flash a lot of things that you're not going to actually be able to see a lot. But the main things I actually want you to see are actually the things in red. So 7% and 15%. So I'm going to explain those pictures in a minute. The question is how. So what I'm going to cover in this talk is how to create a frame. How to actually have the people who are watching your messages or experiencing your material being in an environment like this. How to put the correct lenses on them. That's actually what Robert Cialdini's work is all about. And then ultimately how to get people to make big decisions. How to make people or get people to take action. That's basically what this is all about. And I actually. Gina, I'm pretty sure that this is the wrong set of slides. I'm pretty confident this is the wrong set of slides. Anyways, that's me and Joel practicing this. I gave this talk at 100k about a month ago and so I decided to reshare it. Anyways, we'll start with Robert Cialdini. So here are some of the quotes he said. There's a critical insight for those who want to learn to be more influential. The best persuaders become so through pre suasion, the process of arranging for recipients to be receptive to a message before they encounter it. To persuade optimally, then it is necessary to pre suade optimally. But how? In part, the answer involves an essential but poorly appreciated tenant of all communication. So this is the key. What we present first changes what people experience. So what we present first changes the way people experience what we present to them next. That's the key. It's all about creating the context. And, and then when you create the context, you shape everything. So I'm going to just share with you one of my favorite psychological studies. This is a really funny study. You can look it up if you want. It's called Mind Over Milkshake. And so as you can see in the picture, basically there was two groups. One group was given a milkshake that they were said was very healthy, low fat, gluten free, all those things, 104 calories. The other group was told that the milkshake that they were drinking was indulgent, totally filled with brownies, all sorts of stuff, 600 calories. The truth is that both of them were the exact same milkshake. This was all about framing. What the psychologists did is they ended up testing the people's blood and kind of the biological response of what happened after people took these milkshakes. And basically what it showed is that people had different physiological responses based on the framing of what they thought. There's a lot of interesting, more stuff that Jamie Hope would understand, kind of component of all that stuff. But basically the idea is that your framing not only influences your insights and your mindset, it literally influences your biology. So now I'm going to talk about how I've applied that principle to webinars recently.

Hey, I hope you're enjoying this video. And I want to let you know that I have a new book that's.

Come out and if you'd like to.

Get it absolutely free, there's a link below in the description. Or you can wait till the end of this video or you can simply go to Joe's free book and you can get a copy there.

So this is a video that people land on when they come to my webinars. And basically what I say when people come to this video is I actually tell them that I don't want them to watch my webinar. I tell them that it would be a waste of time for them to watch my 60 minute training if they don't have the right perspective. I would rather them not consume more information. They already consumed so much information online. It's going to be a wasted 60 minutes, both my wasted 60 minutes and their wasted 60 minutes if they do not have the right perspective. And so when they click that registration button, I say, if you really want to watch this webinar, I want you to watch it from the right perspective. And so I've put together a seven minute video that's going to help you get into the right perspective. It's one of the things that Joe says, it's one of the things that Robert Cialdini says you have to have the right mindset and the right setting, set and setting in order to have a transformational experience. That's actually true of therapy as well. Joe said it, he said people go to therapy not for information, they go for an experience. And so if you want people to have the right experience, they have to have the right perspective because you've got to create the right context. And so basically what then happens is when people click the registration button, they go through this pre webinar training, it's seven minutes long, they watch it. And I just teach them a bunch of stuff that I'm going to already teach them in the webinar. But one of the things I do at the very end is, and I don't see a clock either on a 10 minute thing. So hopefully I'm not going too far overboard. But anyways, at the end of the training I make an offer, essentially a tripwire offer. I offer them a $7 journaling course. And one of the things I say is if you buy this course, you don't have to buy this course in order to watch the webinar. You've actually already registered for the webinar. But if you buy this course, two things are going to happen. You're going to be able to go through a few exercises that are going to help you have a much more powerful experience with the webinar. But also by spending $7 on this thing.

We.

Good, good. By spending $7 on this journaling course, you're also going to be invested. So this is one of the things that Joe says, let's see here. Joe Polish, Ph.D. he says if they don't pay, they don't pay attention. So one of the things I actually say at the end of that seven minute thing is I say, look, you don't have to buy this, but if you do buy it, you're going to have a completely different mindset for the webinar. It's only $7 to buy this journaling course, but it's essentially like buying a ticket. And if you're more invested, you're going to have far more commitment and you're going to have a different lens. And that $7 lens could be worth a lot of money to you. It's just like why we paid $25,000 to be in this room. The information we get in this room is valuable in a lot of ways because we're so invested financially, it puts on a different set of lenses and commitments. And so I just, I literally explain all this to them. And one of the things as part of the pre suasion principles is that you're striving to align their identity with what they're trying to accomplish. And obviously you're striving to have part of that be that they're making a decision that you're trying to help them make. And so that's actually one of the things that Dan Sullivan says that's what marketing is and selling is that you're helping people get intellectually, you know, interested or stimulated and emotionally committed to making a decision. And so this is just all part of training their identity. And really what the context is that you're creating is their future self. You're creating a context that they already want. It's their future self. And so they're coming at it from that perspective. And so these are all just things that I say in a lot, kind of quicker stream in that seven minute video. And so over a six, this was without it over a six month period of time. And it's a very similar funnel. I made that much money on a funnel selling a particular online course by just adding, and these are two separate webinars. But by adding the $7 offer, so you can see the $7 offer and then the thing down below it, I've actually sold probably 4 or 5,000 of the journaling course, which is $7. But what happened is that the conversion rate of the actual thing I'm selling, which is an online course, between 500 and $1,000, that conversion rate almost doubled on the sales page. Because you can test the sales page, you can see how much people when they land on a sales page. So before the sales page conversion rate was 7%. That was the first picture I showed you. The conversion rate on the same sales page. Essentially little tweaks, but not really. Is now 12. Actually no, it's 15%. So the conversion rate on the sales page doubled by adding in this pre suasion component. And it happened for a few reasons. One is because far more of the people who are at the webinar now actually paid to be at the webinar. Thousands of people have now paid $7 to watch the webinar that used to be free. Those people are far more likely to buy the program. But also for me, who's someone who wanted to give material that was useful. I wanted them to have the right perspective. I wanted them to have the right perspective, the right lenses, so that when they watch the webinar it was a transformational experience. Not just them consuming more information. This is the sales page pretty much the same thing as it was before. Another kind of very important principle that I've learned about pre suasion, that this is something that has fundamentally improved the program. So I've had thousands of people go through this online program that I sell. It's a year long experience. And one of the things that I've learned after having thousands of people go through it is that I actually have far lower like refund rates than typical. But when people join a program like mine, and even if they join Genius Network, there's a lot of new information that they have to gather in order to be successful in that new environment. So when I give them this New online course. A lot of the feedback we got was that people felt overwhelmed. People were like, there's so much information, I don't know if I can apply it all. And so what we then did is we built an onboarding program. So my program is called amp. And so what we did is we designed a, an AMP warm up program. There's about 300 people in it right now. And actually a lot of the former people who have been in AMP for like six months who are floundering, we put them back in this program. And essentially what this onboarding prep program is is there's a video at the beginning. And I say, this is after they've bought my program. I say, you actually can't have access to my program or not my program, but you can't have access to AMP what you purchased until after you go through this prep program. This is a buffer. And essentially I explained to them the core mindsets, the core things that they need to understand in order to be successful with the thing that they just bought. And they actually have to accomplish a few requirements in order to actually get access to what they bought. And by doing this, by creating this AMP warm up program and it's essentially like a buffer. I mean, our refunds are so low, but people are so happy because when they walk in, they're no longer overwhelmed. They can take this program at whatever pace they want. And that's one thing I tell them about. You take this at whatever pace you want. The fastest you can do it is in two weeks if you're really a rock star. And then once people actually get into the program that they bought, they have such better results, not only because they worked for it, but because now they're ready for it. They've got the right mindset for it. They actually know how to do it rather than just jumping onto a rocket ship. So this is the thing that me and Joe actually have been working on. Joe filmed an onboarding process. He spent three hours filming some of the most amazing stuff, helping people to, when they join Genius Network, prep their mindset so that once they come to these meetings, they know exactly how to execute at the highest level. So I'm now going to finish. But These are the two pictures. 7% versus 15%. The difference was persuasion.

Did you hear about the money that I made? Isn't that crazy? Joe says, let's not tell anybody. Let's keep it a secret. I said, no, let's tell everybody on the planet. Planet. It's good for the brand, but it's Also, I want to help you see what's possible in markets that most people think is impossible. So let's take a trip back in time. March 25th of last year, 2021. And that was a day that I owned zero dollars and zero cents in crypto. I didn't know crypto. I didn't like crypto. I didn't want crypto. I was happy living life without crypto. And then I get a meeting. That day, I was blindsided into a meeting with the man that literally introduced me to. To Joe Polish. Once upon a time in 2014, we get on. This call shows me something cool. I buy some crypto. December 15th, we closed cart 57. Some odd million dollars. That's how fast it happened. It went from knowing nothing about this market, no product, no asset, no position, nothing to 57 million. To me, that's even more impressive than the number, the speed of execution and implementation. So how the hell did we do it? How did we do this? I want you to have a number so big that you round down 940 million dol. $14,510. Because it's too hard to say. You just say, ah, $57 million. I want that for you. Do you want that for you? Okay, good. We're in the right place. Tip of the iceberg. I got 10 minutes to distill something like this. Can I even scratch the surface of it? Nah, I'm good, but I'm not that good. But I'm going to try my best. Okay, so we're going to go a little bit fast. What were we selling? A product called the Plan, by the way, what a baller ass name that.

