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

by Russell Brunson

Unless people know that you exist and you give them a compelling reason to come find you, they aren’t coming.

The world has changed. And for those who don’t know how to pivot, a life of struggle may lie ahead. Or—less dramatic but equally sad—yours could be a life, a purpose, unrealized. A life in which you don’t tap into your next level and you never reach your full potential.

A few of the core concepts that I first revealed in DotCom Secrets were: The secret of the value ladder, and how you can use it to provide more value to your customers and make more money from every customer in the process.

How to attract your dream customers that you want to work with and repel the types of customers you don’t want to work with so you only spend time serving the people that you enjoy being around.

The exact funnels and sales scripts you can use to convert website and funnel visitors into customers and move them through your value ladder so ...

Expert Secrets helps marketers master the art of converting leads into dream customers.

That brings us to this book, the third and final volume in the trilogy, Traffic Secrets. Traffic is the fuel for every successful business. It is the people who are coming into your funnels. The more people you can get in front of, the bigger

impact you and your company can have, which, in turn, usually creates more money for your company.

Traffic Secrets approaches traffic from a completely different direction than anyone has discussed before: less from the tactical, fly-by-night operations and more from the strategic, long-term model that will ensure a consistent flow of people into your funnels. The strategies inside of this book are evergreen and will never change as long as there are humans on this planet to sell to.

Each book in the Secrets trilogy was written as a stand-alone playbook, but mastering the skills from all three books is essential for the long-term growth of your company. Because of that, each book refers to and ties in important concepts from the others.

Step #1) The Adoption: Make the barrier of entry easy to get everyone in and using the platform. Step #2) The Price Hike: Slowly raise the prices to squeeze out the margins, killing off any entrepreneurs who don’t understand how to use funnels. Step #3) The Slap: Kill off the 50 percent of advertisers who cause 90 percent of their headaches. (If you spend less than $1 million per month on ads, you’re considered a small advertiser. You only make up a tiny percentage of their revenue, yet you’re 100 times harder to support than a big brand who cares less about ROI and more about just seeing their brand everywhere.)

If you rely 100 percent on Facebook for your traffic, then this is your warning that a storm is coming. You should implement everything you read in this book so you can protect your company and thrive during that storm.

We understand how to use funnels. With funnels, we can make 5–10 times as much money for each visitor who clicks on our ads, so we survive and thrive when costs go up.

We have mastered the strategy (not just the tactics) behind getting traffic, and these strategies work on all advertising platforms in the past, present, and future. If you master these strategies, then no slap or snap can affect the lifeblood of your company.

The tactics behind how to get someone to click on an ad and come to your website literally change daily.

Moving forward, you have to understand that traffic is people, and people are extremely predictable.

Instead, we will be focusing on strategies that don’t change, including: Identifying your dream customers Finding out where they are already congregating online Learning how to “work” your way in Understanding how to “buy” your way in Creating your own publishing platform Building your own distribution lists

I can tell you that the people who put all their focus on creating something amazing (instead of also focusing on getting people to actually see what they created) are the people that fail. The biggest problem they have is getting their future customers to discover that they even exist. Every year, tens of thousands of businesses start and fail because the entrepreneurs don’t understand this one essential skill: the art and science of getting traffic (or people) to find you.

Waiting for people to come to you is not a strategy.

But understanding exactly who your dream customer is, discovering where they’re congregating, and throwing out hooks that will grab their attention to pull them into your funnels (where you can tell them a story and make them an offer) is the strategy. That’s the big secret.

This section of the book will be focusing on answering two very important questions: Question #1: Who is your dream customer? Question #2: Where are they congregating?

When you have a perfect vision of who your dream customer is, it becomes easy to find where they are congregating. On the contrary, if you don’t have perfect clarity on who that person is, it’s really hard to find them.

Each business needs to understand their dream customer avatars better than the customers know themselves.

Most entrepreneurs mistakenly think that their business is about them, but it’s not. On the contrary, your business is about your customer.

If you want customers (traffic) to come into your funnels, then you have to be able to find them online. And if you want to find them online, then you have to start to understand them at a much deeper level.

The first step in this process is to become obsessed with your dream customer. Companies that become obsessed with their products will eventually fail.

Being obsessed with your customer means understanding them just as well, if not better, than they understand themselves.

