STEVE:
Welcome, everyone. Today I have a very special guest. I'm very excited. I actually have only met her only two weeks ago. It was pretty cool actually. I felt an immediate connection. Anyway, this is Jennifer Goodwin.
How you doing?

JEN:
Good. How are you?

STEVE:
Fantastic. I'm doing really, really well. I was scrolling through Facebook, it was about two weeks ago, and ... I don't know if I've told you this yet, but I was scrolling through Facebook, and I saw an ad that you had out. It was ad for vets. I can't remember exactly what the ad was saying, but it said something like, "Hey, here is a way for vets to launch their businesses online." I immediately was like, "Whoa, this is so cool. Someone's going for this market?" I didn't know anyone who's been going for that. It's such a needed thing, being in the military myself. How did you even get into that?

JEN:
Absolutely. I grew up very patriotic. I didn't realize until this year that the veterans were my ideal client. How it happened was, I was always trying to help veterans that were, military guys and gals that needed help with the internet marketing and getting themselves to the next level. Most recently, I was volunteering at a local homeless veteran shelter where some guys and gals were in transition. I said ...

Well, a little back story. Three years ago I was on a motorcycle, my first ride, and I was life-flighted off the highway.

STEVE:
Oh, my gosh. Three years ago?

JEN:
Three years ago. Twenty-five, 30 minutes into my first ride with a friend on Highway 95. We were set at 70 miles per hour. Road debris came out of everywhere. An 18-wheeler had blown his tire, and we couldn't avoid one of the pieces. It flattened the back tire. Needless to say, I took a nice, pricey helicopter ride to the trauma center, so I actually lost my business.

I was down for a lot of time. Financially, physically, emotionally, I had to go through that trauma. I had a lot of time to think through in recovery, and I made a few decisions about my business when I got back to it, which I really just got back to it full-time this past January. I decided that I was going to partner with the right people and never sit on my ideas and make sure that I was launching all the things that I had written down in a book and that were collecting dust.

One of the other pieces was that I was going to give back. Even though I was sort of starting over, I knew what I was doing. I had 15 years in the business. I was relaunching, but I still wanted volunteering and giving back to be part of that.
I was literally driving to a veteran center in Jacksonville, Florida and just camping out in the chow hall every Thursday and saying, "Whatever you have, just bring it to me. Just bring me your website needs. Bring me your resume needs. You got a new computer and you need to know how to run it? Just bring it to me." Even some of the staff there who weren't veterans would say, "Hey, I'm going for this other job interview," and so I just made myself available every Thursday. It didn't feel like work.

Then fast forward a couple months. A friend of mine that's pretty well-known in the veteran space, he's on the History Channel and got quite a following on social media, said, "I've got four veterans that need, like, yesterday." Just working through those clients, it just didn't feel like work. It just felt so easy, because they're so loyal. They're so grateful. Usually what they're inventing, we're writing about, is something I believe in, so I re-branded my business to be all about serving veterans.

STEVE:
That's incredible. I love that. I've noticed that a lot of the people that I interview, they never ask permission to go do something like that. You just showed up. You just sit down and every Thursday ... How long did you do that before you went to that re-brand?

JEN:
I only did that for a couple months, because I actually ended up moving out of the area and haven't found a new local shelter to go help with. Let me see. I believe I started ... January, February, March. Probably about two and a half months into that I re-branded. I was also talking with some coaches. Actually, one of the coaches I was speaking with, a female coach, she was a veteran ... or she is a veteran. She said, "Jen, I got my start helping my fellow Army soldiers, starting their businesses when they got out." I said, "This is my ideal client, the more I think about it." I said, "Is it that easy?" She said, "Yeah."

Literally, within 24 hours ... I couldn't even wait to re-brand everything. I went to the team and to the social media images, and I started changing it all up. The first batch was a little bit rough and amateur. I just wanted to get camouflage in there.

STEVE:
Yeah. Yeah.

JEN:
That's probably one of the ones you saw or maybe one of the newer ones. Yeah, it was pretty quick.

STEVE:
Yeah. That's incredible. It's interesting that that's the way it worked out. I remember when I went through basic ... I'm obviously business-minded. I really enjoy it. It's my obsession a little bit. I was going through basic training, and it's hard at certain points. One of the things that kept me going mentally and emotionally was talking about business ideas with all these other guys. I ended up having it, and all these guys that would sit around, and we would just talk about some different strategies. To this day, I still talk to some of them, and they're trying to do business stuff. It's definitely clearly an awesome market. A lot of them are go-getters. Anyways, that's super cool. That's fantastic.

JEN:
Yep.

STEVE:
One of the things I've noticed too, though, is that immediately ... You were doing the same thing with me. I was blown away with that, "Hey, do you need help with this? Do you have VAs for this? I have teams for this." You are an absolute master with VAs. How did you get that way?

JEN:
Thank you for saying that. I love helping people. They ask me, what's my agenda sometimes, very few, but I say, "I just like getting a break from the paying clients, who are so demanding." It's like a break to just pull away and just go help people for free with no expectations, so thank you for that.
I have been an entrepreneur my whole life. My father was an entrepreneur, made some money in the door and window business. Very early on ... Well, not too early. I guess my late 20's, because I went and got an architectural degree, a drafting degree, from 26 to 28, but as soon as I came out of that, I worked for someone else for six months, and that was it. I had worked for people previously, from 16 to 28, but I knew at that moment I did not want to work for somebody else, and I couldn't work for somebody else. It just felt like my soul was in jail.

STEVE:
Yeah. I like that.

JEN:
I left the corporate world, and I was working for an engineering company, and I co-advertised. I didn't even think you could do this, but I rented an exhibitor space at the kitchen and bath show in Orlando, Florida, way back when, and shared it with one of my competitors. I was turning away 95% of my lead. I was so lucky, because what I was providing was CAD drawings and artist renderings to interior designers and kitchen designers. They didn't have anybody that was serving them. Usually people that were drafts people were going to work for architects and engineers, and so the designer industry was left hanging. I filled that void.

I was turning away so much business, I knew back then that I had to learn how to scale my business and learn how to use the software that was out there that was going to help me scale my business by leveraging the tools and the people. Very early on I started to outsource to other drafters and just caught the bug of outsourcing and marking up the work and being the middle man really. I was outsourcing right away. I ran with the CAD services for about four or five years. After teaching myself everything on the internet, everything that I could at that time ... The internet was much smaller then.

STEVE:
Yeah.

JEN:
It was easier to master. I re-branded into Internet Girl Friday, and I've been doing that ever since. Again, I did lose my business for about two and a half years, but I've been back at it now, and I have virtual assistants and developers. It's great, because in my mind that's the only way to scale your business, is to have a team to support you. That's what we're doing.

STEVE:
Yeah, and you clearly have that. It's so fascinating, though. I wish I could pull up the text real quick that you sent me. It was a long list of stuff that you were asking me if I needed help with. I was like, "Man, she's got the hook-ups."

JEN:
Yeah, I would say, if it touches the web, we can do it and mean it. People come to me and say, "Well ..." I have friends that, you know how the friends and family never know what you're doing with the internet, and they don't get it.

STEVE:
Yeah.

JEN:
I have a friend that called me. I said, "Listen, I've got 20 minutes to talk. What's up?" He said, "Sounds like you're too busy and you can't take on my work." I said, "No, I have a team for that. I can do it. We can do it." I'm hiring people all the time. There's no shortage of people out there that want to work, whether they're US-based or they're offshore. There's hundreds of thousands of workers out there that ... You can go to Fiverr. You can go to so many different sites and get people to help you in your business, and I take advantage of that.

STEVE:
That's amazing. When I was in college, that's really when I started getting the bug for this. Well, that's when I started getting traction, I should say. I always had the bug. I went and I started hiring these different VAs. My buddy and I, we were building this Smartphone insurance business, and we went and we hired out this guy. He was just like, he wasn't very good. We paid him $500 to build this really small thing. It wasn't big at all, and we got it back and it was awful, like, "What the heck?" That's why I started using click funnels, so I could do it on my own.
Then another time came up and another time came up. I was like, "Man, I'm really striking out with these VAs." I'm curious how it is that you actually go find good ones, because that's a skill in and of itself that I don't think people realize you need to have. Not all VAs obviously are built the same. What process are you taking up? What are you having them do? How are you vetting the VAs for your vets?

JEN:
There's a couple different ways. I hate to say this, but I don't like the big outsourcing sites. I think it's really hard to find that needle in the haystack, and you have to spend a lot of time sorting through people that are really just looking at the dollars per hour; right? They're like, "No, I can't make anything less than $8 an hour." They overbid. I just don't like those sites. I never had great luck with them ever.

STEVE:
That's totally the opposite than what everyone else says, so that's interesting.

JEN:
I've done it for 15 years. If I had an army of 100 virtual assistants, do you know how much money I'd be making? If it was that easy, I would have just hired a team of people from there, but I've spoken to people for 15 years from those big sites.

What I find works for me is I enter a couple of virtual assistant groups on Facebook. Whenever I have a need for somebody, I post the job on my blog post, and I'll send a link out to the virtual assistant groups and say, "Hey, by the way, this week I'm looking to talk to people that have skills in ..." whatever skill I'm looking for that week. That's worked out well, because I only get a handful. I might get 10, 15, 20 applicants. It's totally manageable. I have a forum on the blog post. I'm not going to field emails or phone calls or be scattered.

I want them to just dump their info into a form, and then I can go back and look at, and I can say, "All right. I'd love to talk to these three out of 10 on Skype," or somehow. They say, "Hire two and fire one." Try a couple people out just on a small ... I work through baby steps when it comes to hiring a virtual assistant. Let's take one tiny task, not, "Oh, I found you. Here's all my money. Here's all my tasks. Talk to you in a week." That will just go wrong every time. You want to start with, "Can you contact me on Skype," because that's a requirement. That's my office.

If they tell me they don't have Skype, they're out. It's that simple. You have to work my way in my company with my tools. I'm flexible, but you have to show up in my time zone. You have to speak my language. We start at the very beginning and make sure that those pieces are there before moving on to, "Okay, here's how you get into my project management system, and here's where you find your first task." I work closely alongside them and say, "Stay with me right here on Skype. Tell me, 'Jennifer, I'm starting Task A right now, and I plan to be done in 15 minutes, and I'll ping you back when I'm done, so you can review it.'"

It's really micromanaged in the first week. As you get more comfortable and as they're trained a little bit more, then they can work on their own time. I literally do that every morning for about two hours, Monday through Friday, from, roughly, 9 to 11 every day, which is a lot of time when you think about it. I'm also mentoring virtual assistants, so I'm not paying the ones that I mentor that I identify in the group as being really smart and might have come from 15, 20 years of past corporate experience, so they have skills. They just don't realize how to translate them to the internet.

Again, I love helping people, so I say, "Come on in as an apprentice. You can follow along. You can invite your friends to sit in your house and watch. It doesn't matter." I've hired people from that group as well.

STEVE:
Wow. That's fascinating. If the person is good, they might have friends that are good. Might as well bring the friends along and train them too.

JEN:
Yeah. I tell them, "Listen, I'm looking to build teams, so if you already know someone ..." I had this conversation just last night with one of Filipino VAs. She's amazing. I said, "I'm about to hire a few more, so if you know anybody ..." She's like, "Well, actually, I do have three assistants, and they work in my house with me. It's my goal to help these single moms that need some more income to get going." I said, "Great. Let's ramp them up." Yeah.

STEVE:
Awesome. That's fantastic. That's amazing. Eventually, what started happening was I was like, man, I literally have spent thousands and thousands of dollars on VAs for stuff that was not very good work. I was not happy with it. I started going through, not the same process at all. That's genius. I'm going to have to ... That's absolutely incredible.

I'm going to have to think more about that and try and figure out how I can do that too, or I'll just ask you, hire you to do it.
Do you have a particular freelance or VA site, I guess, that you like more than others, Fiver, Freelancer, Upwork?

JEN:
I love Fiverr. Actually, this morning before this podcast, I was looking on Fiverr for a virtual assistant but only because in the virtual assistant groups that I'm in on Facebook, I saw someone saying, "I'm not getting any traction as a VA on Fiverr. What am I doing wrong?" I clicked on the link which took me to their Fiverr account, and I said, "I'm willing to try you out. Contact me on Skype." Again, that's my first requirement.

I use Fiverr for other services. If my dev team is too busy with some bigger projects, and I need to knock out some quick keyword research or a quick image, I can go to Fiverr and I can find it. It's just like any other service where you can see the ratings, but for some reason they have, they've made their user interface so easy to navigate and quickly see, "Oh, wow, they've had 200 projects. They're five stars on all the reviews for all those projects. I'm pretty sure they're returning good work, and it's dollars." Who can't lose $5; right? We spend that on a coffee sometimes.

It's different from going to the big sites like Upwork and saying, you have to put your whole job description. You have to say, this is 30 hours a month or 30 hours a week, whether it's permanent. They make you jump through so many hoops before you even find someone. Then you might get a thousand applicants, and you have to sort through all that. It's too much work, where you can go to Fiverr and just browse really quickly and click on someone. You don't even have to click on someone and contact them, but you can just put your mouse over their little portfolio image, and it shows you how many jobs, how many stars. Very quickly you can jump into having an assistant or a vendor.

I know there's a lot of controversy with using offshore vendors versus keeping it in the USA, and I do keep most of my work, 99% of my work, in the USA. Even my Indian development team is in the USA, strangely. When you're restarting, which is the mode I'm in now after the accident, you need that payroll break; right? You want to have assistants so you can scale your business, but you can't go out and afford the $25-an-hour United States VA, so it does help to go offshore. I do like the Filipino virtual assistants. They are super-smart, super-talented. Their English is perfect. They are very friendly and very accommodating. There's no language barrier like I've experienced with other countries. They're extremely affordable.

Here's a little trick that I've done. I've gone to Wikipedia and typed up, "Countries with the lowest hourly rate," and it's mind-blowing and scary that there's some countries or areas of their countries where 50-cents-per-hour is the minimum wage.

STEVE:
Oh, man.

JEN:
That's not saying you can just go there and find a virtual assistant. Virtual assistants have to be a booming industry in a certain country for it to be valuable to you, but the Philippines are great.

STEVE:
That's incredible. There's a workaround that I have found that helps. I did a whole podcast on this actually earlier, because it's a frustrating thing to go through. The biggest things I've learned from Russell, you got to have people. The biggest things I've learned from my own things, you've got to have people. Otherwise, you as the entrepreneur get bogged down. You can't handle all of the tasks. This is definitely valuable information to hear. There was a workaround that I, to using VAs that I was figuring out too. Do you use Freelancer.com much?

JEN:
I have, but, again, I didn't use it much.

STEVE:
Yeah. It's a little bit challenging. There was one feature that saved my butt on a lot of different things, and it was the fact that you can post contests. That's actually pretty cool. I needed all these different images made, or I needed a tee-shirt design. I basically said, "Hey, I really want to motivate people, so here's the prize is $100 and everyone submit your work. I'm just going to choose one guy." It was fantastic.

I got 80 or 90 submissions, and the whole week during the contest, I could talk back to them and say, "This looks good but change this." "This looks good but change this." I could rate all of their work, which was public to everyone else. All the work, the freelancers started pushing towards a different path as they watched my comments to other people.

That's really the only trick I have for VAs. I haven't done anything else that you do with it. It kind of works, but what you do is a lot cooler, actually.

JEN:
I don't know. The contests sound pretty cool. I remember seeing them on Topcoder years ago when I was looking to build a software, and someone said, "If you don't have unlimited budget to build the software, present it as a contest." I thought that was fascinating, where they have a contest for one part of the software and a contest for another part. Then they have a contest at the end to put all the parts together. I thought that was fascinating.

STEVE:
That's incredible. Hey, there's a lot of people obviously who are trying to get into this space who want to do what you're doing. I know you alluded to it before, but what would be the first step to getting a good VA?

JEN:
I would definitely check out the virtual assistant groups in Facebook. It's a close-knit community. People can vouch for other people. There's some names at the top that know a lot of the VAs in the industry, so they actually have requests for proposal boards that you could sign up to and submit your work. Then you know you're getting a qualified VA, or you can find me and I'll point you in the right direction. I would check sites like FreeeUp. That's with three E's, F-R-E-E-E-U-P.com.

STEVE:
I've never heard of it. Awesome.

