There I was standing in a line of people, blood dripping down my arms, this is actually a true story though. I was going through basic and I remember we get to this medical part, this is for the army and we get to this medical part and they're like, "Sit down," they're yelling at us, making us feel like we're not large at all. They're like, "Sit down," and they're like squishing us chest to chest like crazy tight to each other. We had just come from a haircut and they're were like crazy rough. They through us in this chair and they would shave our heads but the guys that were shaving our heads were so rough with our heads that we were all bleeding from our scalps by the time we were done. I look at this now and I just laugh.

There's a point to the story, by the way but I just laugh. They're throwing us up against the wall afterwards, they've missed some spots so some of us still have patches of hair coming out the side. They don't care that you're not clean at all either. There's hair everywhere and you're shoved up against the wall. I remember this guy's little blood streak coming down by his neck and right after that they have us go get cleaned up because we go to the medical area. In the medical area they take us and they put us down on the ground roll our sleeves up. They're like, "Take this alcohol swab, wipe down your arms, clean your arms," and it was the craziest thing I've ever experienced, I guess, medical wise. Every time I think of it I always have to laugh. We rolled our sleeves up and we're standing, we call it nut to butt, toe to heel, basically really close to the other guy.

You're standing super close and you take one step forward and there's a doctor on each side of you and they have a shot in each hand. You take one step forward and they both go right in to your arm. I got four shots at one time. Boom. Took another step forward, another set of two doctors, each with two shots in each, a shot with each hand. Then I got two more shots on each side. Boom. Took a step forward, two more doctors, each with a shot and it's like factory style. I mean, you took one step forward, boom. One step forward, boom. One step forward, boom. They're not being soft or anything so there's like blood coming down your arms. I remember the last guy, he was giving us a Tetanus shot and this guy must have really, really been having a bad day or something like that because oh my gosh, he was taking it out on us. That dude was jamming that big fat Tetanus needle in our arm so hard, I'm pretty sure it was hitting all of our bones or something because there were these other girls were there that were screaming and stuff. The very last thing that just kind of took the whole cake, they made us take this live virus by mouth. It was this pill, right?

We took a step forward and you had to show them that you swallowed it. You put it in your mouth and took some water down and show them that you swallow it because they said it goes in and kills all this crazy crap in your body. They're like, "For the next two weeks that live virus will come out of your pores. Make sure you always wash your hands. Don't touch your eyes," that kind of stuff. They're like, "You're worthless pieces of crap." Of course, everybody gets sick. We were sick, basic training is like two and half months long, we were sick for probably two months of that. Coughing up green crap and you're not really sleeping. Sleep isn't actually that, too crazy, it's the no eating part. I lost fifteen pounds and I was not overweight.

We were all like crazy sick and I remember feeling at the end of it, it's funny going in actually because I was like, "They're not going to break me. They're not going to get me." I was a little bit older than everyone else there. I was doing it in the middle of college instead of right out of high school. I had a kid, I was married, you know what I mean? I was gone for like six months total and I remember going in thinking, "They're not going to break me, they're not going to get me, I'm Steve Larsen, they're not getting me." They totally did. They broke me down hard and they rebuild you. It's the organization older than the United States so they know what they're doing for sure. It was cool though because I remember at the end of it we had thrown grenades, shot machine guns, we had done all this stuff. Crawling in the mud, laying in thirty-three degree water that's barely about to freeze, do that for half a day and anyways, at the end of it, I just remember feeling like crap, I feel like a soldier. This is weird. I did not expect that.

Anyways, why am I telling you this story? That sounds awful doesn't it? I'll tell you it kind of was at some points. I actually loved basic though. It was fun just because of the challenge of it and going and being intense like that. Anyways, why am I telling you this story? Because that's not what they show you in the commercials on TV about military. They don't show you that you only sleep three hours a night when you're out in the field and it's at one and a half hour increments. You get up constantly through the evening. They don't show you that you're not eating hardly at all. They don't show you all that crazy stuff. You have an idea that it's going to happen. You're going to put camo on and you're going to go do tough stuff. It's cool and it's fun after the fact. In the middle of it sometimes it's kind of challenging but it's actually super fun though. Basic wasn't that intense physically, which I know it doesn't sound that way, it was just the mental games they play with you. Anyways, it was fun though. I'm really glad that I did that. That was a while ago now.

The reason I'm telling you that is, like I said, those aren't the things they show in the commercials. Those aren't the things that the recruiter tells you. Look, the whole thing, they show you pictures and images of you, of these guys wearing camo and holding a gun, sitting, watching, they're the ones that are the guardian of, you know what I mean? They show you the sexy side of it. We all love the sexy side of it. That happens like five percent of the time though. The other ninety-five percent of the time, you're doing the stuff that gets you to the sexy part of it. The reason I'm showing you this, yesterday I reviewed two more value ladders that people send to me. If you don't know what a value ladder is, it's just a way to model out your business so that you can serve more people and get more money from customers and spend less on ads and acquiring customers. It's pretty cool. Go Google, Russell Brunson talks about it a lot. There's, I think Jeff Walker talks about it. Anyways, value ladders, they're not like a new thing or whatever. They've been around a long time.

Anyways, this is the reason I'm doing this because after reviewing tons of these value ladders from people, especially over the last couple years, there's a common thread that I'm seeing and I'm realizing that I'm saying the exact same things to every person who sends me their value ladder. It is not about just giving a free eBook to get an opt in. It's not about, here's a free course or here's a free, whatever it is to get the opt in. That's not how it works. What you do is you think, what's my main goal? For me, I like to sell real estate sales funnels. Some for like ten grand a piece and people come to me and they pay for that and I give them a sweet, awesome real estate sales funnel that helps them sell another house or two every month. That's huge for their income. That's massive. What you do is you take the sexiest part of the goal and that's what you offer for free to people as the bait. It's just like when I was going, I realized this, it was actually last night as I was falling asleep and I was like, that's a great analogy because going through the military they don't show you all the crazy hard stuff.

I'm not saying that you got to have hard stuff in your value ladder. I'm just saying they take the sexiest part of their organization and that's what they give to you. You know that there's harder stuff in there and you know that there's going to be challenges and it's going to be interesting but the whole point is that, stop just thinking, oh I'll just give a free eBook. It's like, no, no, no. It's actually deeper than that. Whatever it is that your goal is, the big thing out there, whether you're, you could be selling candy. Give some candy away for free and a free plus shipping model. If you're selling insurance, I don't know how to make insurance sexy but you could find a way. You know the industry more than I do but that's the whole point though. Whatever the main goal is, wherever you're trying to lead them, that's where you take the sexiest thing from and stick it for free all the way at the bottom of it. Take a part of that that's very enticing and then you'll get away from all the crap that all these other people are doing.

If you're getting people inside of your value ladder by just offering discounts, like fifty percent off or here's a coupon code , then you don't understand value ladders and you're doing it wrong. I know it's bold and if you're crying, I'm sorry but not really. This is how it works though. If the coupon is literally the only thing that you're offering, that's not an offering. You need to actually put another offer together. It's a whole different offer. It's a different product that you're giving away for free but it's the sexiest part of your main goal. Does that make sense? I'm going [inaudible 00:10:03] like crazy. Ready, here it comes. Does that make sense? You guys getting that? Are you seeing how this could work for you? That's true though. Stop sending me value ladders where there's no tie between the bottom and the top. It's a ladder. It's part of the same ladder. The bottom rung and the top rung, they're not different ladders, it's the same logical flow.

For salesfunnelbroker.com, I took the sexiest thing I could, which is a free done for you sales funnel that I built. I spent two-hundred hours just on the site. Then I spent another, I don't even know, on some of them like eight months to put together those different sales funnels and I get opt ins like crazy because of that. I give away my website for free because it is very sexy for people. That thing gets downloaded like crazy and I have not been outbound marketing it. A lot. I have no idea where all of them are coming from and it's awesome. I just haven't gotten that far in it yet, I'll figure out that soon. The whole point of it though is that you have to understand that it's, remember that it's a different rung so it is a different product itself. You're not just giving away something free or a discount but it needs to logically tie from one piece to the next.

So for secretmlmhacks.com when I built that, first there's a quiz that says, hey, how many people do you have? How many people do you want? How many opportunities is this for you? It just kind of pokes their eyes. Oh wait, you're not successful yet in this, how many of these have you tried? You really think you're going to be successful this next round? I kind of poke them in the eyes so that the very next page they see is this thing that says, I'm going to send you out this CD that teaches you how to create a sales funnel in your mlm so that you can, you just follow along with me. A lot of it's screen recordings you can just follow along with me and build out a sales funnel and it scratches a huge itch for them. People buy that. The very next thing is a logical progression. You know what though, this is my one time offer, you know what though, if you don't want to spend all this money, I'm sorry, if you don't want to spend all this time just pay a little extra money and I'll give you this done for you sales funnel that works for mlm's.

Then the very next one is like, now that you have a sales funnel, logically a sales funnel without traffic is nothing. It's worthless so here's a course about traffic. It's this logical conversation that you have with people throughout the sales funnel. It's not different products. They are different products but it's not this whole different category, where you're like, now I'm going to offer them health pills. Sweet. Let's go to insurance. Cool. Now it's offering a gym membership. That doesn't make any sense. They have to have a logical progression the whole way, then take from the very top thing, the thing at the very top, your most high ticket item, the whole purpose for you being in business, take some aspect of that, make it free, put it at the very bottom and now you have a very sexy sales funnel. Get away from the whole discount thing.

That's what the military did though. When I was talking to recruiters, when I went and did all the, they took the sexiest part of it and they say cool, we're going to put you up in a hotel tonight for free and you're going to go do this and this and this and you'll get to go do, we'll shoot bullets around your head, which they did, real ones. Which is kind of cool to hear as they go by you. They're only a little bit above you. You'll get to throw grenades which is like the coolest you'll ever do in your life. Holy crap. I threw grenades and I felt like a beast. I wanted to go climb Everest, riding a rhinoceros bare back, holding a mythical trident. It was like, oh baby. Throwing grenades was nuts. Same with shooting the M240 Bravos. Huge machines guns. Those things were crazy. Oh my gosh. It was like eight hundred grounds a minute out of that thing. I digress because I could, slightly salivating. That's the fun part of it. That's the sexy part that they sold.

Go find out the sexy part is of your business and make that the free thing. For example, there's a chiropractor who, chiropracticing and adjusting, that's not sexy. He went and he found a whole bunch of masseuses who, while they were doing massages, if they found anything that might be wrong with the persons spine, said hey, I know a great chiropractor if you want to go talk to him. Just this referral system, that's it but because of that, massages are much more sexy than a chiropractor that can do adjustment. Do you know what I mean? Whose up-sell was a huge health package for five grand and he gets one or two of those a month that purchase it. You guys get the idea. Find out whatever's sexy and sell it. Unless it's actual grenades or something. Give it for free. Don't do that either. Bye guys.

Hey you guys. I am actually excited to share this story with you guys. This is a personal story. This is something that happened to me and I'm laughing because I'm looking back at it, thinking how crazy it was. I grew up in Littleton, Colorado and I loved it. I had a fantastic childhood. I look back at all the crap that I did growing up and it's just fun. I had a really awesome child. I had awesome friends and grew up in a cool neighborhood with tons of other kids on the street. You know there was like two kids in every house on our street for the longest time. It was kinda fun because at night, I feel like everybody came out and the street became alive which is good and bad for various reasons.

Growing up, I went to this high school called Chatfield High School. I go and my brother and I were always trying to find stuff to sell to other people. I think it started because we grew up on the back nine of a public golf course. It wasn't like crazy nice or anything, but it was kinda cool because we'd go sneak on there, run from the golf rangers. We'd have our backpacks on, but the top open, and we'd have our swimsuits on, and we'd go jump in this pond. There's tons of them, it's a golf course. We'd go riding our bikes through this golf course on the paths and everything or just straight down the fairway just collecting golf balls. Then, we'd clean them up and we'd go sell them back to the golfers. I think that started us on this, I don't know, downward spiral.

