DotCom Secrets: The Underground Playbook for Growing Your Company Online

by Russell Brunson

I asked myself, “Where could I serve my customer at the highest level?” I realized it wasn’t through a product or a service. Rather, it was by giving them a result that would change their lives. That result is where I wanted to take them.

What type of BAIT can I create to attract my dream client and repel everyone else?

Question #1: Who Is Your Dream Client? The first question you have to ask yourself is, Who do I actually want to work with?

Who are my dream clients? What do they look like? What are they passionate about? What are their goals, dreams, and desires?

After about a week of thinking about the WHO question, I sat down and created two customer avatars: one for the men I wanted to work with and one for the women I wanted to work with.

Write out their characteristics and then go find an actual picture to represent them. It’s amazing how your perspective changes when you have a physical picture of your ideal customer—instead of a hazy, half-formed image in your head.

Question #2: Where Can You Find Them? The next question in the Secret Formula is WHERE can you find this ideal man or woman? Where do they hang out online? Are they on Facebook or Instagram? What groups are they part of? What email newsletters do they subscribe to? What blogs do they read? Are they reading The New York Times or The Huffington Post? What other interests do they have? Do they like sports or the arts? How about fishing or race cars? If you don’t know the who, it will be hard to find out where your perfect client can be found.

Question #3: What Bait Will You Use to Attract Them? Once we know where the dream customers are, we have to create the right bait to attract them.

When you find out what your dream clients want, it becomes very easy to attract them.

Question #4: What Result Do You Want To Give Them? Once you’ve hooked your dream customers with the perfect bait, the last question is what RESULT do you want to give them? I’m not talking about what product or service you want to sell them. A business is NOT about products and services. A business is about what result you can get for your clients. Once you (and they) understand that concept, then price is no longer a barrier.

Imagine that your clients could pay you anything to get a desired result. What, then, would you do to help guarantee their success? Where would you lead them? What does that place look like? Keep that place in your mind; it’s the pinnacle of success for your clients. It’s where you want to take them, and it’s the key to this last step. That’s it. The four steps again are as follows: 1 Who are your dream clients? 2 Where can you find them?? 3 What bait will you use to attract them? 4 What result do you want to give them?

We provide insane amounts of value at each step of our Value Ladder, so our clients naturally want to ascend, get more value, and pay us more money.

If you have a blah frontend offer, your business will always struggle.

You might be selling a book right now on the frontend and have no idea how to build up a backend Value Ladder. Well, what other value can you provide to people? Can you be more hands-on with them? Can you offer more personal attention? Can you provide ancillary services or physical products that enhance your primary offer?

The Value Ladder is the key to building your marketing funnels and mastering everything else I’m going to teach you in this book. This system does not work if all you have is one thing—like a book or an adjustment. You need to be able to build out a full Value Ladder.

Once we add in the missing pieces, the business can start to expand dramatically. There’s no end to the level of backend services and experiences you can add.

If you keep providing more and more value, people will spend more and more money ...

A percentage of your audience will always want to pay you the premium to get more value.

The only limit to your value offerings is your imagination. Keep thinking of higher and higher levels of service, and you can keep charging more and more money. There’s always something else you can offer.

Often times, companies have a frontend product but nothing more to sell on the backend. For that, I love to look at what else they could bundle together. Could they offer a coaching program? How about a live event? What other results or value could they give their clients?

It’s almost impossible to build a company just offering your high-end services. You need a full range of offers. So instead of trying to convince someone to buy the most expensive offering right away, we build a funnel that will help us to do two things:

1 Provide value to each customer at the unique level of service that he or she can afford. 2 Make money and be profitable while identifying our dream clients who can afford our highest offer.

At the top of my funnel is the “bait” that will attract my dream customers. Notice that this bait is also the first rung of the Value Ladder. As I start to place ads featuring my bait, potential customers will start raising their hands, and a certain percentage of those people will purchase my frontend offer.

The deeper your funnel is, and the more things you can offer your clients, the more each customer will be worth to you. And the more they are worth to you, the more you can spend to acquire them. Remember this truth: “Ultimately, the business that can spend the most to acquire a customer wins.” —Dan Kennedy

The Secret Formula will help you find your dream customer, offer them your bait, and lead them to where you want them to go—all while providing the customer value and making you money.

Because marketers are now able to target so many different characteristics so accurately, people have lost all patience for generalized, mass media messages. Consumers expect and demand that your advertising be extremely relevant to them.

Consumers want and expect messaging that speaks directly to them, or they will likely ignore you.