JEN:
It's new. It's getting a face-lift. The site is only about eight months old, I think. They've got some big plans. Nathan Hirsch, who's out of Orlando, Florida, he's doing very well with it. You can get VAs as low as $5 and up to $50 per hour, depending on what skillset you require.

Check out the Filipino ... I can't remember the domain names off the top of my head, but there are a lot of Filipino virtual assistant sites out there that you can just Google it up, and it will pull up some of the top ones. They really are a great crowd for your everyday administrative stuff. I'm literally teaching my VAs now how to set up some of the beginning integrations of click funnel.

STEVE:
That's awesome.

JEN:
I have a checklist, and they can go through and connect the SMTP and the domain and do some of the basic setup. Then I can take it from there and build a funnel.

STEVE:
Fantastic. Just because you mentioned it, how are you using it with click funnels? I went through and looked at your site, and it looks fantastic. It's very clean. HowToGoVirtual; right? Dot-net?

JEN:
That's the academy site that we're launching. The services site, where all of our clients go through is InternetGirlFriday.com, and we're just like any other entrepreneur. We have multiple different sites.

What happened was, I needed to get all of this information into other people's hands. I've got 15-plus years on the internet. Of course, you want to package that up and provide it online as a video course or some type of academy environment. I created a class to teach people the four steps of getting your business website launched, because you know how customers get confused about the internet. The internet is so big now, and there's so many steps, and the algorithms. They get approached by so many vendors. "What should I be paying for," and I said, "I've got to find a way to simplify this."

Back in 2010, I think it was, I came up with a 12-step plan. Just a way to categorize everything you do on the internet came to 12 categories. That's it. I just wanted to show people, "Okay, Step 1 is your research and your keyword research and your competitive analysis. Step 12, at the end, is analytics." Everything falls somewhere in between, so that they had something that they could follow along. Not that every strategy goes in order, but the first four I call, "The foundation." You've got to do your keyword research if you're going to launch a website, and your competitive analysis, and you have to know what people are looking for, what your target market is looking for. Step 1.

Step 2, building your website in a blueprint first. I think that's so important, because you need to get the SEO and the keywords that were revealed in the first step into your website. If you just hand your website over to someone, they might make it beautiful for the humans, but they're neglecting what robots need to see through Google.

STEVE:
Right.

JEN:
That's Step 2, build the blueprint. Step 3, build the website. Step 4, connect it to the search engines and some directories. Now you've got your foundation to go offsite and do all your marketing with whatever strategy you're deploying. I package that up into a course. I'm glad that I had the time off that I did, because when I came back to it, there was click funnel, and it was like, "Ah." Finally there; right?

The funnel isn't new. The strategy isn't new. It's a little different, because, again, the internet is bigger and more complicated, but a sales funnel is still a sales funnel; right? We didn't reinvent the funnel. We just put the software together in one place, like Russell.
All the steps that you used to have to do, you used to have to literally build a landing page, usually in HTML, because you needed it to be a certain way. If you needed a green check-mark versus a red check-mark, it was all piecework. Then you'd have to go to the next step, and you'd have to connect your email responder.

Everything was daisy-chained together. It was so overwhelming, that most people didn't launch, because there was so much work. Even me, who has a team, knew how to do it for so many years, I could never launch, because it was overwhelming.

STEVE:
Yeah.

JEN:
ClickFunnels comes on the scene and it's all in one place. I don't use the term, "All-in-one" lightly. I don't give credit to many softwares. It's not an all-in-one where you're billing and all your other things are in there, but for the funnel it's all in one. Everything is literally in one place, and it's been so exciting to set up and to get going and to see that now I can literally wake up at 3 am, have an idea, and within two hours, have it going and some ads going, and it's launched. That's the exciting part. My clients are excited about it to.

STEVE:
That's so cool. That's so awesome. I remember when I first started putting things together for ... It was an artist actually that built the first site/funnel four or five years ago. I remember spending two hours ... No, it was two days, two full days, trying to make WordPress act like a squeeze page.

JEN:
I know.

STEVE:
It was the most hellish thing. It was awful. I remember just settling with something. I can't remember what it was. Neither of us liked it. I'm not a coder or programmer. I can read it. I can edit it, but I'm not at all a programmer, at all. I was like, "This is terrible." I almost gave up on the internet a little bit, because it was so hard. Then when click funnels came around, I remember I saw the presentation that Russell gave mine. I probably shouldn't have done this, but I didn't talk to my wife about it. I immediately bought it, and I started using it and building for other people. I was like, "This is the craziest thing." Now I dream in funnel editor. It's the funniest thing.

JEN:
Same thing, yeah, because back when you were creating your old landing page, which, again, is just one tiny piece of the whole funnel, I often went back and forth to, "Gees, I've got to hire a developer just to create a landing page page template in my WordPress?" Then that never got done. Then you go over to the third-party platforms that are providing fully landing pages. You're like, "I don't want to spend another $50 a month just to do this one piece, because by the time I'm done with the whole funnel, I'm spending a thousand dollars a month just to get it all connected. Yeah, it's been such a blessing, and I'm so excited.

STEVE:
I think my record so far with sitting here next to Mr. Russell Brunson, I think the fastest we put a funnel out is 45 minutes or something like that, a full one. It's like there's no way. He and I will still sit back and be like, "I can't believe we have this software," and he's the CEO of it. We'll be like, "Man, look what we just did. Look what we pulled off." He's like, "This little change used to cost me 10 grand. We're going to do it in 30 minutes."

JEN:
I remember testing my first webinar funnel, and I didn't have it completely set up, but at some point I got my reminder email, and I said, "Oh, look, how cool is that? I'm already getting the emails automatically." I didn't even set up the email, and I clicked on the link inside that said, "Your webinar is starting now." I clicked it 20 minutes late. When I did click it, it went right into the webinar that was playing, at the 20-minute mark. I said, "This is magic."

STEVE:
Yeah. So cool. I know I said we'd keep it to 30 minutes. You are amazing. I can't believe all the stuff you're pulling off is incredible, manager and builder of teams. I'm looking at all these sites right now. It's absolutely incredible and just crazy impressive. Where should people go if they want to follow you, learn more about you, even obviously use some of your services.

JEN:
Yeah. If you go to InternetGirlFriday.com, then you can find my social media, which is everywhere. We have Periscope and Instagram and YouTube and all that, and follow me on any of those. We're very active there. InternetGirlFriday.com is the service's site. You can contact me there. You can say, "Hey, I don't need to hire you, but I have a question," and I'll be glad to help.

STEVE:
Awesome. I appreciate it so much. Thanks. This is spur-of-the-moment, but this has been awesome.

JEN:
Sure. Thank you.

STEVE:
All right. Hey, we'll talk to you later.

JEN:
Okay. Bye-bye.

 

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All right, all right, all right.

Today I've got a sweet story for you guys.

I was, so it's Monday right, and I was coming out of church and yesterday I was in church and this guy and I just got in this conversation. I've seen him before. I've haven't really talked to him that much though.

Great guy. I was sitting there and actually we were walking out and our little kids were running around screaming like crazy right and he goes, "You're in the Army right?" I said, "Yes".

He goes, "I don't know if I should publicly say that but I just did so." He goes, "Man, like is that cool and stuff?" I was like, "Just like anything there's pros and cons you know. There's really fun times and there's really boring times." He goes, "You do marketing stuff right?"

I said, "Yeah, yeah, yeah." He goes, "So what do you do?" I start telling him. I go, "Hey, I build sales funnels and I do this and this and this." He was like, "This is really really interesting."

I could tell like something was bothering him. He looked over and I asked, him, "What do you do for work? You do like supply chain management stuff?" He was like, "Yeah, yeah, yeah."

I was like, "I almost did that in college but like you guys are crazy smart. Like you guys have so much" ... I remember my supply chain classes that I took being up all night making these ridiculously huge Excel models. They were cool but man it was rough. It was super super rough to do that stuff. My brain ... I wasn't cut out for it. I got bored really quick.

He goes, "That's just the thing man. Like I'm so, I don't know, I can't say what it is." I was like, "Are you just really really bored?"

He goes, "Yeah". He goes, "I'm so bored. I hate my job. I hate what I do. I don't ..."

He got animated. It was the first time I'd seen him kind of open up. He and I have spoken before but you know small talk. We're not really friends or whatever. It's not that we're not but we just haven't done anything.

Anyways he starts opening up to me. He's telling me how bored he is with his life. He said, "The only think that I like about my job is the fact that it provides for my family. I like that. I hate going to work though. I hate doing what I do."

He looked at me and goes, "You are so lucky." I felt like, I mean I didn't know how to react to that because yes, I am.

He was like, "You wake up every single day and you're excited to go to work." I was like freaking yes man. It's not even seven o'clock in the morning right now and I'm all ready at the office.

I get up early to just crush it because you guys know that I have a normal job on the side so I do this in the mornings and I build sales funnels in weird times of the day so that I can keep moving towards my dreams and make extra money and it works. I make a lot of extra money with this. He looks at me and he's like, "You're so lucky man."

He's like, "And you're in the Army. How's that? Is that super fun?" It's just like, it's exactly what I said before man, it's like, there's really good times and there's really boring times.

Anyways, there's a book by Tim Ferriss. I'm sure you guys have all heard it, The 4-Hour Workweek. In that book, the first time I read it, I thought this was kind of a weird comment that Tim Ferriss said in there and Tim Ferriss, I remember he said, "The real thing that we're fighting in this life is boredom." I thought, I don't know if I really agree with that. I don't know. I wish I could remember the rest of the quote. I should have looked it up before I started recording.

He said, "The real thing we're fighting in this life is boredom. We should do things because it excites us and that's the only reason."

I started thinking about why I am where I am and that actually is one hundred percent spot on true that I started learning how to drive traffic because I thought it was really freaking cool and I could send traffic over to tons of different sites and make money.

I remember the first time that I made money online. I went to sleep. My buddy and I was working on stuff and I had just convinced my internet marketing teacher to not let me, I said, "Hey, please don't let me come back, I don't want to go back to class. I've all ready been studying this stuff for awhile. You guys are talking about the basics and it's killing me."

I said, "No offense but can I go do this instead right?" I drew up a plan and it was just a sales funnel. I had an opt in page, an order from, there was an up sale and something else. It was for affiliate products right? I said, "This is what I want to go build and I wasn't to do this instead of your class."

I can't believe he let me do it but I thank God every day that he said yes because he very well could have just changed my life right there, which he probably did because it worked. I went out and I built it and I remember that night I was like, "Gosh, I hope this work."

I sent traffic to it. I spent fifty bucks which to me was a huge amount of money. Fifty dollars in traffic and I went to sleep and I woke up the next day and immediately pulled up my computer and I was looking at it.

I was like, "Holy Crap!" There was fifty dollars back in my account. I broke even. There were seventeen people who had seen it and had opted in but didn't purchase so I gained seventeen contacts and fifty dollars.

I was like, "This is crazy. Oh my gosh." I was a little bit disheartened because I didn't make money right? All I got was contacts. I didn't understand how cool it was and what I had just pulled off the very first time that I had tried it.

We call that a self-liquidating offer. I had made no money but had gained customers, so my cost to acquire a customer was zero which to any VC firm or whatever, is nuts.

I went through and I could re-market to those people and I could make more money with them. Anyways, I was going nuts. I got super excited and I started going and driving traffic for Paul Mitchell that was local there and got introduced to eight more Paul Mitchell's through California.

My buddy and I started building websites for some of their upcoming celebrities who were being on TV. I did it because it was exciting. I was fighting boredom and my brain works at a billion miles an hour.

You guys can probably hear it.

Sometimes I talk super fast but I just, I was fighting boredom. That's what you should do. Go fight boredom. That's the real enemy is boredom.

Gosh, I hate going to ... The reason I love my job so much, my normal job, is because it's different every day. I do a different thing every single day. It's the reason I chose marketing.

I remember I was talking to a professor and a teacher. I know I talk about college a lot but there were some things I really liked about college and things I hated and I'm not necessarily that old.

I'm only twenty-eight. For me college was not that long ago and so there's always lessons I still did learn from college. I'm glad I went and I'm glad I did it.

There was a teacher that I sat down with and I was like, "Look, I don't know what I want to do. I can see myself being in finance. My brain can handle that stuff a little bit. I can see myself being in supply chain. That stuff's really interesting to me too.

Marketing is interesting but it seems like the one that I would actually like the least." I can't believe I said that, which is very funny. He's like, "You're built for marketing." I said, "What? Aren't they like a dime a dozen?" He said, "Well yes, but you don't need to be."

I was like, "There's no tangible skill that comes with marketing though." You don't study marketing and come out and go, this is x, y, z like engineers who say, "Hey, I can make you a blueprint. We'll get it going over to an architect and then you've got a building." Marketing people don't do that stuff. I said, "What do you guys do?"

He's like, "The reason I think you're going to like it is because there's literally a different problem every single day."

He was the chief marketing officer of Denny's for a long time and Little Caesar's. He's actually the guy that invented cheese crust. You know the cheese filled crust. He thought about that and he was like, "Hey, let's just try it out."

He told me that for a long time there's not string cheese in any stores in America because he kept telling all the managers to go buy it up because they exploded their projections.

People wanted cheese filled crust. Anyways, random story. Anyways, he told me that in marketing you get to go solve a new problem every day.

My problem right now is I'm trying to find a good Blogger. I don't like writing but there's some articles that I need written all right. I'm going to go solve that problem.

Another problem I'm having right now is I want to go find one more awesome sales guy that I can manage all my other sales guys with and pay more than the others. That's a problem I'm trying to solve right now. It's fun because I can go out and okay, how am I going to get new blood into my business.

How am I going to sell more sales funnels. How am I going to get more people to try ClickFunnels because I absolutely love it and I do get a little bit of commission with it. That's my business model and that's how I make money. How am I going to that?

I get to think of all all these cool problems and come up with all these cool strategies and really the number one thing to fight in this life is boredom when it comes to professionally.

Boredom.

Don't be bored.

If you're bored at your job go quite it. I'm serious. Go, maybe not right off the bat. But seriously go get a book that has a really interesting title. If you want to go make money in a different way then start.

Holy crap, start. Life's too short to do stuff you freaking hate.

The guy yesterday I was talking to was saying, "Hey, you're super lucky and I just hate my job." I said, "Well there's some books I'll give to you if you want that really have pushed me forward.

The books that have really made the huge difference in my life." He's like, "Well yeah, that sounds awesome, let's do that." I was like, "Yes, let me show you what I do and let's see if we can kind of save you man because that sucks." I can't remember the name of the book. I'm looking at the bookshelf here.

Gosh, I can't remember the name of it. You know, anyways, one of the major lessons. It's on the back of the cover. It says ... Oh, it's a book called, How the World Sees You, Seven Reasons to Discover How the World Sees You. I just want to read these real quick.

The first one is, the world's not changed by people who sort of care. The world is not changed by people who sort of care.

You kind of have to really care. I've talked about that in a previously podcast, how you have to be purposeful.

Number two, you don't learn how to be fascinating, you unlearn boring. Number three, instead of focusing on strengths, highlight your differences. That alone has made me really stand out. There's some things I really suck at. I just would hate to be an account.

I would hate to be a lawyer. There's people who love it so that's great and I'm going to hire them out. Just because I can do something doesn't mean I should. I should do the thing that distinguishes me the most, which is building.

I'm actually quite a good funnel builder. Until I realized that I kind of stayed in the back scenes.

Number four, every time you communicate you're either adding value or taking up space. I hope that you guys think I'm adding value. I'm trying to give you guys cool nuggets and get you motivated to do stuff. Number five, to become more successful don't change who you are, become more of who you are. Number six, if you don't know your value, don't expect others to know it, which is true. I charge ten grand for my sales funnels.

Those are the ones I kind of pre-built for a certain industry. I charge fifteen grand for custom funnels. Until I actually said that for people, I actually worked for free for a long time, which is good. You should go work for free for awhile. Get results, get testimonials, if you're just starting out.

If you don't actually come out and say, "Hey, this is how much this is going to be", before you start building, before you start doing whatever it is you're going to go do. I don't care if you're not building sales funnels but whatever it is you're going to go do, then people aren't going to, they're not going to pay you any money. Number seven, the greatest value you can add is to become more of yourself, which I kind of all ready said that.

This is kind of six things.