One day, we got out of high school, and my brother and I we're pretty close in age so we were usually in the same school buildings. We get out and we're like "Hey, let's go over to- there's a Walgreens nearby." There's a Walgreens over there and its not far away. It was not uncommon for us to take like huge detours before we'd go home just for fun, just doing whatever. I don't know at that time that I'd necessarily call myself book smart, at all. I think I barely graduated high school like literally. I know some people say that figuratively, but I think I actually literally barely graduated. I had straight D's for a very long time in all the major course subjects. I guess you could say I was "street-smart" or whatever that is.

We go over to this Walgreens and we're looking at this toy aisle, which is the coolest aisle. You always go to the toy aisle when you're a kid, you know, even when you're an adult. I go over to the toy aisle and we're looking in there and we're like "What can we get?" We only had a couple bucks on us. We started looking around. We didn't even know what we were looking for. All the sudden, something catches our eye, and it's this little tiny ... It was kind of shiny, actually, but it's these pens, like writing pens.

They're in these awesome cases, like plastic cases to make them look really nice. Some of you will probably know what I'm talking about. There's two buttons on the side. It was a nice chrome pen and it's like one of those twist pens and on the side, there's two buttons. The top button makes this blue light come out the top. It was really cool. The bottom button shined a laser pointer out of the top of this pen and we're like "Holy crap, that's so cool!" We love that stuff. So we're like "This is awesome." We look at the price and you could get two of them for five dollars. We're like "What, this is ridiculous!" We each had like 20 bucks on us. We bought all the pens that I think that they had. We're like "I think we can go sell these," so we grabbed our pens, there was dollars in our eyes, we were thinking all about it.

We get back and my mom had this labeler and so we went and we were making these labels that are like "eight dollars", "twelve bucks," I mean like huge mark-ups from what they currently were. We marked all these things up and as a big fan of cargo shorts back then for their "utility and comfort," we loaded up our cargo shorts full of these pens in these nice looking cases. We'd taken off the original price tags for 2.50 and put on like 12 bucks. We go to school the next day and those were always the days I was excited to go to school.

I didn't necessarily love school. I liked it for all the extracurricular stuff that was going on there. I was a bit of a geek for sure. I was one of the head editors for yearbook and for computer stuff, go figure, not writing or taking pictures and stuff like that, but for layout and stuff like that. I was in choir and theater and stuff like that, but I did awful in all the other subjects. The days where we were trying to take over the world and sell stuff to people, those were fun days.

We go to school and we start showing these pens in our classes. We're like "Hey, check it out," almost like we're doing a drug deal. It's funny to talk about it now. I never really thought about that, but it must've looked bad. I was like "Dude I got this sweet pen, do you want it man?" It was totally the drug dealer clothes. We'd play with them for a second and someone would be like "Oh, that's totally legit man! Can I have that pen?!" We're like "It'll cost you 12 bucks, I don't want to lose money on it." It showed 12 dollars on the price tag and they're like "Dude, I'll totally buy that from you!" We're like "Okay," you know? What's crazy is at the end of that day, we had sold all of the pens in a matter of like 20 minutes individually in our classes in one class period. We were like "Oh my gosh, we're going to be rich!"

We went straight back to that Walgreens, used all the money we got, bought more pens, which I'm glad they restocked and such, and went back, used the labeler, and the next day, we were loaded up with more pens. We sold all those pens in like a matter of hours, not even another class period. We go back and forth and we're doing this several times and we're making crazy margins on this thing. We're like "These pens are so under-priced, this is ridiculous!" We're selling these things to people for even like 15 dollars, 20 dollars, and they're two and a half bucks! We were making a killing on these things. We just kept going back, taking all the money we were making and dumping it straight back into our product.

It's funny because looking back on it, people were buying from us, turning around and selling again. We had our own freaking distribution channel starting! It was nuts. It kind of got out of control. It got to the point where people, I don't know how they heard about what ... I guess it was pretty easy to see and hear about us. You'd walk into the commons and there was all these red dots all over the walls, like I didn't grow up in a small high school. There was like 3,000- no, what was it? It was about 2,300 people in our school. It wasn't small. We had been pumping in tons and tons of these pens in there. Like I said, it got to this point where people were like interrupting us in the middle of a class. They seriously would open up the door in the middle of my english class and they'd go "Uhh ..."- like the class would be going on. They'd be like "Uhh, are you the kid with all the pens," and I'd be like "Dude, come on! You're stupid, man. Get out of here," and then I'd be like "Uhh, yeah," he's like "Do you have any more of them?" I'm like "Yeah," like "I'll meet you- here, I'll just wait right outside when your class is over and I'll get them right there."

We had caused so much freaking desire for these pens. It was starting to get us in trouble. What is funny because one day, like I said, you can start to see all these red dots all over the place. One day, I was sitting in algebra class which I think I failed, well no, I got like a 60.1% in that class. That's what I got in most my classes. Math for sure, English for sure, because you had to read a whole lot, definitely got straight D's every single semester in Spanish, like mercy kills- 60.1%, barely passing these so I could move forward. I think they knew that I just wasn't a kid that was into drugs and had good intentions so they just kind of grace killed me and moved me forward.

I was sitting in Algebra and all of the sudden someone comes in and they're like "Hey Steve Larson," they're like "Here you go," and they handed me this red card. If you get the red card, you've been red-carded, kind of like soccer. If you have been red-carded, you were busted, because it meant that the principal wanted to see you. I was like "Crap," so I get up and everyone's like "Ohhh!" I was like "Don't worry, I'll go sell him a pen too ha ha ha," trying to act all tough about it, like totally crapping my pants though at the same time. They had no idea.

I was walking down this abnormally long hallway that day. It seemed so much longer. It was a big high school. I walked down and I go inside the principal's office and I sit down and my brother turns out had been in there for like two hours already and they had been grilling the crap out of him. They had just been smoking his butt. I get in there and they're like "Do you have one of these pens on you?" I was like "Yeah," and they were all like pre-sales for like 6th period. We we're going to cash in like 2 or 3 hundred dollars that period. Everyone wanted them.

I was like "Yes," so I took the pens out and I one by one was like stacking them on his desk. I still remember the grains of wood in his desk like to this day. I'm closing my eyes and remembering how dim the room was abnormally. So funny! I ended up stacking, just like chk chk chk chk, this huge pyramid of pens, and the look of surprise on his face was just priceless. He was like "How much are you selling these things for?" I was like "Anywhere from 8 bucks to 12 bucks," and I started like nervous laughing. He was really interested. I thought he was. He wasn't, of course.

I was like "We're selling them for like 15 bucks," he was like "How much are you getting them for," I was like "2 and a half dollars." He was like "What??" My brother's pyramid of pens was already ... Our cargo shorts were bulging to the point where our shorts were like swaying when we walked. We were selling so many of these things every single day. He just sat back and he's like "You know the principal wants to expel you," and I was like "Oh really?" Thinking about it now, I was like "What the freak, are you kidding me? For selling ... Kids can openly sell pot in the hallways, but I can't sell laser pointing pens?"

Eddie's like "Yeah, the principal wants to expel you," and he's like "You're directly violating our code of conduct," and I was like "What?" He pulls out, and I know now ... I still remember now the bottom of page 6 in the code of conduct book and we all signed that stupid piece of paper saying we read it and no one reads it. There was one sentence down there at the bottom that says "You cannot posses laser pointers and shine them, bring them in, do anything like that." I guess what had happened is people were selling after we were selling. We had all these people who were selling.

There was a mentally handicapped kid that ended up getting a hold of one of these laser pointers and was like shining it in everyone's eyes in the commons, things like that. They said "Hey where'd you get that?" Then they asked the next kid "Hey where'd you get that," "Where'd you get that?" They just followed the bread crumb trail straight to my brother and I. It totally makes sense why you cannot have laser pointers. We just had no idea. We didn't think it would- there'd be no harm or foul in it. What ended up happening is they were like "Yeah, we want to expel you." We're like "Holy crap, oh my gosh!" He goes "I don't think we're going to do that,"- this is the vice principal- "I don't thin we're going to do that, I think that you will have a few days of suspension though." We're like "Oh, okay, what?!" He's like "Okay, go on back to your classes," and we're like "Oh my gosh," and so we walked back.

My brother and I were just shocked. We're generally good kids like we weren't into drugs, we weren't doing any kind of crazy crap. We were generally good kids, we were just trying to make money. We walked back to our classes and everyone in the class was like "Dude, what happened? Like oh my gosh!" We were telling it and our teachers were listening and they're like "Are you kidding me? They're going to suspend you for that crap?" We ended up creating like a teacher army. All these teachers started going down and fighting on our behalf. They were like "You can't expel these kids for doing what we're freaking teaching them. They're doing what we're teaching. They're going out, they're trying to make money, they're hustling, they're actually selling stuff." I think it was because of those teachers that we didn't get even suspended.

They brought us back in and we sat down and they're like "Hey, you can't do this," and they called our parents, you know, things like that. We ended up getting off with like a couple hours of community service. We were punished for being entrepreneurial. That's one of the purposes of me telling you this story is that society doesn't exactly like entrepreneurs. They know that we're necessary, but the breed of myself, because I would consider myself an entrepreneur, I make money online by myself and a good amount of it. People don't really know where we fit inside of society. If you listen to Alex, I think it's Shafron, I think that's how you say his last name, Shafforn or Sharfon, Alex Sharfon, he talks about what's called the entrepreneurial personality type. I think I was an EPT or whatever, but 100% I am that personality type. If you've never heard of him, go look him up, look at his stuff.

He talks about in there how we're not really a breed or a class of person, a way of thinking of person that is very much accepted. If you are entrepreneurial at all, I want you to know that that's okay, just expect that people are not going to like what you're doing. They're not going to know where you fit. They're not going to know how to react to you. "Oh, oh, wait a second? You're not willing to follow all the rules? Oh, that's too bad!" I'm like "No, I'm not, I don't care. There's no such thing as rules, there's only models." I've said that before, but I really believe that. What's the model for staying out of jail? Well here's a list of things that you shouldn't do. What's the model for being successful? Well here's the things that you should go do. Here's the model for being a professional baseball player or basketball player. We all know the model it takes to get to where those people are. Most of us don't have the discipline to follow through with that model.

It's the same thing with being an entrepreneur or anything else. We got punished for that crap. That's stupid. What was funny is that we ended up taking the remainder of those pens, luckily they gave them back to us, we took them home. I think they could see that they scared us to death and we weren't going to do anything else. We took the pens home and we ended up selling them to all the neighborhood kids anyways. We kept selling stuff. For whatever reason, that experience really opened up my eyes. I was like "Oh man, I can get something cheaper and sell it for more." That's the base of business.

Later on in college and I failed out my first semester in college, too. It's funny because when you start doing this stuff, people look at you like you're a genius. Guys, I'm not a genius. I just work my butt off and there's a model that I'm following. Just like Tony Robin said "All you have to do to be successful, model those who are already successful." That's all I'm doing and I'm loving it. It's been so fun and I've been doing it for the last five years and man, it works! It's good stuff. Model what I'm doing, listen carefully to what I'm doing. Anyways, that's the story I wanted to tell you guys is that if you're finding that people aren't accepting what you're doing, get over it, they're not going to. It's not like Steve Jobs was an agreeable person. Socially, that dude was a bit of a jerk. It's not like Bill Gates was a bit of an agreeable person. To the rest of the world, the people who just want a 9-5 job and they're fine staying in what Robert calls "the rate race," that's not an acceptable way of life for a lot of people. If you're in that and you're feeling that, that's 100% okay.

In college ... I don't know if I have actual ADD, I don't think I do, but my brain gets sidetracked, for sure. In college, I remember we built this student run business from the ground up. We were making 2 or 3 grand a week in this company. They voted me as the CEO of it so I was like "All right cool," so I was the CEO of it. Man, I ran that thing hard. It was good. We made a lot of money for, you know, students. It was all on campus. We were pulling 2 or 3 grand a week from students and just in the middle of campus. It was nuts, it was crazy. I'll have to tell you guys that story later. I remember there was this girl who was just businessly naïve. She was like "Wait a second, we're going to buy something and sell it for more? Isn't that like totally unethical?" I was like "Who are you? Are you kidding? You have no idea how it really works out there. It's not like business owners are making 3 cents every time they sell you something. No, they're trying to make as much money off you as possible. Like stop being naïve."

