Secret #53: Beware Of All Platforms... Except This One

Hey everyone, it's Russell Brunson. Welcome to the Marketing Secrets podcast. Today we are taking this whole thing is happening on a private plane with Todd Dickerson.

It's a little bumpy right now.

So the big question is, how are entrepreneurs like us who didn't cheat and take on venture capital, were spending money from our own pockets? How do we market in a way that lets us get our products and our services and the things that we believe in out to the world and yet still remain profitable? That the question and this podcast will give you the answers. My name is Russell Brunson and welcome to Marketing Secrets. All right, so right now we are on a private plane and I want to show you guys the moon out here. Now we're going to a cloud. I don't know if you can see.

This busting through the clouds.

There's the flight. For those who are watching this, if you're listening, you can't see it, but we're on a private plane. We're like, I don't know, my feet in the air. We just left Atlanta, Georgia. Or we left. Not Atlanta, we left Cherokee County. Cherokee county, the airport, which is kind of cool. Switching the light on again now. And we had. We're supposed to be. We're really excited because this flight was supposed to be a beautiful girl right there and a beautiful girl right there and then Todd right there. But our beautiful ladies, AKA our wives, are not here. So Todd's daughter got sick the last two or three days. So his wife's like, I can't make it. And then my wife said, well, she's not going, I'm not going. And so now Todd and I are on a romantic trip together without her wife because we've the plane.

So we're going either way. It's going to be fun.

It's going to be so awesome. So. Oh, check out, here's the moon. See the moon shot?

Yeah, there's the moon.

For those who are watching this, there's a picture of the moon and the end. Oh, it looks so cool. Anyway, those of you guys who are listening, you have no idea what you're seeing, but you're totally missing out. Go to marketingsecrets.com and you can watch the video version as well. Anyway, so this plane is really bumpy, bumpier than I thought. So we're past the clouds. Oh, we're above the clouds now. So we're legit. Alright, so for those of you guys who don't know Todd yet, you need to know him. He is the Brains behind clickfunnels. He's the one who built it all initially, and he lives in Atlanta, Georgia. We've been trying to move to Boise now for six years. They told me no. So finally I feel bad. He comes to Boise, like, every quarter, every few months. The first time I've come to Atlanta to hang out with him and see his house and had a chance to spend time with him and his home and his family, and it was amazing. And tell them all about how cool you are.

Oh, ye. Yeah, it was fun.

So anyway, and right now, we're actually heading down to a conference.

St. Peters. St. Petersburg Airport. Yeah.

Clearwater Beach. Clearwater beach is email marketing conference national.

It's top secret. We're not allowed to say where it is.

Oh, yeah, we can't talk about it. Oh. By the time this comes out, you can't yell me. Anyway, so that's what we're doing. We'll bring this along, see, show you guys what's happening. But it's kind of fun. And checking it out. Oh, looks so cool. Anyway, so I don't know exactly what we're gonna talk about. So many things we talk about when we're. We're on the Play in the street podcast. I have one thing I want to rant about, and then while I'm ranting, I'm gonna let Todd rant about whatever he wants to do because I want you guys all to get to know him better. So my rant today. Right now, I'm recording my podcast. Now, some of you guys know I've been doing my podcast marketing secrets. Excuse me, Marketing your car first. And I keep popping my ears. That's why I'm doing the weird stuff. So we launched that podcast and ran it for almost six years, every single day in my car. Podcasting, Podcasting, like, putting in the time, putting in the effort, putting in the work. We built a big following, and then about a year ago, we rebranded it Marketing Secrets. And since we've rebranded, we had 3.5 million downloads in the top 10 business podcasts for the entire year. Our video podcast is the number one. Not, like, in the business category. Our video podcast, number one video podcast in all of itunes. Right? See things Itunes should like us.

Yeah, you're thinking, right?

But apparently, like, 10 days ago, they decided they didn't like us, and so what they did is they shut down. Basically, if you're subscribed to our podcast, you continue to get our stuff that nobody knew can subscribe. And, like, we've been, like, appealing to Them and writing to them like sorry, like why? Why are we kicked out? They're like you're just kicked out. Why? They won't tell us why. They said you're out. And it reminded me about something I want to talk to you guys about because it's very, very important and it's never, never, never trust a platform. Okay? If you're building your business on a platform, just prepare to be to lose it all very, very soon. I've done this multiple times and now it's happening on itunes. I've lost how many since we've known everything. How many email auto responders?

Oh my gosh, I've been kicked out.

Of aweber almost a dozen times. I contact at activecampaign mailed shit multiple times. Sendgrid multiple times. And again recently, just again they did it again. Facebook. We got kicked off at least two or three dozen times. We've been really good consistent recently. Instagram kicked me off, I got back in. Luckily Google kicked us off like a decade ago. We never got back really. YouTube I watched we had one video that the headline was the Internet marketing Illuminati and they canceled our account. It's just crazy. And so all of us like we put like all of our eggs in this basket. Like many chat or Facebook messenger. Here's what the eggs like you gotta put all your eggs in this basket. The problem is like if somebody doesn't like you for whatever reason or no reason at all, they don't have to.

