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Norm went on to explain that in the heat of battle, the fog of war, under pressure, the undisciplined die.
My advice: Don’t settle for or be distracted by mere tricks. Be a responsible adult. Invest your time ’n treasure in information, skills, and properties that can yield harvest after harvest after harvest—not fleeting fads or not sexy ideas that age very poorly. And don’t fall for the idea that any new media gets to defy gravity and live untethered to reality, math, or history.
like most companies I work with, FitLife.tv’s problem wasn’t a traffic or conversion problem. It rarely is. More often than not, it’s a FUNNEL problem.
Dan Kennedy, says, “Ultimately, the business that can spend the most to acquire a customer wins.”
Whatever they were selling, the process was the same. They would place a small ad asking people to contact their company for a free report. After you contacted them, they would send you a sales letter disguised as a free report, selling a low-ticket information product. When I purchased the product, they would send me their “system”—along with another sales letter selling me a high-ticket product.
Figure 0.4: Blogs, podcasts, and online video are simply newer versions of the old-school offline media channels.
I found that the difference between a $10,000 website and a $10 million company was all the things happening after a buyer came into the initial sales funnel.
then I had a flash of inspiration. I thought, Has anyone else besides me searched for information on how to make potato gun plans? Online, you can find websites that tell you how many searches in Google are happening each month. So I went to one of those websites, typed in the keyword “potato gun,” and found that over 18,000 people that month had searched for the phrase “potato gun”!
“Did you know that when you go to McDonald’s, they spend $1.91 in advertising to get people into the drive-through? That means that when they sell you a burger for $2.09, they only make $0.18.” “No,” I responded. “But what does that have to do with my website?” “Well, after you order your burger, they have their cashiers ask this magic question: ‘Do you want fries and a Coke with that?’ They charge $1.77 more for this upsell, but they make—and more importantly they keep—$1.32 profit from everyone who takes this upsell! That’s eight times the profit of the initial sale!”
Figure 1.4: After adding a potato gun kit as my OTO, I was able to increase my customer’s average order from $37 to $102. Instead of losing money with $50 per day ad costs, I was able to make a higher profit than I did before the Google slap.
“Ultimately, the business that can spend the most to acquire a customer wins. A business beats its competition by making the same prospect worth more to his business than to that of his competition.”
People often ask me, “Russell, does my business need a funnel?” to which I always respond, “Only if your company needs leads or sales.” If you want to generate leads, there are funnels for that. If you want to sell products, there are funnels for that. Funnels will grow any company. Your goal is to figure out which funnels are right for your specific situation. Most people start with one funnel to acquire new customers and then build other funnels to help them make more money on autopilot from each new lead they get.
A traditional website is a lot like a brochure, where it shows everything about a business. With so many options, though, sales usually suffer because visitors are confused about what their first step should be.
One of the fundamental rules of marketing is that “a confused mind always says no.”
A funnel, on the other hand, is created to be simple. From the outside, it may look like a website, but you’ll notice that each page and each step only has one call to action. There is strategy behind what page someone sees first, and then the journey you take them on.
When a salesperson takes someone through a funnel like this, two things happen: The customer has a better user experience. They aren’t confused, and they can find exactly what they’re looking for. You as the store owner actually make more money. Because you don’t confuse your customers, you upsell them on the right things that will help them on their journey.
what happens in a funnel. I take someone to a page that only has one goal: to get their name and contact information. From there, I take those people who became leads into a sales process to sell the one product or service they are looking for. After they make that purchase, I help to customize the order for them through an upsell process, and later I use other funnels to help ascend those customers to other things I have to sell.
A sales funnel is similar to cloning your best salesperson and having
Each type of funnel that you will learn about in this book will do this in a different way, but the process is always the same. Each page is simple, has a hook that will grab your attention, tells a story to create value, and makes you an offer that will move you to the next page of the funnel.
Question #1: Who is your dream customer? If you could pick your dream customer, the type of person who would make you wake up every morning on fire because you’re so excited to work with them, what would they look like? The better you can identify this person, the easier it will be for you to find them. Question #2: Where are they congregating? After we know who we are looking for, the next step is to find out where they are hiding. Where are they spending their time online? When I can identify exactly where they are online, getting them into my funnels becomes easy. Question #3: What is the
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First, you must ask yourself, Who is my dream customer? Then go find where your dream customers are congregating.
“If you don’t like your customers, that’s your fault, not theirs. You attract your customers based on the content and offers that you put into the marketplace.” And then he said the line that I’ll never forget, “If you change your bait, you’ll change your customer.”
Question #1: Who is your dream customer? The first question you have to ask yourself is, Who do I actually want to work with? Most of us start with a product idea, never thinking about who we want as clients or customers, yet these are the people you will be interacting with day in and day out. You’ll oftentimes spend more time with these people than your own friends and family. You choose your significant other carefully, so why wouldn’t you take the same time and care in deciding who your dream client or customer will be? If you’re just getting started, this may not seem important. But I
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I realized I had overlooked some pretty important questions such as: Who are my dream clients? What do they look like? What are they passionate about? What are their goals, dreams, and desires? What are the offers I could create that would attract them and repel everyone else?
After about a week of thinking about the who question, I sat down and created two customer avatars: one for the men I wanted to work with and one for the women I wanted to work with. For the women, I picked a name and wrote it down: Julie. Then I listed out the things I knew about the Julie that I wanted to serve. She is successful and driven; she has a message to share; she values her personal growth over money; and she’s already started a business and had some success, but wants to learn how to grow it. Next, I wrote down the name Mike. Next to Mike’s name, I wrote out the things I knew
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Really spend some time thinking about who you want to work with. Write out their characteristics and then go find an actual picture to represent them. It’s amazing how your perspective changes when you have a physical picture of your ideal customer—instead of a hazy, half-formed image in your head.
if you sit down and really say, “Hey, this really is the one perfect listener of my podcast,” then you’re going to know that person inside and out. You’re going to know where that person hangs out, what Facebook groups they’re in, what LinkedIn groups they’re in, how to advertise to them, and what lead or ad is going to be appealing to them on Facebook that’s going to get them to download it.