The biggest one I wanted to say is that you need to unlearn boring in your own life, not just in your marketing, and then just because someone says, like working nine to five is awesome but it doesn't always take me eight hours to get my tasks done for the day. Go do something else.

Work on something on the side. Instead of focusing on your strengths, highlight your differences. That's like Marketing 101 right there as far as personal branding.

Anyways, I'm kind of ranting now again but I just want you guys to know that the thing you need to be doing is like I said, unlearning boring. Fight boring. You can't, number one you can't be boring in your business but number two, you can't do boring over and over again in your life and expect to maintain potency.

You can't.

Don't be like that guy that I talked to yesterday.

If you hate your job, man, start making moves to quit it. Figure out what you do like. If you need help, here's a trick. What do you think about when you don't need to be thinking about anything?

That's one of the reasons I chose business. That's one of the reasons I chose building stuff. Because I started thinking, holy crap, every time I have nothing to be thinking about, meaning I don't need to be doing homework, I didn't need to be working for a client that I had during college, I was away from home so I wasn't talking to my wife or anything, I wasn't around other people.

The things I would think about was always business related. I was always thinking, "Oh, how could I sell that. How could I do this. How could I do this. Wow, this was a great idea."

I fell into that wow, it's a great idea trap for awhile but when I actually started putting things into action, anyways, it was really, anyways.

Go out and don't, just don't be boring. Just go figure out what it is you want to go do. Figure out what excites you. Think through, what do I think about when I don't need to be thinking about anything. The answer to that it is usually what is really going to excite you. Just follow that trail for a little bit and you'll probably find the answer.

Anyways guys, I want to thank you guys for listening in. As always please go to salesfunnelbroker.com, download some of the free funnels if you don't know where to get started and just tinker with them. You do need to ClickFunnels account but that comes with a free trial when you download that link.

If you have any questions go to the HeySteve page there and you can record right off the browser page of recording to me and it will email that voice recording to me. I kind of vent the questions and if the question pops up on the show, then I will go ahead and send you guys a HeySteve t-shirt.

It's a sweet t-shirt. I'll go through another podcast episode on how I made those t-shirts without really needing to. How I made them not on my own.

Anyways guys, I'll talk to you later and please let me know what you think about this. All right guys, see you.

Not that I won't, but so far, anyone with a "mission statement" actually written and printed out hasn't truly done anything cool yet... So those must not be that helpful...

Good, good morning everybody. How you doing? Welcome to Sales Funnel Radio.

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

Hey what's going on? Actually it's morning time for me. It's about 6:18 in the morning. I actually got here a little bit late. Usually I'm here a little bit early but my mom and sister dropped in from Arizona and we were just talking this morning. Love my mama.

She said something that was really interesting to me though. She goes, "Hey don't kill yourself." She said, "Hey please don't kill yourself."

She got up, my little girls were crying so I got up and got them some milk and got up and got going. I get out here to the office early, about three hours before I need to so that I can work for you guys and record and get some sweet stuff out and make you sweet sales funnels. As I was leaving she stops and she goes, "Hey make sure you don't kill yourself."

I was like, "I appreciate what you're saying and I understand what you're saying but I've been living at this pace for three or four years now."

She goes, "I know, I know, I know, you've been doing it for a while, that's fine.

She goes, "But still make sure you do things for you, make sure you take a break." I said, "Well I want you to know that I really want to make a lot of money in this life."

She goes, "That would be nice." I said, "It would be nice but I'm purposeful about it." I mean it. I want that to happen and I'm doing everything in my life for it to happen. I've sold a lot of sales funnels and I've make good money right, but I want to really crank it up.

She goes, "That would be so nice to make that much and I would like a lot of money too," and I was like, "No you don't get it, unless you say I want to make a lot of money you're not going to, right."

Because everyone that I've talked to and everybody that I've coached and all the people that come to me for help. The people that say, "It would be cool to make that much money one day, ha, ha, ha," and nothing about their pattern changes.

They're not going to make a lot of money. They're not. You won't. You have to actually be willing to tell people, "Yeah I'm doing this and working my butt off so that I can make a lot of money," and I want to do it so I can keep serving people.

That sounds oh really Peter Panny of me or really Robin Hood style right there. Really I just want to be able to go invest in people's businesses and help it grow and help the American economy and stuff like that. I see the Shark Tank guys and I'm like, "Yeah that's totally me, I'm totally going to do that one day." That's all I really want to say. Unless you are serious about it. Unless you're big about it and you say, "Yes I want to go do this and yes I want to make a lot of money and yes I'm going to change my behavior, change what I'm doing," you're not going to make a lot of money. You're not, right.

Right now one of the main reasons I started doing this also is because I have a normal job, and so I wanted you to know that you can still make a crap ton of money on the side, right, that's why I'm three hours before my actual job starts. I'm here early kicking it. Working hard, right, I've been doing this for a long time and it works. All I do is set a clear goal knowing I only have three hours before work starts and I got to go crush it and turn a dollar.

The other thing I wanted you do know is you can do it too but you have to be serious about it. There is a guy ... It stuck out to me a lot. I graduated from BYU Idaho, I got a marketing degree. I remember as one of my last classes this kid, it was a business strategy class and I remember it so clearly and I remember his face because what he said just make me want to spit. I wanted to barf when he said it just ugh.

The guy was sitting near me and he raised his hand and I can't remember what the professor said or whatever. He said ... He raised his hand and he goes, "Yeah, one of the main problems I have, I just have ... Like I know I should probably be an entrepreneur because I just have so many ideas and there's so many things I feel like I should go do and there's all this stuff that I want to get out there and crank out and I just can't stop the ideas from coming."

In my mind I'm like, "Oh my gosh, shut up. Shut up. No one cares about your ideas. I don't care about your ideas. You barely care about your ideas because you're not doing anything about it." Oh man, was it Benjamin Franklin that said, "The value in the idea lies in the using of it." Oh man, I don't care that you have a sweet idea. Nobody cares that you have a good idea. I don't care if you have a good idea if you're listening to this.

Because it's not a good idea unless you've made a dollar with it, right? I share my ideas with everybody, and the whole reason for it is because when you share the idea it becomes more polished and 99.9% of the time no one ever does anything with you idea ever. I think I've had maybe one guy actually go out and do ... Someone who's not already in this game. Someone who's not already working hard and trying to do things in their life. I think I've only ever had one guy who's in that kind of scenario who actually went out and actually tried to do some cool stuff and do some things I was trying.

The other people I have begged. I've sent books to literally. I went back to some of my teachers who are teaching marketing stuff. I don't know if this is a jerk move or whatever, but I sent them some marketing books that told them ... It was a little bit ... It was pretty forward, but I did tell them like look, "I learned more from this book than I did from a lot of the marketing things that you were teaching, just know that, and know that that's the reason why I was hustling like crazy when I was in the middle of your class, and I know you noticed that, right, and ..."

The whole point is you got to hustle. You got to be willing to say, "Yes I want to make a lot of money," and you got to be able to say that to everyone you meet. You have to be able to learn to share your ideas. Your ideas don't mean a thing unless you actually go and do something with them. Share them with everybody. Get people's reactions. That's where the value of it is, right.

It's like when you launch a product. You don't just put a product out there without seeing people ... You know if people are going to buy it. That's suicide right? I learned that the hard way and I'm sure a lot of you guys have also.

Years ago I started making these different ebooks and products and things like that and I just put them out there and no one had heard of it or seen of it ever. Well go figure, no one purchased it for a long time. I had to drive ads hard and things like that. Anyways, all I'm really saying is you got to be purposeful. I know I've said that several times but it's just such a clear lesson to me.

Holy crap, nothing happened in my life until I actually went out and started being purposeful about it and raising my hand to the sky and to the universe and to God and saying, "Look I want it, give it to me please." I am doing everything that would require me to make that kind of money. Sales guys are selling. I'm working and producing. People are fulfilling. I got a business running, right, and I am in the spot where I am most likely to make a ton of money. I'm already making good money but I want to make a lot more.

That's all you got to do. That's all you got to do. It makes me laugh when people say, "Hey you got to write a business plan." Man I hate business plans. I hate resumes. Resumes are crap. Okay, show me what you can do. Go do something. Stop planning dumb documents like, "Here's my business plan and here's my business model and this is our mission." It's like, "Cool, who is actually giving you a dollar, I don't give a crap." That's how I feel, and that's true and I hate those.

Any job I've ever had that has been worth anything has never asked for a resume. The best sales jobs I ever had, the best jobs where I was building for people, they didn't ask for a freaking resume. All I gave them was, "Hey this is what I've done in the past. Go to these URL's, I built that." "Go to this, I did that." "Go to this, I did that." That was my resume. That's all people care about. They don't want to read some piece of paper garbage that tells them, "Yeah in college I had a 3.81 GPA," which is true, but I don't care.

Now that I graduated I got my diploma in the mail an it was a little bit more of a disheartening feeling than I thought it would be. Because I got my diploma and I remember looking at it and just thinking like, "Huh that's interesting." I was expecting to feel like this huge amount of, "Whoo this is nuts." I didn't feel any of that. I was like, "Huh, well college taught me that I can do hard things and it taught me how to problem solve, that's it." It's mostly because I was hustling on my own.

I don't really know what else I learned in college. I'm not saying you shouldn't go to college. Especially if you're a doctor or a lawyer, please go to college. I don't want anyone to be a brain surgeon and have an encyclopedia with doctor terms sitting on the side while they're in the operating room.

I looked at my resume and I was like, "Hmmm, that's kind of cool," and it's just sitting in the same envelope it came in in my dresser. I didn't frame it or anything. I'm sure I will one day or whatever because it was a big thing for me to get it, but I'm just in such a different mentality. I don't really care.

I'm kind of rambling and ranting now, but all I'm telling you is you've got to say and make the choice, "I want money." You're not being prideful when you say that. You're not being greedy when you say that right. There's a really good book called, The Science of Getting Rich. Some of it's a little bit strange and out there. Like everything is energy and money and it's a little bit woo-woo, and I'm not really into that stuff, but there's some really good parts in there though where it talks about how it is the ... How does it say it ... It's the duty of every man who ... Gosh how does it go ... It's the duty of every man to make more money because of the betterment that it will bring him, or something like that.

I read that and I'm like, "Yeah I should not be so ashamed that secretly deep down I have a secret to make a crap ton of money." I've always had that desire and it's been funny because a lot of times when people ask it I feel like I have to coat it with something. "Yeah I'm going to go make a lot of money and reason is I got to ... Like I'm going to go serve like crazy." Which is true. I do want to go serve like crazy and I want to invest in other businesses and I do want to make the economy better and I do want to go to build schools in Africa and I do want to go do all that stuff.

I also want to make a lot of money just because the game is really freaking fun. I get addicted to it. It's just fun to go turn a dollar and deliver a value to someone who gets really stoked about it and who's like, "This is awesome, I really, really want to make this, or I really love your product." That's fun, and I've done that several times now and I enjoy it.

That's the whole reason I built salesfunnelbroker.com, is so that you can go and see a lot of sales funnels that will make you money. I've personally made money with probably about 90% of those funnels. If you go to the free funnel section that's where I keep a lot of obviously free funnels, but those funnel types are the ones I use to make money. I've used just about every one of them.

One of them in there we pulled like sixty grand and it was about two months, but it was all from an email campaign. You know that's not a ton of money but it's a lot and we pulled twenty grand in two days from one. Anyways, go to the free funnel section in salesfunnelbroker.com, you guys can see that. Be purposeful about trying to make money.

There's nothing wrong with that. I'm extremely religious. Money is not the root of all evil. Right, the love of it is. I do love the game and I like to be able to have the means to help others, but I have to tell you though that I'd give it up. This is just ... I was talking to Russell Brunson once and he said ... It was really interesting, he looked at me and he said ... You guys are all going to ask why I was talking and sitting next to him, but that will be for another day.

I was talking with him and he was like, "You know this game is really fun but it's really just something that we use to distract ourselves until we die, right? What really matters is your relationship with your family, with your kids, with God." I am religious and if you're not okay with that just know that I talk about God on this podcast and I don't really care if I offend you. It's similar to the whole be purposeful about making money and don't care what other people think when you say that.

The same thing about God and offending. I don't care if I offend you. Some point you got to stand where you are and say, "This is where I am and I don't care if you don't like it." I'll say things on this podcast. I'll say my opinions. I don't care if it offends you. That's your own choice to be offended. I'm going to tell you and tell the listeners and tell everyone in the world because you're going to hear this podcast soon and the transcriptions will be on the blog and it will be blasted all over Facebook and I'll put two hundred dollars behind this article so more people can read it and I can increase my reach.

Well everybody who's listening to this, know that I don't care if I offend you when I say I'm trying to make a lot of money and I'm religious and I'm a family man and I get up early and I bust my butt every day. That's where I stand.

If you identify with any of that, right, welcome to the podcast. Welcome to Sales Funnel Radio. This is not my first episode, but I'm just saying welcome, thank you for being here and we'll have fun on this journey together so let's go crush it.

Anyways, it's a little bit of a rant, this podcast, but I just wanted to put out there. Write it on a piece of paper. I actually have a white board on the top that says, "World domination." I'm not trying to take over the world, I just think it's funny when I call it that. It's my business plan though. I just said I don't write a business plan but my business plan is one graph. That's it. It's the value ladder. That's it. At the bottom I have the free thing that I'm going to give and then as I move up the next thing I'm going to give that I'll charge for and the next thing I'll give that I'm going to charge for.

Then next to each one of those things on the value ladder is how I'm going to market it. That's it. I guess that's my business plan. I don't have like some cheesy crap that's like, "Here's at Sales Funnel Radio, we will do our best to provide value to every customer, and we'll make ... Every customer will feel great. Customer satisfaction is our number one priority."

It's like I hate that crap. Makes me ugh, makes me want to barf. I hate that. My gosh, corporate crap suck.

Hey guys, I'll talk to you later. I know I've ended this three times already but thank you so much. Please go to the free funnel section on salesfunnelbroker.com. Download any of those sales funnels you want. It does require that you have click funnels but you can get it under a trial, so you can still get on there and make money with it.

Then also if you guys have questions about sales funnels. I have been building them hard core. I don't even know how many hours. Thousands. Thousands and thousands and thousands of hours have been spent in click funnels for me. If you guys have any questions, go to salesfunnelbroker.com, and up in the top you'll see a button. It's either podcast or Hey Steve.

Anyway, go to Hey Steve and you can click a button right on the website and it will record ... Just start talking and it will record a voice mail to me of your question. I listen through those questions and I kind of vet them and if your question gets on the show I send you out a Hey Steve tee shirt. They look super cool. You'll see a picture of it on the actual website there.

Anyways, send your questions over and I would love to get you on the show. I'll give you credit for it. Obviously say your name, where you're from and I'd like to start answering your questions. I get a lot of questions on Facebook anyways. I figured I might as well make them public and possibly answer other people's questions that are out there also.

Anyways, guys I'll talk to you later. Have a good one. Go make money.

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.

Steve:

Hey, everyone. This is Steve Larsen and welcome to Sales Funnel Radio.

 

Speaker 4:

(music starts) 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. (music ends)

 

Steve:

All right you guys. Hey, I am super excited. Today I've got two very special, kind of unique guests on the podcast. As you guys know, a lot of times, I record my own thoughts on things that Russell and I are doing to make marketing awesome, but I like to go and interview other people as well. Today I've got on the show with me, it's Dallin Greenberg and Kristian Cotta. These guys have a pretty awesome unique way for building funnels. Anyways, I want to welcome you. Thanks for joining me.

 

Dallin:

Appreciate it.

 

Kristian:

What up.

 

Steve:

Hey. I actually was thinking about it and Dallin, I don't even remember how we actually met. It wasn't that long ago, was it?

 

Dallin:

Ah, no, not very. Just a couple weeks.

 

Steve:

Just a couple weeks ago.

 

Kristian:

I think Dallin met you the way that him and I kind of joke about he's the black box back alley hacker. He does all the ...

 

Dallin:

If there's someone I want to meet, I find a way.

 

Kristian:

He's the unconventional guy. You won't find his practices in a book or a manual.

 

Steve:

Crap, that makes me a little nervous.

 

Dallin:

Yeah, don't mess ... I told Kristian the other day ...

 

Kristian:

Not black hat, black box.

 

Steve:

Yeah. We can call it whatever we want, right? No, just kidding.

 

Kristian:

Yeah.