Tell you a reason.

They can just turn you off. It's their business. Yeah, it is insane. You were talking about the Amazon one today.

Oh yeah, the Amazon guy. So there was a guy locally that was selling stuff online on Amazon. He was killing it, doing great. Ordered a huge new pallet of stuff from IT from China, had it all shipped over, got here while it was on the way over. Amazon decided to delist his product. They didn't like the name of one of the products. They thought it was too close to another name of something else the product completely. His entire revenue stream disappeared overnight. Luckily he had been talking to one of our other guys, support agents about funnels. So he started his funnels up. But he completely was dependent on Amazon. Lost a business. He had five employees. All of his employees are like looking for what they're going to be doing next. He's struggling to get things going and it's all because he was 100% reliant on Amazon. Doesn't mean that it can't be a side channel that's also pulling in sales, but you cannot have it be a primary thing. Not Amazon, not Google, not Facebook, not nothing.

It's crazy. So I just want to reemphasize this to all of you guys. If you're building your 100% on Facebook, I got bad news for you. Zuckerberg doesn't care about you.

He doesn't.

You may be Russell by paying $1,000 a day in Facebook ads. He doesn't care. He doesn't care even a little bit. We're spending insane amounts of money and they don't care. They don't care about you, they don't care about me. They don't care about any of us. All they care about is their customer, makes sure the platform's happy and guess what, their shareholders. The platform doesn't like people like us. Okay? So, like, that's just. You have to be aware of that itunes, apparently, now that I know they don't like people like me, I don't know why. I just kind of added a ton of publicity to their platform, added thousands of view millions of downloads, and they just one day out of the blue, like, oh, bye. With no rivalry. It's crazy to me.

Top guy won't even tell you why.

Yeah, they escalate the highest guy's support. He's like, yep, we canceled your account. Like, why? He's like, stick his hammock close. Like, you won't even tell me why. Like, I don't know what to do. And so a couple things is same merchant accounts. I almost went bankrupt before. I had nine merchants. I had 14 merchant accounts in one bank and all of them got shut down the same day. And so like one is a very, very, very scary number in business and in marketing. And so it's like always think having multiple things, right? Like having multiple ways you are collecting money or able to collect money. Making sure you're getting customers from different platforms, making sure the way you message your customers. There's multiple platforms.

In fact.

Can we talk about this right now or is this top secret?

It's a little top secret still.

It's still top secret. Come on.

We can't talk about this part of it yet. But what he's leaning towards is what we already do with action. EDX on some levels is being able to communicate on multiple channels, multiple modalities and stuff. But there's some definitely nice stuff that's going to be coming into the near future.

Yeah. Because I don't want everyone again. If you're relying on email, you could Be in trouble in fact. Yeah, like it's hurt me multiple times. I think I would say probably conservative. About 20 times. I've lost my email service provider and I'm not an aggressive market. Well, maybe I'm aggressive, definitely. I may be aggressive, but I'm not unethical. Like I follow the rules of everything. Right. So it's just kind of crazy. So a lot of things we're doing, like if you read last year's funnel hacking Live, we talked about the big benefit of using Action Next, you can plug in your other SFTP and like you have the same grid. Shut your gang, you can plug in a new one. But we still keep your accounts. Like we're trying to be a platform that's not shutting down our members now. So you have access. Like something bad happens, you can plug into other things.

That's the new thing with the custom domains. I'm not sure. So now with actionetics you're able to have your own custom domain for everything. So link tracking goes through your custom domain. Your unsubscribes go through your custom domain. Everything goes through your custom domain. So you don't have any relationship to any other people on the platform or to us. So if you get in trouble or someone else on the network gets in trouble, it doesn't affect anyone else, which that's not the case. There's a reason why AWeber won't let you import people into their platform. It's because if you import people and spam them then it hurts everyone on AWeber, that's no longer gonna be the case. On the whole actionetics platform you are super isolated so it's only gonna affect you if you cause a problem and if another person on the network causes a problem, it's only gonna affect them. Same thing with image hosting. Everything. It's all gonna be on your own custom domains now, which is actually already live. So if you haven't set that up, go set up a custom domain. We're giving everyone free custom domains. It's awesome.

