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

by Russell Brunson

Who are the people on your Dream 100 that have an interesting story they could tell that will relate to your show and have a following of people that you can promote their episode to? You have a platform that you can now leverage to get people on your show, and they have a network that you can advertise their episode to. It’s a huge win-win. In a perfect world, they would promote their episode to their entire following when it goes live (and that does happen at times), but even if they don’t promote, you can still buy ads targeting their audiences on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, or wherever their following is.

The reality is that many people you ask will say no, and that’s okay, because you don’t need everyone. You just need one: one guest that you can then leverage to get the others.

Typically, most markets have a “good ol’ boys” club atmosphere, and usually a lot of your Dream 100 will be in one or more clubs. To infiltrate and get access to that club, you don’t need to get access to all of them; you just need to have one of the cool kids think you’re cool, and then you’re in.

So your job now is to look at your Dream 100 and start asking them to be on your show. Many will say no, but don’t let that stop you. You only need one yes.

As you have a chance to interview your Dream 100 on your podcast, you’ll be giving them a platform for which they’ll be grateful. You’ll be able to spend time building a relationship as you interview them on your show (digging your well before you’re thirsty), and you can tap into their audience to promote their episode, build your show, and get access to their followers.

Step #1: The first step is to figure out what type of show you want to have. If you’re a writer, then you should start a blog. If you like video, then you should start a vlog on one of the video platforms. Lastly, if you like audio, then you should start a podcast.

Step #2: 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.

Step #3: You’ll leverage your Dream 100 by interviewing them on your show. This will give you the ability to build relationships with them, give them a platform, give you the ability to promote their episode on your show to t...

Step #4: Even though this is your own show, you’re renting time on someone else’s network. It’s important that you don’t forget it and that you focus o...

And with that, I will close out Section One of this book. So far, we’ve covered a lot of core principles to traffic. We: Identified exactly who your dream client is. Discovered exactly where they are congregating. Talked about how to work your way into those audiences (traffic that you earn) and how you buy your way into those audiences (traffic that you control). Learned how to take all the traffic that you earn and all the traffic that you buy and turn it all into traffic that you own (building your list).

Discussed how to plug that list into a follow-up funnel so you can move them through your value ladder. Prepared to infiltrate your Dream 100, find your voice, and build your following by creating your own show.

In this section, we’ll be shifting more into the tactics of how to fill your funnels with your dream customers on the following four advertising platforms: Instagram Facebook Google YouTube

Showing you the strategy and tactics on one platform is the equivalent of “giving a man a fish,” and teaching you the framework to get traffic from every platform is the equivalent of “teaching a man how to fish.” As you read the following chapters, you’ll learn the pattern and see its practical application throughout the four most important networks today, helping you to master the frameworks that will fill your funnels with your dream customers.

Step #1—Understand the history and the goal of the new platform: If you want to know where the platform is going, you have to know where it came from.

As you start getting a layout of each platform’s history, you’ll quickly start to see what their end goals are. Each platform has a goal to make the best user experience for their end user as possible.

The goal of spammers is always to hack the algorithm to get what they want, which always provides short-term gains, because as soon as the spammers are identified, the loopholes that they have been exploiting are taken away. Instead, if you align with the wills of the network and give them what they want, then they’ll give you what you want: tons of traffic.

Step #2—Find and model your Dream 100: The next question is, who on this platform has already figured this out? 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)?

As you start this part of the journey, I want to bring you back to the core questions we asked in Section One. Question #1: Who is your dream customer? Question #2: Where are they congregating? Asking these two questions should then get you to ask the next question: Question #3: Who are your ...

When I first went onto Facebook or Instagram (and I did the same things on other networks like Twitter and LinkedIn), I looked to see the Dream 100 who had already mastered that platform. Who had the big followings and tons of engagement with my dream customers? Then I built out a new Dream 100 list specifically for each of those platforms, and I followed each of them. I needed to be able to see exactly what t...

Here are the three things it will take to funnel hack social algorithms: 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 not copying. 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.

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.

After you model the pattern that’s working, the next phase of funnel hacking the social algorithms is to look for and test ideas that will become the next pattern interrupt.

Following your Dream 100 lets you have your fingers on the pulse of what’s working currently in each platform. You can model ideas that they’re trying, come up with your own unique ideas, and test them both to see which ones stick.

Because the algorithms are always changing, it’s essential that you network with and stay close to your Dream 100. They will be the ones who will also have a vested interest in staying in front of the algorithm changes, and it can be super useful to have a sounding board of people in your market during the inevitable changes that will come.

Step #3—Identify the publishing strategy and create your publishing plan: Each platform has multiple ways that you can publish your content, so it’s essential to understand the strategy for each section and h...

There are a lot of possibilities, so you want to understand all the publishing opportunities on each platform, decide which you want to focus on, and figure out a plan to make it simple to consistently publish on your chosen platform.

Step #4—Work your way in: After I start publishing on each platform and I have content that my dream customers can see, I look for ways to work my way into the Dream 100. I start asking myself the question, how can I get organic, free exposure to the audiences of the people who have already congregated my dream customers, and then get these people to join my lists and become traffic that I own?