Is for a product.

You want to own a market, you know, you just claim the blank and nobody can dispute it. So we're the plan. You have a plan, we have the Plan, we win. So the Plan was created by Dan Hollings. He's the gentleman that we published. He came to us about 12 years ago because he was the marketing guy behind the Secret, you know, that small little thing that ended up on Oprah. And he was burned out. He said, I don't want to do business anymore. I just want to teach. We started publishing them back Then off and on, he'd come to us with crazy ideas. We made a lot of money together. Hadn't heard from him in five years until he came to us with this idea. So the plan is essentially him doing 10,000 crypto automations, spending millions of dollars testing up these crypto bots in the span of three years. And he says to us, hey, listen, you want to sell this? We say, maybe. Let's test it first. Okay? Now here's the key to all successful launches. Just three things. Traffic, conversion, fulfillment.

That's it.

It's so simple, even a CEO can understand that.

Hey, I hope you're enjoying this video. And I want to let you know that I have a new book that's.

Come out and if you'd like to.

Get it absolutely free, there's a link below in the description. Or you can wait till the end of this video, or you can Simply go to joe'sfreebook.com and you can get a copy there.

That's all we got to do. So what do we do in traffic? Here's all we did. Affiliates, brokers, word of mouth. What's missing on this slide? I didn't pay a single penny for this traffic. Some guys make $50 million, but they spend $60 million. That doesn't count. We didn't spend a single penny on traffic. That's not to say we didn't pay for the traffic. We just didn't buy it up front from Facebook. We had these things called affiliates. So here are some of our smaller affiliates. All of them generated over a million dollars in revenue and sales, of which they made 590,000, $423,550,000. These are affiliates making money because they're referring customers to us. That's a pretty good clip of money. So this guy right here, this affiliate, he did okay for us. He did 1.5 in sales. He kept $595,000. We created Leaderboard. This is game theory, right? You want to make people do well, don't convince them on how much it'll help their customers. That's boring. Show them how much cooler they will be than the next person so they can compete with each other. We gave away prizes. We gave away 100,000 to the first prize here, which was Stefan and tatiana. They sold 700 plus units. Do the math on that. That's incredible, right? This time, because Dan owns millions of dollars of NFTs. This time we're giving away a $450,000 NFT on our next launch. I think we're going to make 50 some million dollars smaller in size with this next launch. Now we did something else. We did brokers. Brokers are essentially the ones who would feed us the affiliates. And they got 10% just to feed us the affiliates. So this guy right here, he referred one affiliate to us and we paid him $150,000. This is the kind of traffic that I like to get. You take care of the traffic, I take care of the conversion. That's what I want to do. Try to do traffic and conversion. Guy said to me once, he's like, I'm going to get this right, Jason, or I'm going to die trying. And then he died. You can't do both. I live in conversion land. I can do a lot with a little. Give me a few people, give me enough time and I will have their money in my pocket. Most of the time I'm on a conversion thing. That's what I like to do. So we did this webinar on opening day of the last launch. We had 11,033 people on that Zoom account. Insane. We converted at 11.2% and my business partner was pissed when we stopped because we had to go to the next webinar. We slotted four hours. We thought that was enough. Turns out it wasn't. We left with 3,000 people still on the call. He nearly had a heart attack. We should have done better. But you know, you live and you learn. This is why you iterate and do these things. And you try and you try again. My favorite stat was 6.42% of all leads converted into customers on a product that sold for $3,500. It was non refundable. They had assigned an NDA to purchase this. I don't mess around, you say, Jason, you can't ask customers to do all that stuff. I just did. Why not? It's your planet. You can make the rules up. They don't like it. They can spend their money somewhere else. So we focus on conversion. We like traffic from email. You like social media. I hate social media. I want all my traffic from email. It's the best media ever. If I get traffic anywhere else, I launder them through email. So we did less than 200,000 leads to do 57 million. We sent the traffic to this boring page, a webinar registration page. Look at this brilliant headline. If you're in crypto or thinking about investing, you must attend this one of a kind web event.

I wrote that.

It's not very good, but it converts well. Not creative, but it doesn't need to be. People say webinars are dead. If this is dead, I don't want to be alive. This is killing it. Okay, now the one thing we did in this webinar is we had a dramatic demonstration prior to the launch. We had 18 people pay us $10,000 a piece Dan taught them these strategies one on one, and we got permission to share their open portfolio of all the coins they were holding in that moment whenever we wish to. So we get on a webinar and be like, hey, look at these 18 people. Look how good they're doing now. Do you want to buy this thing? That's essentially what it was. We established the price point is very high. How can you sell something that doesn't have a price point? What's the value on that? It's nothing until you make it valuable. So we took those 18 people. We say, pay us $10,000 and we'll do this for you. Then I go to the public and say, they paid 10,000. You want to pay 2,500. They don't say, 2,500 is a lot of money. They say, 2,500 is a deal because it ain't 10,000. You get it? Everybody makes decisions on prices based on relative comparison, so help them. Okay, here's an interesting fact for you. The replay, I'll convert to the live webinar. I can't unpack that today, but people don't understand this fact. I want you to start thinking about how replays should out convert live webinars, because they do if you do it right. One of the X factors here that we did that was incredibly challenging and hard, that we couldn't do without a team, was we forced our affiliates to have results with the very process they were promoting. Most affiliates don't even look at the products they promote. They just look at the EPCs, earnings per click, and all that nonsense. We said, if you're gonna play with us, you better have results. Every single one of them got on and showed their results made a huge difference. I attributed $15 million just to that one. One aspect right there. Now, it took hundreds of hours. Herding cats is easier than dealing with affiliates, but herding cats don't pay as well. Now, just like you can't both do traffic and conversion. Not really. You can't ride two horses at once, but there's three horses in this race. There's fulfillment. You also got to have the product. You got to have the support. You got to have the infrastructure. So Dan was the man with the plan. He came to us with the product, and we provided the marketing for it. He did the first half of the webinar. He taught on the procedures and techniques and proof. And then I came in, and for three or four or five hours, I sold everybody until I either fell asleep or they dropped off. And that's how we made it work. But it was a group effort. Dan brought a whole team with them. He bought all these people like Tony and Elaine and Ian and Daniel and Anthony, Mikey, Ashley. He even had my dog in on this mix. Lots of people were involved. We had 52 people on support. Sometimes people say, jason, how do you sell so hard? I said, when I got 52 people supporting this, I feel good selling you something. If I had zero people supporting this, I wouldn't want you to buy it. So it takes a lot. It sounds like it's just good marketing, but it's good everything. Here's the timeline. This is what's insane about this. We have the meeting on March 25, May 2, we emailed people to a Discord group to sell them the $10,000 thing, which we close on May 6th. We get results and people. We couldn't take everybody in, so we said, we're going to create a beta course for 2,500 bucks. They buy that, we do a first webinar on it, close it, teach it, go back to a second webinar, close it, teach it, refine it, go back to a third webinar on September, close it, teach it, refind it. Then we do big launch November 27th. We car it open on December 2nd. We cart close on December 14th, and we're looking at this big old pile of money. And that is the high level version of how we set the Internet marketing record for biggest launch in history.

So am I on?

Okay, you're always on with me.

So do you have a down period psychologically after something like this? Because stuff like this could be. Yeah, it could be exhausting, which is a very interesting thing. I will talk to Ned Hallowell about perhaps of when you have a big success, a lot of entrepreneurs go into just a depressed state.

Yeah, I mean, I took a month and a half off. I just started working again, like the other week or so. You do feel hollow afterwards in some instances, simply because the adrenaline wears off. And then you're left with the real world. You know, the kids still fight me at bedtime and, you know, the dog still barks at suspicious dogs and wants to eat them for breakfast. And no amount of money changes that. So you kind of feel like, okay, I got to get back to the real world now. But, yeah, you're right, there is a depressive state of time because you go from a super high normal now feels low again.

Well, and the reason I want to bring this up is because me and you were talking about, like, Making money and success and everything. And then I think I've kind of reentered you into getting into doing cold plunging and all this.

You did? Absolutely. Yeah.

And you are now sending me, like, you're using the Wim Hof app and you're, like, holding your breath. I think the last one you sent me three and a half minutes.

Yeah, I did three minutes this morning.

Yeah.

Crazy.

And the reason I want to bring this up is as we talk about strategy and success and all this, which is incredibly valuable and important for people here in their businesses, there's also this other side of just how one feels in life. And I also find out of all, because I think you're still the top webinar trainer in the world. You've made more money and taught your clients how to make more money than anyone in the world in webinars. You know, it's in, I guess, hundreds of millions of dollars now. But you were, you know, before we met. I mean, you were not taking care of yourself as well as you could physically and everything. And so you've had a lot of transformation in that regard. So what advice would you have for people on this journey? Because you're around crazy marketers all the time.