 

Steve:

Well, hey thanks for-

 

Dallin:

I told Kristian, the other ... Oh, I'm sorry.

 

Steve:

No, no, you get a say. Thanks for letting me wake you up at the butt crack of dawn and still being willing to share some cool stuff.

 

Dallin:

Yeah.

 

Steve:

How did you guys start meeting or working with each other?

 

Kristian:

I'll let Dallin take that one.

 

Dallin:

Yeah. I was working on a kind of unique project. We had a guy up in Scottsdale that owns a software. He's the developer. It's a software that does algorithmic stock trading and he was stuck with his marketing. He's a big guy. He's got a lot of stuff going, but anyway, we were trying to help him get some plans going.

 

 

I had actually watched Kristian on Periscope. I'd met a lot of guys on Periscope and one day I noticed Kristian was actually in Chandler, which is only a few miles away from me. Like I said, if I see someone, I'm going to find a way to meet him, so I'll comment in his Periscope a few times and little by little, end up getting his contact info. Day later we're in a Starbucks together talking about a plan that we can do, well I was more impressed with Kristian, what he was doing. My partner that I was working on with this marketing plan for this software developer, we were on kind of different pages. I have a background in sales and Kristian's dynamic was a little more my still, so my partner ended up leaving and I ended up asking Kristian, "Hey, is there anything on the side that you're working on or that I think we can do together?"

 

Steve:

Mmm.

 

Dallin:

Badda bing badda boom. We've ... I feel like it's the perfect love story. We've been hanging out pretty much ever since.

 

Steve:

As long as he says the same thing, I guess that is true, right?

 

Dallin:

Yeah. Yeah.

 

Kristian:

Yeah, no. The funny thing, Steve, about Dallin is I'd been with ClickFunnels, I was one of the first 50 people that signed up for the beta version of ClickFunnels.

 

Steve:

Wow. You're from the dark ages, Man, that's awesome.

 

Kristian:

Dude. Yeah. We were just talking yesterday because we literally I mean the crazy part ... I'd been so resistant to start using Actionetics.

 

Steve:

Yeah.

 

Kristian:

Until I had to transfer from Infusionsoft to AWeber, AWeber to ActiveCampaign and we're trying to do something and it's like, "Dude, why don't we just use Actionetics?" It's all in here." I'm like, "Fine." We're switching everything over and I needed ... I'd been doing funnels and learning about ... like when I first signed up for ClickFunnels, I didn't know what a funnel was. I wasn't even sure what Russell had explained to me. It just sounded so cool and I was like, "Dude, I'm going to figure this thing out because what he's talking about and the numbers, I'm like, "That's what I need to be doing. That's it." I been doing this for two and a half years, which is kind of a long time in funnel years.

 

Steve:

Yeah. Yeah, it is.

 

Kristian:

It's not really that long of a time in regular terms, but I got on Periscope and started kind of talking about my business. At the time, I was trying to grow this fitness, be an online fitness guy.

 

Steve:

Yeah.

 

Kristian:

I'd used funnels to grow an email list of 3,500 people and I got on to Periscope and nobody cared about the fitness. They wanted to know how I was growing my email list and how I was doing my, how was I doing this business.

 

Steve:

Interesting.

 

Kristian:

Then I kind of became one of the funnel guys on Periscope and was a speaker at the Periscope Summit. I got this notoriety on Periscope for, they call me the King of Funnels. I'm like, "No, guys. I know some really big funnel guys on Periscope." They're like, "No, King of Funnels."

 

Steve:

Wow.

 

Kristian:

It's been like two and a half years of this little journey of learning funnels where it's been ... I'll tell you the three guys I credit everything to are Russell, Todd Brown and [Lo Silva 00:06:09].

 

Steve:

Mmm.

 

Kristian:

I actually had just finished the PCP coaching program with Todd Brown and those guys. Dallin, when he came to me was like, "Dude, this stuff you're talking about is awesome." I said, "Well, let's, I need a guy that gets it. That is driven and ... " that was Dallin. Now we've got this little, little agency we're trying to scale.

 

Steve:

That's awesome, because good partners are hard to find. I remember I started doing this back in college. My buddy and I were driving traffic for Paul Mitchell and we were doing all this stuff. I ended up firing, going through nine different partners. It's cool that you guys found each other, you know what I mean? That's pretty rare just right there.

 

Kristian:

Yeah. If you go back and talk about Dallin's ... there's a couple of key things that I was looking for, because I have an entire course. You love Periscope. I saw some of your Periscopes on YouTube and ...

 

Steve:

Dang it. Man, those were the new days for me.

 

Kristian:

Yeah. I was a speaker at the Periscope Summit in January.

 

Steve:

Cool. Wow.

 

Kristian:

Dallin's helped me develop this program and it's something that we've rolled out in beta and we're going to roll out as a digital product. It's called the Live Video Funnel. I've been working with Todd Brown and the guys at MFA on the entire sequence and the packaging and all that kind of stuff. They're calling Kurt [Malley 00:08:00] speaking at Marketing Funnel Automation Live in October and one of the things they're saying is that the biggest opportunity of 2017 is, they call it the Facebook Live Funnel, but I'm going to let you guys in on a little note. Facebook Live and Periscope don't work the same way. Even though they're both live video, they're different, so Dallin ... I needed somebody to help me with that aspect. I couldn't ... to be honest, you know this Steven,

 

Steve:

Yeah.

 

Kristian:

I couldn't do all that, every single thing, every single aspect of a funnel.

 

Steve:

No.

 

Kristian:

The script writing, the copy writing, the editing, the videos for the VSL's, the strategy, the email marketing sequences, all the social media.

 

Steve:

Yeah.

 

Kristian:

What I'm really good, compliments what Dallin's really good at, like I said, his ability to get in on Facebook and recruit people. He has this really strong sense about building a team, which is one of those things that ... we both get along with people, but Dallin's good at that recruitment process. When you want to build and scale something and you need the right people, you need somebody like that.

 

Steve:

That's awesome. That's awesome. Yeah, it's hard to find that stuff. Dallin, you and I, we were talking a little bit about some of the trials you guys went through. Obviously individually you do, but you guys met each other, what have you guys been working on and I guess what was the ... What are some of the issues you guys have run on, I guess, getting to where you are. You know what I mean?

 

 

Unspoken stories, you know that where none of us put in our marketing hardly ever unless it's part of our sales letter. "I was in the dumps, but now I'm flying high." These are like, really what kind of issues did you guys run into what you're doing now? What are you doing now, first of all?

 

Dallin:

Well, the majority of our issues actually are from more individual sides. We're actually doing really good with our projects together.

 

Steve:

Mmm.

 

Dallin:

Your typical issues you run in together are testing. That's what funnels are, right, it's testing, testing, testing, testing. There's always that down side until you ... it's just a numbers game, right, until you find something that works. As far as the personal side, because I believe that this kind of runs, this is the fire that's on the inside, the Y factor from what I call it, right. My background's in sales, so I did door-to-door for years. I think, Steven, you've mentioned that you flirted with that a little bit but, I was really good at it.

 

Steve:

Yeah. Yeah. That's like, I'm sorry to interrupt, but that's one of the best educations I've ever had.

 

Dallin:

Yeah. Yeah.

 

Steve:

I've got a marketing degree and I don't know what I learned from it. You know?

 

Dallin:

Well, that's actually just what I was going to say. I was going to school for business and marketing and be honest, my classes were super redundant. I hated them. I was like, "Man, this is for years I've been planning on doing this and ... " Anyway I got into sales and I did pretty good at it. I just kept going. I ended up doing more recruiting and for six, seven years going out on the summers and taking a team out and helping manage and recruit and sell.

 

Steve:

Yeah.

 

Dallin:

You learn so much from just talking to people, the sale cycle, funnels, a different type of funnel, right?

 

Steve:

Yeah.

 

Dallin:

Learning how to build value to the point where it doesn't matter what you ask for money, because they love it so much that they're going to buy. It taught me a lot. Well, long story short, I made my transition. I was doing alarms and home automation. I made my transition with this solar boom.

 

Steve:

Mmm.

 

Dallin:

Solar's on fire and fortunately for us, we live in Arizona, one of the sunniest places in the world. Solar was hot, but a lot of stuff was happening politically. A lot of the utilities are trying to shut down solar here just because of different costs. It's a mess. They succeeded and actually the utility ... There's two main utilities in Arizona. They succeeded shutting down solar where I live.

 

 

In order for me to get work, I'd have to go an hour a day just to prospect clients, let alone keep my pipelines, my relationships, my contracts, everything going, because they're longer projects. It was really funny because I was really bummed because I was really excited about this transition. It was a huge jump for me because we were so comfortable with what we were doing, making awesome money and it was kind of just this really big leap of faith. Well, last April, fast forward a little bit, last April, our little girl, our daughter, she was four years old. She got diagnosed with leukemia.

 

Steve:

Oh man.

 

Dallin:

When that happened, we literally were going to leave for another summer, two days after she was diagnosed. It was crazy. Everything was just happening and days and days and days sitting in the hospital. I had always wanted to do something online my whole life, but I didn't want to ... I didn't know exactly what was happening. I didn't know where I wanted to put my foot in. I didn't want to mess with inventory and selling one off things. I wanted to do something on a big level. I just didn't know how to do it.

 

 

In the hospital you got a lot of time to yourself and so I'd study these things. I'd start looking at different processes. I'd find patterns. I would sign up for everyone's email list, not because I cared about their product. I wanted to see their system. I wanted to study the funnel. I wanted to study the email sequences and I started seeing the patterns.

 

 

That's when I kind of got into a lot of this other stuff with Periscope and live stream. I was like, "Man, this is the future. I get it." I think every guy that's doing any sort of digital marketing has a day where they, it kind of clicks and they say, "Holy smokes. I can really ... This is powerful. This is how you can reach a lot of people." What everyone wants to do is have a voice and do something.

 

 

I ended up switching my major, going to school for persuasion and negotiations were my sayings. I was a business communication major and I had that emphasis in persuasion and negotiation. Looking back on everything now, it was just perfect. Everything kind of worked out really, really good. I was kind of like, my little side, so we really hit this kind of rock bottom where it was like ... financially we took a massive hit because I wasn't able to go out, drive an hour and do all this kind of stuff. This last year-

 

Steve:

Yeah. You needed to be home. Yeah.

 

Dallin:

This last year has really been an investment of my time and I just kind of feel like I went back to school. I feel like I'm getting way more out of this school than four years of collegiate, right?

 

Steve:

Easily. Man, how's your daughter now? If you don't mind me asking.

 

Dallin:

She's awesome. She's in a maintenance phase right now, got another year left of treatments, but she's ... hair's back and muscles coming back and went back to school. She's in a really, really good spot right now. Appreciate it.

 

Kristian:

She's strong too. You should see her.

 

Steve:

Really?

 

Dallin:

Yeah.

 

Steve:

That's amazing.

 

Dallin:

It's from everything that she went through. She got down to, had to relearn to walk, lost all her muscles. She was a little skin and bones and now she's this little muscle ball.

 

Kristian:

Now she's a beast.

 

Dallin:

She's awesome.

 

Steve:

I appreciate you guys sharing that kind of stuff. I mean it's ... because most of the ... I've never interviewed anyone on this who hasn't gone through something crazy, you know. It's not like the path is always clear, either. Usually it isn't.

 

Dallin:

Yeah.

 

Steve:

There's a lot of times I wake up and come here, I'm like, "I don't even know. I know I got to work on something, but I don't know what." It's like going through this hazy fog, so I appreciate that. Then there's all the personal side and all the things going on. Yeah, I first started getting into this stuff, little bit similar with door-to-door sales. I started looking around going, "What the heck?" We're driving out and there's all these billboards everywhere. I was like, "People call these things ready to buy." I'm knocking on people's doors all day long and they're not wanting to buy it when they wake up. I've got to go convince people who weren't planning on spend money. Like, "How do I do this?" I start putting ads everywhere and that's how I started getting phone sales and stuff. I was like, "There's something to this." Anyways, I-

 

Dallin:

See, that's funny because I was kind of the same person. All the other managers are, "Dallin, stop trying to reinvent the wheel. It works."

 

Steve:

DS, yeah.

 

Dallin:

DS, this. I'm like, "No, guys. There is a better way." My motto in everything in life is there is always a better way. I don't care what you say and what's working. Something can be tweaked and something can be done to scale.

 

Steve:

Yeah. Yeah, definitely.

 

Kristian:

Which is funny, because Russell always says, "You can tell the pioneers because they're lying face down with arrows in their back."

 

Steve:

Yeah.

 

Kristian:

I guess in this case, it wasn't really pioneering. You were trying to find the people laying face down.

 

Steve:

Yeah. Yeah.

 

Dallin:

Yeah.

 

Steve:

Side stepping all the other people who were already face down because they knocked 400 doors that day, right?

 

Dallin:

Yeah, seriously.

 

Steve:

What are you guys working on right now though? You guys mentioned that there's some awesome things going on. What's your current funnel, if you don't mind talking about that? [inaudible 00:18:19] sounds like, maybe ...

 

Kristian:

Dallin said like perfect timing. I feel like it has been. We joke about being a startup because ultimately we are, to the point that we're even in the process of creating our business plans and our SOP's and all that kind of stuff, so that we can talk to some investors. We have some investors that we're talking to in order to really have the capital that we think we need to be able to scale this thing quickly, instead of Facebook ads tested at $10 a day for 50 weeks.

 

Steve:

Yeah. Yeah.

 

Kristian:

Yeah. The whole reason I got into learning funnels was, you guys talked about door-to-door sales and I have 15 years of commercial real estate experience. I worked with clients like L.A. Fitness and McDonald's. I represented McDonald's for the state of Arizona and Burger King and Taco Bell, so pretty big name companies.

 

 

There's a lot of guys that would be happy with that, but the problem I had was that I kept looking at the deal size of what I was doing. It was constantly kind of like this feast or famine situation where you either had a huge check or you had nothing. Literally, nothing. It kind of got to the point where I was like, "Man, there's a better way to do this." Very similar. You guys hear the consistent theme here? There's a better way.

 

 

That was kind of the first step of me saying, "I'm going to figure out how to streamline this" so that it wasn't even so much ... I just kept seeing all the guys that were buying the properties doing all these big deals. They weren't even in real estate. They had these other businesses that were generating cash flow and here I am putting these deals together that are making, Dallin and I had this exact conversation, making these guys over a million dollars and they're like, "Oh hey, thanks. Here's 40 grand."

 

Steve:

Yeah. Yeah.

 

Kristian:

What's wrong with this equation? I'm the one that did the whole thing, the financials and all that. I just didn't have the money. That was the start of it.

 

Steve:

Yeah.

 

Kristian:

Then you add on top of it that we got into a network marketing company and did really well, but we got stuck right under about 10 grand a month for like 18 months. It turned into another full time job where I was 40, 50 hours a week at every Starbucks from east to west meeting people. I'm like, "This is not working."

 

Steve:

Yeah.

 

Kristian:

Those two combined, I was like, "If I get online, I can figure out how to do both of these. I don't have to pick because I can leverage myself."

 

Steve:

That is kind of the funny thing I learned about ... because I got into an MOM. I went and did exactly what my upline was saying. Got 13 people my first move.

 

Kristian:

Oh, wait, your [inaudible 00:21:42] not duplicatable.

 

Steve:

No. Not at all.

 

Kristian:

I don't care. If I find enough of the right people, it won't have to be.

 

Steve:

Yeah. Yeah. My first month, I recruited 13 leeches. Man, they wouldn't do a dang thing unless I was like pushing them in the back with a cattle prod. I was like, "Ah. There's got to be a better way to do this." That's why I took it online and did a lot better. I definitely relate with that.

 

Kristian:

Yeah. The crazy part about this is, like Dallin was saying, he's, shoot, some of the advanced strategies ... Dallin's has this like ... he understands and can see what the outcome is that we're trying to do. He gets it. He gets the whole flow and process of this, of how funnels work. He's been studying them. I just think for a big part, he just needed to connect certain pieces and be able to see what's going on behind the scenes that you can't see online.

 

Steve:

Yeah.

 

Kristian:

We talk about ... the hardest part about knowing how to do funnels is focusing because when you understand it and it clicks and you realize what you can do, it's like .... Someone starts talking you're like, "Oh my God. I know how to make money with that. Oh my God."

 

Steve:

Yeah.

 

Kristian:

It's like entrepreneurial ADD exacerbated.