Anyways, if you find yourself getting punished because society is not accepting what it is that you want to do, don't worry about it. Just get out there and keep going. Take the "punishment" and it will make great stories later on when you're telling podcasts early in the morning. All right guys, I'll talk to you later, bye.

Thanks for listening to Sales Funnel Radio. Please remember to subscribe and leave feedback. Want to get on one of today's best internet sales funnel for free? Go to salesfunnelbroker.com/freefunnels to download your pre-built sales funnel today.

steve larsen:
All right everybody, hey. I'm super excited for today. This is the first interview that I've actually done on, Sales Funnel Radio. It's actually one of the main reasons that I started this podcast. There's so many cool, silent, unspoken entrepreneurial heroes out there. I really, I just wanted to go expose a lot of those stories and share with you guys how possible it is to make a profitable sales funnel. Today, I have, actually one of my good friends, Ben Wilson, on the phone here recording. Ben and I actually have quite a history together. I'd say that I first got into sales funnels online with him, doing products with him. Anyway, I'm excited. We want to go through our story a little bit and share with you guys things you guys can do in your own business. Ben, how's it going?

ben wilson:
Absolutely good, man. Great to be here.

steve larsen:
Awesome, awesome. I was thinking back to the time when you and I first met. That was ... We were in college, that was back, what class was that?

ben wilson:
I think we were probably, Marketing 101, something wasting our time.

steve larsen:
Yeah.

ben wilson:
I remember leaning over and you were looking at Stripe, and I was like, "Most kids aren't looking at Stripe in class. Why is this kid looking at Stripe?" Then I leaned over and I was like, "Hey man, we should totally set up an API for you. We could get that going." You're like, "What do you know about Stripe?" I was like, "Yeah, man, I've set up Stripe." That was the start.

steve larsen:
That was the start right there. I remember I was making an e-book.

ben wilson:
Yeah.

steve larsen:
Yeah. That was my first attempt ever at making a landing page on WordPress, and I had spent two days trying to get this stupid theme to do what I wanted it to do. Yeah. That was funny. That project, I think I've sold two copies of that thing. It's on Amazon.

ben wilson:
That was a good book though.

steve larsen:
How did we get together after that though? What did we do? I actually can't remember. I just remember...

ben wilson:
I think we started bouncing ideas off as to what had done in the past. You started sharing to me about, I don't think you called it funnels at the time, you really started looking at affiliate marketing, and how to push products online without necessarily being attached. I think, I don't know if it was a clash, or some type of beautiful art piece. I always got attached, like, "Well, we have to brand it. We have to be attached to some level at what we're doing." You're like, "It doesn't matter what it is. Let's do it and we're moving forward." Just like a rubber band. Sometimes we'd have the snap, but the snap wasn't a bad thing. The snap was like, okay, I'll give up that I don't have to be that attached. You're like, "Okay, we can kind of brand it," and something would actually happen. Then we convinced our teachers.

steve larsen:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

ben wilson:
I was describing this to someone yesterday. We convinced our teachers that what we were doing was a lot more beneficial.

steve larsen:
Than in class.

ben wilson:
Yes!

steve larsen:
I remember that. That was our internet marketing class itself, man.

ben wilson:
We missed ... I mean, we convinced several teachers...

steve larsen:
To not go to class anymore.

ben wilson:
To [call up the class 00:03:52] the class, and they're ... Oh man. I can't believe we actually pulled that off.

steve larsen:
Me neither. I was thinking about it. We drew up that plan. We got in our internet marketing and they were doing that stupid, SEO old school stuff. We both wanted to shoot ourselves. I noticed you were the other kid in the class that was just pounding their head on the wall. Like, "Oh this crap is so old. It doesn't work."

ben wilson:
Yes. I remember they were trying to teach WordPress, and they were like, "How do you do such and such?" I was like, every answer, both of us just raising our hands.

steve larsen:
Yeah.

ben wilson:
I was like, "Do we really have to sit here the entire time and build you a website? Can't we go build ourselves a website?"

steve larsen:
Yeah. That's funny. Then we wrote up that plan. It was basically a flow chart for pages.

ben wilson:
Yes!

steve larsen:
He said, "Yeah, go for it. Just bring a deliverable." Then we started meeting every morning for two or three hours. Way more than the other kids in class were doing it. I remember we made that first affiliate product. I think it was, Click Bank. Right?

ben wilson:
[inaudible 00:05:00] was it? Was our first one the weight loss supplements?

steve larsen:
It was something like ... No, no, it was the social media producer thing. We put a landing page together using some guys weird generator and put 50 bucks on it and woke up the next morning, saw that 50 bucks had come back, and I was like, "Holy crap! We didn't lose money!" We got 17 people to opt in, and we sold it.

ben wilson:
I was so stoked the moment we didn't lose money. That was the first accomplishments of, like, no way!

steve larsen:
How did we get with Paul Mitchell after that though?

ben wilson:
I think he was assigned to our class, and I had to go over ...

steve larsen:
That's right, you closed him.

ben wilson:
He was trying to do something with Facebook, and I noticed he had a lot more other issues than trying to do Facebook advertising through our class. Then we had an assignment that was to get 10 people to fill out the survey. You and I looked at each other like, "We could get a lot more than 10 people, but I'm not calling anyone." Right? Let's think hard of a way to get a lot more people. I think there ended up being, was there 1100 people we got to take the survey?

steve larsen:
Yeah. Everyone else got 100 or something.

ben wilson:
Yeah. I think they called their 10 people.

steve larsen:
Yep.

ben wilson:
Yeah.

steve larsen:
That was hilarious. Then we started driving traffic for them. Which, I can't believe we did that. Oh, and then the [Arhenis 00:06:32] Project.

ben wilson:
Arhenis. You and I were out for what, 72 hours straight building a website, and then come to find out, the guy didn't even mention his website that we had built for him after being asked by him to build this website.

steve larsen:
Gosh, that whole thing was so weird.

ben wilson:
We were like, "There's a million people watching right now, and the only way you're going to further your career is by sending people to this website, and you got 2 hours to do it." We sat, I sat, we sat there and even Paul Mitchell watching. They're like, "Okay, any time now, any time now."

steve larsen:
Mention, just say the URL, just say, and he never did.

ben wilson:
We're like, "We do not have to run any type of funnels. If you just by chance mention this email address that you paid $1800 for, if you could just mention it once."

steve larsen:
It would be great. Those of you who are listening, Paul Mitchell asked us to come build out ... They basically said, "Hey, we're getting on tv in 2 days, we need a website people can go to, and we need a lead capture system and all this stuff." This was ... Just mapping the same time, this was when ClickFunnels was still in beta. It was a while ago. It was way longer than that ago. Man, how long ago was that? That was 2 or 3 years ago now wasn't it?

ben wilson:
We're coming up on ... I mean, it's been 18 months since I graduated, and that was before my last semester. Yeah, at least 2 years.

steve larsen:
Yeah, yeah. Paul Mitchell, they hired us ... I think we're okay. I'm going to say names. This is a while ago now. They wouldn't pay us, and this is what I love about Ben. Ben looked over at me, and I can't remember the exact phrase. You know, I won't say the phrase he said, but you had this crazy look in your eye. You're like, "Dude, I'm going to go put one period in their code." I was like, "What?" I remember just watching you, and we were in the library on campus. You opened up the back end code, and you put one period in their PHP, in their code, and it white screened the entire website. I was like, "This kids a cowboy. This is awesome!"

ben wilson:
Like, that's it. Your website's done. You're not paying us, you don't get our benefit. Then, we set out to make Beauty School Index.

steve larsen:
Yeah.

ben wilson:
Do you remember that?

steve larsen:
Yeah.

ben wilson:
We were like, "We're just going to just give out free leads to every other beauty school for free, and not Paul Mitchell."

steve larsen:
We scraped 100, what was it like, 1,000 email addresses for them?

ben wilson:
A thousand email addresses. We ran a campaign to get beauty schools on board with us of how we were going to give them free leads. Our open rate was through the roof.

steve larsen:
We did a 77% open rate.

ben wilson:
Yeah, and we had a really big return. We asked people to fill out questions. I don't even remember the questions. I remember you coming back and being like, "We got to get them involved and we need their feedback. That way they're contributing and they're loyal to whatever we're going to do for them. That way they value the leads that we give them." I think one of them was, How is it, or what are you struggling with and how can we help you?

steve larsen:
Yeah.

ben wilson:
That's everything we have been doing, and everything I do now always stem from that question that you ask them. We've got to provide a value, so if we listen to them, they're a lot more loyal. We're like, if that's what you want, let's give it to you.

steve larsen:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

ben wilson:
It started from there, and then I moved to Colorado, and it seemed out of sight and out of mind. That's where my life got dark Steven. No longer with you.

steve larsen:
I got obsessed with sales funnels at that time, and I started dueling for different companies in the area. That was good times man. Talk about a walk down memory lane there. That's awesome. Now you, I mean, it's funny. I can't remember, you sent a message over to [inaudible 00:11:04], would you look at this site. I was wondering if you could just tell everyone who's listening right now a little bit about your website, and what is it you do, and how you came about with that. It's pretty genius. At first, it was like, I had never heard of it, and then you were like, "Oh I have 2,000 subscribers a week later." Oh, now we've made a butt load of money already and not spend a dollar on ads. It's like, what the heck. I thought it would be kind of cool if you want, this is totally your brag moment. Just tell what happened.

ben wilson:
No, you're good. It's similar, I guess backtrack a bit. Steven and I also once ... Remember when we launcHed [SWOG 00:11:38]? Some of it stemmed from that. There's this new concept of Trilify stemmed from what we were doing at SWOG when you and I came up with a business, entered into a business competition, and we've really been doing it for a week and half. A lot of it was just driving traffic and getting, running people through a certain type of funnel which is so funny because it wasn't ... Neither of us knew what ClickFunnels, at least I didn't and I didn't never think of it necessarily like ClickFunnels, but everything at the time was exactly what is going on at ClickFunnels. We were running people through a certain cycle getting a certain amount of information each time. That way there was creating this loyalty. Similar process as to what you and I were doing with SWOG, is running through certain sales cycles.

The concept is only running through affiliates. Affiliates, typically there is the affiliate program that you send out, and anyone can join and sign up.

steve larsen:
Mm-hmm (affirmative)-

ben wilson:
Where as, what we're doing is approaching...

steve larsen:
Like, specific ones?

ben wilson:
Very specific people who have followers already. Right? When they send out a tweet, they've already gained a genuine sincere following. We don't have to worry about traffic when they send out tweets, or a Facebook post, or making a YouTube video, or anything of that nature because they already have the followers. There's a certain amount of followers that we're trying to gather as well as a certain age group of people who haven't done affiliate marketing, they're not seeking to only do affiliate marketing. We're looking at it at a more of a, how do we provide value to them? They don't recognize how much value they can provide.

Millennials are a perfect target because a lot of them are seeking more fame and if they can get fame and money without having to go through the typical college and Corporate America, and they can continue doing and being famous, even it's to several thousand people, they still consider themselves like a taste-maker. We look at those people, try to run some ways of how can we provide value. A lot of it is creating a brand for them or running through certain memorabilia designs that they don't have to worry about their backend. It's like an agency coming to a talent and saying, you keep doing you, and send people to your new "Websites." This is what's going to drive a lot of traffic.