Yeah, I think the average entrepreneur is traumatized before they ever become an entrepreneur, because I don't think a sane person wants to become an entrepreneur. I'm serious. I know it's funny, but you got to be insane to be an entrepreneur. So typically, most of us do that because there's some traumatic experience in our early childhood, usually that we haven't healed from. And so, you know, you take care of the money, you realize that doesn't heal the trauma. And then if you're lucky, like I was, I start working through the. The trauma. You helped me out a lot and pointing me to the resources to do that. And so I've made a lot of effort to heal from traumas that have happened to me before I was 8 years old that still affect me at 38 years old, even today. So I would recommend that you do a lot of trauma work. If you're working really hard and too much, there's a problem there. Anything that leads to addiction, there's an underlining problem there that needs to be dealt with, and the sooner the better, and the later, the worse. And so being in Genius Network helped me understand that side of the business as well. Because, you know, you come from trauma, I come from trauma. And so by Joe being vulnerable, it allowed me to feel more comfortable being vulnerable with myself. Which by the way, made me a better marketer too.

Yeah, yeah, no, absolutely. So what advice would you give for anyone to pay attention to, read, look at study that you have done recently. I mean, everyone can get a copy of Jason's book if you haven't already, which he explains his process. I mean, that whole book kind of walks you through the salesmanship and it's great psychology.

Yeah, the book's one to many. Definitely get that because I break down the whole webinar process I predominantly use. But if you can find and watch one of my webinars, that's going to be your best education because it's a master class like Joe can tell you. When we launched genius webinars, people literally made money on the free webinar. Hundreds of thousands of dollars in some instances, regardless of whether they bought our product or not. So my attitude is, how do I construct a webinar where it's so valuable just by being there that whether you buy the product or not, you're successful on the thing that I'm teaching as much as possible. And so that's the attitude of everything that we do. And so if you can watch a webinar of mine, you would see that personified. It's not learning how to swim in a seminar, it's getting in the pool.

Yeah, awesome. I will just admit right up front, 10 minutes has got me nervous. I don't do nervous on stage, but here I am. Okay, so let's see, what are we at? Let's try this one. Okay. Yeah. The next half billion dollars in launches. So you ever notice when Apple launches a product and people just, you're anticipating that you're excited about that. The market's just, just talking about it and everyone's just, they're counting down. It's all about anticipation. It's when is that product going to get released? People line up outside the stores, right? This guy, first in line for iPhone 5. Woo hoo. You know, put that in his gravestone, you know, but they had these lines outside of the Apple stores, you know, you ever noticed how I am an Internet marketer? I sell stuff online. Sometimes servers crash. Well, the iPhone, I think it was the 4. The Apple site crashed. I'm like, okay, if Apple's site can crash, my site can crash. I'm good with that. But they do, what do they do? They do tens, hundreds of millions of dollars immediately, right off the bat from, you know, from 0 to 100 miles an hour right away. So I've wondered, how can we do that? How can we do that in this room? You know, we don't have those resources. We don't have their branding, we don't have their advertising, we don't have their teams. How can we do that? So for 18 years I've been working on how we can do it, but actually that's bullshit, because 18 years ago, I was a stay at home dad and I was like, I was just desperate to make some kind of money to try to impact my family in some way. So I started publishing. I started publishing online. This is 1996. So back then, my first email went out to everyone I knew with an email address that was like 17 people. But it gradually grew from there. And I grew this platform, okay, I grew this platform. Anyone out here have a platform? You've got an email list, you've got a social media following. Are you guys just not willing to raise your arms or what? Thank you. Okay. So I gradually built up this platform. I did what they now call content marketing. So I published. And then I got to this point, well, maybe I can actually sell something to these people. But I was actually. We have born closers. We got closers in the room. Raise your hand proudly if you're a closer. So we've got some closers, right? You guys know what I'm talking about. You know how to sell. Unfortunately, I'm not one of you. I don't have that sales gene. So I had this little platform that was growing up and I was like, how can I sell something to them? And I was terrified. I was actually terrified to ask for the order. I was terrified to ask for the order. And that actually, that little thing allowed me to sort of invent this process that has made all the difference. Because what I did was I romanced my people, I've romanced my followers, and then I asked for the sale. I built relationship first. And even for the closers out there, you all do that, right? You all build relationship. But now, in this day and age, we're able to do that in a way we never could before. We have the speed of communication, interactivity that we've never had before. So I tweaked this, and I tweaked this. I did my first launch. Some of you heard the story. That did $1,650. That was enough to make me do backflips. $1,650 changed everything with that first launch. But then I got better. I instantly knew I could get better at it. And I did get better, and I got better. Here's a photo. I put this in a book, but I've never really made this one public. That's actually me. I am at my kitchen table and I'm in a bathrobe. And this was not staged. This is actually when I did a launch. This is the first six figure launch I did. It was $106,000 in a single week. I think like sitting there for an hour, you know, we did 28,000 in sales. And this is. That was like unbelievable, life changing money for me. So I gradually got better and better and better. And then in 2005 I started teaching it. And my students and clients have now done $500 million in sales. In fact, it's way beyond that. But that's the number I feel safe saying publicly. You know, I've got clients that have done tens of. And even one that's done 100 million in sales. So what I wanted to share with you is based on what I've learned. And you know, it's funny, cause I was thinking about like I did just roll out this book. Okay, there it is. In fact, there's a book, it's in all your bags. I bought one for each of you and we rolled that thing out. And I was talking to Pollock Holligan and he's like, yeah, dude, I think you're, I think the title of your talk, you should just go up there and say this shit works. Because I came in, I was completely unknown author and boom, it was like up to number one. In fact, what happened was the first week the New York Times decided not to put me on the list even though I had the sales. And so then we doubled down and I had several conversations with my good friend Brendan Burchard and came up with a strategy how we were going to come back and sell even more the next week. And then we were able to put it up to number one. There's the proofs in the pudding. That was a screenshot. I got to print that one out and put it on the wall. So how do you do this? It all comes down to three things. Sequences, stories and triggers. And so sequences. You can't ever. There's so much noise in the market now that to gather someone's attention, you have to put your material into a sequence that tells your story. Then your story just. It's almost like what I call the sideways sales letter. We used to have these long form sales letters and they worked really, really well. Now they don't work as well. So I took that 10 page sales letter, I turned it sideways into a 10 day process. And now you do very much the same thing you do in a sales letter, but now you do it over a series of pre launch content of value videos. We typically do this now with videos that build over time. And then the triggers are simply things like we all use all the time, authority, reciprocity, scarcity. And in those three videos they allow you to deploy those triggers and you build up this anticipation just the way Apple does. And you get the situation where people are like, they cannot wait to buy. They absolutely cannot wait to buy. So you want to know how you want to. You know, this is obviously very, very compressed what I just gave you. That's normally the first two and a half days of my three day event. So do you. Anyone want. In three minutes, anyone want to see that sequence for the book? Because the book is a little bit different. And are they. Can we put this on camera? So what we did was we had an offer for the book and basically we were selling it for $7. It was actually free with shipping and handling. Okay, so we give the book away for seven bucks. So we're going to put a B here for the book. Someone comes in to buy and they get an instant upsell. Okay, so this is a one time offer, OTO. And this is for $197. Okay. I would have liked to say I got 8 or 10% conversion, but we got about a 7% conversion on that. Okay, but at a $200 product, that means that everyone coming in and getting a free book is worth 14 bucks right off the bat. Now the key here, the really important thing is that in doing this, it allows you to incentivize partners to mail for you. Because all of a sudden I can pay commissions and I gotta. And I gotta give a shout out. Brendon Burchard is the one. Brendan, in 2011, I think bought my product and he's taken it and did really well, but then he morphed it and he came up with this process. So Basically, book for $7 to upsell for $197. And then either way, whether they take the upsell or not, then they go into my PLF product And that's at 1997. And the conversion for there is around 1.7%. You can do the math on that. But it comes out pretty well. But what we do is basically now I've got partners, lots and lots of partners driving into the book, driving traffic into the book, saying, hey, go check out Jeff's book and get it free. With shipping and handling for seven bucks, ten bucks, they'll ship it anywhere in the world. If you're outside the U.S. i'm able to pay partners at commission on this one click upsell. And I'm also paying them commission down here. Boy, that writing is nothing like a time deadline to take your writing at all to hell. But in any case, that's how I sold 41,000 books in just a couple weeks time frame. That's how we put it on number one in the New York Times bestseller list. So remember your marketing Joe talked about this in his little introduction. Your marketing has to tell a story. Nothing captures people's attention like a story does. Stories win. And when you deploy that story over a 10 day time frame and you give three great value videos that define the opportunity, define the journey, define how your prospects lives are going to transform. Then when you land them on your sales video, they don't even need to watch that and take, they are ready to buy.

