DotCom Secrets: The Underground Playbook for Growing Your Company Online

by Russell Brunson

For hot and warm traffic, the ad or email generally serves as the pre-frame. There’s no need for extra steps before those people understand your offer. They already know, like, and trust you. But for cold traffic, you often need a whole separate page that they go through (the bridge page) before they hit the offer page. As I just explained, this separate, pre-frame page educates people, enabling them to better appreciate the offer and making them more likely to convert.

Whatever product you’re selling, it’s critical that you match your message to your traffic’s temperature and knowledge. This awareness will help you determine the kind of bridge required to take them to the landing page.

Another cool type of bridge page is a survey or a quiz. We can ask certain questions to get the mind’s wheels spinning in a particular direction. We plant seeds, and the visitors start wondering about a question we asked. Then they click over to the landing page where we reveal the answer or solution. It’s all about influencing what people are thinking about when they see your offer.

Immediately after you qualify your subscribers, you want to find out who among them is a buyer. How many of those three hundred people who were interested in getting free information are willing to pull out their credit cards and make a purchase?

Don’t wait a day or a week. Qualify buyers right away. My early mentor Dan Kennedy taught me this golden principle: a buyer is a buyer is a buyer. If someone is willing to buy from you once, they’ll continue to buy from you as long as you keep offering value. So as soon as someone fills out their name and email address and clicks the submit button, they should land on a page that offers something to buy. Offer them something of value that will hook them. It’s typically a little higher up your Value Ladder, and this is where I’m usually selling my “bait,” which is something your dream clients will really love. It should be priced so low that it’s an absolute no-brainer for them to buy.

I usually use a “free-plus-shipping” offer or something in the five to seven dollar range. The offer is extremely cheap because I want all the buyers to go for it. Once I’ve identified who the buyers are, then I can market to them differently. I can pick up the phone and talk to them; I can send them a postcard or add them to a separate email sequence. At this point, I have two lists: subscribers and buyers. Each list is unique and gets treated differently.

Who’s in pain right now? And what are they willing to buy right now to alleviate that pain? You want to be able to offer them something—ideally several somethings. If you don’t, they’ll leave your site and go find another site to buy from. People love to buy. And when they’re in pain and want relief, they will spend money in that quest.

If you’re stuck in your business, it’s probably because there’s a glitch in one of these seven steps. What’s the temperature of the traffic you’re driving? What’s the pre-frame bridge you’re taking potential buyers through? On the landing page, are you qualifying subscribers? Are you qualifying your buyers on the sales page, and your hyperactives on the upsell pages? Are you aging and ascending the relationship to match the buyer with the offer they really need the most? And are you changing the selling environment for your high-ticket offers? Most importantly, how are you treating each of your different groups so that each receives a specially tailored experience?

This is how direct response marketers have created magic for over a hundred years: Try it. Test it. Tweak it. And start all over again.

If you require people to opt-in (give you an email address) to get their quiz results, you’ve killed two birds with one stone. The prospect has moved through both the pre-frame and the qualify subscribers phases in the funnel. Then you try to qualify him as a buyer by making an offer immediately after he opts-in.

Another great reason to use quizzes is that you can segment your audience according to their answers. You might ask, “Do you have a dog or a cat?” Then you segment your list according to the responses. With sophisticated quiz programs, you can even have the subsequent questions match the two segments. So, your next question to the “dog” segment of responders might be, “How old is your dog?” Then offer answer choices like zero to one, under five years, under ten years, over ten years, etc. How does this help you sell more pet food? Well, puppies need different nutrition than older dogs. If you know how old their dog is, you can sell them exactly the right type of food. Also, if you know the quiz taker has a dog, not a cat, the ad on the next page should picture a dog. The quiz helps you segment your buyers, as well as pre-frame your offer.

Quizzes are great tools for engaging your audience and getting their brains primed for your sales page.

Better yet, have the blog author post the article in their name so that you are not seemingly tied to it at all. I did this once with a successful student in the “make-money-online” market. I asked him to write an article detailing his experience using my products. He added a link to our offer, and we drove Facebook traffic to his blog post. The campaign worked great. It was engineered as a pre-frame, but the content was 100% true and ethical.