We just launched on June 9th.

steve larsen:
Just a month ago?

ben wilson:
Just a month ago. Came up with a concept and 3 weeks later we just threw together a Shopify because we didn't have to deal with PCI compliance.

steve larsen:
Sure, sure.

ben wilson:
Or any of the other reasons of our design. Easily threw it together, found a bunch of products that we could have drop shipped that looked pretty cool that we didn't have to necessarily have any products on hand. We weren't going to lose out on any up-front costs. It was simply, "Hey, it's brand new. It's going to take 3 weeks to get to you, and we're sending it to you from our Chinese suppliers."

steve larsen:
Right.

ben wilson:
Which was the beauty behind it. Suddenly everyone didn't have to care about Trilify, they cared about the person, and the person who had a brand within Trilify.

steve larsen:
You effectively have gone, and you created an e-commerce store, based around clothing that is totally outsourced to China?

ben wilson:
Completely.

steve larsen:
That's amazing, dude.

ben wilson:
Completely. We've got no products on hand, and we don't have any storage cost. We're not shipping anything, we're not wasting our time.

steve larsen:
So it's a huge drop ship operation basically?

ben wilson:
Completely. Now, we could definitely make a lot more money per product if we were to buy upfront. However, we also had, we wanted to come out with a hundred products and then start narrowing down, and then selecting which products are being purchased and obviously moving forward looking at finding a new fulfillment service that we could buy in bulk and then have someone else fulfill it. We're run ... We'll scale it as it needs to be but, we had a hypothesis of how much traffic would come, and our traffic was a lot more than we thought we had. We ended up doing 50,000 by the end of the month.

steve larsen:
50,000 people?

ben wilson:
50,000 people off of 1 tweet and 1 Instagram post. That was simply it.

steve larsen:
Wow.

ben wilson:
From there, all we were doing was, we needed ways to capture peoples information, filled up a MailChimp account within a week. That was when I called you. I didn't actually ever run into that issue before of not necessarily ... We had a lot of names before, we had a lot of information. We just had it on hand and we had scraped it and stuff.

steve larsen:
Right.

ben wilson:
More so of, I've got to now start dumping names out of this because I'm not, I don't want to start paying for MailChimp quite yet.

steve larsen:
Right.

ben wilson:
I was just exporting names so that I could continuing running a map free account. We're up to 10,000 names at the moment of emails, of people who've opted in.

steve larsen:
10,000? Dude, a few weeks ago, you were like, "Dude, we're already at 2,000 subscribers." You've grabbed 8 more thousand subscribers in the past 2 weeks, or whatever?

ben wilson:
Correct, yeah.

steve larsen:
Oh my gosh. Man, that's amazing. Okay, so you're "attracting," people through authority figures. Pulling them in and then ... What's causing someone to subscribe?

ben wilson:
We want all of our, I'm going to call them a brand ambassador, that's probably the best way to say it. We want all of our brand ambassadors to take ownership of what they're doing. That way it's not a 26 year old guy behind the computer who's actually running. I got 2 other guys that are running this with me, and one's in production, and the other is an actual talent agent so it's a lot easier to contact a lot of these people because he's got the experience.

steve larsen:
Right.

ben wilson:
He knows what to say. We run through and have all of them take full ownership. This is something that they created, therefore, when they send people over to the sites, and there's this taste of that person. Right? This goes back to that branding. It's got to be branded.

steve larsen:
Right.

ben wilson:
Everything comes back to how this person is perceived by their audience and not how they think they are perceived.

steve larsen:
Interesting.

ben wilson:
It might be a little confusing so we look at, what is this person actually wearing in their posts? What is that they are into? Then, find similar pictures that we can gather to create the same aura, so it's another, on the social media means to finding more information about this person, or how this person that they already admire, that they can further their knowledge of someone that they look up to. That's kind of the approach behind it.

steve larsen:
You go and you ... What are you asking for, I guess what are you giving for someone to subscribe. You know what I mean? What's causing them to subscribe. From the 50,000 that have hit so far, I'm sure it's way more than that now and 10,000 subscribe, what's causing them to do that?

Just to follow you?

ben wilson:
Literally, yeah. 10% off, and it says something quirky that probably a millennial would be really attracted to. Right? They're looking at this thinking, "This person I admire who's 18 years old, what's their lingo?" The lingo that pops up right away is, we've got an A/B split test. One of them is, "Let's be BFF's. Sign up here and we'll shoot you a 10% off discount on your purchase." The other one, a little more risque, but I like it. Which is working is, it pops up and says, "Let's be friends with benefits." It also has a 10% off discount. That one is killing it.

steve larsen:
These people are signing up for a 10% discount. That's not only saying, A: Follow us and we'll give you cool stuff. A 10% discount is implying that they're going to make a purchase in the future obviously, very near future. You're really knocking out more than one bird with the same stone. That's amazing.

ben wilson:
Yeah. They've all got on a drip campaign. We've got a ... Shopify is really nice, and I know ClickFunnels does a lot of similar things where you can do other affiliates, or similar products, or similar brands, and you can keep sending people to where they want to go. Right? Listen to where people want, follow their clicks, understand your analytics. We set up cross sales and up-sales where people are purchasing certain products with, and they're looking at other products.

steve larsen:
Right.

ben wilson:
Everything is an up-sale and that's really where we're making a lot of headway is it's all in the up-seller, it's moving people through a funnel.

steve larsen:
Yep.

ben wilson:
If they have a ... In a cart, we send out an abandoned cart. If they didn't do it from there, I would figure out what products that they had. All of this, there's a lot of programs out there that can help you understand what your customers want, and you just have to listen and find out ways to remind them as to what they came for initially.

steve larsen:
Absolutely. There's a, I can't remember if it's called the secret formula or what Russell Brunson calls it, but he said, "Basically all you need to do is find a raving niche who is willing and able to make purchases and then just give them that thing." It's as simple as that. It's not that hard, especially online. You create these virtual pieces of real estate and they just work for you. That's amazing. Do you mind, if I ask sales? Things like that, like numbers?

ben wilson:
Yeah, go for it.

steve larsen:
Of the people that are coming in, what percent are opting in right now?

ben wilson:
Percentage wise, it's low.

steve larsen:
Okay.

ben wilson:
Which is the humble pie I'm eating at the moment. I know it should be a lot better. We've had ... Dealing with Chinese manufacturers is a lot more time consuming than I initially thought. That's where I've got a lot of time. In this regard, out of ... Boy, percentage is dramatically low. If we've had 10,000 people who have opted in, we've had 50,000 to the site.

steve larsen:
So, 20%?

ben wilson:
20% which...

steve larsen:
That's awesome.

ben wilson:
That should be better, Steven.

steve larsen:
I mean, it should be, but when you think about other industries and ... People get stoked. Most people have a 5% off on their rate, 20% is crushing it dude. I mean that really is awesome.

ben wilson:
I appreciate the lift up, I need that. Definitely, I know ... You know when you are doing something, and you're like, man, there's so much more I could be doing?

steve larsen:
Yes.

ben wilson:
That's I guess where the justification comes from. Definitely, 20%'s a good number in looking at what the [inaudible 00:24:13] rate is, but it's always that inner feeling. You've definitely got to trust that movement of flight. I could be doing more to convert.

steve larsen:
How many customers, purchasing customers have you had?

ben wilson:
We've had 175 as of yesterday.

steve larsen:
175 customers purchased ... I'm pulling out my calculator on the phone because my brain doesn't do all those numbers.

ben wilson:
That's okay.

steve larsen:
Here we go. That's awesome. From all the subscribers, the people that actually do subscribe, you have about a 2% conversion rate. That's good.

ben wilson:
Yeah.

steve larsen:
I know you look at it and say, we need to do better, but you're not even paying for traffic, man. That's amazing. That's what blows my mind about this. You have a 10,000 person list. I mean, you go drop an email to those people, 2% go and purchase, and you make all this money on the backend also after you acquire the customer. That's amazing.

ben wilson:
I appreciate it. Yeah. We're starting to run some more campaigns on testing single products as oppose to just sending people to the whole store itself.

steve larsen:
Yeah.

ben wilson:
Which we're really excited about launching. We've got something coming out this Thursday, which is more of this memorabilia take on the individual, like you would going to a concert. Right?

steve larsen:
Right.

ben wilson:
We're testing out the single product that's more branded and specifically to the person with their name on it. We're excited to see if that changes anything. If the name now suddenly on the clothing as oppose to just similar items of clothing that the person wears.

steve larsen:
Yeah.

ben wilson:
We may have to do a round 2, Steven.

steve larsen:
Yeah.

ben wilson:
Thursday.

steve larsen:
That would be awesome. That would be awesome. It's trilify.com, right?

ben wilson:
Trilify with one L. T-R-I-L-I-F-Y.

steve larsen:
Okay.

ben wilson:
.com.

steve larsen:
Trilify.com.

ben wilson:
At the moment it's just at an MVP. It's just testing out for our, I guess our test run of an individual person, and then we've got a lot more affiliates in the pipeline who are watching what we're doing. We're keeping them up-to-date as to how we're doing it, and that gets them excited. They can see that we, that their influence is going to provide them with a lot more sustainable of a future with the amount of followers and they can continue doing what they love doing with us basically running the show.

steve larsen:
Yeah.

ben wilson:
Yeah.

steve larsen:
That's amazing. I'm looking at the site right now. I mean, this is fantastic. It looks really good. Yeah, definitely applies to or appeals to millennials and what they love and stuff also. Do you know what the average cart value is for someone who purchases?

ben wilson:
We're running an average of $40 a purchase.

steve larsen:
Oh my gosh. That's so cool.

ben wilson:
Our hypothesis, or our reasoning I guess, within our justification of why we think it's 40 is we set free shipping at $35.

steve larsen:
Okay.

ben wilson:
Which is pretty low, but yet again, our average purchase is $40. We think a lot of people are taking advantage. We're going to start creeping that number up and seeing if that actually changes and test the hypothesis that, that is the reason why the average is up. I mean, it can really only benefit us if we can average each purchase to $45 or even 50 and start seeing if that's going to move any further purchases.

steve larsen:
That's awesome. That'd be an interesting split test and this is super cool. I just want to recap just in case, because I get close to projects and I forget the coolness of them or something like that. You got 50,000 people by asking 2 people to drop a tweet and something else, right?

ben wilson:
The same person.

steve larsen:
The same person? You're out there tweeting people.

ben wilson:
An Instagram post, yeah.

steve larsen:
10,000 opt in, you get a 175 purchase, average cart value of 40 bucks, so you've pulled around 7 grand for this thing and you haven't paid a dime in advertising. This is the classic awesome story. It's cool.

ben wilson:
I appreciate that. We're excited. we're testing each social media to see what kind of pull. Learning Instagram, at least of what we've seen is that there's not as much traffic. We've got a speculation it's because there isn't a link. Sometimes, or link in each picture. It's in the bio. Then at the same time, we also figured out that there isn't as much text that goes below. If you're describing the pictures that you have posted, we've learned put it in the first sentence, in the first line if you're going to try to get someone to do something. Below that, they typically won't see it in their feed. Twitter has driven most of our traffic which was more surprising than we initially thought. We're excited to, like I said, we're also dropping a vine and a YouTube to see how that affects our traffic as well.

steve larsen:
That's awesome. Hey, I don't want to take all your time. I just want to thank you for this. This is fantastic. Guys, this is Ben Wilson. After one month, one month! People try forever to get profitable, and after one month he's got this awesome result and awesome site. I guess, where can people head? It's trilify.com. Go ahead and opt in and you can see his sales process. Ben, I want to thank you for this. This has been awesome.

ben wilson:
Absolutely, man. Glad I could come chat and reminisce about the good ole times, man. Definitely miss those time for sure.

steve larsen:
I look forward to seeing your face all over The Wall Street Journal, soon.

ben wilson:
It'll be the millennial Journal.

steve larsen:
Awesome, man. Thanks so much. We'll talk to you later.

ben wilson:
Absolutely, dude. Bye.

All right, All right. Sorry, I'm in the car again, by the way. Usually I am in front of a nice microphone. Every once in a while when nice thought hits me and I'm like, "Oh my gosh. That's one of the core principals that I use." I decide I should probably share them with you. Anyways, I'm in the car driving and just thought I'd take the time.

Recently somebody asked me, I can't remember what they asked me, but this story from my past popped up, right. I had this stalker and sorry if she's listening to this, I seriously doubt it. I was in college and I had this stalker and everyone kind of knew it. I guess that's the thing about stalkers is they're not being subtle. She was showing up at our door in our apartment. She'd be like, "Hey, how's it going?" She was awkward about it. She'd be like, "Hey, yeah, so hi. Just wanted to come by and say hi and come say hi." You're like, Yeah you said it three times now. Then it'd be silent for a second and be like, yep because I wasn't interested. Then she'd be like, "See you."

I'd be like, "Okay, we're done today, this is good. See you tomorrow or tonight or some awkward time." Then she'd show up again, and be like, "Hey I made this t-shirt for you." I was like, "You made me a t-shirt?" I think I threw it away after she left. I felt bad. I was like I'm not going to wear this and keep this going. Another day she came by and was like, "Hey, I made you cookies." I was like, "Oh my gosh, you're not buying me with your dang cookies, although they're tasty and delicious."