And again, this is your ideal, perfect client. You can probably picture right now this person, that whenever he sits down in front of you, you’re just like, “Dude, you’re like my favorite client.” And he’s like, “I know I’m your favorite client.” That’s the person that you want to be drawing in. So if you sit down and really just figure out who your perfect one ideal listener is, everything changes from that point forward and all the decisions you make are based off that. So every piece of content you make for your podcast is speaking to that avatar, that one person. Every call to action you
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The change didn’t come from changing their products; it came from changing who their dream customers were, and then speaking directly to and attracting them. That is the first question you need to ask inside of the secret formula: Who is your dream customer?
Question #2: Where are your dream customers congregating? The next question in the secret formula is where can you find your dream customer? Where are they already congregating online? The real power of the internet is the power of congregations. Groups of people gathering in little corners of the internet make it possible for people like you and me to get into business quickly and be successful without all the barriers and expensive hurdles of traditional media.
There are congregations online for everything you can dream up. What are the online congregations that you participate in? My guess is there are at least a dozen or more things that you’re interested in, and you have a special place on the internet to go be with your people and talk about what’s important to you.
Start asking yourself these questions: What are the top websites that my dream customers already go to? What forums or message boards do they participate in? What are the Facebook groups they participate in? Who are the influencers they follow on Facebook and Instagram? What podcasts do they listen to? What are the email newsletters they are subscribed to? What blogs do they read? What channels are they following on YouTube? What keywords are they searching for in Google to find information?
Question #3: What is the bait (hook, story, and offer) you’ll use to attract your dream customers? Once we know where the dream customers are, we have to create the right hook to grab their attention. The hooks are the ads that will grab the attention of your dream customers just long enough for you to tell them a story. The goal of the story is to build rapport with them as well as break the false beliefs they have that would keep them from taking you up on your offer. The offer is the thing you’ve created for your dream customer so you can give them the results they desire. If you do this
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Question #4: What is the unique result or value that you can create for your dream customers? Once you’ve hooked your dream customers with the perfect offer, the last question is what result or value do you want to give them? I’m not talking about what product or service you want to sell them. A business is not about products and services. A business is about what result you can get for your clients. Once you (and they) understand that concept, the price is no longer a barrier.
Imagine that your clients could pay you anything to get a desired result. What, then, would you do to help guarantee their success? Where would you lead them? What does that place look like? Keep that place in your mind; it’s the pinnacle of success for your clients. It’s where you want to take them.
The four questions to the secret formula, again, are as follows: Who is your dream customer? Where are they congregating? What is the bait that you can use to attract them to you? What is the unique result that you can create for them?
“You have to understand there are two ways to have the lowest price product in your market. The first is to decrease the price of what you sell (and cut out your margins and profit). The second is to increase the value so much that when you sell it for what it’s worth, it seems inexpensive.”
I quickly explained how I had used this Hook, Story, Offer framework on them. “I started with a hook to grab your attention: ‘In the next ten minutes, someone here will be willing to give me at least $100,000 for this phone.’ I then told stories about what was on my phone to increase the perceived value, and then I made an offer, and within minutes the value of this phone went from $600 to over $750,000.”
we can change the value of a product by changing it into an offer and dramatically increasing its value by using stories and a hook to grab attention,
Each piece of bait you put out (such as ads, emails, landing pages, upsells, webinars, and phone calls) should include a hook, a story, and an offer.
these are the three core categories that almost every business online falls into: You’re selling a physical product: This could be anything from supplements to flashlights to RVs or more. Any type of physical product that you would ship out to someone after they order. You’re selling an information product: These are my authors, speakers, coaches or consultants (or affiliates selling these products for others). These products often include digital courses, membership sites, live events and training. You’re selling a service: Many of my local brick-and-mortar companies like restaurants,
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Dan Kennedy once said, “There is no strategic advantage of being the second lowest price leader in town, but there is a huge strategic advantage of being the most expensive,”
If you fight on price, you lose your margins, you can’t pay for advertising, you can’t pay for and hire the best team, and you can’t provide the value your dream customers deserve. On the other hand, when you build an offer that is perceived as inexpensive to those customers because you’ve created so much value, then you are able to serve them at the highest level. This is a big mindset shift that most entrepreneurs need to make to really become successful.
The solution to selling a commodity is to restructure what you are selling and turn it into an offer. When you add more value than anyone else, you are no longer needing to compete on price. For my physical product owners, my information product owners, and my service-based entrepreneurs, the first s...
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The goal of an offer in its most simple form is to: Increase the perceived value of what is being sold. Make the thing being sold unique to you and ...
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When I created the iPhone offer for those at the Wake Up Warrior event, I increased the perceived value by showing everything that they got inside of the offer, and I made it unique because no other phone on earth had that information inside it.
To overcome price resistance, increase the value of your offer so it’s worth 10 times more than what you’re selling it for.
My goal for any offer is to make the total value of it 10 times as much as what I am actually charging. So if I’m selling something for $100, I want to add enough value that the entire offer is worth over $1,000, and then I can easily sell it for $100. If I want to sell something for $1,000, then I need to create enough value that it is actually worth $10,000, and then $1,000 will seem like a bargain.