 

Steve:

Yeah.

 

Kristian:

Forget entrepreneurial ADD. This is like an entrepreneurial ADD addiction.

 

Steve:

Yeah.

 

Kristian:

That's the issue, so we've had to get very focused on okay what's the quickest and most pressing thing at the moment that we can make money with, so that we can reach our long term goals. Like I said, Lo Silva is one of the guys that I credit a lot of what I learned from. There's three little things that I take from them and that's think big, start small, scale fast.

 

Steve:

Interesting. Think big, start small, scale fast.

 

Kristian:

Yeah, that's kind of our little mantra.

 

Dallin:

Yeah. That leads into basically what we're doing now. Our whole plan without getting too much into detail is we have a very, very big picture. Just like a funnel, we have our personal value ladder. Our big picture is more in investments, real estate, things like that. Those are our high tickets. Right.

 

Steve:

Yeah.

 

Dallin:

For the time being, we need to make sure that we couple that with clients, so we have our lead gen system, our agency that's doing multiple things, SCO work and funnels, and social media strategies and management and that way it can help us scale. Our agency essentially fronts the bills and I guess the best way to put it is we want everything that we do to be self-sufficient. If we build something, the entire goal-

 

Steve:

Keep it in hands.

 

Dallin:

Well, yes and no. The entire thing is for that project to sustain itself, so you understand once you get going with your Facebook marketing and such, it gets to the point where you reinvest X amount back into it. Then it lives, it breaths on it's own kind of. It just needs to be monitored, right.

 

Steve:

Yeah.

 

Dallin:

If we have this solid balance between us of we have clients coming to us for done-for-you services, that's awesome. That's cash. That keeps us busy. That keeps workers of ours busy. Then in the meantime, if we can couple that with 40, 50% of our other time for in-house projects, because Kristian and I already have entrepreneurial ADD, we're always thinking of ideas. We always have something going on or a lot of times a client that comes in has something that sparks an idea.

 

Steve:

Yeah.

 

Dallin:

We'll, like you said, we'll keep them in-house and then we funnel them. We get them to the point where they self-sustain and all of a sudden, we have our house projects, our client projects and it's just a very healthy business model. You don't see a lot of very sustainable and scalable models. You know what I mean?

 

Steve:

Yeah.

 

Dallin:

Especially, because I've been with very, very, very big companies with these companies I've sold for and you find ... one of the things I like to do is study patterns and development. I'm really into the business development side of things. You look at the ones that have made it, that have succeeded and that are scaled to the massive, massive billion dollar companies and that's kind of what they do. They make sure they have kind of that happy medium, that solid balance in all these different areas and factors and that's kind of what we're trying to do.

 

 

One of the projects we're working on right now is a political campaign funnel. This is just one that's easy to scale and we're just pretty much hacking it and taking advantage events which one of the things coupling social media with funnels is current events, man. That's, they kill. If you can find something trending and good and that has ... that you can milk for a long time, you better believe we're going to find a way to make, pinch money out of it, right.

 

Steve:

Yeah. Isn't it the-

 

Dallin:

I'll let Kristian talk about that.

 

Steve:

The political campaign funnel, is that the one you downloaded I think from Sales Funnel Broker?

 

Kristian:

Ah, no.

 

Steve:

Maybe that was you, maybe it wasn't. I don't know. There's some guy, he downloaded it and came back and he's like, "This is the coolest thing ever." I was like, "Just the share [funnel 00:27:53] free one I got from someone else. Glad you like it."

 

Kristian:

Yeah, no. I got the idea from actually from Funnel ... I got part of the idea from Funnel U. To be honest, as much as we know about funnels, something clicked when I watched Russell's video inside the membership site for the political bridge funnel, where it was like, "I see it." It was that coupled with the, the funnel stacking I got that whole idea of moving them from a front end funnel to a webinar funnel to a high ticket and how you stack those.

 

Steve:

Sure.

 

Kristian:

Bridging and when all the sudden the bridging made sense to me, I said, "Oh my God." Just like what Dallin was talking about here. Ultimately our goal is to, take the same amount of time to do all this work to go and work with somebody and do a commercial real estate transaction, where we're an investor or we're buying the property and people are investing with us, as it does to sell a t-shirt. Just time is time, it's just the size of the value and how you frame your mind around it. We are in the process of growing our agency. The whole point of it is to, if you think of construction companies, really good construction companies constantly have work that's in place to keep their employees working, so that they have the best team, right.

 

Steve:

Mmm. Yeah.

 

Kristian:

That's what they're always talking about is we just have to keep work so we can keep these guys busy. It's not about keeping them busy, but we also want to have the team in place because ultimately when we have our ideas, we can get them shipped quicker.

 

Steve:

Yeah. I've been approached by a few people lately and they're like, "I got these awesome guys. I absolutely love them." He's like, "What work do you have? I just don't want them to go anywhere else." He's like, "I don't care what it is. I just got to bill."

 

Dallin:

That's exactly what it is.

 

Steve:

Yeah, interesting.

 

Kristian:

Yeah. That's the idea, but to get back to what we're doing right now is I got the idea of how Russell explained the political bridge and my dad had ordered 100 t-shirts from my best friend. My best friend did all the screen printing for the Super Bowl in Santa Clara.

 

Steve:

Jeez.

 

Kristian:

He's got one of the largest screen printing companies on the west coast, based here in Phoenix. He has a company very similar to what Trey Lewellen started with Teespring.

 

Steve:

Interesting.

 

Kristian:

He's set in and he came to us and said, "Hey, why don't you partner with me and just handle the marketing on this." He's talked to me about doing some marketing for them for different aspects of their company. Now we're working together and the whole idea came up I said, "Well, you know what? I think I can do it." Before I was hesitant because I was like, "Well, I'm in the digital media space. I'm selling digital products." That was big hangup was I've got to sell to these entrepreneurs.

 

 

Then when this political bridge funnel that Russell talked about when he talked about how you move people from this list to this list, I went, "Oh my God. I can build a list in anything. I can just bridge them." It was a combination of that video inside of Funnel U and my participation in Todd Brown's PCP, Partnership Coaching Program, where they were really working on educational based marketing, and script and copy writing. The confidence level in my own ability to write copy had shifted to where now MFA is outsourcing some of their done-for-you client work to Dallin and I and having me write copy and script for their video sales letters.

 

Steve:

What?

 

Kristian:

Yeah.

 

Dallin:

That's real, man.

 

Kristian:

That tells you the ...

 

Dallin:

We scale fast. Remember that third principle. We scale fast.

 

Steve:

Yeah. Yeah. I wrote all those down. That's amazing. What's funny is that people don't realize that it literally is the exact same amount of work to do a small company as a big one.

 

 

My buddy, I mean as far as building a funnel and things like that, my buddy and I were building an [inaudible 00:32:11]. It was the first funnel I ever built with ClickFunnels and it was a smartphone insurance company and we were ... we got out of that for a lot of reasons, but it was interesting though because I was building it. We put it all out. That's actually when I got into ClickFunnels and it was right after ClickFunnels left beta. I was like, "Hey, I'm going to build this whole thing out before my ClickFunnels trial runs out." I'd never built one and I just killed myself for the next little while. We got it out.

 

 

Then this guy approaches me in Florida. He's like, "I need a funnel for some of my ..." He was selling water ionizers or something. I was like, "Oh man. This is a big company. They're already making a couple million a year." I was blown away. I was like, wait, this is the same exact amount of work as it was for the small little startup. Anyways, I thought that was interesting you said that.

 

Kristian:

Yeah. That's what we talk about is that it's easier to work with those bigger companies. They get it.

 

Steve:

Yeah.

 

Kristian:

You work with the smaller companies and they're worried about how much money it's going to cost them. The reality is that the more we put ourselves in a position to work with guys like you and Russell and guys like Todd and Lou Coselino and David Perriera and all them at MFA, they're saying, "Man, why are you, how come you're not charging double and triple?"

 

Steve:

Yeah.

 

Kristian:

Dallin and I are sitting here like seriously if they're willing to pay us to write scripts for, to outsource their ad copy to us for some of their client work, what's that say? I mean, we're literally working with, doing work for the guys that are considered the best in the industry.

 

Steve:

That's ... Yeah. Yeah.

 

Kristian:

It's just a mindset shift is what it is. That has made it a little easier to have a conversation with someone and say, "You know what? We can take on this project. Here's how much it is."

 

Steve:

Yeah.

 

Kristian:

They're like, sticker shock. Well, sticker shock. You can go and just have someone build the pages for you, but it's not going to convert. I know that for a fact because copy os what converts, right.

 

Steve:

You know Tyler Jorgensen?

 

Kristian:

You know what, it sounds familiar. I think I-

 

Steve:

He said the same thing to me. He's like, "You charge 10 grand to build a custom funnel?" I was like, "Yeah." He's like, "Why not 15?" I was like, "I don't know. I'd never thought about that before." I thought 10 was kind of the mark. He's like, "No, no, no, no. I'd do 15, 20, 25." I was like, "You've got to be kidding." That is is just a mindset shift. You'll get better people to build for anyways, whatever it is.

 

Kristian:

The big thing for us-

 

Dallin:

True and at the same time ...

 

Kristian:

Yeah, I don't know.

 

Dallin:

You there?

 

Kristian:

Yeah, you cut-

 

Steve:

Kind of lost you there.

 

Kristian:

The big thing for us is really to build a team, Steve, and to have that team in place and be able to have people that focus on all the different areas of the funnels, so that they get really, really good at that. They don't have to know the whole process because that's what I've spent the last two and a half years doing, right.

 

Steve:

Wow.

 

Kristian:

They can be part of this and be part of building something and helping these clients and really enjoy what they're doing. Then, like I said, when we have these ideas we can ship them. I know you want to know and your audience probably wants to know what it is that we're doing, which is what got you in. I mentioned my friend, Bryant. He's got this company like Teespring. He's got everything in place to roll this out. We had this idea for how to start doing that. We took advantage of knowing that the campaigns going on right now. I mentioned to you I think my dad bought like 100 Trump t-shirts from him. I was like, "Those are really cool shirts." My dad's like, "Yeah, man You should do this funnel stuff and figure out how to sell these to everyone. Look how crazy everyone is about Trump. Trump's going to kill it." At the time, it was still in the Republican Primaries. I'm like, "Well, I don't want to go build a funnel."

 

Steve:

Yeah.

 

Kristian:

"Then trump doesn't win the primaries." But as he started pulling away I'm like, "Oh, let's start testing some stuff." We tested one funnel and surprisingly the Facebook campaign got a lot of clicks, but there wasn't a lot of opt-ins and conversions on the funnel. What it did and I think this is one of the biggest skill sets that people who are elite develop versus people that are frustrated and saying this isn't working for me is understanding the information that they're getting and what to do with it. You might not have a winning campaign or a funnel that's making money, but to understand what kind of info you're getting and how to use that to do the next thing is that whole testing process is what separates those that are killing it from those that are getting killed. That first funnel that we did, didn't make money. Not at all.

 

Steve:

Yeah.

 

Kristian:

I mean it lost $1,200. I went to Dallin and I said, "Dude, this is awesome." He's like, "Huh?" I said, "Look at the retargeting list that we got." Then we went and we tweaked this and I said, "What if we change the front end," and at that time Mike Pence had just been named Trump's VP. I'm like, "Who the hell is Mike Pence? I never heard of this guy before." I started asking people, they're like, "No." Unless you're from Indiana, you don't know who Mike Pence is. I go, "Should Trump have picked Mike Pence? Isn't there someone else." I'm like, "Boom. Is there a vice presidential debate in the Republican Party?"

 

Steve:

Yeah.

 

Kristian:

We created a little mini survey around is Mike Pence the right one. First of all, you've got all these people that love Trump and they're hardcore republicans and now you're creating an internal debate. Everyone wants to voice their opinion, but they don't want to be judged.

 

Steve:

Yeah. People get pretty intense about that for sure.

 

Kristian:

Yeah. We created a mini survey.

 

Dallin:

Oh yeah.

 

Kristian:

We created a mini survey and we had this retargeting list from the first time and we started running ads. I didn't expect and I don't think Dallin either, that it was going to do as well as it did, but I mean, we had in less than 12 hours, we had 500 email opt-ins.

 

Steve:

What? Oh my gosh.

 

Kristian:

I was like, "Oh my God." I'm like, "Holy crap." I'm like, "What the hell's going on?" Of course the first goal is to try and get the funnel to break even. What we had to do was we were getting so much information so quickly that we really had to be on our toes and make adjustments and modifications. What we figured out through the first week of testing this is there's so much activity on this funnel. Just to give you the stats, after what was Dallin, really 6 days of running the ads, we got 2,600 email subscribers?

 

Dallin:

Five and a half, yeah.

 

Kristian:

Yeah. Five and a half days, we got 2,600 email subscribers.

 

Steve:

Wow.

 

Kristian:

K, the funnels not at break even, but here's what I want whoever's listening and whoever wants to take this information understand is the testing process. We figured out between two front end offers-

 

Steve:

Which one was the winner.

 

Kristian:

Which one's working better.

 

Steve:

Yeah. Which one's the awesome one. Yeah.

 

Kristian:

It's still not winning. Our free plus shipping is not, it's not helping us break even. The reason for that is because we're getting so many opt-ins. On a normal free plus shipping, you're not getting as many people clicking on the ads, right.

 

Steve:

Right.

 

Kristian:

Well, we're getting 5, 6 times the amount of people subscribing to the email-

 

Steve:

Would you, in that scenario, would you ever try and get even less people. It'd be counter-intuitive maybe, but I would just start tweaking the free plus shipping, I guess.

 

Kristian:

No. No. Well, no. We can't-

 

Dallin:

The strategy-

 

Kristian:

Yeah. We can't really tweak it because it's not like we're going to offer anything cheaper than free plus shipping. When you start looking at all the different things we can offer, there's not a lot of options, but here's what Dallin and I have figured out is that we think we've created a new funnel. It's not really new in the sense of what you and I and Russell and all these other guys think of.

 

Steve:

True.

 

Kristian:

In terms of Russel and [Daygin Smith 00:41:29] coming up with the black box funnel, right.

 

Steve:

Yeah.

 

Kristian:

It's just soft offer funnel, a front end soft offer. We think that we've come up with what we call a backdoor funnel.

 

Steve:

Interesting.

 

Kristian:

You get so many people on your email list. You get as many people to take the first offer and you get as many people to take your upsell as possible to figure out how close to break even you can get. If you look at 2,600 people, we go back and look at the numbers, only about 115 of those 2,600 ever saw the offer.

 

Steve:

Huh.

 

Kristian:

Now we have an opportunity to present those people with the offer again. Well, how do you do that in a way that's going to get a lot of people to open the e-

 

 

All right. Want me to ...We cut off here at the point of high dramas. As I was mentioning, we got so many email subscribers and such a lower number based on the email subscribers because we didn't expect to have that many, that we still weren't at break even, but we have a ton of people that we can show an offer to. It's a little different obviously because our price points ... We're doing apparel and things like that.

 

Steve:

It's like delaying the offer almost on purpose, right. I mean this is ... awesome.

 

Kristian:

Yeah. Remember, we started this whole thing with a survey, right, something that people were very passionate about, so a lot of polarity in there. They want their opinion-

 

 

They also want to know what everyone else thinks, where they fall in line here. We thought, "Oh my God. Somebody that votes, that voices their opinion, takes the time to put a vote in wants to know what the results are." We created a results page that shows them the results and has a special offer that all those people haven't seen. When we send it in the email and we tell them here's the results of the survey, the open rates are and the click through rates are sky high.

 

Steve:

How long are you waiting to actually send them this results page?

 

Kristian:

A couple of days, so-

 

Steve:

Oh really. Wow.

 

Kristian:

Yeah. I mentioned Actionetics. The whole reason that we started doing this is because we wanted to ... since we're having people take a survey and we're offering them this gift, we want to make sure we get as many people that take us up on that gift for taking the time to vote. We have a few of those triggers built in there, "Hey, don't forget to grab your free gift. We noticed you took the time, maybe something happened. Go back here and grab your gift." Then we make sure that everybody sees the results page a couple of days later.

 

Steve:

A couple of days. That definitely is a different style for sure. You don't think that hurts conversions at all?

 

Kristian:

No, I mean. It's a survey, right?

 

Steve:

Sure.