When you’re frustrated about a problem you’re having, you look for a solution. If you’re not able to find a solution that gives you the result you want, then you’ll likely go on a journey to find or create your own solution. In that way, your problem becomes your business; in other words, your mess becomes your message. If that’s true, then you need to look back in time to find the point where you were struggling with the same problem your dream customer has now. Then you need to remember what you were feeling when you were in that pain.

Collier believed that we as marketers should not be trying to figure out how to create the next amazing ad campaign, but instead we need to learn how to “enter the conversation already taking place in the customer’s mind.”

If you want to really understand who your dream customers are and where they are congregating online, you need to be able to enter the conversation that is already taking place inside of their mind and see the world the way that they see it. When you truly understand the core pains they are trying to move away from and the core desires and passions they are trying to move toward, it becomes very easy to identify exactly where they exist online. As soon as you know where they are online, then you can hook them and bring them into your funnels where you can serve them.

The three desires (in no particular order) are health, wealth, and relationships. When people purchase any product from anyone, they’re hoping to get a certain result in one of these three areas of their lives. So the first question you need to answer is this: Which of these three desires is my future dream customer trying to receive when they buy my product or service?

However, sometimes people get stuck on this question for one of two reasons.

Reason #1 — My product fits into more than one of these desires: Many products can be marketed toward getting a result in more than one of these desires, but your marketing message can only focus on one of them. Anytime you try to get your potential customer to believe in two things, your conversions will usually cut in half (most times by 90 percent or more). To target two different desires, you need two different ads leading to two different funnels. Only focus on one desire with each message you put into the market.

Reason #2 — My product doesn’t fit into any o...

Most products can fit into multiple categories, even if they may look as if they don’t fit into any category at all, but no matter what, the key is that your marketing message can and must be focused on only one of the 3 Core Desires.

Now that you’ve identified which core desire your product or service is focused on, the next step to entering the conversation inside your customer’s mind is to understand which direction they are moving. Every human being on this planet is always moving in one of two directions when they make a decision: away from pain or toward pleasure.

Moving Away from Pain: The first direction that people can be moving in is away from pain.

when I actually wrote down the thoughts that my particular dream customer was having, I did three things to try to understand the conversation that they were having with themselves each day.

I wrote out hundreds of phrases that I used to say to myself when I was trying to solve the problem for myself initially.

I looked online in forums, message boards, and groups to see what others are saying when they ar...

I really tried to put myself in their shoes and wrote out what I believed...

Moving Toward Pleasure: The second direction that people can be moving in is toward pleasure. They don’t have a desire for health, wealth, or relationships because they are unhappy; they have a desire because they are happy and looking for more.

While two people’s goals might be the same, their reasons for accomplishing that goal might be completely different.

get a captive audience, entertain or educate them, and then, when you have their full attention, interrupt them with your message. You can then grab their attention and create desire for the product or service that you are selling.

Pros and Cons for Search: The pro for search-based traffic is that when they come to you, they’re hot buyers who are ready to buy. This is similar to people who walk into your store or find you in the Yellow Pages and give you a call.

The con with search-based traffic is that they’re not just searching; they’re also comparing options with your competitors. You’ve got to be the price leader, as well as the quality leader and the niche leader.

Pros and Cons for Interruption: As a marketer, you can target people who are interested in certain people, ideas, TV shows, or bands, and then you can interrupt them with your ads. You open a small window of time where you can grab their attention and show them the perceived value of what you’re selling. You no longer have to wait around for someone to come looking for you. Now you can create desire in your dream customers. The pro for social-based interruption traffic is that you can target warm traffic based on people’s interests. Therefore, you can sell based on the perceived value of your product or service. The con for social-based interruption traffic is that because the customer isn’t actively looking for you, you have to become good at your “Hook, Story, Offer,” where you can grab their attention, tell them a story, and then make them an offer.

the real power of the internet: it has allowed us to connect with like-minded people in a way that wasn’t possible before. It’s allowed each of us, with our unique and sometimes weird hobbies and interests, to congregate with our people to discuss the things that mean the most to us.

Pre-internet, it was expensive for a marketer to sell products and services to each of these small groups. After all, how do you target just those people in every city who were interested in what you have to sell?

The internet has made it so that when you find those existing congregations of your dream customers, it’s like catching fish in a barrel. You simply have to find the barrel of fish with your dream customers and throw in your hooks. If your hook is good, it will pull people from that barrel into your funnels!