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

by Russell Brunson

Red Flag #1: Don’t send a templated message. So many times I see the copy/paste emails that have been sent to 500 other “influencers” that day, and these messages don’t get a response. Write each person a personal message or don’t send anything at all.

Red Flag #2: Don’t tell me your story yet. There will be a day and time that your Dream 100 will care about your story, but it’s not with the first message. You telling them your story is them serving you, and you have not built up the reciprocity yet. Serve first, or they will never have a chance to serve you later.

Pretend like you are trying to date your Dream 100, because you kind of are. Treat them right, and one good relationship can be worth millions of dollars to you. But now that you’ve seen the red flags, let’s talk ab...

Green Light #1: This isn’t the first time I’ve ever seen your face. Most of your Dream 100 spend time publishing things they believe in, and if you don’t think they read the comments on the things they publish, you’re wrong. Make sure that they’ve seen your face actively participating in meaningful ways in the discussions they create, so when they see you pop in their inbox or as a direct message, they recognize you. During this phase you are sellin...

Green Light #2: They tell me how great I am. I know that sounds shallow, but come on, there’s a reason we’re doing this. I personally feel very uncomfortable when people give me direct praise, especially in front of people, but I love reading it in comments or messages, an...

Green Light #3: They’ve done their homework. They know who I am and what I care about, so when we do talk, they ask me about stuff that’s important to me. When people ask me about my wife or kids or wrestling or things that I’m really passionate...

Green Light #4: They don’t ask for anything now. Just don’t do it. Trust me. If you ask too early, the answer will always be no. There wi...

Phase #3 (Day 31–60): Make your Dream 100 your fan. I never ask someone to promote something for me i...

Your best promoters will always be your biggest fans.

After I have plugged into each person in my Dream 100 and started the process of digging my well before I’m thirsty, there are now two ways that I can get my message in front of my Dream 100’s audiences. First, I can “work my way in” by getting traffic that I earn. Second, I can “buy my way in” by getting traffic that I control.

You can work your way in to your Dream 100 by appearing on their own shows.

Not all promotions are an interview, although I think that is the easiest way to illustrate this concept. Many of my Dream 100 had an email list, and they promoted my books to those lists by sending out an email recommending purchase of the book. Some wrote reviews and posted it on their blogs, while others talked about it inside their Instagram stories. Everyone published to their own platforms in different ways, so I let them do what was most comfortable to them.

Now, this concept isn’t just a launch strategy. It can and should be a consistent part of your business. To this day, I still do multiple interviews each month for people who have a platform that want to have me on as a guest. I would recommend trying to do at least two per week as a starting goal.

This can and should be a consistent part of your traffic strategy. This organic, earned traffic oftentimes converts at a much higher rate than almost any form of paid traffic. It’s harder to scale, but your hottest, best buyers will typically come from an endorsement from your Dream 100.

We call this “earned” traffic because you typically aren’t paying for it with money, but you are paying for it with your time. When people are getting started and don’t have an advertising budget, I always recommend starting with earned traffic.

While controlled (paid) traffic usually produces a quick spike, the traffic typically fizzles out. Earned traffic often produces a slower amount of traffic than paid traffic at first, but usually grows over time.

Now while I’m digging my well and building relationships with people, at the same time I’m buying my way in to their audiences. I do this for a few reasons.

First: It’s faster. Paid ads can give you immediate feedback. I can turn an ad on and within minutes have people flooding into my funnels.

Second: It gives me the ability to test out different hooks and see what things people in each of my Dream ...

Third: 90 percent of my Dream 100 will likely never actively promote me on their own, but I still want to get in front of their audiences, and this is the only way. It’s not as powerful as an endorsed promotion, but it’s the second-best thing.

Fourth: Paid ads are how you scale a company fast. My number-one goal with every funnel I create is to have a “breakeven” funnel, where for each $1 we put into paid ads, we get at least $1 back.

You see, there are really only two ways to scale a company fast. The first is to take on outside funding and then to use that money to either acquire other companies or pay to acquire customers. However, this way is lazy and inefficient, and I don’t recommend it.

The better, smarter, and more efficient way to scale a business is to create a funnel that is profitable and then to put as much money into paid ads as possible. When you have a funnel that at least breaks even, then you don’t have an advertising budget and you can spend as much money as you want without it ever costing you anything to acquire customers.

You might still be asking yourself, “Which is better: controlled traffic or earned traffic? Is it better to work your way in or buy your way in?” The answer is, “Both are essential to the long-term success of your company.”

While traffic that you earn and traffic that you control is good, traffic that you own is the best type of traffic to have.

the list is the key. That’s the big secret. It is the only real asset in any company.

Your list is your key to your current and future success online. This is the best type of traffic: traffic that you own.