 

Kristian:

The point of high drama and the suspense and all that. We're still testing it, again, like I mentioned earlier that the biggest thing I think that separates those that are successful and those that aren't is to understand the type of information that you get.

 

Steve:

Yeah.

 

Kristian:

We may found out that we need to send the results sooner, but we don't know. We've got to test.

 

Steve:

It's interesting positioning too of you saying, "Hey. It look's like. Thanks for taking it. Here's your results. I don't know if missed this, but just jump back and get that." That's interesting. Like they missed it. They missed the gift.

 

Kristian:

Yeah. Yeah. "You forgot to grab your gift." That's our first step and then in the email that comes after they've taken the survey, "Hey, we're in the process of tallying up the results. We'll send them to you as they're updated."

 

Steve:

Interesting. It keeps the loop open, basically.

 

Kristian:

Hmm-hmm(affirmative). Exactly. Exactly.

 

Steve:

Man, that's awesome. Well, hey is there a URL that we can go check that out on? I don't want to pollute or dilute any of your stats, so if not that's fine, but ...

 

Kristian:

Yeah. We're just running ads to this right now.

 

Steve:

Good.

 

Kristian:

We're in the process of, like I said, this was just an idea that my dad came up with. I've got to give him credit for the initial idea, but now it's turned into kind of a new business entity, right.

 

Steve:

Yeah.

 

Kristian:

We're growing this email list and the concepts that Russell talks about the how to bridge funnels and lists and things like that. We're starting to build a list now in that republican, conservative, survivalist category. We're going to take it a step further and build out a home page and start doing some different stuff with it.

 

Steve:

That's interesting. You're going to go through and who's going to keep opening all the emails over and over again, looking at all the stats of all the people around. These are the hyper active political caring people. You know what I mean? That's awesome. That's a really clever way to segment out those people. That's fantastic.

 

Kristian:

Yeah. Yeah. You never know where your next business entity is going to come from.

 

Steve:

Interesting. Gosh, well, hey, I know we've been on quite a while. Thanks for dropping all the bombs of gold you guys did. I don't know what happened to Dallin, but ...

 

Kristian:

Yeah. He just texted, said thank you. He's trying to get back on, but I know we've got to take the kids to school and stuff, so-

 

Steve:

Awesome. Well, hey man, I appreciate it. Thank you so much and this was awesome.

 

Kristian:

Well, thank you so much. I appreciate it, Steve. Love meeting new people that are doing the same thing as us and glad that we can reach more people that are trying to learn how this works and kind of help them understand the process and that if they just stick at it and keep testing. That's really the big thing I think is testing and learning is how you get better at it.

 

Steve:

You're kind of a scientist going through this, for sure. Going in an industry you know will make money obviously, but whatever you're doing specifically, you might almost always be the first. The think big, start small and scale fast. That's huge.

 

Kristian:

Yeah. If anyone wants to connect with us, Dallin and I are both on Facebook. We mentioned Periscope. I do a lot of broadcasting on there with what I call the Live Stream Marketing Funnel Show. We're rolling, if people are interested in learning how to use live video, we've got that coming out. Yeah. Connect with us on social media. Kristian Cotta and Dallin Greenberg.

 

Steve:

Okay, yeah. Then you've got the Health Success Podcast. Guys, go check him out at Health Success Podcast as well as he said Live Stream Marketing?

 

Kristian:

Well. Yeah. Just go to KristianCotta.com. It'll take you right there.

 

Steve:

Cool. Awesome.

 

Kristian:

Kristian with a K.

 

Steve:

Kristian with a K. Cotta, right?

 

Dallin:

I'm in.

 

Kristian:

Kristian with a K. Cotta. Dallin's in here. He just got back in.

 

Dallin:

Dude, I don't know what happened. I was getting all excited what Kristian was saying and then just cut off.

 

Kristian:

It's the point of high drama, that's what we were talking about.

 

Dallin:

I know. It was. That's what I told Amy. Is it over?

 

Steve:

It is now.

 

Kristian:

Yeah. We're just wrapping it up.

 

Steve:

Awesome.

 

Dallin:

Sorry.

 

Steve:

It's good. Hey, thanks guys so much.

 

Kristian:

All right. Take care, Steve.

 

Dallin:

See you man.

 

Steve:

All right. Bye-bye.

 

Speaker 4:

(music starts) Thank 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. (music ends)

Hey guys, what's going on. I'm super excited because today is number ONE of the "HeySteve!" Show. Sales funnel Radio encompasses all the stuff that I do. However, there's lots of different things like, I'm going to have some interviews here soon for you guys. Obviously I post my own thoughts on what I'm doing for marketing that's working and my own sales funnels.

What I wanted to share though is a show that I'm calling "HeySteve!". Here's how it works, you guys get on Sales Funnel Radio, go to salesfunnelradio.com or you go to salesfunnelbroker.com. Up the top it says podcast. You can look for"HeySteve!". What's cool is right on the website, there's a little widget that I found, I think it's called SpeakPipe, really, really cool software. Simple, but amazing.

What's neat about it is that you can click right in the browser, it says start recording. You can ask a question to me. That little widget or whatever will record whatever you ask and send an email copy over to me, which is awesome. I get a copy of your question.

Anyway, just got the first question in. This is from Todd. Todd is from Littleton, Colorado. He said, "Hey Steve, my background is on online marketing for e-commerce businesses. Each have 20 to 50,000 products ..." Holy crap, "first place I worked was for a ski and snowboards place and now I work for a place that sells restaurant equipment."

In this scenario he said, "Where do funnels come into play?" Do you start with top selling products, do you build the ladder from there, do you build maybe from a group of brands, where do you think the best place to start is or is it better to just find a business that just sells a handful of things where you can find your value ladder?"

Hey, that's a great question. E-commerce is the question on this one. I've had people ask me this before. How should I say this? Sales funnels are not supposed to give the person who is going through a lot of options. That's like totally the opposite of what an e-commerce business does.

E-commerce is 20 to 50,000 in options, that's a lot of products man. A sales funnel, what it's supposed to do is, it's supposed to give them only like one or two options the whole way through. That's why we call them upsells. It's literally one time offers. They literally can only get it right then and right there. It creates urgency and it creates scarcity.

The person wants to go through a purchase, because it's the only time they are going to see it. You get those feelings, "Oh man." That's what a sales funnel is. That's what it's meant to do. How can you use it in e-commerce setting? Now, you certainly can. If you use something like Shopify, I use ClickFunnels, you guys know that.

I love ClickFunnels. If you guys want a ClickFunnels trial you can go to the resource section of salesfunnelbroker.com. There's a free trial on thee you can use or just download any of the sales funnels that I have on the free funnels section. You will get those also.

What's cool is for e-commerce, here's what I would do. I would still use some kind of bait. You want something to get people over to you. If you are using restaurant equipment, that's what you are selling, you can still put something out there that's for free.

That's one of the biggest aspects of marketing when it comes to the funnel. You've got to give something for free off the bat. That's how you get a relationship with people. That's how you create a feeling of reciprocity. If I give you something for free over and over again, that's going to make you feel really indebted to me, whether or not I wanted to.

It's the whole reason we do it, is that if I give you something for free ... Think about my free funnel section for example. That free funnel section represents months and months and months of work. I'm just giving it to you for free. There's probably all the stuff that I've built in there and just decided to just give away, probably represents like a year of my life.

Now, I've made some money from those things. They are great. A lot of them, I just decided to give you for free because I know it would be a lot of value, why, why did I do that? It's because of how I know it makes you feel. I wanted to solve a lot of problems for you. I love building funnels. A lot of people don't like building funnels.

I'm just going to solve one of your problems, give you a crap load of value and you are going to be more apt to listen to things that I say. That's the whole reason I do it. It's to give value and to help you guys. Same thing with e-commerce. The rules of this don't change. That's the whole point of what I'm trying to make here. The rules don't change. You've got to find something.

If you are selling restaurant equipment or you said that you used to work for skis and snowboard place selling lots of e-commerce stuff too, think about that market. Think about like if it's a restaurant equipment ... I used to ski like crazy growing up. That's like all we wanted for Christmas was a ski pass. We would go like 30 times in a season and it's so fun.

Anyway skiing and snowboard, let's take that for example. What do those people want? If they are coming to an e-commerce place, they obviously like skiing and snowboarding. What can you give to that person for free? The rule is that you take the most valuable thing that you have. You take the thing that is the coolest thing and you give it for free, which is really hard for people to do.

It's hard for business owners to do that, which is understandable. You take the biggest thing that you've got, give it for free. Hand it off to those people and say, "Hey, look, here you go" and that's your bait. Now it's irresistible. Now you are someone who has given away tons of value. Now you are someone who has given so much value that they feel the need to purchase something from you in the future. That's the feeling you want to create.

Everybody can give a discount. Everybody can give coupons. That's overdone. I don't care about that stuff anymore. That's not a very good bait, "Order now and get you get 50% off," that's a terrible bait, don't do that in your own business. Oh man, unless you've got like a countdown time or anything, where you can tie it to like an event like there's a holiday going on. Don't use a discount.

That's my own opinion. If you've got data that says otherwise, by all means go for it. Have something that is even more sexy on there. I give away free funnels. You could give something away equipment-wise, it's free, "Hey, we want to give you guys these sweet ski poles or something like that." Something that's low cost to you that is perceived high value.

That's how you can use an e-commerce setting. If you sell equipment to restaurants, you can say, "Hey, look, here's latest tips on how to get more people into your restaurant." PDFs or e-books would be great for this, "Here's a guide on how to get your restaurant equipment cleaner using half of the manpower. The guy that's using your dish washing, here's how to still pay him well, but how to get all the jobs and the cleaning done in half the time."

If you are a restaurant owner, you've got to want to know that stuff, "You are right, yeah, they go straight to my bottom-line, why would I know, I want to figure that out." Solve the problem of the conversation that's goring on in their head. If it's a restaurant equipment, there's just a few examples I just gave there.

If it's a ski and snowboard place, "Hey, here's the best places for powder," "Here are the best places if you are into stunts, this is an awesome place to go. These are the resorts you need to go to," "If you are really into moguls and downhill skiing, things like that, here's the best places to go."

If someone is going to go buy something in a ski or snowboard place, they are buying it because they want to be entertained. It's the hope for entertainment in the future. Getting on the mountain, feeling the snow. Help them have that feeling before they get on the mountain. That's what you are trying to do.

In any of your businesses, in any of your funnels or products, you are trying to help them have those feelings as if what they are buying is already happening. Does that make sense, you guys getting this? I Hope that I am explaining this correctly. For example, I keep going back to the free funnel section I have in salesfunnelbroker.com, but that's the reason why I do it.

I'm giving you a free funnel. The reason why I do it is to help you have the feelings of having a funnel before you have a funnel. It's a future pace. It's called future pacing in sales. I future pace your brain to have the feelings I want you to have before they are even happening.

It's like when you are going on in a vacation. My dad took us to Hawaii once growing up. It's really cool. We didn't start talking about Hawaii the day we got on the plane. We planned months in advance. The anticipation is often just as powerful as the actual experience. That's exactly what you want your bait to do.

I can't believe I haven't got to the upsells yet, I'm talking to you guys to hit you off on talk. That's exactly what you want your bait to do. You've got to help them have those experiences mentally and emotionally before they are even happening. It's the anticipation that things are going to be better. That things are going to be the way they want them to.

The reason that they are hiring, "Ski equipment" or hiring or buying snowboard equipment is because they are hiring those things to help them have a good time later on. That's the job that the customers are hiring those products for. Help them have that. It plays straight into that, "Here's the best places for restaurant equipment," "Here's the best suppliers we found for food for restaurants."

If you can do that, those are great baits. You can totally use them in e-commerce businesses to drive them to your e-commerce store in general. Look at this, you've got your bait, I'm going to be drawing this on a yellow legal pad. You've got your free bait in the front.

Like I said, it hits all those things, it helps someone with what they are wanting. Not what they need, with what they are wanting, the feelings and emotions. We need to drive them over to an e-commerce store. You've clearly got a crap load of products, 20 to 50,000 products is a tone.

I would choose your top selling products. Anytime anyone clicks on them and says, "Yes, I want to buy this," the very next thing is a one time offer. You can still use upsells inside of an e-commerce business. Most places don't do it, but you've seen Amazon is actually doing that now.

Remember when you go when you click through Amazon ... If you don't know this, just go do it right now, you don't need to purchase it. Go through and act like you are going to buy something, what does Amazon do, it says, "Hey, most customers also purchase this." That's totally an upsell. It doesn't necessarily need to be on a one time upsell page. That's totally what's going on there.

They are upselling because you are purchasing this one product, "Most people who buy this also buy this or they also buy this." They say, "Do you really just want one of those or do you want two." Those are the different ways that you can do a funnel-like structure inside of e-commerce.

The other thing you can do is that, after someone purchases a product, drip them onto an email sequence that says ... In five or six days we are going to ask them how much they liked it. We are going to offer them something else to get them back into my e-commerce store or push them over to another funnel that was related to whatever they purchased.

If they purchased skis, your bait was, "There's something really, really cool," let's say you partnered with someone and you are giving them tickets to a mountain or a certain resort and that's your bait. They go through and they buy skis, that's it. You offer them something else, but they don't purchase it. Five or six days later you say, "Hey, do you like the skis, are they awesome?"

It comes over an email or a Facebook ad that re-targets them that says, "Why don't you get the wax that goes with it." Think about complementary things, salt and pepper. Whatever things go together. Here's the rule with one time offers, Todd from Colorado, this is probably way more than you are asking.

There's two more things I want to show you. In upsells, you cannot solve the same problem that they were trying to solve in upsell. For example, if someone is going through and saying, "Hey, I need new skis." Your upsell later on cannot solve the same problem as, "Hey, I need new skis." It's got to be complementary.

Anyways, I won't go more into that. If you want to pull this off, the way to do it, I would still use ClickFunnels. If you use a place like Shopify, Shopify have got some embeddable widgets for their checkout. I would still use something like ClickFunnels. Anytime anyone clicks on something in e-commerce, you can steal the funnel structure inside of ClickFunnels, but embedded with it one of their HTML elements from Shopify over into ClickFunnels. I hope that makes sense.

If you have any questions about that just ask the ClickFunnels support team. They will help you with that. I just want you to know that it's totally possible. When people do it, they often will make a lot more money. For guys who know Marcus Lemonis, he does the show, The Profit on CNBC, I can't remember what other stations he's on.

He's got a really cool show where he goes and invests in people's businesses and help them turnaround the company if he sees potential in them. He's doing that kind of thing, also he's currently, as far as I know, building sales funnels out of e-commerce stores that he has purchased and helped turnaround before.

Anyways, guys, I hope that helped. Todd, please let me know if that helped. If you guys fiend that that was helpful at all please let me know. I would really appreciate that. Actually go to our Facebook page and comment down below. Pleaser rate, review, subscribe and guys I'll talk to you later, thanks so much for tuning in to the "HeySteve!" Show Sales Funnel Radio.

Thanks for listening to Sales Funnel Radio. Please remember to subscribe and leave feedback. Have a question you need answered on the show? Take 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. Hey, welcome everyone. Today I am super excited; I have a very special guest who's very near and dear to me actually. I have been looking forward to this actually for several weeks; ever since we set it up. Everyone, this is Becky. Becky, say hi.

Becky:
Hi, everyone.

Steve Larsen:
Really though, Becky has been very influential to me, and I don't know that I've told you this which makes me feel even worse, but I actually feel like you were very influential on me being in the position that I'm in right now.

Becky:
Oh, wow. Thank you.

Steve Larsen:
Yeah, absolutely. If it's all right, I'd like to tell that story because it was a moment of high drama for me, you know what I mean? We always talking to people when they're in a life transition period, and that's kind of what I was in when you and I met. I was in college, obviously. I was about to graduate, literally the week before we met at Russel's last event, the Funnel Hacker event. I was about to go over and work for this guy in Florida. I knew it would be good, but I wasn't totally stoked. I remember at the event Russel had just pitched the whole certification event and I had a little prayer in my heart. I was like, "God, I feel like I should do this," and then ... I can't even remember what I stopped by and asked you. Do you remember that?

Becky:
I think you just asked me about the certification and kind of what I had talked about. A few of the certification partners had talked a little bit about what I meant to me and I had mentioned that it really meant a lot to me to be able to be home with my kids and work with people who I believed in and who I [crosstalk 00:02:20] make a different.