I want to talk to you about how to transform from a personal brand, from a guru brand into a profitable, scalable and if you want to, sellable brand. Brand. Now obviously you don't have to do this if you don't want to. But if you want to, it's kind of a cool thing to know how to do. So that's what we're going to talk about now. There's a big problem and I guess this is the reason that I want to talk about this today. It's a disease that I see infecting so many of my friends in the entrepreneurial world today. And I call it Guru Itis. And it's literally every single CEO I know wants to be the next Tony. Now there's nothing wrong with this. If this is what you want, that's fine. But in my experience, what so many people don't realize, the big challenge with Guruitis is while very often you look really successful on the outside, inside you're stressed beyond belief because you're thinking like, how do I maintain this facade? I gotta look like I got my stuff together, right? And really I'm kind of screwed up like everybody else, right? You're also exhausted because you're the one doing all the work, right? You're out there doing everything. There's only so much that you can have other people do. And the worst thing is you're trapped, right? You're trapped. You're trapped because you are the business. Worse, you're trapped because you are the product. My business partner, Roland Frazier, who you saw up here earlier today he calls that refers to that having a dancing bear business.

Right?

You're the dancing bear. And when the bear stops dancing, the bear stops getting paid.

Alright?

So my goal, my hope is to at least give you a path, give you an option to de gurufying your business again if you want to. I know many of you would actually, though you don't like to admit it, would much rather be famous than rich. And that's cool. That's cool. But if you're like me and you're mostly in it for the money, then I want to show you how you can build a business transition away from a pure guru into a business that's maybe a little bit more sellable. Now where I came from, definitely I've been doing this since 1999, made my first sale online in 99 and have kind of started out in the guru space. I mean, I was running stupid ads like this, talking about, look at me, I'll build your funnel. So I went from doing jackassy kind of stuff like that to with the help from a lot of smart people, launching the. Helping to launch the brand digitalmarketer.com, which thankfully is relatively well known by enough people to keep my family fed. And it's now a real company and everything. And it's a company that thankfully has value outside of me. It's a company that if tomorrow we wanted to sell it, my partners and I would make probably more money than we needed for a while, right? Not Roland. Roland. If you know Roland, he spends all his money on way too expensive wines. He'd be done in like a month or two. But Perry and I'd pretty much be fine. And so again, this is what we've been able to roll out and do. So I just want to talk to you about kind of the process of what we went through. If you want to follow a similar path, step number one is you need to materialize your genius, alright? You need to productize your genius. You need to take the voodoo that you do so well and you need to somehow extract it from your brain, from your general awesomeness. And you need to put it over here. It needs to kind of become separate from you. In other words, you need to not do what a lot of people talk about doing, which is black boxing. Everything that you know. And I see this done, I see this talk. Like if you want to be the expert, you're the guru on the top of the mountain. Don't tell anybody how you do what you do because then they won't need you. Anymore, you want them coming up to you. The problem with that is, is if you're the one they want, you never really get a day off. You can't really take a vacation. And what you got really isn't sellable. Now maybe you're thinking, that's fine, I'll write a book. I've written a book. I love books. I think books are great. I think just about everybody in this room should have a book. If you don't have one, they're good for business. It's a good marketing tool. But this is not what I'm referring to.

Hey, I hope you're enjoying this video.

And I want to let you know that I have a new book that's come out. And if you'd like to get it absolutely free, there's a link below in the description. Or you can wait till the end of this video, or you can Simply go to joe'sfreebook.com and you can get a copy there.

Primarily because no one in the history of the world has actually finished a book. Do you realize that, like, nobody's actually ever read a book? People buy books and they put them up on shelves and they look really nice. But in general, sadly, human beings don't read and finish books. So if we want to get our knowledge out of our head, we want to put it somewhere where it can be transferred then. I'm not talking about a book. I'm not talking about writing the bible of your industry. I'm really talking about what's your ten Commandments? Okay, what is your ten commandments? I came across this accidentally. I remember I was at a really low point in my business career and I kind of scribbled down on a napkin one day. Here's generally what I know to be true about how my business works. I know that I want to bring some leads in and somebody will buy something small and then I'll upsell them something a little bit bigger. This napkin that I wrote, which now is framed and in my office I now refer to as the million dollar Napkin. It's a super corny name, but this napkin is actually what planted the seeds of digital marketer. When we first started teaching and talking about this idea of the napkin model, right? Go from a lead magnet to a tripwire to a core offer to a profit maximizer. This five step funnel concept, has anyone else heard of this? Yeah, that's where it started. It was an accident, but it was the first time I took something that I had and I said, you know what? I'm Gonna place it over here. I'm gonna let it stand separate from me. That was when things started to take off. People started to adopt it as their own. The napkin became customer value optimization. Now it's a flow chart. Now I'm beginning to see people print these out. They're turning them. They're making posters out of them, putting them up on their wall, and then eventually became an actual tool that people could use to figure out what's the process of turning strangers into friends, into customers, into raving fans. And that's the customer value journey. Now, you know you've nailed it. You know you've got it right. You know that people are really beginning to adopt your framework when they're doing stuff like this, all right? When they are taking your framework, when they're taking your concept, they're printing them out, they're turning them into posters. That is when you have it. That is when this genius that is yours and can now be consumed by someone else, they feel like it can be theirs. Now, the important thing I want you to keep in mind, to pull this off, you must fully transfer your genius onto the artifact. Okay? You must fully transfer your genius onto the artifact. It must hold the power, or you will remain trapped. So when people say, oh, you're so smart. You're so great, no, no, I just do what I talk about on that napkin thing. It's not about me. It's about that. You have to learn to redirect the attention away from you and onto the artifact if you want to be free. Does that make sense? It can't be about you. This can be the hardest thing in.

The world to do.

But if you want to be free, it's got to be about the thing that can be transferred and your brain ain't that. So my first question for you, I'm going to have three question number one. What's your ten commandments? What's your napkin? How do you materialize? How do you productize your genius? That's step one. Step two, we need to profitize your message. That's not a word. Made it up. What do I mean by prophetize? Well, I don't mean prophet P R, O F, I mean P R, O, P, H. And the question I have for you is, are you a prophet or are you a God? Are you a prophet or are you the God of your brand? How have you positioned yourself in your business with your brand? I want to kind of take you back, and I want to show you some of the homepages for DigitalMarketer.com and I want to see if you notice any themes. So this is kind of where Digital Marketer started. Not bad looking. Then for some reason, we got worse. Not really sure how that happened. Then we got a little bit better, and then we decided, oh, maybe we should capture some leads.

So we did that.

And this is kind of where we sit today, right now. Throughout all the different changes, one thing has remained consistent. This jackass has not graced the top of the homepage. Right? My face hasn't been at the top of the homepage. And I would submit to you that if your mug is at the top of your homepage, you are likely positioning yourself as the God of your brand and not a profit for your brand. Now, this is where I want to kind of pause for a little bit and let's talk about what's the role? Right? What should your role be? Let's think about the Ten Commandments. Moses coming down from Mount Sinai. Even if you haven't read the book, you've probably seen the movie, right? Charlton Heston, long beard. So up here at the top of the mountain, that's God, okay? That's not you. Now, I know that's gonna be hard news for some of you to swallow, all right? That's not you. And the reality is you don't want that to be you. Because God doesn't get a day off, right? God doesn't get to take a vacation. Who are you? You're the messenger. You're the prophet. You are the guide. You are the one coming down with the tablets, which is your message saying, I have the good news. You are the messenger bringing that to your customers. So the question that I have for you, that I want you to ponder, this is question 2 of 3 Are you currently positioned as the profit for your brand or the God of your brand? Profit for your brand or God of your brand, how are you positioned? Step three, we need to deputize other true believers. So we've crafted our message. We've separated it from us. We've begun to be the prophet of our brand. Now it is time to gather others to the cause. It is time to make disciples of all nations, right? So we need to deputize other true believers for us. At Digital Marketer, we did this formally with our certified partner program. We said, let's certify agencies and consultants to teach our stuff. Most people would never do this. Have somebody else teach my content. That's my content. They'll never do it as well as I can. Some do it not as well, some do it better. Recently, one of our certified partners pitched our stuff into Southwest Airlines. I don't know anybody from Southwest Airlines. They did. Right. We have them taking it into other nations in different languages that I don't speak because I'm only kind of good at one of them. All right? So that's one of the ways that we did it. Another way that we did it is at our event, Traffic and conversion Summit. I remember Traffic and conversion Summit one. I was on the stage all three days. Even when I wasn't speaking, I was terrified that somebody was going to say something that went against something that I said. So I made sure I was on the stage monitoring them, sitting there in a stool, just judging them.

Right.