Step #5—Buy your way in: While I’m working my way in, I want to stimulate growth as fast as possible. The best way is to buy ads targeting the followers of my Dream 100 and then get these pe...

Step #6—Fill your funnel: As you’re publishing, working your way in, and buying your way in, the goal is always to convert all the traffic and attention into traffic that you own. You do that by pushing people into your funnels where you can get their contact information, sell them your front-end products, and then push them through a follow-up funnel to ascend them up your value ladder.

Social networking is not about making money; it’s about making friends. It’s just like how we do business in person. Let me show you how I view social media and how we use it to grow our companies. 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?”

“Well, when you go to a party, do you just talk about what you do? ‘Hey, I’m Perry, and I sell stuff. Would you like to buy some stuff from me?’ No, of course not. If you did, you’d be the biggest jerk at the party. Everyone would avoid you.

“Okay, then what do we talk about on the social networking sites? As an introvert, I’ve never really networked in real life, so I’m not sure how or what I should be saying.”

“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 second part of the process is how I use my personal profile on each social platform,” Perry continued. “My personal profile is my house, it’s my home, it’s where I live. It has most of my thoughts, my information, and stuff that is interesting to me. I archive pictures, videos, fun stuff I’ve done with friends, and stuff like that. When people come into my house, they know what I’m about. They can see the things that I like to talk about.”

“Now, this is how it works. When I go into groups and start networking, or I see someone else’s posts in my feed, I go and participate in the conversations and make friends. As they see me consistently show up, they will want to drop by my house and see what I’m all about. Give them some free stuff like chips and dip (free content) to get them to come to your house. Then when they’re at my house, that’s where I invite them to take action with me: register for my webinar, attend my next event, read my new book, or join my newsletter list. That’s how I invite people from my house into my funnels. Those selling conversations don’t have a place on social media, but they do at your house. You can direct people into your funnels from the posts you make on your own personal profile. If you provide value on the social platforms, people will come running to your house because they want more of you, and from there, they will flow into your funnels.”

If you’re spending more than 10 minutes a day consuming social media, then you are wasting your time. The keyword here is “consuming.”

As of today, you are no longer a consumer of social media. You are a producer of social media. There is a big difference. Consuming social media doesn’t serve you or the audience you’ve been called to serve. Producing social media does serve them.

The first step in this process is to do a social media reset. That means unfriending and unfollowing almost everyone on every platform that you’ll be using to generate traffic. That way, you won’t be distracted by the nonsense that everyone around you is posting. From here on out, you’ll use social media as a business tool, not a social tool. After you unfriend everyone, I suggest only following your Dream 100 on each platform. That way, when you log in to any of the platforms, you’ll be able to quickly get a glimpse of what they’re posting and get ideas for things that are working well that y...

Now that your social feed has been cleaned up, go and look for the social parties that have the most people engaged in them. You wouldn’t go to a party that only has a few dozen people; instead you would look for the largest parties in town where you can get the most exposure for your efforts. Depending on the platform, you’ll be looking for the largest groups, podcasts, blogs, videos, and Fan Pages that you can go to and become the life of the party. A...

As you can probably tell, 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.

Adding paid ads into the strategies you’ve been learning about is like adding lighter fluid to a pile of charcoal. You will get results faster on any funnel you want to promote and be able to more predictably control sales over the long-term.

“While it’s true that each advertising network has little intricacies and nuances that can take a while to get used to, and there are definitely tips and tricks that can incrementally improve your performance, the good news is that the strategy of advertising on these networks is the same. The specifics of the platforms can be learned with online tutorials, or they can be hired out, but the strategy needs to be understood by you (the entrepreneur) in order to succeed.”

The number-one question I get from people every time I start talking about paid ads is always related to how much money they’ll need to budget to actually run ads. I always smile and tell them that if they have been following my advice so far and they’ve created a break-even funnel, then every dollar that they spend in ads comes back to them immediately. If they have a funnel that is break even or profitable, then they don’t have an advertising budget. Their goal is to spend as much money profitably as possible because each dollar they spend turns into more dollars.

never like putting very much of my money at risk at any given time, so with each new funnel, as soon as it’s live, we set up a few ads, give it a small test budget, and see what happens. The funnels that flop are sent back to the drawing board to get reworked, and the funnels that work are scaled to see how much money we can profitably spend.

Before we start talking about ads, I need to take a minute to explain the difference between “prospecting” ads vs. “retargeting” ads. Once you understand the difference between them and how they work together, we’ll dive deep into how to use each of them together.

To get your best results for paid ads, don’t stop with prospecting ads. Continue with retargeting ads to give your warmer audience another opportunity to buy.

John explained, “Prospecting ads are the act of reaching out into the networks to find cold traffic or people who aren’t familiar with you or your offers and hook them long enough to get their attention. After we’ve gotten their attention and gotten them to engage with us (engage could mean they watched, liked, or commented on an ad), then we move them from the ‘prospecting’ pool into the ‘retargeting’ buckets. We then advertise to these people differently and work to warm them up and then get them into our value ladder.”

It’s those people who have engaged, but not purchased, who you would put into the retargeting buckets. Once they’re in those buckets, we can warm them up, test other hooks, tell other stories, and remind them of the great offer we’ve made them in order to persuade them to click through and go into your funnel.”

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.