The magic of a squeeze page is the complete lack of distractions. There are no ads to look at and no navigation menu tabs to click. People are forced to focus on your most important message— the one message you want to give them. And they have to make a decision: either give you their email address or leave the page.

A two-step web form allows you to collect a name and email address on step one and credit card information on step two.

Anyone who fills out step one of this form is automatically added to an email list and is qualified as a subscriber—even if he doesn’t fill out step two.

When we qualify buyers, remember that the goal is to get people to pull out their credit cards and actually pay for something. The first purchase is the hardest to get, so it’s best to offer something of value for a very low price. Then, you can guide buyers up the Value Ladder as soon as you can.

Free-Plus-Shipping: This is my favorite way to qualify buyers (as you’ll see in Secret #13). If you create a great product and give it away for free, it is the perfect bait and gets one of your products into the hands of a new customer.

Tripwire: Tripwires are smaller offers used to get buyers in the door. They are often a “splinter” of your core product. For example, you might pull out one module or one of the training sessions and offer it for a huge discount.

Self-Liquidating Offers (SLO): These types of offers are usually a little more expensive—between thirty-seven and ninety-seven dollars. Often times, with free-plus-shipping, trials, and tripwire offers, you may actually lose money initially, although through your upsells you can often break even. With a self-liquidating offer, on the other hand, the goal is to have the frontend product liquidate your ad costs so that your upsells can become pure profit.

Straight Sale: This is just a regular sale of a high-ticket item, from ninety-seven to five thousand dollars or higher. It usually takes a little more selling to convert these offers, so we typically only introduce this option to people who are in our warm market or who have gone through our initial funnels. It usually takes a stronger bond with the Attractive Character before people will make these larger investments.

To figure out which customers are hyperactive buyers at the point of sale, I need to offer an upsell immediately after I qualify them with a low-cost or free offer.

Bumps are a subtle way to increase sales (sometimes dramatically). Just make a simple discount offer with a checkbox on the order form.

One-Time Offers (OTOs): After someone has purchased any of your frontend offers, you can make them a special, onetime offer. The best OTOs are products that will complement the initial purchase. Often we’ll make two to three separate offers to people after they buy, as long as the sequence of offers adds more value to the initial offer.

Funnels have a psychology behind them, and you need to use a different psychological approach for a low-priced, introductory product vs. a high-ticket package.

Cold traffic is probably only aware of the problem they are facing. They don’t know you or your products, so they need to start at the front of the Value Ladder with a low-level funnel, like a Free-Plus-Shipping or Self-Liquidating-Offer Funnel. These funnels are proven to work on cold traffic, people who don’t know you or the solution you’re providing.

These potential customers will start to warm up to you after they start going through your communication funnel—building a bond with the Attractive Character. As they do, you can start introducing biggerticket products through the funnels we use in the middle of the Value Ladder. I like to sell these mid-priced offers using a Perfect Webinar Funnel, Invisible Funnel, or Product-Launch Funnel.

Hot traffic already knows you, likes you, and trusts you. They know your products, so it’s time to direct them to the backend as you focus on the highest level of service you can offer. Because these offers have a greater price, you probably aren’t going to be able to close many sales using online methods alone. You need to change the selling environment and get the prospect on the phone or to a live event. My favorite funnel for moving people from the computer to the phone is the High-Ticket, Three-Step Funnel.

Traffic that we control, we drive to a squeeze page. Traffic that we don’t control, we drive to a blog where the top third of the page collects email addresses. As soon as someone joins, through either of those sources, they become traffic that we own, and we start sending them the Soap Opera Sequence so that they can build a relationship with the Attractive Character. When that sequence is done, we start sending daily Seinfeld emails to help them ascend through the other offerings on our Value Ladder.

Now, immediately after a person joins my list, through either the squeeze page or the blog, they are taken to my first frontend offer. This is the offer I use to qualify my buyers. Those who purchase that product will immediately see a few point-of-sale upsells.

After that initial transaction is over, my email sequences will start to encourage people to purchase other products as they ascend my Value Ladder and join my continuity programs. I will use different types of funn...

When I discovered what I am about to share, it literally changed my company overnight. I went from making about thirty thousand dollars a year online to making over seven figures in less than eighteen months.

Free samples and free trials are everywhere, online and off. Why? Because they work like crazy to get people’s attention. Humans just can’t resist the word FREE.

