Traffic Secrets: The Underground Playbook for Filling Your Websites and Funnels with Your Dream Customers

by Russell Brunson

The next 30 percent of buyers are a little bit harder to convince. They’re the analytical buyers. They may have felt something emotionally, but they need to be able to logically convince themselves that the purchase is right for them.

explain why this is a good deal and compare it to other investments they could make. I also let them know about the money-back guarantee if it doesn’t work so they won’t risk a decrease in status. Lastly, I try to use as much risk reversal as possible.

last 20 percent of buyers aren’t as motivated by emotion or logic, but they are motivated by a fear of missing out (FOMO). The only thing that will get them to take the leap is for them to be afraid that you’re going to take it away.

Urgency comes from you giving them all the reasons why they need to buy it now, and scarcity comes from all the re...

When someone joins a follow-up funnel, my first set of messages focuses on the emotion as I tell stories of other people who have used the product and share the hidden benefits. After a few days, I switch all my messaging to logic, and then the last set of messages will switch to fear.

If I’m only sending out three emails in that step of the follow-up funnel, then I have one for each of the three closes. If I have five emails, I might spend the first three days on emotion, one day on logic, and one day on urgency and scarcity. The number of messages matters less than making sure you hit each of the closes, because each one will bring in a different group of buyers.

When someone first joins my list, I take them through a process called the Soap Opera Sequence.

the emails aren’t stand-alone messages, but instead we will use multiple emails to tell a story, where each email hooks you to read the next email in a way that is similar to how a good soap opera will use their storyline to pull you from episode to episode. In these emails, we tell our readers a story that will build a relationship and rapport. That way, they’ll be more likely to keep reading our emails, clicking on our links, and buying our products.

The second type of communication is the Daily Seinfeld Emails that are more similar to episodes of the Seinfeld show. Each email is a stand-alone message that has a hook, tells ...

most good follow-up funnels are effective for 30–60 days. After that, people drop off the core list that has ascended your people through your value ladder, and then they’re moved to our daily broadcast list.

Arsenio explained that everyone used to answer his calls when he had his own show. But when he didn’t have his own talk show, his so-called friends avoided him. And that was the big takeaway! When you have your own show, everyone answers your calls.

Your platform is the true value that you have to provide your Dream 100. It’s more valuable than money, gifts, or anything. The Dream 100 want exposure, and your platform can provide that for them.

As cool of a person as I think I am, I’m sure that if I didn’t have my platform of over 2 million entrepreneurs among my email lists, social lists, and podcast listeners, it would have been very difficult to get Tony Robbins, or any of my Dream 100, to return my calls, respond to my emails, or be interested in working with me. None of these people needed another friend. They did need, however, access to my platform, and so that gave me the ability to get my foot in the door, build friendships, and start partnerships. This is the key to working your way in.

if you go look at the brands (the beer brands) that were romantic about staying on the radio, because that’s how they did it and didn’t shift to television, while things like Miller Lite (that nobody had ever heard of) went TV only and became the brand.

Find the “channel” where you can be the star, then build your show there.

I’ll show you how to leverage your primary show to get distribution across all channels, but, for now, you need to focus on just two channels: your primary distribution channel (email) and your primary show channel.

The channel you should be growing your primary show on depends on you, your personality, and your talents. For those of you who love writing, I’d focus on creating a blog.

If you’re still not sure which platform you’d like to create your show on, I’d recommend looking at which platform you consume the most content on. Typically, if you love YouTube and spend a lot of time watching videos, you’re going to have the best success creating videos for that platform, because you understand it.

I was just telling stories of my own and from my clients. Yet that podcast has converted more casual followers into raving fans than anything else I’ve ever done. But it didn’t start that way; it took over three years of consistent publishing.

Step #1) Publish daily for at least a year: The first commitment that you have to make is that you will be consistent. I knew when I started that if I didn’t find a platform that was easy for me and easy to create the content, I wouldn’t be consistent.

If you can publish every day for a year, you’ll never have to worry about money problems again. During the process, you will find your voice, and your audience will have time to find you.