The most recent traffic and conversion summit. The most recent traffic and conversion Summit. Three talks, which is about three more than I actually wanted to do instead. I wanted to make room for our customers. I want to make room for our members. I wanted to make room for our certified partners. I wanted to make room for our customers and all the other folks over there, our team, our employees. I want to make room for them to come up there for those messengers. Now, I know what you're saying. Yeah. But if I make room and all these people come up, what if they leave? What if I make messengers of people, I make gurus of other people, and they leave. I want to show you one other picture. This is me on stage hugging a banana. The man in the banana suit is Russ Henneberry. The rest of the team there is Lindsey, Suzie, and you can see the top of Molly's head. At this event, these four people who are critical team members to Digital marketer, all spoke and were featured prominently on our stage today. None of them work for us anymore. They've all gone on to do other things. They've all gone on to do other things. They left the right way, love them to death, miss them terribly. But the brand goes on. The company goes on. The messengers have changed, but the message remains the same. The messengers have changed, but the message remains the same. So I want you to write this down. When you let go, you make room for others to take hold. If you grasp onto everything that's yours and you claim it as your own, and you don't let anybody else have anything to do with it, you know what? There's not room for them to get hold. When you let go, you create room for others to take hold. And you know it's working when people start sticking your logo on their stuff. I'm proud of the Fact that I've walked into coffee shops all over the world and I've seen people with our logo on their computer, that's crazy to me. But it's because we let go and let them take hold. So the final question I have for you is, who do you know who could help spread your message? Who on your team could be spreading your message? Which customers could you certify to let them talk about your stuff? Who could share in spreading your message, knowing they won't do it as well as you, but knowing that they'll get the message out to more. So just to review, materialize your genius, separate it from you, have it be something that's transferable, that's passable, prophetize your role, deputize other messengers. And the final action item that I would have for you, I would ask you to mentally shift your role from guru to the world's best spokesperson for your brand. Mentally shift your role from guru to the world's best spokesperson for your brand. Will any of you in the room do this? Yeah. If you will please repeat after me. I am not my company. My company does not own me. I own my company. Say it again. You own the company. The company doesn't own you. That's what I wanted you to hear. Thank you.

When I was talking to Steven yesterday, I was like, you know what? And I'd even asked, I asked Joe this and I talked to Susan. I was like, what will be the most helpful thing for people? And I think the only way that anyone ever does well with marketing is they gotta appreciate it and respect it. When people say, I don't like marketing, or marketing isn't important, that's like saying, I really don't like oxygen. You know, that oxygen just isn't really that big of a thing. I mean, hold your breath for three minutes and see how gasping for air kind of sucks. And if you don't utilize marketing and appreciate marketing and reframe it, we can take any painting here, you know, any painting, and we can duct tape it to the wall. And it's going to look a certain way. If you put it in a nice frame, you position it well, it's going to look completely different. Your whole business is that way. How? You know, some of you can make incredibly beautiful art, but then you don't do the same thing for yourself. You don't create bio videos. You don't make your brand and the way you position yourself desirable and attractive and awesome. And so you cannot bore people into buying. You're not even going to create A desire that already doesn't pre exist. And so what I would encourage you to do. And I'll do some Q and A if we have time, time for that. And if we don't, I will be happy to hang around because more than anything, it's really hard to share 20 years worth of marketing experience in a short talk. But I have a couple hundred hours of amazing content with some of the world's greatest thinkers in business and entrepreneurship and in marketing that I will share with all of you for free. I'm not going to try to sell any of you guys anything. I'm happy to just provide this stuff because I'm going to actually take Joe as a case study and I'm going to, he's going to teach me how to be like a better artist than I am and he's going to actually show me how to throw. Thank you. Thank you, but no. We're going to throw some pots and we're going to videotape this stuff. And I'm actually going to, I'm going to see if we can actually create a multimillion dollar campaign with Joe's art because the guy's incredibly talented and he already does. Well, he's made a living doing this.

And.