Steve Larsen:
Yeah, absolutely. I must've had a freaked out look on my face or something like that because I remember the first thing you said to me is, "Do you just need to go talk?" I was like, "Sure, I guess I do." I didn't realize that I ... I don't know. Anyways, so we stepped out of the whole meeting and you started just answering questions for me and it was awesome and that led me to apply not just for certification, but to work at ClickFunnels, and that's literally why I'm sitting in Russel's office right now I think. It really ... Everyone listening, Becky is amazing.

Becky:
Thank you. I appreciate that.

Steve Larsen:
Yeah, I've just been very excited for this. It's fun to interview everyone, but I was like, "Oh, I've got to interview Becky. Becky's been awesome." Throughout the rest of the event you were texting me and you were like, "Hey, just following up with you. Have you been doing all your stuff?" I was like, "Man! Normal people don't do this, that's awesome." Anyways, you've been working on a lot of funnels, obviously. You've been doing this as a certified partner especially for how long? A year and a half?

Becky:
Yes. I signed up for the certification at the first Funnel Hacking Live in May of 2015, and I've been working with ClickFunnels since it was in beta, so 2 and a half years.

Steve Larsen:
Oh, awesome. How'd you get into it overall? How'd you get into funnels?

Becky:
I really just kind of fell into it. Some of my clients had been using different things and we were piecing it together. The whole story about piecing all these different things together. I'd been actually doing funnels without the name "funnels" for years and years just trying to get people in and build that relationship. Then a client of mine went to one of Russel's events or seminars and he said, "Hey, I really wanna try this. Let's check it out." From there we just kind of jumped on. Even after I stopped working with him, when he went to travel, I was hooked; completely jumped on board.

Steve Larsen:
That's awesome. Obviously ClickFunnels' beta version versus what it is now is very different.

Becky:
Yes, very very different. It was much clunkier, you didn't have a lot of the drag and drop capabilities, you didn't have a lot of the editing capabilities. It was still better than anything out there, but a far cry from what it is now with the amazing capabilities that it has to drag and drop and edit and customize. I'm really excited with the changes that are coming this summer, too. That's going to be even more cool.

Steve Larsen:
Oh, yeah. It's going to be cool. For sure. Was it because you'd already been kind of doing it that led you to be a certified partner and go through that whole gate also?

Becky:
Absolutely. Because I already had that experience, I already had the knowledge, I was already using ClickFunnels about 60% with my clients at the time, if not more. Just a few of the benefits of becoming certified were enough to tell me that it was really a great thing to do, and in the process i developed this whole new family of partners and colleagues and friends who've supported and helped and it's just been really amazing to have that group of people to support me in growing my business and helping people.

Steve Larsen:
I remember that's one of the things you had mentioned to me when I was asking questions about it, is just how big the network is when you jump into that boat. I've actually really felt that. It's amazing. I know a lot of people and they're all amazing. I went through 9 business partners in the last year and a half and they were awesome, but I moved on for certain reasons. Everyone I've been meeting is just ... They're all A-players.

Becky:
Absolutely. Absolutely. They say that you draw the people toward you that you need, and I really believe that, particular with this group of people because obviously there's people in this realm who are not the caliber that you and I have met, but somehow we've drawn to us the type of people who we need and who are amazing to work with and supportive and ethical and just not any of the negativities that maybe you've experienced before or I have or that you've seen out there. It's just been a great group of people who are willing to make referrals and help out and answer questions.

Steve Larsen:
Yeah, absolutely. It's not to say that everyone that everyone that I ever worked with in the past has not been good, because especially a few of them, they knock the socks off of what they do, but it's the ... I don't know what it is. It's fantastic, though. It's a cool community that I've never experienced.

Becky:
It really is.

Steve Larsen:
It's kind of funny because whenever you see ads or we all see sales video [headers 00:07:38] or we all see whatever it is. We all like to kind of puff our chest out and say, "This is what I've done and it's amazing and I'm making this much money," but beneath it all there's usually this lifetime of struggle and this lifetime worth of just going against odds that no one else would; a lot of courage and stuff like that. No doubt I'm sure you're the same with that. I was wondering, what are some of the issues you've had with some of the funnels that are now successful that may not have been in the past?

Becky:
It's funny that you ask that because I've been working recently on one that I feel like it's just a poster child. It's so cool when everything meshes and it just clicks. I didn't really start to feel success with this until I kind of was willing to have my own voice to say who I was and use my personality as opposed to try to be a cookie cutter with other people. That's particular what has made this particular funnel with Alex [Sharfon 00:08:52], and he said that I could definitely use him as an example.

Steve Larsen:
Do a little name drop. That's awesome.

Becky:
Yes. It's really cool because he has had so many successes in the past and these particular funnels were successful, but they weren't having the type of reach and success that he had hoped for and that he really wanted. You and I met him in San Diego and he just speaks so well to entrepreneurs especially. When he reached out to me and I went up to his office to work with their [inaudible 00:09:27] for an entire day, the first thing that I noticed was that what was in his funnels didn't resonate with him. It didn't have the same language and personality that he has in all of the things that he does through his podcast and his Facebook lives and even just his posts and everything that I've seen from him as well as the presentation you gave.

Steve Larsen:
That's interesting. You're saying match the personality with the funnel?

Becky:
Exactly. What we did was we went in and we basically stripped out a lot of the industry speak types of things where you might have these specific phrases or you might have these things that other people have used with great success with different markets, but it didn't fit him and his market. We really made the wording match what his message was and the people that he wanted to reach and the fact that he wanted to build a long-term client relationship with the people that he was reaching out to. He wasn't looking for a sale, he was looking for that relationship.

Steve Larsen:
How did you create that? You just basically got the whole funnel, or just changed verbiage? How do you match someone's personality and funnel? I've never thought about that. That makes sense, though.

Becky:
Yeah, it really does make a big difference. For him, the very first things we did were take out some of the language and the headlines. We focused on the headlines first because obviously that grabs your attention, and we changed the wording where it was going to reach people. We're always saying to touch people's pain points, and so that's really what tried to do, but in a way that matched his message. Then we went through and we looked at: Are we really showing people how much value they're going to get from listening to one of Alex's webinars or one of his products, and we focused on all the ways that this was going to really change their lives. I don't use that phrase loosely when I come to his particular work, but you and I know it really did.

Steve Larsen:
Oh, yeah.

Becky:
I do this with all of my clients. How is it going to change their lives? I have an iron man client, and what we focused on was: How is this training going to make these people's lives better? Focus on that messaging in a way that sounded just like she speaks. We looked at the headlines, we looked at what we were offering, and we took out a lot of the things that are purely sales-driven. Like I said, a lot of my clients are trying to build a relationship, so anything that felt too pushy ... Maybe some of the phrases and graphics that were really about sales ... For these type of people we took out so that they could start to build that relationship and let their audience know that they're trying to build a relationship and not just sell them a product.

Steve Larsen:
That's counter-intuitive to what most people do when they're selling. Does that mean you switch a lot of the things to a lot of soft closes instead of a hard- ...

Becky:
Yup.

Steve Larsen:
Okay, interesting.

Becky:
Absolutely. We did a lot of soft sell. Any time that you're not just about a product, but you're about a relationship, that's so important to look at. Are you pushing too hard to build that relationship and turning people off? This is something that the feedback that I actually got was they had had a lot of unsubscribes in the past 6 weeks, 2 months. Once they had started this particular method of marketing because it didn't resonate with what they were trying to do.

Steve Larsen:
Did you conduct a lot of interviews and things like that to understand his market better, or was he able to pick out, "Hey, that's not how I would say that." How did you identify what that is since it's matching him?

Becky:
Before I went in there, I had looked at a lot of his unscripted work: The things he was doing on Facebook, what he was doing on Facebook live, I watched 2 of his presentations, the live one at San Diego and then the video one, and I do that type of background with my clients in trying to get inside their head exactly the same way they're trying to get inside their audiences to really understand them better and really understand what they're trying to do for their audience and how they can do it better.

Steve Larsen:
Interesting. You watch your clients' social profiles. I never thought about that. That's clever, though.

Becky:
[crosstalk 00:14:15]. When their business is reaching out to people on social, then yes I do. It sounds very stalker-ish, and I don't mean it that way at all.

Steve Larsen:
We'll call it research.

Becky:
Yeah, it really is. For instance, my iron man client, she had been on several interviews, she had done things outside of social media, so watching her there was very helpful. If I have the opportunity, then I will talk to some of her clients or my client's clients as well to get that better feedback for how we can better serve them. In a nutshell, it really all boils down to being authentic and finding out what the real message is. Sometimes that takes a little bit of background, sometimes it takes a little bit of research, or really getting to know the person who is trying to reach out to their audience, but it's so worth it because in the end you are promoting a community and not just a bunch of sales. Like I said before, when I was at Funnel Hacking Live, that's part of the way that you help people change the world is helping them reach their audience.

Steve Larsen:
Interesting. You're basically going through and you're scraping out all the techno babble and stuff that doesn't make you human; the things that you and I would not normally say in a conversation with each other, and that's awesome.

Becky:
Exactly. The things that just sound too [canned 00:15:46] that maybe have been said too often or don't fit. You can't fit your particular personality inside someone else's funnel, just like you can't fit inside someone else's shoes or clothing. You just have to make it your own.

Steve Larsen:
I remember on SalesFunnelBroker.com, the site I built and put up, it was kind of funny because the moment I watched it someone was making fun of it. One my buddies, he was like, "You have yourself in a shirt and tie on the front." I said, "Yeah." He said, "No one looks at you like a shirt and a tie guy." I was like, "You know what? That's good, because I don't either." He's like, "Yeah, if you scroll down you've got a big picture of you being all goofy pointing at your shirt in a black and white. That's more what everyone looks at you as." I said, "Yeah, I know, I just thought I should toss that in there." It makes sense, though. It's not my personality, I probably shouldn't have that on my front page.

Becky:
Exactly. Especially people who know you, they understand what you're really like and we just can't fit inside someone else's funnel or someone else's marketing because we need to reach out to our audiences in our own voice and be authentic and sometimes share a little bit of our vulnerability and our background so that they know that we're real and we've been through the same types of growth problems that they have.

Steve Larsen:
Yeah, I am a brass tax really intense guy, everyone. You've just got to watch out for me. I will rip your head off.

Becky:
I totally get that about you. I totally get it.

Steve Larsen:
Yeah, most people do. They tremble in fear.

Becky:
Absolutely.

Steve Larsen:
Do you mind kind of walking us through the funnel that you've built or fixed with Alex? Is that okay? Just from your perspective I thought it'd be kind of cool to hear, "Hey, on the first page he was getting this percent kind of conversion, but after the tweaks ..." Are you allowed to share that kind of stuff?

Becky:
Yes, I actually asked him and he gave me the permission to do so. [crosstalk 00:17:48]

Steve Larsen:
Awesome.

Becky:
His funnel starts with a free book download, and it's a really impressive book. The people who were going to it were actually warm traffic, so his numbers should have been really high, but they were in the teens and nobody could quite figure out why he was getting 15, 16, 17%. He actually had several funnels for different reasons, but all that were identical and were all for the free book download, but none of them were converting it higher than 30%. Most of his traffic was warm and these people really liked him, so the first thing we did was look at: How are they drawing people in? It was just very simple; there was the title and there was a very very long description. We shortened that up and we made it a little bit more true to his personality. The other thing that we did was they were asking for about I think 6 pieces of information and we stripped that down to 3. Those particular numbers more than doubled after we made those changes.

Steve Larsen:
You cleaned up the copy and then basically ... I call it funnel friction. He had too much funnel friction; he had to release it a little bit before ...

Becky:
Right, we just stripped it down a little bit and made it simpler so that people didn't have to read quite so much, but the impressive thing was going from the second page where they would get the "Thank you for downloading" onto looking at another video. This part that we completely gutted. We took out all the headlines, we took out the slide deck video, we took out the offer- ...

Steve Larsen:
On the thank you page?

Becky:
On the thank you page. There was an offer for an upsell and people were even clicking to find out more about it. Those numbers were I believe right around 10%, so really really bad, especially for him for [inaudible 00:20:03]. We changed it over to be just a video thanking them, telling them what the book was going to give for them, and offering the opportunity to move on with the training with an additional video and more training.

Steve Larsen:
Kind of just like a soft offer but not even an offer; you're just asking them to progress clicking.

Becky:
Exactly. The thing that I said to them before they shot the video was, "You are not selling to people. You are offering them the opportunity to continue on this journey with what they've started to learn, and you're going to help them even more."

Steve Larsen:
Interesting.

Becky:
Once he did that, the clip throughs to the third page went up 6 times.

Steve Larsen:
What?! 60%?! Holy smokes!

Becky:
Yes, it was pretty phenomenal. It was pretty phenomenal because that was the most heavily salesy page of [crosstalk 00:21:04] marketing.

Steve Larsen:
Wow.

Becky:
It was really cool to see that change, that by really dialing into his personality, stripping out everything else, and just giving them the opportunity to continue on, because we weren't going from sales page to sales page the first time and then taking out the sales the second time. The funnel was the same, it was just the messaging that was different. We had the same offer that they could go on to watch this video and get more training, took out all the salesiness. That was very cool to see that stripping that down, making it really about helping made that dramatic of a change.

Steve Larsen:
That's incredible.

Becky:
Thank you. Yeah, that was really cool to see. Then on the next step of his funnel which was actually his funnel stack because they were presented this offer a little bit later; it wasn't immediate. What we did was we took the sales page and we stripped out a lot of the pushiness on that one as well and we told them all the ways that this was going to benefit them and all of the things that they could do in order to continue to improve their life, which is his theme as an entrepreneur. By really telling the audience about what they were going to get and the changes they were going to make before we promoted what the course was going to do, those sales doubled.

Steve Larsen:
Was that an e-course, then? A membership area it promotes?

Becky:
Yes. It was an e-course; a membership area, it had I think 2 payments. It's within a long-term continuity type of thing, but the offer was the same, the price was the same. The difference was that we added a little bit of graphics so that it wasn't real plain and boring ... The graphics of Alex and of the course ... We talked about the changes that it was going to make and then down next to the order form is where we labeled out the ABC of what it was going to offer. When we went in, I believe it was about 8 days after we made those changes, it was so exciting to see that those sales numbers had doubled.

Steve Larsen:
That's fantastic. I'm a big fan of Perry Belcher, and one of the things that he talks about is how when you start to do a sales letter, or anything really, everyone comes into these scenarios having different beliefs: "Hey, I can do this," or "Hey, I can't do this," or "I believe I won't be able to because of my past and it's very very hard to get someone to change their beliefs. What a sales person's job is is truly more about suspending people's beliefs long enough for them to purchase, which is the greatest chance of them changing their beliefs in the long run anyways. I think it's interesting that you said in the sales page you didn't put the ABC's of the offer out until way at the bottom and the whole way from the top down to that point, you're really just pre-framing them to suspend their belief with time. Time is the biggest way ever to suspend beliefs. If they're out going from the top of the page down to the bottom, there's more time involved there; more stuff to help them suspend beliefs so that at the end, "Okay, ABC, here's 2 payment plans," and you don't pitch until the end. That's amazing.

Becky:
Definitely. The top was really about the changes that it would make and it was bullet points. There were very few paragraphs; it was all bullet point to attract the attention and again, to figure out how to help these people realize that they're continuing on a journey and that this is going to help them improve their business, their life, whatever the case may be that you are working on. It's about that transformation.

Steve Larsen:
That's incredible. That doubled the sales right there.

Becky:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Steve Larsen:
Holy cow. People get stoked in the stock market when they have like a 10% gain, and you're like, "Nope, let's double it."

Becky:
It was very very cool to see. The really cool thing about this particular funnel was that the results were so immediate and changes were very obvious. It was very simply, "We are making this for your voice. What would you normally say?", and these are the results. I've only been working with him for I think about 6 weeks. Maybe a little bit more; maybe 2 months, and we've seen these types of changes. If you can get these types of changes quickly when you're really dialing in and he knows his audience, and that's what's really fun about working with clients who are established, is that they've done the background on their audience and they know their message, so you can really help them transform what they're saying just by being more authentic. When you're starting from scratch, it's so nice to know that these results are possible.