We're trying to figure out ways to make it so that we care about you guys as customers. We wanna protect your businesses and so we're trying to make clickfunnels easier and easier. We can add in multiple SMTPs, multiple ways to collect money, ways to message. Just like you're not 100% relying on email. There's just a lot of cool things that are coming. I can't tell about that. I always tell people stuff before they're ready. And Todd Yells at me, so I'm gonna be careful, but that's like where we're going. And I just want to, like, re emphasize for you guys. Like, if you're relying on one platform and Zuckerberg is the way your entire business runs, like, now is the time to diversify. Don't diversify in six months from now, a year from now. Okay. My guess is that window's not gonna be that long. About a year and a half ago, when Facebook started shutting our accounts down, I was like, we just missed over. And for some reason, they loosen back. They went tight grip on people. Somebody loosened back up. But you know it's going to come back. And we saw Google. Google did it. I have friends who are making millions and millions of dollars a month who, when Google put the chokehold down, they never recover. Like they're doing. They're working at McDonald's, I don't know where, but they're not doing their business anymore. And so if you want to be around in the long term, it's very important to understand that, like, look, I have, like Facebook's right. I still think people should start with the platform, start with Facebook, start with email, whatever that is, and go there. But then, like, be very aware. Like, as soon as that's working, then it's like, we need to add a second source as soon as one disappears. Or I need two merchant accounts in two separate banks. I need to collect money different ways, just in case one dries up, one goes away. Or make sure multiple order smtp. All these different things is very, very important. Just don't rely on a platform. The platform will screw you over it. They do not care about you or me. They only care about themselves and their customers. And they think that for every reason that because it's something we produce, it affects the experience of the customer gone.

Or the shareholder.

Yeah, or the shareholder.

That's the reason why we're not vc. But the same type of thing.

Yeah. Why we love you guys. We're out taking B.C. money because we want to be able to protect you guys. But it's crazy. I have no idea. Like, I talked about God in my last podcast. Maybe that was why. I don't know. It's crazy YouTube. Like, we're talking about. Who was the famous dude that lost his YouTube account?

Oh, well, there's a PewDiePie or whatever. He was like, what, 50 million followers? I mean, to be fair, he did say some things that he shouldn't have said, but, like, instantly they shut down his business. He had you know, dozens of employees, everyone out of work, completely shut down this entire media empire, more or less with, like, the flip of a switch from you.

PewDiePie.

PewDiePie.

PewDiepie. So if he has a PewDiePie, he got screwed by this as well. And it's crazy. And, like, you look at it like, there's stuff on YouTube that's so super offensive, but he has something. I don't even know what he said, but he said something, said something offensive.

It was probably really bad.

It was probably really bad. Yeah. But nevertheless, like, they just, like, crush you like a grape and they don't care. And you're like, but, dude, like, you know, I put in $5 million a year on your platform. Like, we don't care about you. That's what happened to Google. I remember, like, when Google slapped everybody. Everyone's, like, so shocked. Like, I spent, like, 100 grand a month on Google Ads. They're like, you were one of our smallest clients.

That's a bl Talk to you. If you're spending that.

Yeah, that sends a lot of money to the usins, but to them, they don't even care. They're just angry that you interrupted the customer experience. And so it's just something to be very, very, very aware of.

Yeah, if you're selling on Amazon, if you're building your business on any of these platforms, that's fine. But you need to also be expanding out. You need to be building that customer list, you need to be building your email list, building your different chat lists, building your different communication channels with this, Building an actual business that you're able to keep things going if Amazon just decides to shut you off tomorrow. Because it will happen, happen to plenty of people.

So there is your warning. Ye have been warned. Thus saith the clickfunnels, Be careful, because they will screw you over. Okay, one last thing before this podcast. Todd's working on tons of new stuff. We can't talk about it, but what are you most excited about? The new stuff in clickfunnels coming up?

I'm most excited about this thing that I can't tell you about yet.

Sorry. It's so awesome, though. He showed me all the screenshots today.

So, yeah, there's the potential to basically 2x probably the results that you're getting from different leads that are coming in on the front door from a communication perspective, double open rates, double click rates, that kind thing on what you're currently seeing through your primary channel of communication.

And that's like being super, like, lowballing.

Double ish, super generic low balling.

But it's way more than that.

Yeah, it really is probably nuts. It really is probably way more than that. And there's also some cool things with payment processing that we're beta testing right now. That should literally instantly double mobile conversions for anybody. Yeah, I mean we can talk about that.

We can be in on this one. Yeah.

So Apple Pay, Android Pay and PayPal, all of them push to order. So the results that we're seeing, preliminary, at least on the Apple Pay stuff is literally you go online, you add, you click add Apple Pay to your thing, you press your thumb on it and it everything works with upsells, with otos downs.

Imagine on your mobile, you're on your phone and someone comes your free shipping offer and they buy like does that play the popular order?

They only literally have to order once. They order on your primary order form one time, just like you, instead of typing in a credit card number, they have their thumbprint, boom, it's ordered. And then on an upsell they can just click one button just like you would if they had to put in a credit card number. We can charge them, do the whole process, do everything we need to do.