As modern humans, we are subconsciously forced to screen out anything that doesn’t directly apply to us. So a dog food commercial may not even register on a cat owner’s radar, even though your store also sells cat food.

To create hyper-targeted messages, you have to know your target market inside and out. Successful businesses get inside of the customer’s mind and find out what the individual really cares about. What are their pains and passions? What do they des...

What are they searching for? What problems do they want to solve? What questions do they need answered?

Remember your target market is made up of real people, so you need to look at their real behavior. Where do they hang out online? Where do they spend their time? What email newsletters might they subscribe to? What blogs do they read? What Facebook groups are they a part of? Are they even on Facebook—or do they prefer Instagram? What keywords are they searching for on Google? What books are they buying on Amazon? Answering these questions can take some time and research, but it’s worth taking as much time as you need to develop a clear picture of where your ideal clients are directing their attention.

You are trying to engage someone who is already checking email, Facebook, and his cell phone at the exact same time. You have to interrupt potential customers long enough for them to click on your ad and visit your website.

In our ads, we place these Enquirer Interrupts to grab our prospects’ attention and send them to our squeeze pages, our frontend offers, and our bait. Remember that just because you’ve identified who your dream prospects are and where they are, your job isn’t done. You still need to grab their attention and get them to click over to your website. You do that through these interrupt-style ads.

Your job as the entrepreneur is to understand the strategy behind these DotComSecrets and then hire the Facebook guy to run Facebook ads and the Google guy to run Google ads. To this day, I’ve never once run a Google or a Facebook ad, yet I’ve made millions on both platforms. I understand the strategy, and then I set up systems and hire people who are great at the tactics. In this way, we all do what we are best at.

Your one and ONLY goal is to OWN all the traffic you can. That is how you grow your list and increase your sales.

Traffic you own is the BEST kind of traffic. It’s your email list or your followers, readers, customers, etc. I call this the traffic that I “own” because I can send out an email, post a message to my followers, or make a blog post, and I will generate instant traffic. I don’t have to buy it from Google or Facebook. I don’t have to do any PR or SEO. This is my own distribution channel; I can send out messages anytime I want, with no new marketing costs. I can sell things to these people over and over again, and all of that money comes back as pure profit.

“Russell, you have to build a list.” He ingrained that principle into my mind, and it became my only focus for two to three years. As my list started to grow, so did my income.

That’s why it’s so important to convert the other two types of traffic (both traffic you control and traffic you don’t control) into subscribers and buyers (traffic that you own) as quickly as possible. The bigger your list, the more money you make.

Any kind of paid traffic is traffic you control, including the following: • Email ads (solo ads, banners, links, mentions) • Pay-per-click ads (Facebook, Google, Yahoo, etc.) • Banner ads • Native ads • Affiliates and joint ventures

This squeeze page is a very simple page with ONE goal: to convert traffic that you control into traffic that you own. I send all of my paid traffic to a squeeze page, and when the visitors get there, they only have ONE option: give me an email address or leave.

Now a certain percentage of people will leave, but the cool thing is that some of those people will give you a personal email address. After that, the traffic you control becomes traffic that you own, and you can start sending the new potential buyer through your Soap Opera Sequences (Secret #7) and your daily Seinfeld emails (Secret #8).

Now, just like traffic that I control, my ONLY goal with traffic that I don’t control is also to turn it into traffic that I own. To do this, I try to push all traffic that I don’t control back to my blog.

An Attractive Character is not someone who is extraordinarily good looking, although they might be. What I’m talking about here is a persona that attracts clients or customers and helps you build your following to eventually make sales.

All of the major success stories from any of our coaching programs got results by building huge brands and platforms around an Attractive Character.

This concept can mean the difference between making one thousand dollars a month and making one hundred thousand a month. How attractive are you? How interesting are you? Why would someone tune in to watch a TV special about your story?

You share your backstory because you want people to see where you came from. If they can relate to where you came from, then they will want to follow you to where you are now.

The key is that the story has to relate to the product you’re selling somehow. If you’re selling a weight-loss product, you want to talk about a weight-loss backstory. If you’re selling investing advice, you want a financial backstory. Does that make sense?

Your Attractive Character does not have to be you, but a backstory is essential.

Look through your life, and I promise that you’ll start finding these little parables that can help illustrate important points. You can also draw parables from the lives of others. Just know that when you stop teaching facts and start teaching through parables, your messages will stay with an audience longer.

You need to understand that every believable, three-dimensional Attractive Character has flaws.