In fact, my only goal with traffic that I control and traffic that I earn is to convert it into traffic that I own.

When I’m buying ads, sure, I want to sell a product, but, more importantly, I want to get those people on a list first. Because when I buy an ad, I’m getting them to click once. When they join my lists, I can email them as often as I like for free, instead of just getting them to click once. It’s the same with traffic that I earn. I want to direct these people into funnels where I get their information and get them on to my lists. That way I can follow up with them over and over again.

With a lead funnel, you’re giving customers something for free in exchange for their email address. We call the thing you are giving away for free a “lead magnet,” because if you create something that is exciting for your dream customers, it will attract those leads just like a magnet. You don’t sell anything in this type of funnel, but once they’re on your list, the follow-up funnels are where you’ll make your profit.

With the book funnel, we give them an amazing deal to get a copy of my book when they cover the shipping. I send them the book, and then the upsells will cover my ad costs and hopefully make me a small profit. More importantly, though, I create a customer to add to my lists.

With the webinar funnel, I invite them to the web class. When they register, they join my list. Then at the end of the web class, I make a special offer which covers my ad spend and ideally makes me a profit.

Do you see how this works? I earn my way onto a platform, and then my offer at the end pushes customers into one of my front-end, break-even funnels. Each of the funnels is created in such a way that there is value at every step of it.

With all of my front-end end funnels, the goal is to break even so I can ascend my customers up my value ladder, thereby making a profit.

It’s been said that on the low end, you should average about $1 per month for each name on your list,

I suggest setting a benchmark of $1 per name per month and then trying to beat it.

You might be wondering, “Now that I’ve added someone to my list, how does that grow my company?” Well, the answer is simple. Now that you have created the most valuable thing inside your company, you can then direct your subscribers into “follow-up funnels.”

“A study done by the Association of Sales Executives revealed that 81 percent of all sales happens on or after the fifth contact. If you’re a small business owner and you’re only doing one or two follow-ups, imagine all the business you’re losing. Not following up with your prospects and customers is the same as filling up your bathtub without first putting the stopper in the drain!”

Some say that the “fortune is in the follow-up,” and I believe it’s true. The way we follow up is to take the traffic that we now own and push them through follow-up funnels.

Once someone is on my list, I can then send out follow-up messages to them anytime I want for free because I now own that traffic!

VC-backed companies will go in the hole for 6–12 months or more to generate a customer. That’s right, they sometimes don’t break even for over a year, but they can do that because they’re burning someone else’s money.

Ideally, we break even in our initial funnel, but sometimes it might take us a few days or weeks to break even using our follow-up funnels. Many times, people will lose some money inside of their front-end funnels and not break even immediately, and because of that they get scared and walk away from it. If they looked closer at their numbers, though, they’d see that they might have been just a few days away from breaking even and that they could still have kept running ads to those funnels profitably, even at a loss.

The next set of emails in my follow-up funnel would be focused on introducing them to the next funnel in my value ladder.

The next step in the follow-up funnel would be to move them into one of my higher ticket funnels. We call this “funnel stacking.”

Sometimes the break-even happens inside of the initial front-end funnel, but other times it happens within the follow-up funnel. As soon as I know that I break even on day X of my follow-up funnel, then I go back and spend money to acquire customers, knowing that I’ll have a return on that investment at an already established point.

Mike Litman say, “Amateurs focus on the first sale.”13

As the war for attention has grown, a lot of amazing tools have been created that we can plug into our follow-up funnels to make sure people actually see our message. My hope is that this list of tools will continue to increase, but I’ll share with you the ones that I see as the most powerful today.

Retargeting: The first, and one of my favorite tools to plug into my follow-up funnels, is retargeting ads. We’ll go deep into our retargeting strategy in Secret #9, but for now, I want you to be aware of what they are and how they work. Have you ever been to a website, and then over the next few weeks, it seems like they’re stalking you online? Everywhere you go, you see their banner ads following you around? That is retargeting, and it’s one of the most powerful ways to push someone through your follow-up funnels and ascend them up your value ladder.

Messenger: In 2011, Facebook created their Messenger program which, for many people, has replaced email as their favorite communication tool. You can add Messenger subscriber boxes into your funnels and get people joining your email list to also join your Messenger lists. This gives you the ability to follow up with people through a different channel than email. It’s a very powerful tool that has a much higher open rate than email. However, because of the intimacy of people’s Messenger inboxes, I’ve found that unlike email, where I can send email daily and not have many people upset, with Messenger, I can only send one or two messages a week without losing many subscribers. We strategically place Me...

Text Messages: We don’t normally try to get someone’s phone number on a traditional landing page, because each new field traditionally lowers conversions, but I do try to grab a phone number when people buy something from us or when they register for a webinar. We can use text broadcasts to make sure people don’t miss the webinar they’ve signed up for, let the...