what is this book about and what it's not about?
This book is not about getting more traffic to your website, yet it will help you get more traffic.
It's not about increasing conversions. yet it will increase your conversions!
sounds controversial right?
This book will help you fix your sales funnel, and by fixing your sales funnel, your conversion rate will increase!
Once you fix it, you will be able to spend more to acquire new customers, because the more you make, the more you can spend!
As Dan Kennedy said "ultimately, the business that can spend the most to acquire a customer wins"
This book will show you how to communicate with your customers in a way that they buy more offers from you as you provide them more value.
Russell Brunson spent years analyzing how direct response marketing operated and transformed this process online.
The offline sales funnel was as follow, a company would place an ad asking people to contact them for a free report, once you contact them, they would send you a sales letter disguised as a free report, selling a low ticket product. Once you purchase this product they would send you their system along with another sales letter selling you a higher ticket product.
The online method is where you see an offer on social media, or read a blog where someone placed an ad, you click on it, and they get your information, after that you land on a page similar to that sales letter. once you buy, they start contacting you to sell you higher ticket products
The world didn't change, people used to use direct mail, now they use email, they used to network in events, now they go on Facebook, you used to listen to the radio, now you listen to podcasts, blogs are the modern newspaper.
The book has so much in-depth and how-to knowledge, I literally highlighted more than half of it, because there are also scripts for you to use.
I'm gonna share 6 big ideas from this book: the secret formula, the value ladder, the types of traffic, the invisible funnel webinar, the seven phases of a funnel, how to reverse engineer a successful funnel.
The secret formula:
The secret formula is made of 4 questions, these are fundamental questions to ask before starting to grow any company. the first question is, who is your dream client? This helps you identify the customers you want to work with. Write down how do they look like and what do they do and visualize them.
The second question is: where can you find them? This question I rarely see anyone asking, but it is the most important one! So ask yourself: where do they go online? is it Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter? what groups do they join online? what newsletters are they subscribed to? what blogs do they read?
Then the third question is: what bait will you use to attract them? since you know where they are now you should know how to attract them because personally, I don't like the word bait, you can attract them through an ebook or an audio recording.
The fourth question is: what results do you want to give them? here Russell Brunson explains that it's not about what product or service you sell them, because a business is about what results you can get for your clients, and once you and they understand this concept, then the price is no longer a barrier.
so this is the secret formula, I love it because it helped me identify where I can find my audience!
Now we start with the value ladder, everyone wants to sell their best stuff to their customers right? they want to serve them in the best way. But that product may be a million-dollar product like Russell Brunson's best. And you just can't go to a stranger and sell them that product, they would think you are crazy.
So that offer is where you want your customer to end up ideally, for that to happen, Your customers must go through your funnel and then ascend the value ladder, which starts with a free product, then maybe a free plus shipping, then a membership maybe, then your big offer, and this spreads on a certain timeline.
And always remember to have a continuity program, like a monthly membership, this is what brings you cashflow each month and sustains your business.
Types of traffic
you have 3 types of traffic, the traffic you own, the traffic you control, and the traffic you don't control.
the traffic you own is the most important type of traffic and the best. This is your email list, followers readers, customers. You own this traffic because you can send them a message and you will be able to generate traffic directly. you don't have to spend money to market to this list. that's why it's vital to make the other two types of traffic your own.
The traffic you can control is when you direct the traffic and you have control over it, like placing an ad on google, you control when you spend money on the ad, and where the traffic goes, all kinds of paid traffic is traffic you control.
You convert this type of traffic into one that you own, through a squeeze page where you offer something in exchange for the person's email.
The traffic you don't control: you can't control this traffic, it's like someone mentioning you in a conversation and someone searches you and finds your website. This traffic includes youtube, guest interviews, search traffic, or social media.
The invisible funnel webinar:
This funnel is in the middle of the value ladder. the concept was created by Daegan smith. it's a premium webinar where people pay after the webinar is over, only if they love what you taught them.
This is a really detailed funnel so I'm not going to share all the details, but the main idea is that people enter their credit card details before the webinar but they are not billed right then, they watch the webinar, which is usually 3 to 4 hours of really high-value content, then after finishing the webinar if they agree that it was worth it, they do nothing and they get charged the next day. but if they don't think the webinar was worth the price, they must send you an email before a certain deadline so that you won't charge their card.
The numbers for Russell Brunson were mind-blowing, 550 people signed up with their credit cards, 85 percent showed up in the webinar versus the usual 30 percent, he taught for 4 hours, and only 10 percent canceled the payment!
Reverse engineer a successful funnel:
This is a strategy that you can use to see the sales funnel of your competition. You will be able to know where their traffic comes from, and how you can transform their traffic into your traffic.
So to start, make a list of your direct and indirect competitors.
each time you want to reverse engineer a funnel you need to identify 5 five variables, or at least 3, if not it's better not to proceed, the variables are the demographics, the offer (this is when you might need to purchase their product to see their full-funnel, the landing page ( here is where you should exactly model a successful landing page, it's better not to try to reinvent the wheel, the traffic source, the ad copy (same goes here, find an ad that is working and model it)
The first step: you have to find out where are your competitors, make a list of them, these are companies that are selling something similar to you or an alternative.
The second step is to check what they are doing: the tool that Russel uses is called the similar web, it's one hell of a great tool, enter the URL of the website of your competition, now you can see al the traffic sources, you will see the organic search keywords they appear for and where they are placing ads if it was Facebook, you can go and search their name in Facebook ad library and see the ads they are using, you can see the full ad. then you can model it! you can see the website referring to them and the audience's interest!