Same thing for Android though.

That's the other sexy part that just recently came out. Like brand new Android, they're calling it like Google Pay or something, whatever they call it. But we'll be also supporting that as well. So you'll be able to have Apple and Android which for the longest time most of the other platforms out there at least if they do support it, it's only Apple, they just support you.

So that's crazy. So for those who are selling to mobile, it's gonna make your mobile experience so insanely good. People go to the cause. Like I don't know about you, I never buy things on my phone. Cause I hate like trying to hide my credit card on my little thumb. So what I do is I like always email myself the link and then sometimes I buy some cause I don't ca. Forget about it. Whereas this is now there's like. Oh. And they click their little thumb drink and then dings their card and then upsell. Upsell, Upsell.

Boom.

Fulfillment. I'm also, I'm gonna prophesy. I don't know if I should prophesy. It's kind of sacrilegious. I don't want to get shot down. I'm going to forecast. Is that a better word?

Forecast. That's a good one.

I'm going to forecast the Future of where things are going. I was telling Stephen this the other day. You know like we always design websites for desktops. They're usually wide, there's like multiple columns and stuff like that. Mark my word, the future of where website design is going is ins. Centered or not centered but single column, narrow width pages. If you look at dollar, if you get a dollar shave club's order form, this is the best example. You go to the page and the order form's like this wide going down the middle and the fields are all centered and like very, very clear and it works really good. Mobile. But I think that's gonna be a future of like where even desktop is all designed. That's my forecast, I'm guessing. And so you'll start seeing like even though clickfunnel is one of our order pages right now, it's very. It's a lot more like that. I think that's where futures things are gon.

It needs to resize down properly. You can easily. The clickfunnels editor, you can easily do that. Just jump into mobile mode, build it first in mobile mode. Click desktop and you'll see it in both modes. That's the great thing about it. You literally only have to design it once. You might change some font sizes or show some images on desktop that you don't show on mobile. Some tweak stuff like that that you customize. But in reality you can do it first on mobile easily.

I think people read more on mobile than videos too, don't you? Yeah, when I'm looking. I never push play on a video on mobile, like a sales video, but I would always read. Which is why I also think the blend of video plus text gonna be more and more important. Like our stuff. Now it's like there's the video of me pitching it, but then below there's the copy of me pitching it. So it's like. Cause if I want video I'll see the play button. But I'll typically hear I get in the bathroom or something and it's video. This is my phone hand. So anyway, there's some forecasts, there's some ideas, but I guess we got for you guys. So hope you guys enjoyed the flight. We're probably halfway to our destination. All we gotta remember is first off, don't rely on one platform for anything. You're advertising, you're messaging to your customers, your Merchant. The only one platform you should ever rely on 100% is ClickFunnels. Because we love you guys.

We allow you to plug in every other platform out there. So that's why we built waveform.

So we're the only ones love you enough to. You should just focus on us. But then I said our focus. One big thing is that we're moving forward. Is like building in all the backends so you can plug in backups for stuff. You have multiple ways to message people outside of just email in case email gets shut down, multiple merchant accounts, because when your merch accounts get shut down, like, all those kind of things. But don't forget the ad side on your podcast side, like, all those things. My podcast downloads drop because I'm no longer listed, which drives me nuts. And nobody can subscribe to my podcast now. So now I gotta go do work anyways. Just a new noise that's happening and there's always a workaround. Like if you get your Facebook account shut down, don't just walk away and be like, apparently I broke their terms. This is another thing that drives me crazy. I remember you probably thought in the SEO days, people who are anti SEO, they're like, well, we don't want to do this against Google's terms of service. In terms of service, they're coming to your website and smartering you. You can do whatever you want on your own website. It's this weird thing. So same thing. People get their Facebook and hair was shut down. Like, oh, it's over. Like, I'm done. Like, this is not fair. It's like, no, don't understand. Like, this is your business. Like, this is war. If they're coming out, they're shutting you down. Like, you need to like, fight back and get back in. And like, and like, keep coming back. Keep coming back. Like, don't just get knocked down. Like, ugh, I'm dead. If that would happen to us, we would have lost our businesses decades ago. Decades ago. But we're fighters. And so we get back up and we keep going. So you'll see my podcast back very, very soon. It's annoying that I would lose all of my pre anyway. But we're believe it at it's all fun games. When all said and done, it doesn't really matter. We're trying to change the world and these guys get in our way. The platform will get in your way, try to keep you from that. So just ignore them, Keep moving forward. They shut you down. Come back, make some tweaks, changes, keep going hard, keep serving your people because they're there. It matters. It's worth it. Anything else? Any final words?

See you on the ground. See you guys.

Bye, everybody. Would you like to see behind the scenes of what we're actually doing each day to grow our company? If so, then go subscribe to our free behind the scenes reality TV show at www.funnelhacker tv.