If you haven’t read the book Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely, I highly recommend you pick up a copy and read it. In this book, the author talks about an experiment studying the effects of the word free on buying behavior.

I thought that was a pretty cool concept, and it got me excited to implement this concept in my company. I asked myself, How can I offer something in my business for free? If everyone in my industry or my town is offering discounted products, but I can offer mine for free, suddenly the majority of people are going to choose me. So, how can I structure my offer to give something away for free?

Now, this is where the magic happens. Because the customer had ALREADY pulled a credit card out of their wallet and made a commitment towards the concept we were selling, about 25% of free-plus-shipping customers bought the upsell offer. That means we made $394 per one hundred visitors, and we got eight new buyers on our list. I almost doubled my money and got seven times more customers by adding in a free-plus-shipping offer! Pretty cool, huh?

I don’t know what it is about buyer psychology, but once you get someone to say the first yes, it’s so much easier to get the second yes. It’s a slippery slope. You get them started by saying yes to a small thing, then they are much more likely to say yes to a larger thing later.

People ask me if they can just sell (or just give away) a digital product instead of the free-plus-shipping offer. The answer is yes, you can, but you are missing out on some very powerful things. I like to make the free offer physical because it gives me the ability to use the word free, while also requiring the interested customer to pull out their credit card to pay for shipping and qualify as a buyer. If I decide to sell this as a digital product for a small price, then I lose the power of free. And if I just give it away free digitally, then I lose the power...

My team started adding multiple upsells after the initial free-plus-shipping offer, and we saw a huge increase in revenues. We also created sales scripts that work almost universally across most of the markets we’ve tested them in.

And that’s when we discovered the order form “bump.” We found that by adding a small box on the order form AFTER someone fills in their credit card information, but BEFORE they click on the submit button worked miracles. The small box offered to add the thirty-seven dollar product on to the order. We wound up with an average of about 34% of our customers adding the thirty-seven dollar product to their order!

This meant that by using a free-plus-shipping offer, we immediately got three times as many customers, and by adding the thirty-seven dollar order form bump offer, we were also able to get about one out of every three people to also order the more expensive frontend product. This new tactic gave us almost the EXACT same frontend revenue, but it brought three times more people through our upsell flow.

This little secret has allowed us to spend more than our competitors in almost every market we’ve ever entered. Even if you don’t use a free-plus-shipping offer on your frontend (and I think you’re crazy if you don’t), adding this order form bump to every order fo...

Think of the most amazing results you could get for your clients, the one thing that would really solve their biggest problem, and put the information into a book, CD, or DVD. You may hesitate and feel some resistance to this suggestion. Many people think, Oh no, I can’t give that away . . . it’s my secret sauce! Trust me. Give it away for free, and you’ll reap the benefits on the backend.

Or find a physical product you can offer for free-plus-shipping—anything that will attract consumers and get buyers into your Value Ladder.

The secret to converting cold traffic is leveraging the power of free. Whatever you’re sharing in your free-plus-shipping offer, it can’t be boring, general knowledge. It has to be unique, sexy, or fun—the more unique, the better. Using free-plus-shipping offers is the fastest way to qualify your buyers and get people into your Value Ladder. Remember, if someone isn’t willing to pull out a credit card and pay a few bucks for shipping on your product, then they probably aren’t going to buy your other products either.

It’s important that you mention on the first page that the buyers will be charged for shipping and handling. Otherwise, it’s very unethical, and you’ll upset your customers before they even have a chance to get into your Value Ladder, which is never a good idea.

Now, not everyone who fills out step one will fill out step two, so I capture the email address on the first step. That way, I can follow up with them later and ask them to go back and fill out the rest of the form.

The psychology behind this funnel is amazing. People are more likely to fill out the first step because they don’t see a long form asking for credit card information. Then once they do get to the credit card form, they keep filling it out because their brains are already committed to the process. Interestingly, I often find conversions to be higher on step one than on a regular email squeeze page, even though I’m asking for an entire shipping address instead of just a short email. This is probably because receiving something physical in the mail has a higher perceived value than receiving digital information via email.

The Two-Step Funnel is great for converting cold traffic and getting a visitor to qualify as a subscriber and buyer. The sales process is short and sweet because you’re selling something at the low end of your Value Ladder.