I actually, I'm going to do a Scott Skunk's work thing and I'm going to see if we can actually utilize him as a killer case study. And if we document it, we'll share it with you guys next year when you all come here and do that. So I'll do Q and A. I'll do whatever I can to be useful. Does the carpet cleaning thing seem not to resonate with all, with anyone? Does it resonate? Okay, I like it because it's like again, if you have to figure out how to sell something nobody wants to buy, you have to figure out how to persuade. And so let me share with you a couple of things. The number one thing, the number one question in all consumers minds is who can I trust? All of you are walking like if I was trying to sell something. All of you right now, you just met me, other than Joe came up and said something nice about me. Susan did. Maybe you saw a video of mine. Whatever. So because they introduced me, there's this implied this guy maybe knows what he's talking about, but none of you really know me. So you don't know if I'm a good person. You don't know what my motivations are. You don't know if you could trust me. Whatever. So the whole process of doing business with someone is rapport. That's why McDonald's, although you should never eat that food, or Pizza Hut, I saw Krispy Kreme doughnuts, which is hysterical. But basically, people, McDonald's is not the best food in the world, but it's the biggest restaurant chain in the world and you can go into any country and it's familiarity. So there's a certain level of, even though it's not good food, you can trust it to a degree. If you can trust that it's crappy food and not healthy for you, but maybe, you know, you're not going to get food poisoning. But here's the interesting thing. And I've thought about a lot of stuff related to business. And so the number one question is, who can I trust? And so your job as an entrepreneur is to establish trust and rapport with people. And it is so much harder to make the first sale than it is to make additional sales. And it's so much harder to get a cold prospect to do business with you or to buy into something unless they just happen to see something you have and they love it and then, boom. And that does happen here. So that's the interesting thing about art. I'm the type of guy that if I walk around and I see it, I'm like, I want that. And I'm also in the position where I can buy most things that I want. I mean, I net over a million a year, so I have money where I can actually buy stuff, but at the same time, I'm not a chump. And I also know that a lot of the. And this is maybe the worst thing to say to a group of artists. I think a lot of art that is put out in the world as art is simply pollution. But it has a great marketing story attached to it. So they're like, oh, this is real art. But I look at some art and I'm like, what the hell? Lack of creativity, insane sort of brain created this. But again, if you can sell it and you can, I appreciate that sort of stuff. But then there's other art, which is incredibly powerful. And so the whole thing with trust, when you're selling like carpet cleaning services, nobody wants to buy it. So when I first started reading about direct response marketing, which is the type of marketing I use, it's very copy intensive, using powerful words. And so I have one of my first marketing tools. I think you guys will crack up at this. But one of the very first things that I created was a consumer guide to carpet Cleaning. Now, I learned marketing. Before the Internet, there was no Internet and we were using direct mail, which I'm still a huge fan of direct mail. If I could only rely on one method of selling my services, what I sell, I would use direct mail. There's less noise in people's mailboxes today than ever before in history because so much attention has been put on the Internet. Now. We make a lot of money on the Internet. I have many websites, we do a lot of conversion, all that sort of stuff. And certainly all my podcasts are delivered because of technology. But I love direct mail. So back in the day, all my competitors were running price advertising. Like I said earlier, if you don't have a system for selling your services, every consumer has a system for buying, and it's price. Because when you don't know what something costs and you're interested in hiring a plumber, or you're going to get your house painted, or you're going to buy an article of clothing, or people are walking around here and you don't have prices on your art and they want it, what's the first thing they typically ask you? Yeah, how much you charge. Well, the reason you ask how much you. And you all do it, every one of you does this is because you don't know any other way to make a buying decision. So you would have people call me up if they ever called me up and say, how much you charge for carpet cleaning? Because I didn't really know quite how to price. So I would use. Using price advertising. And I hated that question because I would be on the phone with someone, normally a woman, for anywhere, 15, 20 minutes, explaining my method, what it is I do. And she'd say, let me talk to my husband or let me think about it and I'll call you back. And I did that over and over again, and I was like, what a waste of freaking time. This just sucks. But why are they asking me that? I mean, because they don't have any other criteria to make up price. And if I advertise price, that's the bait. You know, if you don't like the fish, you got to look at what's the bait you're using to catch them. You know, people have disdain for their clients because all these people care about is price. But you're fishing with price. You know, if you don't like the dam, only the hungriest fish will snap at the crappiest bait. So it's kind of like, well, what are you fishing with? So I read this. I Read a lot of stuff from a guy named Gary Halbert. He was a copywriter. He was the first guy I learned marketing from. And he said that any problem in the world could be solved at the right sales letter. And I would encourage you to write that down or think about it. Any problem in the world could be solved with the right sales letter. When I first heard that, I was like, there's many problems that can't be solved with, you know, a sales letter. What if you have cancer? What if you have a relationship problem? What if you don't have good health? You know, can that be? Well, you. As a matter of fact, most of those problems can be solved or at least assisted with a sales letter. Because all a sales letter is are words that are designed to persuade people in order to do something. So I created my very first Consumer's guide to Carpet Cleaning. Because no one cares about carpet cleaning. They're not going to do research to understand what's the difference between dry cleaning and carpet versus steam cleaning versus whatever. And so I took something as boring and as dull as carpet cleaning and I created a consumer guide to carpet cleaning. Everyone was using name, rank, serial number, who they are, what they do, and their phone number. And so I created Consumer to Guide to Carpet Cleaning. And this is it. And I have all this stuff memorized because I've done this so many times, but it says, read this guide and discover how to avoid six costly misconceptions about carpet cleaning. Seven questions Ask a carpet cleaner before you invite them into your home. Crawling critters and crawling. A guide to the slime, grime and livestock that's seeping, creeping and galloping through your carpet. How to avoid 4 Carpet Cleaning RIP offs, the difference between value and price and how to get your carpet cleaner to 100% guarantee their work. So all of a sudden, people were thinking carpet cleaning. But I didn't know there were six costly misconceptions about carpet cleaning. I didn't know there were eight mistakes to avoid when choosing a carpet cleaner. I didn't know there were four ways to avoid getting ripped off. So I started planting these seeds in what to do to look for a carpet cleaner. I was telling a story. I was creating a picture in their mind so that they wouldn't call me up and say, how much do you charge? So then they would open this up because every flyer, every ad yelled out, someone's trying to sell you something. I was like, I want to actually educate people. So the type of marketing that, that I started doing is education Based marketing. I started educating people on what I do and how I do it. Every single one of you have a story about how you started your business, why you do art. Some of it was started out of inspiration. How many of you, your art was started out of fear, desperation, anxiety, depression. You had a crazy ass upbringing. You had depressed parents, you had bipolar people, you had addictions in yourself, that sort of stuff. Stuff. And it became an outlet for you to actually take your brain and turn it. Because every time Joe sits down at a potter's wheel, my guess, and I may be wrong, maybe he's very strategic. My guess is he makes it up and then he makes it real. How many of you sit in front of a canvas that are painters? And then you make it up and you make it real. That's what you do as an entrepreneur. You make it up and make it real. Every day we're getting up and we're bumbling our way through life as best we can. Now the more strategic you are with bumbling around, great. But so here I had this thing where it's like, okay, how do I educate people on carpet cleaning? So choosing a carpet cleaner is easy. Why? Because you're bombarded with misleading advertising, confusing claims and simply bad information. From super low prices and high pressure sales to unqualified technicians and near worthless methods. How do you ever find a corporation qualified, competent, professional carpet cleaner? You start by reading this consumer guide. In this fact filled booklet, you'll discover how to avoid four carpet cleaning rip offs, eight mistakes to avoid, blah blah, blah. And that says, we wrote this guide to help you better understand carpet cleaning. Now you can be a graphic designer, you can be an artist, you could be a pet grooming service. We wrote this guide to help you better understand ceramics or paint or whatever. And now with this information, you can make an informed, intelligent decision. Because that's all consumers want to make. They don't want to make an uninformed, idiotic decision. They want to make an informed, intelligent decision. So I created a consumer guide to carpet cleaning. So when people call me up, I would say, and they would say, how much do you charge? I said, well, you know, I've actually created a consumer guide that will teach you everything you need to know on how to hire a professional carpet cleaner. And I'm happy to mail it to you. And if you read it, we'll clean one room up to 200 square feet absolutely free so you can try our services out. And if you like it, we'll give you a carpet audit. Because everyone else is giving free estimates. I didn't want to give free estimates. I didn't want to do what anyone else did. So I created a unique way of packaging and positioning carpet cleaning. And again, a boring ass service that nobody wants to buy. People would call me up and I would mail them the consumer guide and I wouldn't have to spend 15 or 20 minutes on the phone. I would totally position myself as being helpful and useful. And then they would call me back and say, when can you do the job? After they read it. Because I was the one providing them with information on how to make an informed buying decision. They trusted me, they bonded with me. And that's what you want. You want to bond with your clients. And the more that you can bond with your clients, the more they're going to want to do business with you and the more they're going to want to refer you. Now, there was a problem if someone called me up and they wanted their carpets clean the next day because there was no Internet back then. The problem is the post office wasn't going to get him a consumer guide the next day. So I was like, how do I handle that problem? So one of the first things that I did was I created a consumer awareness message. And I had a 24 hour free recorded message. And so I started giving out a number to people. I said, well, I've set up a 24 hour free recorded message. It'll teach everything you need to know on how to choose a carpet cleaner. And it was a 10 minute recording that people would call up and it would say, hello, thank you for calling this consumer awareness message, if all you're looking for is a cheap brush the dirt off cleaning, we respectfully ask that you call another carpet cleaner. However, if you're looking for the best service, let me teach you what you need to know about how to hire a professional cleaner. And then I would proceed to teach them how to make a buying decision even if they didn't hire me. And because I was the one providing them with that information, they wanted to do business with me. And so this is before I started selling courses and programs. All I was trying to do was build my carpet clean cleaning business. And I learned the difference between a hundred dollar bill and a $1 bill is the message on the paper. Same paper, same ink, different message. Difference between a $5,000 painting and $100,000 painting isn't just the message or the paint or the picture. It's the positioning before it even happens. You know, when Damien Hirst can sell dots, that he doesn't even paint himself for hundreds of millions of dollars. It's not about the dots, it's about the story. It's about the perception. It's about that sort of stuff. Can everyone still hear me? Okay, sound enough. The mic's going to. So I created this consumer guide to carpet cleaning. And I no longer ran ads that said call me and then ask me how much you charge. I would always drive people to call and get information. And so if you're going to have a website, have a consumer awareness video, tell your story. All I did was tell the story story on how to buy. And people would call me up and say, when can you do the job? It's sifted, sorted and screened. Price shoppers. Because of my marketing. Marketing is selling in advance. Like I said earlier, selling is what you do when you're on the phone or face to face with somebody. Marketing is what you do to get someone on the phone or face to face with you properly positioned so that by the time they talk to you, they're pre interested, pre motivated, pre qualified and predisposed to, to give you money. And so I started running ads in yellow pages and they said, warning, don't call any carpet cleaner until you listen to this free recorded message. In the late 90s, every major phone book in the United States had one or multiple versions of my free recorded message ads running in chiropractic, real estate, heating and air conditioning, auto sales, pest control, florists, jewelers, you name it. Because I licensed my stuff to multiple people. And we can loosely track over 2 billion worth of sales that have come directly off of my ads and promotions for my clients. And it's using robotic automated marketing. So the thing is, I don't think anyone's ever brought that type of marketing to the art world. And so my little lab rat test here is I also want to talk with Susan and I want to create a consumer awareness sort of message for this art show so that by the time this happens next year, you got a whole bunch of people that have already done business with you, already know about this. But I actually want to take my marketing and actually work with Susan to try to come because, well, first off, I know I can pull a lot of this stuff off, but I also know there's a lot of stuff we don't know yet. That's what you have to be willing. In the real world, it's called failure. In the marketing world, it's called testing. So you have to be willing to test a lot of stuff. Stuff. But I'm willing to try that stuff. And the reason I want to throw all these ideas out to you. And one of the reasons, Susan, because I talked with her about this. Susan, really obviously doing these meetings shows a real care. I mean, and plus, because of the way you all, like, make money with each other, you're all incentivized. The more everyone here makes, the more everyone makes. It's sort of like a win, win situation. So part of this is instead of someone trying to increase their slice of the pie, you're just increasing the whole pie. And so part of it is I'd like to take the group of all of you and just help you increase the slice of the pie. I mean, my money is made in my Genius Network group. Okay? So this is sort of going to be like a skunk works project for me, but I actually want to become a better artist. And I actually really want to figure out, like, because some of the stuff in the art world makes no sense to me, but it works. And so I want to figure out what is it that works and what is it that does not work and then figure out how to apply that stuff.

Abs home. And as I do at marketing, one of the analogies I would use. And so at the time, Dan Kennedy. How many of you know grumpy ass Dan Kennedy, the marketer? All right, so Dan Kennedy was writing the majority of my sales copy. He would speak at all of my events that I was doing for carpet upholstery cleaners. I would come to his events and speak at his events because I was like this great story for him, like the dead broke carpet cleaner that built a business. So it was a good sort of positioning thing. And he had this great way of positioning people that you don't have any relationship with versus people that you do and why you would write sales letters and why you would do marketing. And back then, the vast majority of marketing was still direct mail. There was very little email marketing. Dean Jackson, who at 1:20pm Is Dean actually online yet?

Yes.

Oh, he is. Okay, wonderful. So Dean's on. So later this afternoon, me and Dean and Alex Mendozian are going to talk for a little bit about marketing because at the last Genius Network meeting, we got like rave reviews about the section that we did on marketing and where I talked about pricing and people comment like, okay, now I understand why you raised your prices and Genius Network, that sort of stuff. And people really like the marketing thing. So Dean didn't even invent the squeeze page till 1997. I had my first website in 1996. But even back in 1999, you know, there wasn't a ton of E commerce. You know, Amazon was relatively new. And Dean Jackson, many of you are friends with him and know him, he invented the squeeze page for a book called Stop youp Divorce. And then he created this model where people had to enter their email or their name and email in order to go to the next page. That ended up becoming the modern day opt in page page which now, you know millions and millions of websites use. How many of you have an opt in page on your website? Well, the guy who invented it we'll be having a conversation with at 1:20pm today. That's Dean Jackson. Smart dude. So basically Dan Kennedy had this thing where so let's say you have a mountain and over here is where you want, if you want to sell something to somebody, even if you're not trying to get money out of them. Let's say Jennifer Hooty, who was recently married, ends up divorcing this kind of bum husband. She has, Alex and decides she wants to have another partner. It doesn't need to be money. It could just be a relationship. It could be whatever you want. I'm saying that jokingly. Alex Close and Mary Morrissey performed the wedding and she's the best at performing weddings.

She's awesome.