Anyways, she went through this crazy elaborate scheme to ask me to this Jane Austin Ball thing that the campus was putting on. That's not something I would usually go to but I'm not going to say no. I wanted to be nice. I can't even remember what she did. Maybe is was another shirt, I can't even remember what it was. It was big and elaborate and it was extremely clear that she was going through this massive thing to go through the trouble to ask me to this dance in a really crazy way. I was like, "Yeah, sounds good." She was like, "That's all you're going to say is yes? I went through this huge thing you've got to say yes back in a really fun way." I was like, "Okay." I never did. She got all offended. She was like, "I get the feeling you're not interested in me." I was like, "That'd be right."

I decided what the heck, I'll answer back in a crazy way. I was like, what's something that I can do that's kind of out there, I promise this relates to business, what's something I can do that's borderline crazy but it's not like the typical thing but will totally get the thing across. I want her to think afterwards she'll never forget it but also put a little disgust in her brain. I was just walking around and I was like, maybe something will pop up today. I was at the grocery store, I was getting food for the next week. I was over by where the meat section is, the deli area. I see these salmon, whole salmon, they're huge. They had been gutted and cleaned and everything of course but huge salmon. I'm like I'm totally buying it. I don't even know what I'm going to use it for yet, but it's somehow involved.

I had this huge salmon and I bring it back to my apartment. This thing is frozen rock solid. I'm like, how am I going to use this for. All the sudden, I'm like, "This is it!" I went and I grabbed this knife and I start trying to chop off the tail part. This sounds a totally morbid but it was frozen solid so I had to leave it out until it was oozing a little bit. It was totally disgusting, smells a little bit. There was six of us in that apartment. I'm sure all the other guys were like, "What the heck is wrong with this kid?" I was telling them the idea though, they were like, "This is genius."

I sawed off the tail and then I took a piece of paper and I wrote on there, "Looks like you got me hooked." I put it inside of a plastic bag and I shoved in it inside of the tail through the part where you clean it all out. Basically, there was a note in this massive Salmon tail. I went and I got a coat hanger and I made a hook out of it and some dental floss and I tied the floss to the hook, then I hooked the tail onto the coat hanger so it looked like it was a fish hook. Then I went to her apartment door an I hung it in front of their door. As soon as they open their door, they see it. It took them a while to try to find it. It was hanging in the hot sun getting all nasty and dripping everywhere. Its' totally disgusting. I had no problem dropping her after this.

She opened the door. I was hiding and I heard her open the door and I hear her go, "Oh my gosh, what the freak is that? This is disgusting." She was looking at it, sees this little note sticking out. Opens it up and was like, "Looks like you hooked my tail" or something like that. She's like, "That's how you said yes?" I was like, "You're not my stalker anymore." I didn't say that. We went on the date and she still was like, "Don't be nervous if I want to touch you the whole night, I'm just really excited I'm on a date with you."

I was like, "Oh, no." She totally got the idea, especially after the fish thing. I never saw her again after that. It's kind of a big long story. I ended up taking the other part of the Salmon and cooking it for a girl that I was actually interested in and totally impressed her and it was awesome.

Anyways, what's the whole point of that story? That sometimes you have to lose people. You don't have to be mean about it. I'm not saying you've got to do crazy stuff. Here's what the lesson is, you've got to be prolific. The question I started asking myself to make that whole thing happen was, "How can I be prolific?" Which is not crazy, but not mainstream. It's that in between stage. The only marketers that actually do anything with a lot of traction, do something prolific. You think of dollar shave club. Their marketing is pretty raw. Stuff like Carl's Jr., I'm not condoning anything that any of these people do but if you just look at what they're doing, they're prolific. They're doing things that are out of the norm.

If I'm going to go pitch someone and try to get them to buy, I might as well make them laugh, or shock them, or do something that's gong to be memorable because I'm sucking up their time. I guarantee she remembers that stupid salmon fish tail and understands that I'm just not interested, stop pursuing me, you're waisting your time. I guarantee she remembers that. Every one of my friends remember that. It was a little bit prolific especially for the dating world.

I keep giving all these dating examples so I'll give one more. I came back home in between semesters for Christmas. I came home and I was actually at church. Goes to show what was on my head by going to church this time. I go to church I sat down in front of this girl. I was like, "Dang, who is that? She is hot. Holy crap." I sit down and my brother is with me. I was like, "Did you see her?" He was like, "Freak yeah man. Holy smokes." Anyways took me a little bit of guts to work up the courage to ask her out and things like that because she's hot. I was making sure I had my buff stuff on.

I went and I asked her on a date. I was like, "I've got to do something on this date that's going to be really cool. Something that's not mainstream." It's really funny thinking about it, I never realized that I was asking that same question. Something that's not mainstream, something that's a little bit crazy. I want to get her out of there comfort zone a little bit just so she knows I'm a little bit nuts sometimes and she's got to know this is part of the package and I like to be out there sometimes. I was like, "All right, what are we going to go do"

I picked her up on the date, and I was like, "We're first going to go to Goodwill." Which was like Desert Industries or something like that. We're going to go buy anything in there that has to do with argyle, like golfer's argyle." We went and I got this cool tie, I was wearing a fedora, she was wearing this vest. It was kind of goofy. She's like, "What the heck." I was like okay cool, just wait a second. We pull up to this putt-putt golf course. I was like, "We're going to play putt-putt like we're serious putt-putters which is why we dressed up for it." I was like, "We're going to go to do putt-putt like that then we're going to go have a picnic on the putt-putt golf course."

She told me later she was way outside of her comfort zone. It was a double date, and my buddy were just hamming it up. It was a lot of fun. Shout out to Dan Wilcox what's up? Anyways, she was not interested in me after that date. She was like, "Crap, this guy is interested and I don't know how to say it." I was like, "I've got to do something else that's kind of crazy." This is going to sound nuts. How long have I been going on this podcast already? I've already been going, I've got to look at my phone without crashing here. Ten minutes, all right. I'll make it quick.

All right, this is your guy's story. I was like, "Okay, I've got to sweeten this deal up because she's not interested I know she's not." Despite my strikingly amazing good looks. She worked at this daycare. I had at least convinced her to start texting me, things like that. Baby steps. I text her things. I'm like, "Hey hope your day went well, hope to see you sometime soon." She goes, "Oh my gosh, my day was awful." It was a Wednesday. She was like, my day sucked. "Kids are everywhere parents expect you to just [inaudible 00:11:27] their children now." She was a preschool teacher basically. She was like, "It was really really bad." I'm like, "Gosh, I'm so sorry. It's awful."

I was like, "I'm going to make a survive your Thursday kit." I didn't tell her that. I was being goofy with it. I showed my childish side, cheesy side, goofy side, kind of crazy side, all that. I was adding in all these things like snacks and books and things that you would give a kid. I was like, "Here's your survive your Thursday kit. Give it to the kids or you have it or whatever." I went and I doorbell ditched it. She was like, "Oh, thanks." She's like, "Crap, this kid is like totally addicted now. I'm screwed." She was hot, you know. Anyways we went and she invited me over.

she actually worked at an orphanage in Romania for a while. She showed me those pictures of that. I was like, "Cool, cool. This is progressing." I was like, "Man, I've got to do one more thing to try to get her to know, I'm a goof ball, but I'm serious. I'm crazy but I want to steady date." I'm losing my voice a little bit. I'm like, I'm going to make a catalog. She's talking about ordering all this stuff for her brother's wedding. I'm like, "Okay, I'm the oldest of six kids." Between me and the youngest one is seventeen years. I still have siblings still that are not even teenagers while I'm recording this right now.

I'm twenty-eight if you guys are trying to do the math. This was like five or six years ago. You know those play sets? I took pictures of these play sets, like the food that they have in there. The little plastic pizzas, or plastic hot dogs or whatever. I was like, "Do you want a plastic pizza or a real one? Call this number to order." It was my number. "Do you want fake dates, which was a pile of dates like the fruit, or do you want a real date? Do you want a fake movie?" I took a picture of a movie theater, and I took a picture of a movie theater. Do you want this or this, this or this, this or this? She calls and she's like, "I'll take the real date with the real pizza, I'd like the real movie, real, this that, that, that." I can't remember. I was like, "Sweet, I got the next date."

This sounds totally cheesy. That's the point. When you do your marketing, when you do anything, putting up a freaking order form, or there's no explanation or you're just buying ads straight to your site, that sucks. Playful people are typically more creative people. I had a professor tell me that. He was one of the best teachers I've ever had in marketing. I have a marketing degree. That's one of the things. He would have us play with little kid toys in the middle of his lectures. No joke, I played with play-doh. He was like, "You're required to play the entire time in this class. You understand that?" We were like, "what the heck?" He was like, "Don't take notes, put that crap way." He was like, "Don't do this, put that crap away." It was prolific. His teaching style was prolific. He's like, "That's not normal, that's crazy. Why are we doing this?" Because we were playing we were in a more creative state. That's the challenge.

That's the whole purpose of this podcast. I'm trying to say, some of your marketing, some of these funnels you're sending over to me, your product is great, but your message is bad in your ads. You look boring. You look like a corporation, no one cares about corporations. No one falls in love with a corporation. They fall in love with a certain individual or icon or idea. You know Flo from progressive? She's the highest paid spokesperson. Why? Because people think of progressive when they think of her. It almost makes progressive third party compared to her. Shes' the advocate, she's the spokesperson. She shows faults and flaws and their commercials are cheesy but they give you a chuckle.

That's the whole thing. One I saw recently, I won't say the name. It was a squeeze page, the page looked gorgeous, it was beautiful, it was amazing. Very well designed, very awesome looking page, totally main stream message. He's got a level ten design on a level two marketing message. Marketing is all that crazy stuff. That little prolific stuff. I'm not saying you have to do stuff that's crazy, but look at what everyone else is doing and don't do that. Which is the exact opposite thing you do when you're building the business.

If you're building a lifestyle business right now or just something to make a little extra money, don't be creative. Don't get out there and be creative. Go find someones who's crushing it, model what they're doing. That's the safest path to making money in that industry also. Then after you've matched the control of the other person. After you're actually making money, it's fine to be prolific. It's time to go out there and find your own spot in the Eco-system of the industry that you're in. That's when you go be creative and crazy and playful or whatever it is. Whatever you are, it's not so much a matter of highlighting all of your strengths. "These are my strengths and I'm highlighting my strengths in my business and personally." No one cares. It's more about highlighting your differences.

Everyone works so freaking hard to be mainstream in our society. Everyone does. That's what pop culture is. That's why everyone watches the same freaking TV shows. That's why everyone does the same things. You know what I do when I'm about to go create sales funnels? I watch comedy. I do. It's not even like it's adult comedy. I'll go freaking watch Even Stevens, one of my favorite TV shows of my childhood. Not all the time. Sometimes I'll go do that stuff, stuff that makes me playful. You cannot be consuming new data and be creative at the same time. You are either consuming or you're being creative. Your brain cannot be analytical which is one side of your head, and then creative, which is the other side of your head, at the same time. That's the whole reason I'm telling you guys these stories.

Freak, man I used marketing principals to get my hot wife. I did. It's what it is thought. It's dating, it's sales. Anything you want. Anyways, I got sweet deals with people and awesome clients because marketing principals apply everywhere. It's all kind of the same formula. Just go be prolific if you have a current business. If you're working on yours, start looking for ways that you can be in the future, just do stuff that's kind of nuts. What's that crazy one I saw recently? There's a commercial I saw, you guys have probably seen this. I can't even remember what it is. You guys have probably seen this. There's a commercial, I think it's a commercial. It's been like a decade since I've seen it which is the power of this.

Here's a better example, the Old Spice commercials. With that guy with his shirt off and he's like, "Hello, ladies." At the end, he's like, "I want a horse." All this random stuff. All he's really saying is wear Old Spice and you'll get a horse an a handful of diamonds and tickets and a lady. Anyways. I don't mean to beat a dead horse but stop being main stream. Highlight your differences and you'll be good. If you just do that one thing, you'll start to become a brand, you'll start to become your own culture, or your own cult-ure. Be your own cult. Kind of like Russell Bronson always says. Kind of funny.

