DotCom Secrets: The Underground Playbook for Growing Your Company Online

by Russell Brunson

OTO stands for One Time Offer. It’s a special offer you make to people who just purchased a product from you. We use this script for the OTO on all of our offers (not just the Two-Step Funnel), so know that you can and should use this script for any upsell situation.

Getting the second yes is 80% offer structure and 20% script.

Rule #1: Don’t Sell More of the Same Thing. This is the biggest mistake most entrepreneurs make when it comes to upsells. They try to sell more of what the customer just bought. Instead, if the customer bought an ebook titled How to Lose Weight by Juicing, your next offer shouldn’t be another juicing product. In the visitor’s mind, he has already scratched that itch, so offering more of the same rarely works.

Rule #2: Don’t Sell a Random Product. The next worst thing to selling more of the same is to sell a random, unrelated product. I see this all the time. Yet, if there is no logical connection between the frontend product and the upsells, you will kill your conversions. Rather, structure your upsell offer in one of these three ways:

Typically, we use the Self-Liquidating Offer (SLO) Funnel when we are trying to sell a product that’s priced anywhere from twenty-seven to ninety-seven dollars. The main goal is to have this frontend product cover the expenses of buying traffic. You hope to break even. That is why we call it a “self-liquidating offer”— because if you structure it right, you won’t have any traffic costs, and your upsells become pure profit. In general, a free-plus-shipping offer will lose money on the frontend offer, but will use the upsells to break even or even make a profit. In contrast, SLOs should break even before any upsells.

First, you’re going to attract people with a free video, report, ebook, or other lead magnet on your squeeze page. Typically, my “bribe” to get them to give me an email address is something that I’m going to show them on the next page in a video or a sales letter. Then, once the visitors subscribe to your list, they land on your SLO page, which sells your core offer.

I didn’t invent the concept of the Star, Story, Solution script. I first heard it when I was interviewing a guy who had made one hundred million dollars in twenty-three months selling supplements. He said there was a script he used to sell all of his products. The script formula was so simple! First, you need a star (I call this person the Attractive Character), then you need a story that agitates a problem, and finally you need to provide a solution (your product).

Whenever you’re telling a story, you want to start at the point of high drama. Don’t start with, “Well, I woke up and had eggs for breakfast . . . then I got dressed and went to work . . . blah, blah, blah.” Do start with, “The gun was in my face. I was staring down the dark barrel, and I could see the bullet in the chamber. My heart pounded in my ears, and rivers of sweat streamed down my face . . .”

One of my mentors, David Frey, said (and I wholeheartedly agree) that if you don’t have continuity, then you don’t have a business. In every business, there are ways to add continuity income, and it’s an essential part of every Value Ladder. Continuity is when you get paid regularly, usually every month, for ongoing access to information or software or some other product.

At its most basic level, a webinar is nothing more than a PowerPoint presentation that you broadcast live (or record) over the Internet. It allows you to give your sales presentation to just about anyone in any corner of the globe. The best part is you can record the webinar once and then broadcast it over and over again. This is called an “automated webinar,” and it’s made me a fortune over the years. Webinars can be as long as you want. In fact, you’ll learn about the Invisible Funnel Webinar in the next chapter—that one can be as long as four hours! The Perfect Webinar we’re discussing in this chapter typically runs for about sixty to ninety minutes.

You promise to teach people something on the webinar. Then, if they want to learn more or dive deeper into the topic, they can purchase your product or sign up for coaching (or whatever you’re selling). It’s very important that the content of the webinar is valuable on its own, but as you’ll see from the Perfect Webinar script, you can craft the material in a way that also helps to set up the sale.

The funnel for a sales webinar is very simple. You drive traffic to a registration page where you have some sort of sales letter or video encouraging readers to sign up for the webinar. Typically I use the Who, What, Why, How script on my webinar registration pages. After watching the video or reading the copy, the interested prospects fill in their name and email to register. (Boom! They’re now on your list.) Then you send them to a confirmation page where they are reminded of the date and time of the webinar and given instructions on how to call in. At the appointed time, they will attend the webinar, and you can sell them your product.

Typically I will do a webinar live once, and then I take the recording from that event and build out an Automated Webinar Funnel that will allow me to keep sending traffic to that website every day for the rest of my life. It’s nice because you can keep selling your products twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, in every country in the world! At the time of this writing, I currently have two webinars that have both made me over a million dollars. Both are still selling to people right now while I’m writing this book!

My team carefully tracks when a participant leaves, and then we send out a different email sequence, depending on how long they watched. Everyone who subscribes gets one sequence. Everyone who shows up and stays all the way to the end gets another sequence. People who show up but leave early get yet another sequence. And the no-shows get an entirely different sequence to encourage them to go back and watch a replay. Each sequence encourages people to either go back and finish watching, or go order the product we’re selling. Once the participant places an order, the email sequences should stop automatically.

There are a lot of pieces to this script, but try not to get overwhelmed. Think of it as just three sections—introduction, content, and the stack— then fill those three sections in with the scripts provided.