So over here. Yeah. So I could just. There's this dialogue going on between me and Jennifer for right now the most. You have no idea what's going. So money, the gold at the end of the rainbow where you want the person to be. So here's a point here though, where sales and marketing take place. So you want gravity to work in your favor so you don't have to work really hard when things are hard, annoying, lame and frustrating is where you have to start here and try to convince and talk everyone to get them over here. But if you can put. Marketing is anything you put in front of somebody that gets them over the hill so that you're pulling a string downhill, you're not pushing. Gravity is on your side. So I just drew this graph out at Dan and Bab's house and I said you can have someone who's either an annoying pest and this is Dan Kennedy. Language annoying pest. Or on this side, what would it be?

Welcome guests.

Welcome guest.

Exactly.

Exactly.

Thank you, Paris. How many of you do not know the name Paris Lampropolis? They should like, truly, like everyone here knows Paris. Okay.

No.

Paris is one of the top copywriters in the world. Literally, I would imagine Billions of dollars have been made from what you have written. So, yeah, so Paris could get up here and do a far better job than I'm doing right now with all this. So you got the welcome. You got the annoying pest and the welcome guest.

And so I shared all this stuff.

With Dan and Babs. I was like, let's create my version of a consumer guide for carpet cleaning. When someone's like, how much you charge? It's like, well, that's because they have no other criteria on how to make a buying decision. So how do you share things with them in a way to where it kind of walks them up the hill? And I was using 25 free recorded messages and strategic coach didn't have a 24 hour free recorded message. I said, instead of them talking to a salesperson, have them call and listen to a free recorded message on what Strategic Coach is. Misconceptions about coaching. All these different things. The same sort of stuff that I taught Bill Phillips, the same sort of stuff I was teaching my carpet upholstery cleaners, all the stuff that I was doing. And so I shared all this stuff with them about how to get people over here. So by the time they talk to a salesperson, it's like what Later. Robert Cialdini wrote the book Pre Suasion. It's not the selling that takes place, it's what you do in advance. That's what marketing does. So if like Paris writes the sales letter, that sales letter is designed to get someone as close to here to just so you're more in the order taking business than the sales business. Right.

What I'm going to talk about today is how to use ethical influence and persuasion to get more people to say yes. And you know, usually when I talk about this kind of stuff, most people are focused on marketing. I teach a lot of people about copywriting and marketing and sales face to face sales and things like that. But one of the things I want you to know is this is not just about business, which I think is really fitting for Genius Network. These are the kinds of things that you can use in everyday life. And, you know, a lot of times when I speak, I get people that, you know, they want to know the magic words. I'm an NLP guy, right? It's all about linguistics. They're like, tell me the right sentence to say for this and you know, this and that. Um, it kind of reminds me of, you know, back when Evan Pagan used to do the, the double your dating thing. You know, I was an affiliate for his probably 20 years ago. And he would guy. He would get guys all the time going, tell me the pickup lines. What do I say to girls to make them like me? And he would say, I'm not going to teach you pickup lines. I'm going to teach you how to be a better man. Then you'll naturally be more. More attractive. And that's kind of the, you know, I thought about all the things that I could teach in, you know, 25, 30 minutes today. And that's kind of the tack that I'm going to take is I'm going to go a bit meta on influence and persuasion. And you'll be able to apply this to anything that you do. It's not necessarily about the individual language patterns. There are a lot of them. You can learn language patterns. This is more going to be about how to think about how you speak to people in a way that will get them to say yes in every area of life, every context of life. So I'm kind of new to Genius Network. You know, my wife Kayla and I, we joined in January. Don't know a lot of people yet, so I'll just spend a second kind of telling you where I came from and how I got here. This is where it all started for me. Back in 1995, I started a company called Liquid Mirror Software. I was what we affectionately called back in the day, a shareware author. Try before you buy software. And I actually got into business for a really weird reason. I was 20 years old. I was fresh off the streets being homeless, and my girlfriend, who I'd only been dating for a few weeks, got pregnant. And I had no ambition in my life. I didn't have a high school degree. I didn't have really any skills other than the fact that I was a hobbyist programmer. And I knew I needed a career. I knew I needed to take care of this, you know, new human being that was coming into the world who's about to turn 30, which is crazy to me. And, you know, I was the security guard making $6 an hour, which was a lot of money for me. I mean, I think minimum wage at the time was 450. So $6 an hour is like, wow, I was making it and I knew I needed to do something. And really programming was the only skill that I had. And this new thing had been coming out called program. And you didn't need a degree to get into it. But everywhere I went, I would give them my resume and they'd say, well, you don't have experience. Come back when you have experience, nobody would hire me. And after probably 20 or 30 interviews, I was finally like, how am I going to get experience if nobody hires me? And I came up with this idea, what if I came up with my own software company and I published my own software title and then put that on the resume. Then, then I've got experience and people will have to hire me. And I had this little program that I had written, it was called Send to Anywhere. And it was a file utility, would help you copy and move files around in Windows. And I published that out there and really it was the only purpose was to get it on the resume. And it took off and it did really well and it did help me get my first job. And then that was my side gig for a number of years. And. And about a year later I started getting featured in newspapers, magazines and I started realizing I should really figure out how to market this thing. Maybe I don't have to have a day job, you know. And so that's where I used to get these 3M floppy disks at Comp USA and duplicate them and put the stickers on them. That's where I started. That was my first website back in 1995. That was my earthlink.net free 10 page website that I had there. It was beautiful. I ended up with a better one later started one of the very first shareware networks. If you ever downloaded shareware software in the late 90s and 2000s, you probably downloaded from one of my sites called the Shareware Junction Network. Had one of the very first file hosting companies out there, SW Mir years ago in 1998, everything changed. I was at the county fair in Orange County, California and my friends and I would go there every year primarily to see the stage hypnotist, a guy named Mark Usick. And I think he's one of the best stage hypnotists on the planet. I was sitting there in the audience and enjoying the show like I did every year. I mean, we would go pretty much just to see him. But I didn't believe in hypnosis. I thought it was all, you know, a put on. I thought the people on stage were drunk or, or idiots are just paid to be on stage or something like that. But I love the show. But at the end of the show he was selling these tapes and he's going, step right up, step right up. Get your tapes. Three for $20. And all I wanted. I didn't believe in hypnosis. I was super skeptical, very logical guy and you know, I believed the Kind of hypnosis that they put out in Hollywood and cartoon, you know, cartoons where people are sort of controlling others and their eyes, you know, spin and stuff like that. But I had 20 bucks in my pocket, and I just really wanted to hear what was on these cassette tapes. So I walked up and I said, you know, I'll take it. Slap down my $20 bill. He goes, which ones do you want? I looked down in the case, and the first one that jumped out at me was, quit smoking. At that time, 1998, I was 25 years old. I was smoking three packs of cigarettes a day. And I was hopelessly addicted to cigarettes. From the time that I graduated high school and really got some freedom, you know, being out of the house a lot, I really just started smoking more and more and more. By the time I was 21, I was smoking three packs a day. There was a time where I actually rolled cigarettes. And I would smoke filterless cigarettes just to get even more of a rush out of it. And I tried everything I could to quit smoking. Nothing worked. And so I bought this silly little tape about three weeks later at home. I popped it in and listened to it. The curiosity finally got to me, and everything changed. I woke up the next morning and never touched another cigarette again. I barely had a thought of a cigarette after that night. I literally fell asleep listening to the tape. And it was so effortless for me to quit smoking that it actually took me three days before I realized that something had changed. And it dawned on me that I hadn't had a cigarette in 72 hours. And that was the moment when I went down a rabbit hole, that I'm still going down rabbit holes. I fell in love with the subconscious mind and how it works. I started reading everything that I could find on hypnosis. That led me to neuro, linguistic programming, social psychology. And in late 1998, it really began to fuse into my marketing. And I began to play around with these ideas of things like conversational hypnosis and embedded commands and anchoring and using these things in my marketing to such an extent that by 1999, 2000, I was actually writing copy for other people. I'd never been trained as a copywriter. I'd read some books, of course. The Joe Sugarman book, you know, was the one that really got me started. If anybody's ever read that, if you've never read that, it's definitely one of the top books to read on copywriting. The slippery slide principle, right? And, you know, really helping other people as well. And it was great because you know, working with other people I could really see the objective change in their results just by adding a few things. Sometimes I wouldn't even rewrite their copy for them. I would just change a few things or put a little embedded command in that, you know, was almost already there. And I just became fascinated with this. So my in. In 2000 I became certified as a hypnotherapist. 2001 NLP. I ran a practice for many years. I'm still a coach today. Till today we run a coaching practice. But my real love, like my passion is fusing together, you know, NLP and hypnosis and psychology with marketing because I really think it's all the same thing. And I think a lot of times people think that marketing is about creative writing, whereas in my mind it's all about hypnosis, it's all about suggestion, it's all about really getting to the subconscious mind. So today I'm the owner of Transform Destiny. We're the top NLP training company in North America. And also with my wife I co own Transform Destiny. And also with my wife I call influence to profit. And that's where we teach heart centered business owners ethical influence and persuasion. I think the most important word of that is ethical because I find that most people who are heart centered business owners, they have something that's going to transform the world in one way or another or at least transform a life, help a person out and they just don't know how to get that message across. And that's what I'd love to do, is to help people, number one, craft that message and then number two, amplify it, teach them how to get that out there. So there's my shock and awe slide. You all know you're supposed to have one of those, right? All right, so let's talk about this. And my goal today is I'm going to talk for probably about 20, 25 minutes. I'm going to give you some really good stuff and then I'll open it up for questions. I know Gina said, you know, we should probably have a question and answer segment if you don't have questions or if you want me to go deeper, I've got more content and I'll go, you know, as long as you want me to, up until the hour. So here's the problem. We live in a high saturation world. This is I think in the last two, two and a half years, even ever more so a problem. Seth Godin predicted this 22, 23 years ago, right? That the Internet was going to change everything about how people consume, about how people lear that we are so saturated.