That's it man. Guys, ladies, whoever it is who's listening to this. By the way if you guys want me to look at your sales funnel, just shoot me a message. I'm on Facebook. Facebook is the best one, not Skype. I will talk to you guys later. Go ahead and send me some of your questions. I've got a lot of interviews that are coming out and a lot that have already come out. If this is the first time you've ever listened to this broadcast, just go back and I like to dissect people's sales funnels with them. Successful entrepreneurs and find out what failures they went through to produce that good result, or leading to that good part. Anyways guys, we'll talk to you later, thank you so much. I promise to not always do these in the care, I know the mic quality.

Thanks for listening to Sales funnel radio, please remember to subscribe and leave feedback. Want to get one of today's best internet sales funnel for free? Go to salesfunnelbroker.com/freefunnels to download your pre-built sales funnel today.

Welcome to Sales Funnel Radio where you'll learn marketing strategies to grow your online business using today's best internet sales funnels. And now, here's your host, Steve Larsen.

Hey you guys. I'm actually super excited for this. I can't believe I'm recording the first episode of this podcast. I mean this is awesome. I love podcasts. I think they're awesome. I've learned a lot from them. I've made money because of things I learn off podcasts. I've gained a lot of respect for a lot of people. Anyways, so I'm excited to be doing this podcast and I remember the idea first came up, and I was like, "I don't want to get podcasting. I don't want to go out and start, I don't know, going around and trying to interview all these people and stuff like that."

What I want you to know is what you can expect from this, though, because I'm excited that I decided to. I used to do a lot more parascoping than I used to. I got 600 parascope followers, and something interesting happened when I started publishing. The moment I started publishing, I started getting a ton of interaction with people. Way more than my ad spend, right? It's super fun. It was just, so, I've got to tell you, it's as much for me to be doing this podcast as it might be for the things that you learn in this. Selfishly, I just enjoy it. It's super fun. I feel a connection whenever I do that, and then I get feedback from people and they say, "Hey, I used that tactic and I made money with it." It blows me away. Super fun. Anyway, I enjoy that a lot.

What you can expect from this podcast is to learn specific sales funnel strategies, whether that's for webinars, trip wire funnels, product launch funnels, automated webinar funnels, anyways. If those don't mean anything to you, no worries. It's okay. I'll go crazy deep on some things, but other things not. I promise to keep it interesting as well. I hate monotone speaking podcasts. Oh my gosh, they're so boring. Those are the ones I always play at 2 time speed. If you didn't know you could do that, it's on your iPhone, but you can play things at 2 time speed, really fast. I kind of tend to talk quickly, so that might sound weird, but what I'm going to do is talk about sales funnels, things I'm building right now for clients.

I've been building sales funnels for the last, about 4 years and the first one I even built was for this guy named, actually I can't even remember his name, but he was an artist and we were selling his art. It wasn't quite like gif art, but it was ... Anyways it was cool. It was cool stuff. I remember I built the sales funnel, cool, and no one came to it. I was like, "what the heck?" I was like, "I've got to go learn how to send traffic." But I didn't, and time went on, time went on, and I was like, "Hey, I'm going to go learn door to door sales, just because I want to learn how to sell in really hard environments." That's why I did it. I went and I was like the number 2 sales guy for a while. I mean I was like crushing it. It was awesome. I was selling pest control and there were bugs everywhere so it was great.

I remember while we were driving out to one of our areas one morning. I was looking and we were on the highway and it was a great day out. I remember it was blue skies, you know, just fantastic out. It was hot, crazy hot. I remember looking around and seeing all these billboards as we were driving down the highway and thinking, this is crazy. I get up every morning and I convince people who were not planning on spending money that they should spend money, and I'm not doing bad at it, which is awesome. That's a skill. But everyone who's seeing these billboards is planning on spending on something when they call that number. It completely switches the psychology of the sale. I'm like, oh my gosh, that's incredible. I was in college at the time. I was like, I've got to learn how to do that.

What I did is I got online that night and I started putting out all these ads, just free classified ads, all over the place selling our pest control. "Hey, if you got this issue, call." "If you got this issue, call." "Hey we're doing a sale. Call." My phone started blowing up. I couldn't believe it. My boss called, he's like "How are you getting all these sales?" I was like, "They're calling me." He goes, "Are you kidding? What the heck?" I said, "I'm kind of shocked it's working." I remember I pulled like 10 phone sales in a very short period of time. It's funny because for a door to door salesman, there's different ratios right? Hey, I know that if I pitch 50 to 60 people one of them on average will say yes. That's a crap ton of work and a lot of talking, right? When I was doing this it flipped it and I closed 90% of the people who were calling, always. I think there was only 1 or 2 who didn't purchase, because they called because they had a problem and they knew I had a solution.

I was like, "this is nuts. This whole thing is crazy. Why am I selling this way?" It was a great way to learn how to sell, and it's a fantastic skill to have. I've used that many other places, but the interesting thing though, I was hooked after that. My sales numbers started sucking because I started thinking like, "How else can I blow this up?" I started thinking about ... Anyways, I kind of quit door knocking and I went home that summer. We made money. It was a good experience.

I came home and that just always stuck with me. I was like, that's nuts. People are clicking ... It's not clicking. That's where I'm going. They were calling. I was like, how can I get them to click on things that I want them to online? So I started getting obsessed with this stuff. Just like, okay, I've got to go make a product and then I'm going to get ads and then I'm going to drive it to that product. Wow, revolutionary Steve. It's not that crazy, but what's is that to me that was a huge deal.

I went and I built this product and no one came and it never sold and no one came and it was tumbleweed after tumbleweed. I was like, crap! That's when I was like, I need to learn how to send traffic. I started going and I started learning all these traffic techniques and it's super cool. At that time I was, this is just the story of how I got into this so you guys know. I thought it'd be good to tell as the first podcast. At the time I was in my internet marketing, it was called Intro to Internet Marketing. It was one of my classes in college. It was bad, man, it was so bad. For the last couple months I had been studying traffic, right, because none of my ebooks had sold. Still on Amazon, by the way.

Anyway, so I started learning all these traffic techniques but by the time that internet marketing class came up in college, I had been studying enough stuff and practicing enough and had made enough money that I knew everything he was already talking about, and I knew that what the teacher was saying was old and was wrong and wasn't going to work for what he was teaching. I told the teacher that. That's not always the wisest thing to do to a professor, but that's what I did.

I drew up this plan, and it was hey I'm going to have this squeeze page. People will come in. They'll opt in and I'll get their email address and then after that I'm going to push them over to the sales page of like someone else's product. I was practicing affiliate marketing. I would get a commission when I would send a buyer to someone and someone else would make the product. That's called affiliate marketing if you're not familiar with that.

It worked. I put 50 bucks in to some ads. I woke up and there was 50 bucks in my account. I was like, "Oh my gosh! Are you kidding me?" I went and I called my buddy. I was like, "Dude, get over here! It worked!" He comes flying over. I was like, "We didn't really make anything, but we gained 17 subscribers and we broke even. We got 17 people that we know are basically buyers and 2 or 3 of them specifically and now I can go market those people because we know that they want this stuff." It was like, "Oh my gosh, this is crazy." I was like, "We're got to figure out how to make money with it though."

Anyways we told that teacher, hey we don't want to do this. We don't want to come to your class anymore and I want to go do this stuff. He's like, okay. We got out of that class the rest of the semester and our deliverables was that we had to teach the rest of the class what we were doing at the end. It's funny because it sounded like ninja stuff. Thinking back, though, it really wasn't that crazy. We were just doing what works.

What was nuts is we ended up getting so good at sending just a crap ton of traffic. I mean, like 53,000 people in 2 days type of traffic. We sent so much traffic to different places. It's crazy. Our professors and teachers started obviously noticing that, because we would talk about it in classes before they'd start and we were just excited about it, and sometimes we'd go ask their advice. Well there was a Paul Mitchell, you know like the hair school, that needed help with their traffic and they said, "Hey we got 2 kids that are doing pretty good with it."

So we started working with some of the owners of different Paul Mitchells around the nation. There was one in Idaho, no there's 2 in Idaho, and then 8 more ... I can't remember. No, there's just one. One in Idaho and then 8 more down through California. We were on the phone with all these business owners making millions of dollar every year, telling them how to send traffic and stuff. We're like, you got to do this, got to do this, got to do this. They're like, "We don't want to do it. We want to hire you to do it." Okay. They started paying us 1,000 bucks here and there, and they'd give us an ad budget and we'd go send traffic to the different Paul Mitchell sites, and we were good at it though. A normal ad word was like $50 on Google and we were getting it for like $5 or 5 cents even at these different places, and it was awesome. People were loving it.

Here's the thing though. As we were driving all this traffic and we started building some sites for some of their uprising celebrities and things like that ... That's a different story though, but it's crazy cool. They started asking us this question. They're like, "Why when the traffic comes, why isn't is actually doing anything?" They were like, "We're spending thousands of dollars in ads but why is it that we aren't actually getting more people?" We're like, "Oh you know, the next ones are coming along. We're just ... It's all about the numbers." Pretty standard stuff you hear in door to door sales. "Just a numbers game." Complete bull crap, in my opinion.

That question just never left me, and I was like, how the heck do you do that? We ended up moving on and I helped start a cell phone insurance business for iPhones called Fixd Insurance. It's still up. F-I-X-D Insurance. Fixdinsurance.com. That was the first sales funnel that I ever built. It was because of that question, what do I do with traffic when it hits my site and how do I get it so that they buy stuff? That's what a sales funnel is and answers.

Anyways, classic sales funnel. Here's a story too for you to for that. Ads have gotten really expensive to send to just a flat website, right? If I'm buying ads and it's going to, I don't know, WebMD.com, just because everyone will probably know that site. If I'm buying ads to that site, it's very expensive because 90% of it is going to leave without purchasing anything. I don't know if Web MD actually sells anything, but let's say they did. 90% of that traffic is going to leave without ever doing anything. It's very very pricey for these people to send traffic.

Us internet marketers, we had to come up with a different way, right? We had to come up with a way to make it cheaper and to get back our ad costs while still getting a customer, and that's what a sales funnel does, right? You come in, you give them something that's free or discounted that a lot more people will take. 20, 30% of people will purchase or opt into. Something free at the front end. Now you got their contact information so then you can put them on different email campaigns and cell phone campaigns and follow ups and direct mail campaigns or whatever it is. You got their information and over the long tail, as they purchase, you're going to make back your money. That's just a one page funnel.

We were like, well that's all right. It's not amazing though. What we did is, us internet marketing industry, we started going and saying hey, why don't we add a product that's slightly higher priced to the next one. Less people will take it but we'll make back more of our ad spend money, right? You got this free thing and then one more thing that's hey, like 20 to 50 bucks. Then we do that again, but we hiked it another time so now it's 97 to like $150. That's the typical price range for the next one, depending on what industry you're in.

Anyways, it's kind of cool. My cost, like I have a site called secretmlmhacks.com. I've built a ton of sales funnels in the last, especially the last year. Probably close to 20 of them custom. It's not like I'm selling the same one over and over again. I'll tell you guys more about those as I go along. Just so you know, the stories I'm telling here are from case studies and things I'm learning personally. I will reference other people in this podcast and I will give them credit, but I will also use just the things that I'm using that are working. That way you guys know.

Anyways, we started going and we started driving this traffic to these different sales funnels and they started working. For secretmlmhacks.com, that's one that is mine. It cost me like $1.30 to get someone into the door, typically, and then my average cart value at the end after it's all said and done across everything is like $2.80. You can make a business off of that.

McDonald's, McDonald's, McDonald's. They spend about $1.81 just to get you to their drive through. That's their ad spend. On average, per customer is $1.81. If they sell you a $2.08 hamburger they've made 20 cents. You can't make a business off that, so what is their "up sale"? They ask you, would you like to biggie size that? Would you like fries and a drink with that? Now that they've done that, they've recouped their ad cost and their average cart value jumps up to I guess like 5, 6, $7. You can make a business with that now. Now they're making 4, $5 after their ad spend in every single thing they go.

That's how it works though. Know what your ... It's all about what's your cost to acquire a customer and what's your average cart value. If your average cart value is higher than your cost to acquire a customer, you have a business. The simplest way to do it is to have a sales funnel that helps you recoup your ad cost. You don't try and make money first, just recoup your ad cost, and then you sell them the other things in the back end. Amateurs focus on the front end. The pros focus on the back end.