Nathan Barry, wrote this post recently, “Endure Long Enough to Get Noticed”: How many great TV shows have you discovered in season three or later? I started watching Game of Thrones after they had released five seasons. Pat Flynn had released at least 100 episodes of his podcast before I even knew he existed. I discovered Hardcore History years after Dan Carlin started producing it.

Seth Godin is very generous with his time and will appear on almost any relevant podcast—but you have to have recorded at least 100 episodes first. His filter is creators who have shown they are willing to show up consistently for a long time.

You must be publishing or you will never become relevant, and you must continue publishing if you want to remain relevant. This part of the traffic flywheel does not go away.

How do I create six to seven meaningful things a day? I’ll give you the biggest tip when it comes to content creation: Document. Don’t create.

I think it’s much more fruitful to talk about your process than about the actual advice you “think” you should be giving them. Documenting your journey versus creating an image of yourself is the difference between saying “You should . . .” versus “My intuition says . . .” Get it? It changes everything. I believe that the people who are willing to discuss their journeys instead of trying to front themselves as the “next big thing” are going to win.

pick up your smartphone, open Facebook Live, and just start talking about the things most important to you.

in the end, the creative (or how “beautiful” someone thinks your content is) is going to be subjective. What’s not subjective is the fact that you need to start putting yourself out there and keep swinging.

“I made a list of the people I wanted to be part of this promotion, and then I started calling them. The first person told me no, and the second person said the same thing. I kept calling and kept getting noes. Somewhere in that list I called you, and your answer was the same, but I was determined to make this work no matter the cost, so I kept calling.” “How many people did you end up calling?” I asked. “Forty-nine.” “You called forty-nine people?” “No, I got forty-eight noes, but the forty-ninth person said yes! I knew that after I had one yes, I was in. I asked him if he knew anyone else that might be interested, and he gave me three names. I called each of them, and they all said yes. I asked them for referrals, and they all said yes as well! As my list of yeses grew, I started calling people who told me no and showed them the people who were now involved and had said yes, and many of the noes I had received earlier turned into yeses. I received forty-eight noes in a row, and then the next thirty people all said yes.” That promotion ended up building Tellman a list of over 100,000 people in just a few short months, and that list generated him over $800,000 in sales during his first year online. This is the power of infiltrating your Dream 100.

Your show will be you documenting the process of achieving the same goal that your audience will be striving for. As you’re documenting your process, you’ll be testing your material and paying attention to the things that people respond to. If you commit to publishing your show every day for a year, you’ll have the ability to test your material and find your voice, and your dream customers will be able to find you.

Who has already identified your dream customers, who is publishing to them, and who is getting rewarded by the platform by getting tons of views or likes (or whatever the reward system is for that network)?

Follow each of your Dream 100 and spend 10 minutes each day watching what they are doing. Write down the answers to these questions: What are they posting? How are they getting people to engage with what they post? What paid ads are they running? During these 10 minutes, try to comment, like, and engage with as many things they are doing each day as possible. Notice the pattern of what is working right now and model it for your posts (funnel hacking). This will give you a pulse on what is working in the market on that platform right now. It gives you the ability to see in real time what the algorithms are rewarding today.

Funnel hacking is modeling, and there is a big difference between copying and modeling. Every day, I look at over 100 people’s posts, videos, ads, and quotes, and that helps me to gather inspiration for unique things that I can create. You’re looking for the types of things the platforms’ algorithms are currently rewarding that you can then model.

Because no one had seen them, every video we published in this format got more comments and engagement than anything I had ever seen before. Soon, though, others noticed how well this pattern interrupt worked, and they modeled it. Within a few months, hundreds of marketers were doing it, and most of my feed was filled with memed videos.

When the pattern interrupt becomes the pattern, it stops being as effective. Notice that I didn’t say they stop working; they just become less effective. So if you are starting right now, and you see all of your Dream 100 doing something, you should still model what they’re doing. It may not be as effective as a new pattern interrupt, but it is the current pattern that is working, so that’s where you start.

If you look at the social networks, we have Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc. . . . I view all of these networks like I’m going to a party. So, if I’m on Twitter posting messages and responding, it’s like I’m at a party. Does that make sense?”