With.

I mean, just messages, but most of them, it's, you know, it's been estimated that we see between 30 and 90,000 marketing messages a day. Remember the first time I heard that, I thought, well, that's ridiculous. We don't see that. And then I realized, well, my, you know, my computer says Microsoft on it is focused right on my thing here. I've got burgers, bagels on my coffee. We probably do, if not tens of thousands, right? We're continually saturated by information and by choices. People are overwhelmed. They're skeptical and they're cynical. And here's the problem with that. The subconscious mind, which really is the number one player when it comes to getting people to buy things, it takes the path of least resistance. If given two options and one is easier or quicker or has less resistance, the unconscious mind will tend to pick that one. And this is where a lot of people's procrastination comes from, right? Is people set up situations where the easier thing to do is to not do what they have to do. And the unconscious mind will always influence you in that direction. The result is this. These days, people's default answer is just no. It is literally the easiest thing a person can say. And it really doesn't matter how good your intentions are or how good your product or your service is. The fact is that most people will probably reject you, especially if you're only trying to sell to the conscious mind, which is what most business owners and marketers do. So the solution is to learn how to ethically influence and persuade people you interact with. Really, I think all business is about influence and persuasion, but more importantly, it's that word, ethical, right? And so we do this by learning how to speak directly to the subconscious mind. This is something I've been fascinated with now for 24 years. And I've dedicated really my whole life to this. Now, people used to think that in order to speak to the subconscious mind, you had to have a pendulum or a hypno disc, and you had to have a person with spooky eyes that would look at you and, you know, speak in a soft voice like, you know, what was the old Taco Bell dog, right? You're getting very hungry if you remember the Taco Bell hypnosis commercial. And the fact is, that's not true, right? Formal hypnosis or formal trance is something that is very useful when it comes to doing change work. If you need to quit Smoking, lose weight, drop a bad habit, gain a good habit, let go of fears, any of that kind of stuff. Formal trance is great for that. But in 1951, Milton Erickson, who was one of the greatest psychiatrists on the face of the earth, he was also a hypnotist. He sort of made the announcement that you don't need formal trance to speak to somebody's subconscious mind. The subconscious mind is always listening as long as you know how to speak to it, right? Now, usually when I bring this kind of stuff up, people go, wait a minute, hang on. You're talking about like, you know, digging into people's minds. And isn't this all just manipulation? Aren't you trying to force people to do things against their will? Well, the fact is this, if we look up the definition of to manipulate, it's a transitive verb, and the definition essentially is to move, especially in a skillful manner. I think all language moves people. Sometimes it moves people elegantly, sometimes it moves people sloppily, sometimes it barely moves people. But really, when we communicate with people, we're trying to move them in one way or another. We're trying to move them from one state to another state, from one decision to another decision, from maybe where they are physically in one place to another place, right? We're always trying to move people when we speak. And wouldn't it be great to do that in a skillful manner rather than what most people do, which is, you know, most people, they learn most of their language between 5 and 8 years old in terms of learning how to speak, most of that you learn between like 5 and 8 years old. And then beyond that, the only thing we tend to do to add to our language is just to learn vocabulary, just to learn new words. Most people don't actually invest time in learning how to skillfully use language, which is a very powerful skill.

Hey, I hope you're enjoying this video. And I want to let you know that I have a new book that's.

Come out, and if you'd like to.

Get it absolutely free, there's a link below in the description. Or you can wait till the end of this video, or you can Simply.

Go to joe'sfreebook.com and you can get a copy there.

But here's the thing. Manipulation isn't the issue, right? What really is the issue is intent. What is a person's intent when using these words? Right? When people talk about the word manipulation, usually what they're talking about is a win lose situation. So I think when it comes down to it. When it comes to influence and persuasion, especially intention and integrity is a big part of it. And this is why the ethical part of influence and persuasion is so important. Can these techniques be used to create a win lose situation or what we might call a manipulation of other people? Of course they can. But all language can do that. Right? You don't need, you don't even need skill to manipulate people. Just a black heart. There are people who manipulate all the time just with the English language. Right. It doesn't even necessarily require skills. So here's the thing, the challenge with creating win lose situations and there are unfortunately there are people out there who use neuro linguistic programming and win lose ways. Most of us know what their reputation is. Unfortunately they've kind of dirtied the reputation of neuro linguistic programming where there is a lot of positive that you can take from that. And the challenge with creating when loose situations is you may get them to say yes but then they never trust you again. Now I've been in this business that I'm in right now transform destiny for 22 years. I have people who've been buying from me for nearly that long right from to me. And I'm passionate about what I do. I didn't get into business to make money. I got into business because I love what I do. I go down these rabbit holes and I'm compelled to do this. It's my purpose and then money's the result of it. But there are some people who are primarily money driven and they try to use these kinds of tactics and techniques but they backfire because that person will only ever buy from you once and will probably poison other people to not buy. It's not influence, it's just tricking people. So real influence creates relationships that thrive and flourish as both parties for both parties as they grow. And I would even stretch that to say that I think that real influence is leadership. If you truly. And Joe's a great example of this. Right. Joe went through his recovery and got well himself and now he helps other people recover. Can you imagine if a person was still stuck in their addiction and charging other people to help them not be addicted. Right. It doesn't work well. And that's not to say that it can't work. And that's not to say that there aren't some people who are, you know, pretenders. We were talking about imposter syndrome. I always find it funny that the people who should feel imposter syndrome don't and all the people who are really the good Genuine, kind people who really can help people are the ones that feel imposter syndrome, Right. I think that the true influence is about leadership, right? So that means walking your talk, believing in what you sell. And that of course goes even further into making you a more influential person. When you are fully and 100% congruent behind what you're selling, that makes other people want to follow. So really, in essence, ethical influence makes you an excellent communicator. So if you look at the mind, there's a lot of misconceptions about the conscious mind, subconscious mind. A lot of people say we only think with 10% of our mind. It's actually nowhere near that. If you look at the research, and a lot of this comes from Mihaly, Csiks and Haley, the conscious mind actually only makes up 0.006% of the mind. It's 6/1000 of 1% of the mind. The conscious mind is the other 99.994%. The conscious mind is logical and analytical, which is how a lot of people try to sell and market. Whereas the unconscious mind, or subconscious mind is emotional, organic. The conscious mind is in charge of accepting or rejecting what it encounters, whereas the subconscious mind is in charge of desire. The problem with trying to sell to the conscious mind is this conscious mind is like one of those funny guards that you see if you've ever been to England and you've been to Buckingham palace, you get the guards, by the way, don't ever touch them, they're badasses. They will kick your ass hard. Other than that, they won't look at you or, or move, but they have permission if you touch them, to really mess you up. The conscious mind is kind of like one of those guards. It's standing guard outside the gate and it's the gatekeeper, it's the guard that you see at the Royal Palace. Its job is to filter out the environment and to keep out suggestions. That's really the job of the conscious mind, right? The intention is supposed to be a good thing, but often it's not. Very often it's our conscious mind that prevents us from achieving what we want in our own lives. From, from taking that chance and falling in love, or from buying the thing that we know is going to help us from starting a business or whatever it is. A lot of times it's the conscious mind that gets in the way and rejects the wrong things. And so what we have to do, we have to learn how to bypass that gatekeeper, right? And if you do, you have Access to the vast majority of the mind that's in charge of desire, which is where all buying decisions are made. And there are people who go, what if I'm B2B? What if I'm selling to corporations? Well, you're still selling to humans. Somebody said this at the last, the last genius network mastermind, which is, you know, it's still H2H. It doesn't matter if it's B2B or B2C or anything else like that. If you're selling to another human being. Desire is always part of the equation. Now it may not be the desire of oh, I want this fancy car, but it may be the desire of I want to make this good purchase decision so that I get praise from my boss and other people think that, you know, I'm a good worker. So there's always desire as part of the part of the equation. So accessing and communicating with subconscious mind is the key to great marketing and sales. And really the number one thing is desire. It's the driving factor in all sales and marketing. So what I'm going to present to you now, I'm going to kind of go meta on influence. Instead of giving you language patterns, I want to teach you how to think about what you say so that you can choose the language patterns that you probably already know. And this will help you in your copywriting and face to face sales and your relationships. My, my first, by the way, guinea pigs when it came to hypnosis and NLP were my kids, right? My son was five, my daughter was three. And you know, using this in my everyday life was how I really began to start to get good at it before I ever even introduced it into business.

Okay, I hope you found that video awesome and useful. So if you want to get a free copy of my book, I want you to click here. And if you want to watch some more videos that will be useful and awesome, click here. Go ahead, you're over here. Do it it now.

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