Anyways, that's maybe getting a little too technical for this, but that's how I got into it. It's just me asking all these questions, like how do I do this? How do I do this? Why isn't this selling? Why isn't this selling? Then it suddenly clicked after like 2 years of trying in the internet space. My purpose of this podcast is to cut down the time it takes for you to learn these things. I'm just going to tell you some sweet nuggets. I'll tell stories in every one of them, usually, just because I hate podcasts that don't have stories. Stories are amazing. Stories engage us. I have to tell stories, so I'll tell lots of different stories and different scenarios and things that I'm working for right now.

I love sales funnels. I am a full time builder and I use a tool called click funnels. If you want a trial of that, go to salesfunnelbroker.com and click on resources and there's a trial for click funnels there. I used to build everything in Word Press and that was not a fun experience. Click funnels is awesome because you can build literally anything, and I'm not a coder or programmer. I'm not a "tech guy." I might be now considered more of a tech guy because I've self taught some code things, but I would never consider myself a coder or a programmer. I use click funnels because I don't have to be a coder or programmer, and I have completely say in what I build and do. It's not like you're getting a template. You can use the templates, but I always blank them out anyways and delete everything and just start over and build what I want.

Anyways, guy thank you so much. I am super excited for this podcast. This is actually a dream come true for me. It's as much for me as it is for the things you'll learn here. Anyways, please subscribe and let me know what you think about this. If you think the idea's cool, or if it's stupid, either or, I just want to know. Feedback would be awesome. Please comment, rate this podcast, subscribe. I would love to send out more of my stuff to you, and my whole purpose is just to help you make money online or offline. Sales funnels work offline, like McDonald's. But make more money using sales funnels because ads and competition have really increased, especially because of the internet.

All right guys. Thank you so much again. Please let me know what you think about this. Bye.

Thanks for listening to Sales Funnel Radio. Please remember to subscribe and leave feedback. Have a question you want answered on the show? Get your free t-shirt when your question gets answered on the live Hey Steve show. Visit salesfunnelbroker.com now to submit your question.

Steve Larsen:
All right everyone, hey. I'm super excited for this, this is going to be a treat and its very rare. There's a few people I go through and I interview, and they don't know much about ClickFunnels or the world that I live in, but that's not the case for this time. You guys have the special privilege of listening to Mr Danny Walsh, thank you so much for joining us.

Danny Walsh:
Thank you Stephen, thank you so much for having me on the show.

Steve Larsen:
I'm really pumped about this. Its funny, so I was interviewing Jenn Goodwin. I don't know when that was, it was a couple of weeks ago and after the show she kept messaging me. She's like, "You have got to interview this guy, Danny Walsh. He's the man, he's helped me with all my stuff," and so I've been really excited for this. She kept telling me, "I use him for building all this stuff." Do you mind telling us a little bit about what you're doing for Jenn?

Danny Walsh:
The work that I'm doing with Jenn and in general is about building a partnership between ourselves, so that we can better serve our audiences. This is a longer term arrangement I guess, so in the short term yes, I'm helping her with ClickFunnels, yes I'm helping her with some strategy stuff. That's not to say that she's not already well advanced in various parts of the internet, and she does have a lot of clients and she's working on some fantastic projects.

I'm helping and advising on funnel type stuff, but in terms of the partnership what we've realized is that we have a lot of similarities. By working together and putting some systems in place, we will be able to better serve more people. That's the angle we're coming at from that piece of work, and its going well so far. Big thanks and shout to Jenn, I guess.

Steve Larsen:
She's also very impressed. You're a ClickFunnels expert, that's obviously what she said and that's what you go out and do, is help people with ClickFunnels itself. How did you get started doing that first of all? You had said just previously to this that you were doing this all on WordPress, and that's awful for everyone.

Danny Walsh:
I've been working online since I was eighteen and I'm thirty five now, so that's quite some time. One of the first things I ever did online was create a music business, and this was before YouTube and Facebook, and the things that we're accustomed to these days. There was myself and a group of friends and we was into music, and underground music in particular in the UK. Lots of bass driven stuff and we wanted to get into raves effectively, and go and perform and DJ and rap, and do all of this cool stuff that we were into when we were sixteen, seventeen and eighteen. At that point when you're eighteen, as you know, you have a choice don't you? Your mom or your family or whoever says get a job, and society says get a job so you tend to find yourself in college or wherever.

I went to college for a week and I left, it wasn't for me. I'm eighteen, loving music, loving all these sorts of things. Recognizing that the internet was becoming very powerful and it was certainly catching my eye and my interest, and I'd done lots of computer stuff at school. Albeit these computers were ancient, the floppy disks and all this kind of stuff. From this music business, we've ended up having choice. You can either go on this course that the government has provided, or you can look to write a business plan, but they never expected anybody to write the business plan. I saw that as an opportunity when I was eighteen to actually not go on this course, and actually do the music. I was one of the only guys who came back after a few days with a big smile on my face, with a business plan.

The lady in the job center, she couldn't believe it but they put me forward into this scheme, where we managed to get £3,000 so, about four and a half thousand dollars worth of funding. This is me at eighteen and we set off on this journey, of running this website and doing events, and we quite quickly became the number one urban music website. People couldn't believe it and that starting point, and that wasn't even WordPress. That was actually coding this stuff in html and everything was so primitive, it took ages to upload anything. There was no such thing as camera phones, we were pretty much on our own playing Vinyl, do you know what I mean? From there, and learning WordPress and the DJ-ing evolved into teaching children and young people, and that set me on my journey if you would.

Steve Larsen:
Sure. That's incredible.

Danny Walsh:
That's just the beginning.

Steve Larsen:
Yeah, you were eighteen. I can't believe that, that's amazing. I almost got kicked out of high school because I kept selling all these random knick knacks in school, whatever it was. Little pens, they don't really like that kind of stuff.

Danny Walsh:
No, and obviously not conforming or you're not parts of the masses and what they want them to be like. If you're doing something slightly different, they'll try and make you fall back in line. That's where entrepreneurs are different.

Steve Larsen:
Yeah, just a little bit. I talk about pre ClickFunnels days like its the dark ages a little bit. It makes it so much faster now, I can't believe it. You've got this business, what's the website again? Just so everyone knows.

Danny Walsh:
I'm on dannywalsh.co.uk

Steve Larsen:
That's right. The biggest thing you do is you go help people with ClickFunnels issues. What are the kinds of issues that people run into that you see?

Danny Walsh:
This is the interesting thing. Since I've been doing the music days and from teaching children and young people how to DJ, and then from there working for the Council Writing Policy. All of these things I've done in my background, the problems that people have brought up in terms of promotion, marketing. The need to get people to come to an event or the need to get people to buy a ticket, or the need to get people to actually take action.

The problems have been similar all the way up until now, up until this morning when I was speaking to somebody on Skype. The similar problems just have new solutions and ClickFunnels is a new solution to age old problems, and literally does take hours and thousands of pounds or thousands of dollars out of the equation. Compared to what we was doing nearly twenty years ago, compared to what you can do now on ClickFunnels, its safe to say that the world has evolved for the better.

Some of the problems that people encounter come in on different levels. If you think about technology, the technology is always a learning curve for people. I've been fortunate that I've done this from young and always done it, so if you're just coming in and trying to get into this thing, there's a big barrier in peoples minds where they're afraid to press things. Does that make sense?

Steve Larsen:
Yeah.

Danny Walsh:
People will for example get ClickFunnels or but a WordPress theme, or whatever it may be. Something practical that they've got to do, Photoshop, whatever it is. They'll get this thing open in front of them and they'll have the training, and there still seems to be this mental block that presents them from pressing things. They always say to me things like, "I was afraid to screw things up," or, "I was afraid that I might do something wrong."

That is like well, there's nothing there to start with. Do something, and trying to get people over that mental barrier very, very broadly speaking. Yes we can talk about how to set up an email or how to set up a retargeting pixel, or how to set up Ationetics or whatever it may be. Specifically but on a very very broad level, you seem to get this theme that people are just afraid to get started. If I can help them to get started that's half of the battle won.

Steve Larsen:
I completely agree with that because I'll get a lot of people that'll just message me, and they'll say, "How do I do this?" You're right, it is this theme of people that are just. You might fail but its so much better to just fail taking action rather than, I don't know what it is. They can't put all the pieces together, they don't know, they super obsess over one piece and the next piece and the next piece. You're like just go ask someone to give you money and see if it works, and if that works go put it online.

Danny Walsh:
People have always said that I've been a bit cheeky. I'll be the guy that'll get pushed to the front, ask them ask them [inaudible 00:09:47] I guess there's a point here about experience. When you take a course or when you read a book, or you follow somebody or you absorb somebody else's lifestyle, you're looking at their experience. You might be reading somebodies experience, you might be watching somebodies experience, taking part of a course which shares somebodies experience.

If you go through life continually looking at other peoples experiences and trying to model, so let's take ClickFunnels. Russel Brunson making all these ClickFunnels and its awesome, and I want to be like that so I'll watch the videos. They're looking at that and that's Russell's experience, and they're trying to model that which is great. Look at me and they'll say, "Danny Walsh is doing all these things, share with me your experience Danny." I'm sharing my experience and they're thinking how do I make this happen, how do I out that in place? That could be true of any guru, author, coach, anybody.

They're all sharing their own experience. There's a time comes where the person who's continually listening and absorbing all of these experiences, needs to have their own experience. That's again this mental block, let's get over this first hurdle because you need to start telling people about your experience. Like you've just said, a failure or a mistake is part and crucial, part of the experience that you're going to be sharing in the future. If you're not prepared to have your own experiences and keep listening to everybody else's, then you're forever stuck.

Steve Larsen:
You're just going to keep hitting a wall. I actually just did a podcast about this, this is very interesting you're talking about it. I had this realization, it was a few weeks ago, which shows just how much we all learn constantly. I was listening to one of Dan Sullivan's courses called Pure Genius and he was talking about, "You can stop comparing yourself to an ideal. Its someone else's ideal you're always compared to." I've got to be more like that guy, I've got to be more like that guy and what it does, it makes you implode. You'll never be satisfied and instead start comparing yourself to where you just came from. I did this, and then you'll actually feel peace and satisfaction with where you're moving forward in that scenario.

Danny Walsh:
Without a doubt, and when you start to show more of your experience, and obviously this is driven by the experience and guidance of others. When you're showing more of your stuff you become more accustomed to likes and comments, and all of the things that the internet will give you which will boost your confidence, and enable you then to keep repeating the cycle. Before you know it, you're inbox is lighting up at two o'clock in the morning, with people asking you for advice as opposed to you messaging somebody at two o'clock in the morning asking them for advice. Does that make sense?

Steve Larsen:
100% I definitely saw that switch happen for me.

Danny Walsh:
I guess it takes a while, doesn't it?

Steve Larsen:
Yeah, I've been doing it for about four years. Not as long as you but it definitely took a long time and finally when I realized that. There's a really good book called How The World Sees You, and in there he was saying, it was just right along with what you're saying. He said, "Stop focusing on your strengths. Its not so much about your strengths, its not so much about your weaknesses. 100% just highlight and focus on your differences. Whatever makes you different out there, you're not going to be, you'll stop focusing on the ideal. You'll start focusing on your insides and again have more." What I think is funny is we could talk about these kinds of issues rather than so much of the tech issues, because ClickFunnels makes it so much easier to do the tech stuff. You can actually focus on your own self.

Danny Walsh:
Without a doubt, and I have three core principles that underpin everything that I do and everything I would do with my clients, and I have them for year. The three principles are very simple. One of them is technology must work, that's the first principle. If technology doesn't work then it doesn't work and nothing can be solved, and no one can click through and there's complaints etc ClickFunnels makes the technology work, that's that bit sorted. Where we have to hire a bunch of guys and spend thousands and bang head on the wall for months, its handled.

Principle one is underpinned by ClickFunnels now in my mind, and that's great. The second principle is get the right offer in front of the right people, and that's like Dream 100 stuff and all the rest of it. Taking the time to actually figure out who are these guys who I need to put this offer in front of, and one of the other things I do apart from music is fishing. I do lots and lots of fishing and we have funnels for fishing. The principles of putting the right bait to catch the right size of fish is very similar in marketing, so principle two you must have the right offer for the right people,

Steve Larsen:
Which is very easy to mess up.