“You talk about what’s going on in your life,” Perry responded. “You talk about your family, tell them stories, entertain them a little bit, ask them questions, and introduce them to other cool people who are at the party. Basically, you do everything you would do if you were hanging out with them in real life. Social networking is just a great big party. That’s part number one.”

The goal of social networking is to invite people back to your home and, from there, to introduce them into your funnels.

Those who just spam their message to their followers will always think that social media doesn’t work. Even if they do get some short-term results, they won’t last. On the other hand, those who play the longer game and plant seeds with their followers will end up with a constant stream of traffic flooding into their funnels.

I spend the majority of my personal time working with my Dream 100, building and communicating with my lists, and publishing content to build fans and followers. In fact, during the first 10 years of my companies, we didn’t run any paid ads. We paid affiliates to promote our products and used a lot of the growth hacks that you’ll learn about in Section Three, but we never actually paid for an ad.

Dean and his team were running four times more creative (ads) than us. “How many ads are you guys running?” I asked. “Lots,” Dean said. “They have me make a few new ads each day.” “Each day?” “Yeah. Through my day, I carry my book with me, and every time I find a cool spot, I pull out my phone and make a new ad. Here is one at my daughter’s softball game. Here is another at my house. This one is at the airport, and this one is when I went out to dinner.” I couldn’t believe this was the big secret. More creative. More hooks. More ads. When you’re thinking about prospecting ads, you’re looking at a huge ocean of people—all who need your product or service but all who have a different reason why. If you try to create just one hook, it may last for a while and grab the people who are looking for that hook, but it will dry up very fast. You’ve got to become prolific at creating ads. The phone in your pocket will become your ad-making, creative-generating, hook-developing machine. Everywhere you go, you should be looking for opportunities to record a pitch for your offers that you can then turn into ads.

Tony Robbins’s followers in one campaign, business owners in another, and women between the ages of 35–55 in a third campaign, but instead to have one campaign that requires the viewers be in all three of those categories in order to be shown your ad. Being smart with your audiences and layering them can really help bring your costs down and improve your results.

When you target overlapping sections of people, meaning you layer your audiences and only target those who have multiple things in common, you can bring down your ad costs and get better results.

The platform algorithms can work with that data and actually start lending a hand in your targeting efforts. In Google and YouTube, they’re called Similar Audiences, and in Facebook and Instagram, they’re called Lookalike Audiences. In both cases, you decide which bucket to use as the source, the algorithm then looks deep into who those people are, and then matches up others in your specified geographical range who are most similar to them (and thus more likely to care about what you have to offer).

Since your efforts to reach people only resulted in a tiny fraction buying, you need specific campaigns in place to reach back out to those who were a good fit but just didn’t take action (or enough action) for whatever reason. In order to do this properly, you need to build custom audiences. There are three specific audiences that are essential to a high-performance retargeting plan. Each is based on how far viewers got along the customer journey.

Audience #1—Engaged: The first audience you’ll want to build is an audience based on viewers having engaged with you. Did they watch your YouTube videos this week?

Audience #2—Landed: The second audience you’ll want to build is made up of the people who clicked through and landed on your page. These people took a bigger commitment, left the platform, and visited your sales funnel. While they trusted you with their curiosity and visited your page, they didn’t take any further action by opting in or purchasing. I tend to run an ad to this audience for up to seven days trying to get them to come back and take me up on my lead magnet. Again, if they don’t opt in or buy within seven days, I just let them fall out of this audience.

Unlike prospecting ads where I’m making new creative as often as possible, with your retargeting campaigns, you’re focusing on creating them once and you will never touch them again. It’s similar to a Soap Opera Sequence inside of a follow-up funnel that you write once, and it lasts forever. As we move people through the retargeting buckets, we use the same three closes you learned about earlier: starting with emotion, then moving to logic, and ending with fear (urgency/scarcity). That is how we pull people into action throughout each retargeting campaign.

Owned → Sell the next step: Tell the network you want to collect a custom audience of everyone who has converted into a lead and/or sale. To this audience, you want to either offer another front-end product or walk them up the next step on your value ladder.

If you are “buying your way in,” you win by showing your ads to your Dream 100’s followers and pushing them into your funnels. As with all platforms, I believe we should be playing both sides: working our way in and buying our way in.