Steve Larsen:
My wife always calls that ... Instead of authentic, she just calls it "being real". We'll be talking to someone and she'll be like, "That guy was the most real guy I've ever heard." I used to tease her and be like, "He was real before that." I get what you're saying, though.

Becky:
Being authentic is very much a marketing term, but just be true to who you are and be real in your messaging and don't try to hide behind a lot of things.

Steve Larsen:
Are you allowed to tell a little bit about the membership area also and what he's done in there?

Becky:
His membership area is phenomenal. He took pieces from a 2 day workshop that he did a few months ago and separated it out and added tools that you can download. Some of it's very focused on yourself and growing into the entrepreneur, the person that you're really meant to be. Some of it is focused on growing your business and some of it is focused on growing your business even more with a team. The pieces that he has and the tools that he's put together just really show how you can take a massive amount of information and break it down via a continuity or a membership area or things like that and offer it to people in bite sized pieces in a way that they don't get overwhelmed so that they can get the most out of what you're doing.

Steve Larsen:
What I'm curious about is: How did you determine, besides in the the beginning of the funnel and watching the conversions as you kind of worked down, but how did you even figure out that it was overwhelm that people were feeling?

Becky:
Because I was overwhelmed when I looked at it. I really have to be honest. When I looked at it, I just felt super uncomfortable because it was that pushy. I really believe that we are connected with people for a reason, that God puts people in our path for a reason, and I felt like when I had met him originally that I had so much to learn. Then when I was reading his stuff, I was just very put off. That's part of the reason why the research does so well is kind of getting to know their personality; you can tell if it's congruent with what you're trying to do when you look at someone's funnel.

Steve Larsen:
Wow. Okay. I'm just thinking. I've been taking notes. I've got a full page of notes of things you've said. I've actually drawn out the whole funnel all the way from the back, all the lessons, I number them out. That's cool. Stu Mclaren, I'm sure you've heard the name.

Becky:
Yup.

Steve Larsen:
Stu's the man, and he loves membership sites; that's kind of his mojo there. I heard him say once that overwhelm is actually the number one reason someone cancels from a membership site. They get in and there's too much stuff. People will go in and they're like, "I don't even know where to start." That's interesting that that's what you said it was.

Becky:
Absolutely. It was the same thing when I looked at his funnels. They had already broken things down on the membership size and had it in bite size pieces, so now what we're working on is just making it more user friendly in that membership area because still we want to make the user experience flow. Again, that's why it's so important to get to know the person that you're working with and do a little bit of research on who's following them and the types of people that they're going to resonate with. If he were, let's say one of these people who was hard-hitting and really promoting hard to corporate men and that type of thing, I honestly would step back and say, "I am not the best person to do your marketing because I have no idea what your message is from a personal standpoint.

That's like what I said before: I really try to work with people that I connect with and who I can help make a difference. If I am nowhere in the realm of your target market, then in order for me to really understand what you're trying to say, I'm going to have to do way more research with the people that you're trying to talk to. If you're in that space where you're working with someone who they are not targeting, then that's when the research is really important.

Steve Larsen:
You made all these changes to the funnel itself, I mean 2x, 6x, 2x ... I'm just looking down all the numbers: 16 to 32, 10 to- ... It's amazing looking at all of it. In that process, you said that he had been sending warm traffic. Did you guys change the traffic source at all?

Becky:
No change in the traffic source. In the process, we did change the messaging in the e-mails as well.

Steve Larsen:
Oh, really? Okay.

Becky:
We took out some of that hard-hitting sales. It was more his conversational personality, it was an invitation and not pushiness, but he didn't change his ads, he didn't change what he was doing on Facebook, and he didn't send out more e-mails. In fact, ,i think he sent out fewer. Everything that he had been doing on social media were really his voice already. It was really just e-mail and the funnel that we had to change.

Steve Larsen:
Interesting. Okay, so fewer e-mails actually went out.

Becky:
That's a thing that I do as soon as I start working with a client, is I go in and I subscribe to what they're already doing if they have something in place. I'll subscribe to their e-mail and I'll start looking at it trying to get a feel for their messaging, what they're saying, how they're saying it. That gave me that same off-putting feeling in the e-mails that I got when I looked at that sales page.

Steve Larsen:
One of the things that Russel I think does ... I've never really realized: Some of it's just for the ease of creation and making things, but it helps him ... What I've seen him do is he will just record himself teaching something and then go get it transcribed so it preserves everything in his voice and it's the way he would say it. Most people, the way we write and the way we speak are 2 different languages, but that's actually an error in sales copy usually.

Becky:
Right, because you're not going to reach your audience if you are putting on a template, putting on this box of what you're trying to say. If they're already following you, then they're following you for a reason. By following that same type of format that you are engaging them with, then you're just going to engage them more.

Steve Larsen:
That's fantastic. I know we've been going for a little bit here. I actually have 1 other question, and I'm sure people are going to just kill me if I don't ask this. How on earth did you get a client like Alex [Sharfon 00:34:34]?

Becky:
It's really cool how that happened, and it goes right back to my strong belief that you provide the value and the rest comes. He had a funnel that he had put out on social media, and I think a friend tagged me in it. I can't even remember how I found it, but I ended up coming across it and suddenly there were all these messages that said, "It's broken, it's broken, it's broken, it's broken." I messaged him and all the people I could tell kind of were working with him and I said, "Send me your information, I will fix it right now," and they did and I did. That's all it was, was just trying to help out. It really pains me to see something like that when there's something not working and they're pushing it out to all these people because literally dozens of people were commenting on it that it wasn't working. Who even knows how many more people didn't comment on it at all. That was all there was. I said, "Here you go, it's fixed," and I don't know, a month or 2 later, probably 6 weeks maybe, his team reached out to me and said, "Can we talk? We'd love for you to help us."

Steve Larsen:
That's so cool.

Becky:
Yeah, it was really neat. They just said, "We appreciate that you helped us before and we wanna see about working with you." When you are genuinely interested in helping people, good things come to you. It may not be that obvious and that immediate; that was just a really cool experience of it was a pretty tight turnaround and the same person. People are going to talk about you helping them and about the things that you've done to improve what they're doing, and then good things will come.

Steve Larsen:
That's incredible. Yeah, I completely agree, and I've seen that definitely on my own. There was a guy I was doing work for once. I actually ... This is kind of how I broke into it, because I needed someone to be able to see what I could do, right? I actually went to him and I told him, "I'm going to build a funnel for you. I know you don't know what that is, so don't pay me for the first 6 months. All I need you to do is pay for the tools, I'll go put it together." I ended up helping him pull an extra $60,000 from just an e-mail campaign that I put out there with his own list through a sales phone. [inaudible 00:37:10] funnel I built. After that, though, then they offered to pay me, and it was a really easy way to go get a relationship going.

Becky:
Whether or not he had helped you or he had turned around and decided to create it or not, it was good experience for you and you were helping somebody to help other people and so it comes around. All these things kind of click together for good when we're trying to do something good.

Steve Larsen:
Absolutely. Yeah, and it's such a counterintuitive thing too, because everyone says, "Oh, put your resume out there and go ..." I hate resumes. I don't have one. You don't really need one. Anyways, that's so cool. Thanks so much for sharing that stuff.

Becky:
You're welcome. It's a privilege to talk to you and I've really enjoyed seeing all the great things that you're doing, so I'm thrilled to be able to chat with you about it and share some f that experience.

Steve Larsen:
Thank you so much. For all the people who are listening or will listen to this, how can they reach you or follow you?

Becky:
You can find me on Facebook, and then if you want to reach out in a way that's more direct, I have a website. It's go.funnelpros.net, and you can see a little bit about me and my history and the story of how I came to be here and a few of the people that we've helped.

Steve Larsen:
That's awesome. Go.funnelpros.net.

Becky:
Yes.

Steve Larsen:
Awesome. Thanks so much, and I am looking forward ... I'm going to go check out that site right now, actually.

Becky:
Thanks so much. I appreciate talking with you. It was a pleasure.

Steve Larsen:
All right, we'll talk to you later.

Becky:
Bu-bye.

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

 

All right you guys, I have a little bit of a cool little, I don't know what you call it. A freelancer hack, or something like that. Anyway, I was looking at how I built salesfunnelbroker.com so fast. I built it really quick. It was up, it was live super fast, and I was thinking about it. This will relate, I promise. Just go on a little journey with me.

I did door to door sales for two summers, and I was also a telemarketer. In each of them, I was one of the top guys, both times. I was making good money, and I remember, I got to this conference that was for people who were doing well. In the conference, they said, "Eventually, what happens is, you guys start getting good enough, you don't know what it is that you're doing that makes you successful". They said, "You start to become blind. You don't know what you don't know. You don't know what you do know. You start to get into this zone where you're saying things, and you have strategies in your normal work flows that are making you successful. But you couldn't teach it to somebody else, because you don't see yourself working. You're just no longer aware of it". It's true, in your own jobs. In your own businesses.

It's interesting, thinking about that. Think about what it is you're doing, that's making you successful, but that you're not seeing. Because every one of us who's working our butts off, we all have these little things that we do, that we don't know. One thing that I do, I get up early every day. Super small, but I was thinking about it. I get at least three hours every single day, on top of normal work, to just go work. My family is all asleep anyway, it's not an extra strain on the family. I get here at least three hours before hand, times five days a week, at least. It's fifteen hours, that's almost a part time job on top of my other job. That's how I get so much crap done.

There's also little tiny tactics and strategies that I use. I was thinking about with Sales Funnel Broker, when I built it, what did I do that made that go up so quick? Here's one of the things that I did. This is a freelancer hack. I always recommend, just because you can do something doesn't mean you should be. I'm not bad with Photoshop. I'm not amazing, but I can get by with it. Same with Adobe illustrator, a lot of the Adobe suite. A lot of building stuff. But that doesn't mean I should always be the one doing it. There's somebody else out there who loves what it is that I'm trying to do. Whereas I just can do it, I don't love it.

When I need images made, the HeySteve t-shirt, things like that, this is what I did. I went on to freelancer.com, and as far as I know, freelancer.com is the only one that actually lets you do this. I don't know if UpWork does. Definitely don't use this for Fiverr. Fiverr is good for certain things, but it's not good for a lot of stuff, because it's so cheap. You get what you pay for a lot of times. All I do is, I go inside of freelancer.com and, I think it's up on the top right. There's a button there that will say, "Create contest". We humans thrive on contests, oh my gosh. It's all about social status and social ques, whether or not we want it to be. That's one of the reasons we do most of the stuff in our life, is because it increases our own status. We want to be interesting, we want to put things out there that help people. We want to be noticed and recognized. Whether or not we're actually trying to be, we want to have that.

So I create contests. The HeySteve t-shirt contest, I got on there, and I said, "Hey, I want a sweet t-shirt for my podcast. I want people ...", and by the way, if you haven't seen that t-shirt, just go to salesfunnelbroker.com/podcasts and you'll see it right there. It says, "HeySteve". What I did is I got onto freelancer.com and I said, "I want this t-shirt, and I want it to have these elements. I want it to have this color scheme, and I want it to look somewhat like this. But really, I'm interested in just what your ideas are". I got 83 submissions. There were so many sick t-shirt contests, and there were so many crappy ones. What was nuts about it is, how fast it came in. Within a week, I had three amazing designs. There's only one design up there right now, at the time of recording this. There might be more now, depending on when you listen to this.

What was cool was, as people submitted, and the deal is I only pay someone, one person. I only pay the person that I like. The work that's good. 82 other people of the 83 submissions, they worked for free for me. I'm not saying to take advantage of people, but my gosh. I have spent thousands, and wasted thousands of dollars, hiring a freelancer straight out, without knowing everything they can do. If you've ever used Freelancers, I know you've felt that pain before. You're like, "I don't really know if this guy is going to do exactly what I want. I don't know if they're going to be the best for my business". Or you have some serious pain going, "No, that's not exactly what I wanted", and you ping pong back and forth. Just screw it, just go create a contest. Get tons of submissions all at once. What's cool is that Freelancer lets you talk to the freelancer, to the person who actually put the work up.

Throughout the whole week, I was critiquing their work like crazy. I only put the contest up for a week, and at the end of the week, I had to choose. Day one, I had tons of submissions. Day two, even more, and just ramped up, until day four. All I did is, throughout the week, at the end of the day I got on and said, "I like this, but just shift it over here to the right". Or, "I like this, but I don't know who's looking at this wrong. I said I want the shirt color to be dark, not white. All the other shirt colors before hand were all white". Until Wednesday or Thursday. Everyone's switching their designs up, and it's such a huge contest. My comments were public, and it was interesting, people started going through and reading other people's comments, and going, "Crap, I've got to switch to that". They would go take their design, and make it better, and work it and tweak it, and do what they're good at. Do what I'm not good at. I would just tell them what I like and don't like, over and over again.

I did that throughout the week, and after a while ... 83 submissions from 50 freelancers. At the end, throughout the week, I just kept rejecting the ones that I knew I hated, and I could rate on the bottom with stars the ones I like. Everyone's looking at the 5 star ones, the top ones, and modeling after that. Then I get dozens and dozens of attempts at the same thing, over and over again, and it made the work really quality. I was like, "This is freaking cool". I got really awesome work over and over and over again, and I only paid 100 bucks. You can choose the amount you want for the contest, you can make it 50 or whatever, but you get the work that's a little ... I just wanted to excite people, and I wanted to motivate people.

I was like, "100 bucks, probably motivating for someone who does this all the time. They can probably whip something up quick, so I want them to fight for it. I want to create tension inside of my contest". So I created it, and just boom, started rejecting, rejecting, rejecting, rejecting. I rejected so much stuff. I think overall there was 8 pages worth of submissions, and 7 of them were all rejected. I'm sure it was disheartening for some people, but it made the ones who really wanted it want it. It made them really hungry.

There were two or three at the end that I really liked. I awarded one person the 100 dollars, and then I went back and purchased the designs of the other two.

I started using that same model for everything else. Images, that header image on Sales Funnel Broker, there's also a footer image. There's also ... I started using it for everything. What was cool is, it worked every single time. Whereas in the past, all I would do is, I would look through different freelancers' credentials, or I would just post the job up and I would get a million people telling me, "Hire me, I'll do your job". Anyway, I was about to say something a little derogatory.

I would speak with people who didn't clearly understand what it is that I was trying to say. Because they didn't speak fluent American, from 'Merica. Which is totally fine, but it made it hard to communicate and actually get done what I was trying to do. No disrespect if you're not from America, that's totally fine, but sometimes it was really hard for me to get across what it was that I wanted, and I ended up wasting thousands and thousands of dollars. Which I totally have. I've paid people to make websites just because I was like, "I could make it, I just want to go focus on this other thing, so why don't you go make it, and I'll just go focus on this other thing". But it turns out, every single time I've done that, I always end up building it again on my own.

In this way, you don't have to. Instead, just put prize money out there, and get tons of attempts from people who are already producing work first. That's my whole thing. Go make value first, get paid later. You'll get paid more money like that, doing that. This model totally falls in line with that. Go create a contest, and get people to submit, get their work first, and create value. What's nice is that, now I can follow up with all those freelancers that actually did do a great job, and I can tell them, "Hey, I've got another project for you. Hey, I've got something else for you", and they've proven themselves to me. I've cut through the fat of 80 other submissions to get to the three that were good. Think about those averages and those odds.

Anyway, that's my little freelancer hack. I don't want to keep beating it to death. But that's one of the reasons I think I got salesfunnelbroker.com up so fast, was because of that. I just outsourced to other people, but I made them work before I paid them, and I only paid for good work.

That's all I expect you guys to do. If you guys ever hire me to build a sales funnel or whatever, I collect a little up front, I go make a super sick sales funnel, and then I get the rest in the back. That's how it works with sales funnels in general anyway. You deliver value up front, get their email address, get contact information, whatever it is that you can use to follow up with them later. Then you get the real money after you finish the break even sales funnel. This is just using that same sales funnel model inside of freelancer.com. It's really cool.

Anyway guys, that's all I've got for you. I hope that is a great day. Go produce more by hiring freelancers, and create sweet contests. If you do this, please let me know, because I haven't heard of anyone else who leverages this the way I am, and it's really been effective for me. It's been an awesome thing for me to go do. Any software piece you need created, any art you need created, any type of creative, make people do good work before you actually pay them, and make them fight for it a little bit. I've noticed the hungry ones create really good stuff.

Anyway guys, I'll talk to you later, and again, please let me know if you're doing this. Bye.

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