Danny Walsh:
Very very easy to mess up but the power of funnels and the power of, the things that we can do now on the internet, especially with things like Facebook and Facebook live video. All of this cool stuff, is the third principle and this is simple as it gets. Technology must work, right offer for the right people. Third principle, build a solid relationship. That part again is where people, they will fall down or they will not put into context how important that part is, because if you can build a relationship it keeps people coming back.

See what I mean? As well as being able to push yourself over the mental barrier of just getting started, you've got to make sure your tech works which we know ClickFunnels will help. Getting that right offer is only the first bit of it, you've got to build a relationship. When you get that package correct, that's when you can start to really advance and it doesn't have to be complicated.

Steve Larsen:
No, it really doesn't. I really like that third one, build a solid relationship. I think a lot of people get into the internet business because they figure, "I don't have to talk to anybody." You're about to go through some personal growth because you're really not going to make that much, unless you actually start building relationships with people.

Danny Walsh:
The relationships are key, do you know what I mean? Whether you have a fancy fifty five page extravagant system with all odds of emails or whatever, or you just send somebody a message on Facebook you're still building a relationship. You've got to do that in a way that gives value, as you know. You've also got to do that in a way that leaves people happy, and there's people out there who are expectant that they can just switch something on and make a lot of money.

As we know that's not the case, its a great experience to have as long as you learn from that and you don't go back to buying the next thing that comes along. Just repeating that perpetual cycle, and having the relationship does mean having a conversation and getting people on the phone, and having Skype calls and all the rest of it. You've got to think longer term, whenever you're embarking on any sort of marketing project I guess.

Steve Larsen:
You just said something there that I thought was very interesting, because I had this realization a while ago that I needed to stop. I was getting stuck in this just go read books and learn and learn. After a while I realized these are great, I know all these principles. This is fantastic, but I don't even have a business to do it with. I realized this is going to sound totally ludicrous but I had to stop reading, because my learning needed to start coming from my own experiences. Rather than just be curios all the time, I had to switch gears and say okay. Stop reading so much, which is totally not normal. Just go execute and execute, and whatever barriers I run into I'll study about that barrier and how to get around it.

Danny Walsh:
Exactly.

Steve Larsen:
Much better way to do it.

Danny Walsh:
We talk about ready, aim, fire. You get ready and you spend ages there, you probably don't do anything. If we flip it round to ready, fire, aim we can fire a few things. People say, "I've not got the money, I've not got the investment. You can put up a Facebook page and you can set up a simple opt in page, and you can gauge interest with a dew dollars of Facebook ads. You don't need a big investment. If that all points in the right direction and makes you happy and smiley, and thinking this is feasible, I'm sure the investment will come. There's so many guys, and like I said I've done a lot of stuff in music and we did internet radio for years.

For example, working with people who want to become artists, and there's guys out there they're older than me and they wanted to become artists all of their lives. Forever, since I've known them, since we were doing the music business. They've still not made it, and they produce music that's release quality will sell. I know it will sell, they know it will sell but for some reason in their mind, they're never quite happy with it. Its never quite perfect and they are ready aim fire. They've spent twenty five years aiming, and in all of those years they've got older, they've lost their rap appeal if that's the right way to describe it. You're becoming old and you're getting past this stuff, and you'll get to some point where you'll never do it. Whereas that piece of music you recorded when you was eighteen or that idea you had last night, is good enough now to take to market.

One of the things I say to people a lot is if you don't have an idea, let's look at you. You are the brand, so if you can become the brand then you've got products in abundance. Like I said, we've got stuff in music, we've got stuff in fishing. I love music, I love fishing, I love all the things as well and we've got funnels and all of those. These are the things that we love, make them into businesses. The guys who are listening, what kind of things inspire you and motivate you? You don't need to worry about the next persons product, you are the brand but only if you think like that, and think what do I have to offer the world and how can I package that up in a simple way that adheres to some basic principles?

Technology working, put it in front of the right people and build a relationship with these guys. Its something I've done since I was eighteen and I had a choice. Follow the crowd and go and go on me to put McDonald's five days a week, eight in the morning for an Egg McMuffin and you don't even get paid and you're going to do some learning stuff or start your own business. At that point I chose that journey, and you've got to take your choice and make your journey start. If you can do that and you can overcome the failures and you overcome the disasters that will undoubtedly get you along the way, and you just put things out there, then you will start to build experience and you will start to build momentum quite quickly. That espouses the formula to all of this, but some people will not take that first step and that's what I specialize in helping them to do.

Steve Larsen:
I want to just clap and shout. I just agree so much with what you're saying right now because its the journey we all go through with this. I think its we all want to be on the laptop on the beach making the millions, with no shoes on kind of thing. That's why a lot of people get into this, but its just like every other business. Russell and I were talking yesterday and I was telling him its amazing to me how many people think that just because, they think online business and offline business are two different categories. The fact that its online does not make it a business, the fact that its online doesn't make it. It was a business without that, just putting it offline or online is just a medium. Its just a channel for actually putting your products out there.

Danny Walsh:
Exactly, and you've got to liken it to a department store but every door leads to the same till as it were, to the same register. No matter which door you go through, it still leads you up to the same bank or the same register or wherever. People look at their offline business as the mainstay, people are coming through the door they're spending money and then they've got little tiny bit of stuff going on online. You're like if we put some simple things in place on the online side, you can double or significantly increase your income. Again, sometimes there's reluctance especially if somebody's used to working in that offline traditional thing. Its frustrating when people spend £5,000 on newspaper advertising and they can't even track who has read it. You have nowhere to track who has read that newspaper.

Steve Larsen:
Is it even working?

Danny Walsh:
Exactly. You can say to them, "How many visitors have you had from your last newspaper advertising campaign?" "One or two maybe, its hard to tell." Let's give away some cash as a lead. We'll give you £10 to spend in our offline business, or $10 to spend or $20 to spend. Complete this simple form. We've done this and the guy rings me up, he says, "Make it stop. It's only been two hours and I've got a hundred people with £10 in their hand, with address phone number every other thing that I could need as a business owner to market to these people. Stop it."

He spent $35 or something on Facebook Ads. £5,000 on newspaper and people continue to pour their money into things that are not even proven to work. He doesn't know whether it's worked or not. Something like ClickFunnels and tracking it with proper analytics and Facebook retargeting and all the rest of it. You can see instantly how your offers are working and who's responding and such like, so dragging these people up from the dark ages and saying look guys. This is very possible for you if you stick to some basic principles.

Don't make it overly complicated and just take some of your best stuff, or if you haven't got physical stuff you can give away, give away coupons or vouchers or cash. People will flock to your business, because you can get them through the door. Do the free plus shipping or some sample or some way to get them in, and you'll get a lot better return than you will of a newspaper or radio commercial, or whatever it is that's costing you a fortune.

Steve Larsen:
The market really is fatigued with the old way of doing marketing. I don't want to say old way because its not that it doesn't work, its just its own beast and most people have no idea what they're doing. You help people with ClickFunnels all the time, and I wanted to ask is there a way that you recommend or that you've seen, helps people shortcut the learning curve with ClickFunnels? It makes it just a billion times easier, but there is a little bit of a learning curve.

Danny Walsh:
Get started, that's the first biggest thing you can say. Is actually open the editor and attempt to do something. I've got videos, ClickFunnels have got videos. There's an abundance of videos that show you to the finest detail, then there's the group. Twenty two thousand ClickFunnels users in the group. If between those resources and the fact that you've got probably one of the most easy to use and powerful editors on the internet full stop, period.

Steve Larsen:
Sure.

Danny Walsh:
In front of you, then is it a need that you need to speak to somebody or is it a need that you need to reassess where you're at, or is it a need that you're so cluttered and you've got so many things going on, that you need to disable or remove some of these other things, so you can focus your time? Clearly, something is stopping you from getting started. Once you do get started clearly there's a learning curve, but like I said at the beginning press things, see what happens. Make a test funnel, do things step by step but with anything in ClickFunnels, from reading Dot Com Secrets to using it, to upgrading to Funnel Hacks, whatever it is that you do, the principles are the same and if you look at the funnel hacking principle of seeing a website that you want to model. Thinking there's a blue line across the top, how do I make a blue line across the top? There you go [inaudible 00:27:12] make it a blue background.

Maybe adjust the padding a little bit, now they match. Next section underneath, and do it in a step by step process and it might take you a few hours. It might take you a few weeks, but by the end of that you will have learned everything you need to know. When it gets to the more technical stuff obviously you can reach out to people, there's people like myself and certified consultants, and all guys all over the place who will happily jump in and hep you. The biggest thing is just getting yourself started and getting stuck in, and like I said don't be afraid of pressing things and seeing how the editor responds. Then test your pages. As long as you've got a plan in mind, which underpins all of this, have a plan. Know what you want to o by the end of the process. What does it look like at the end of the deal, at the end of the process? If you can get that foundation in place, then just get stuck into it and you really will find that its not overly difficult to do.

Steve Larsen:
Its funny, I'm laughing. I always tell people to do the same thing, just go start. Someone was asking me a little bit ago, "How do I even get going on this thing?" I said, "This is how I got started. I just found a page that I liked and I decided I would just clone it, pixel by pixel. The whole way down." I was learning all this stuff and I got into ClickFunnels right after they left Beta. I'm sure you're a long time user also and I have hits.

My wife and I are on a date and we were hanging out, and she wanted to watch a movie but my mind just kept going back to this ClickFunnels thing. I was having a hard time focusing on the fact that I was on a date. She's like, "Hey, let's watch a movie." There's no way she didn't notice but I pulled my computer up on the side and I was doing stuff, I ended up cloning the entire homepage of GetResponse, GetResponse the email auto responders. Just pixel by pixel the whole way through, and I was like holy cow. At the end of it I was like I could do this with anything. This is fantastic.

Danny Walsh:
That's the thing, whether you're on a date and its a bit boring or whatever it is, you're just funnel obsessed. There's a lot you'll get out of this and obviously with the community and the guys that are supporting. There's no reason why you should be stuck, and certainly if I think what I have to do all those years ago to put one website online and the costs. If you wanted custom designs doing, there was no such thing as Fiverr. There's all of the things that you take for granted now when it comes to ClickFunnels and whatnot, but it can't really e much easier and I'm sure it'll get easier and more cooler as time progresses

At this point there's not really much in terms of an excuse, so you get something out there online. As long as you're ethical and you build a relationship with people, and you have some fundamental principles, there's no reason why the stuff won't take off. Again, don't limit yourself to one thing. You've got to look at multiple income streams and there's things like affiliate marketing and al the rest of it, what you can do to bring additional income into your business really.

Steve Larsen:
Its so true. I want to thank you for this, I've been taking notes like crazy. I just want to hit on those three things you said again, your three core principles. Technology mist work.

Danny Walsh:
Yeah, technology must work.

Steve Larsen:
Number two, you go to get the right offer in front of the right people, which is just the most basic. You have to do that, you'll waste so much money if you don't do that. Then number three, build a solid relationship. That's awesome, thanks for saying all you have on this. This has really been helpful. Where can people learn more about you again? Its dannywalsh.co.uk right?

Danny Walsh:
Yeah, that's my main site but I do have free videos that I do, and tutorials. I've got a members site as well again, all powered by ClickFunnels and people are obviously are welcome to join it. Do a weekly live call and working in partnership with quite a few guys who are also using ClickFunnels. I literally do support, I would imagine forty to fifty ClickFunnels users, plus the rest of the guys I support. There's a lot of people moving over from WordPress to ClickFunnels, and I coined the hashtag ClickFunnels pays the bills. Feel free to let that surface around, but it literally does pay the bills. A pleasure to be on the show, really.

Steve Larsen:
Thank you so much. I've been looking forward to this and I'm sorry we had to reschedule tons of times.

Danny Walsh:
It's been good and hopefully, like I said if anybody needs me, needs any help or support just feel free to reach out. It's been a pleasure.

Steve Larsen:
Awesome, thank you so much and definitely go check out Mr Danny Walsh. I appreciate that.

Danny Walsh:
Thanks Stephen.

Steve Larsen:
All right, bye bye.

Danny Walsh:
Bye bye,

Speaker 2:
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