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How ya doin'? How ya doing? I got to say, "Good morning," because for me of course it's morning. Hey, we just got back from ... I just had this really cool thought. I wanted to tell you about it. We just got back from Utah actually. I've got some family there.

I got family in Cache Valley, if you guys know where that is. It's a little bit in the middle of nowhere, but just completely gorgeous. I got an uncle there, and he's got some goats. My little two year old daughter just absolutely loves it. She calls that place, Uncle Goat. (laughs) She calls him, Uncle Goat.

She's there feedin' the goats, and one of 'em was gettin' out, and about to charge her, and she's freakin' out. Anyways it's super-funny.

We're out feedin' the goats, and later we went over to ... My grandma died when I was eight, and we went over to her grave, and I have a ton of family at that cemetery that she's in. (laughs). A lot of ancestors in that cemetery. There's one is particular that's just has been very inspiring to me.

He's the man, and his name is Hans Larsen, and I wanted to tell you a story real quick. This is pretty intense. The guy grows up in Denmark, and he grows up, and he wanted to join a certain religious faith, because it's like 18 ... I don't know, 1880. Somewhere around there.

I can't remember the exact year, but anyways his family says, "No," and kicks him out. He joins it, and he gets on this ship that's going between Europe ... England ... He travels over to England, gets on a ship in England, and he works on a ship that goes from England to the new continents in America back and forth.

He works on that ship for a while, and when he has enough money, one day when they went to America they just ... He just got off, and he stayed there. He stayed over in the new colonies, and then he decided to join ... There's that ... I'm Mormon by the way ... He joined those pioneers that went west, and he walked from the East Coast to Utah.

He went over there, and he walked ... That's a long ways. He walked that. I want to clarify that: he walked it in rain, snow, sun, and he ... The guy's an animal first of all. Total respect for what he did. He gets there and he's like, "Dang.

There's all these other people who are comin'.

They're going to need help," so he walked back.

He walked all the way back to the East Coast, and then helped bring all those people back again.

Then he did it ... He walked back, and forth seven times across those plains. Seven times. I mean, that's incredible.

I think about the things that I complain about sometimes. I'm like, "Man. I'm a pansy if those are the things that I'm complainin' about."

Hans Larsen, which I can't remember how many greats back that is, but he's my great-whatever grandpa Larsen, and he went back and forth seven times across the plains. Total workhorse. That's in my blood. I'm really proud of that.

I was thinking about that, and he's one of the people that settle Mendon, Utah. He didn't want to be the governor for a long time, and they kept saying, "Come on. You should be the governor." He's like, "No, I don't want it." "Come on. Be the governor." "No, I don't want it."

Finally they just voted him in, and he didn't want to be the governor, but he's the governor. He's just dealin' with these issues that he hated.

I just ... Anyways, super-cool attitude, and obviously a go-getter to walk across seven times, and be the governor of a place he don't want to be a governor of. Anyways, just super-cool.

On one part of the family I got that guy. Just awesome dude, and it says a lot about his wife too. Holy smokes.

Which for back in that day, and age it wasn't as big of a deal, and it's still not a huge one, but ... He's like 15 years old, and his wife ... They died a couple of months apart though, which is actually cool.

Anyways, the ... I got him on one side...

Then still on the Larsen side ... My dad and I are talkin' and he's like, "You're obviously an extreme entrepreneur," and I was like, "Yeah." He goes ... He's like, "It's funny. Because if you look at sometimes parts of my family that entrepreneurial, and you are, and I am, and I broke away from everything, and my ...", anyways without going into too much, but (laughs) it's like ... He's like, "It's funny though, because if you look at our family history they're not ... We're not crazy entrepreneurial people when it comes to certain things."

Like Hans Larsen, when he came over, he didn't want any kind of ... He didn't ... He just wanted to farm, and he wanted to help people get across the plains. That's it. I don't think he's necessarily an entrepreneur.

Anyways my dad was like, "Do want to know where ...", because he's like, "I think sometimes things come through our blood, and things stay inside of us," and I got that itch. I just ... I'm antsy.

I'm an antsy guy. I don't sleep a lot.

My dad was like, "Apparently our family history legend has it that there was this guy. He was a traveling salesman way back in the day."

Like ... I don't know when. Early 1900s, mid 1800s. Somewhere in that time period, that 50 year time period, there was a traveling salesman that came through, I think the Cache Valley area, and totally had an affair with on my side and then left.

Ever since then all the little kids that spawned from that, the really little just go-getting entrepreneur guys. I don't think entrepreneurship is something you're born with, you learn it, but I do think some people are more apt to take it on.

Anyways, so whoever that guy is ... If you were related to that guy please let me know. We're probably related, so now ... Anyways, I thought that was funny. The whole point is that this is a more serious episode for sure, but just remember where ya came from.

That you're only where you are, because you've been standing on the shoulders of giants, you know what I mean? You really haven't done anything on your own, and no idea is really yours.

This is just a coagulation of all these other ideas, and experiences you've been having from other people, all these other inputs that have created your cool output. Whatever your business is, or whatever you're trying to do. A little humble pie there.

I was thinking about that just this last time that we had a family reunion with everybody, and I was like, "This is cool. It's good to be with everyone. I mean, this is awesome. At the same time I got to remember I'm still no one."

(laughs) You know what I mean?

Even when you're somebody, and you've made it, and you're successful, you're still technically no one. I mean you're going to die, and the only things you take are memories, and relationships, so ... Man, this is a serious episode. What the heck? Somehow that ties into Sales Funnels, and motivation, so figure out what that is for yourself.

(laughs) All right, guys. I'll talk to ya later. Bye.

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.

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Steve:

All right everyone. I've got a very special guest on with me today. I'm very excited for this actually. I've been looking forward to this interview for a long time. Guys I want to introduce to you Jaime Smith. He's done amazing things with the ClickFunnels community. Jaime thanks so much for joining. I want to talk a little bit about how you got your start. All the cool things you've done. First of all I want you to know, actually Russell and I were talking about you because you've done so many things for the ClickFunnels community. You remember that video, you may not, but I put a video out and I was like hey Russell and I we're looking for some help for some poor things and things like that and you reached out. We were going through this list of people. Over and over and over again I was like, Jaime's the man. Jaime would be the man, Jaime would be the man. The only reason why, I don't know ... He's so good. I think he'll get bored.

Jaime:

Ah. Well thanks man I appreciate that. I appreciate that, yeah.

Steve:

Yeah and Russell's saying, hey he's done so much for the ClickFunnels community himself. It's not like we're asking you to, it's not like we've done anything to do extra promotion for you or anything. It's like everyday I see a new thing that you've done for the ClickFunnels community, for all of us non coders and it just blows our minds. It's like black magic to me man. I have no idea how you do what you do.

Jaime:

Yeah well lots of years of kind of doing some intense stuff. Honestly my background is as a senior web app developer. I've been working since 2000. Started out, my first project was actually an enterprise level project with Eli Lilly. I've always been the cowboy coder writing enterprise level applications. Always web based. I've done desktop software and stuff like that but that's not as much fun for me. After doing enough of those things you learn how the back ends work. I'm able to take some of that experience and see how the front end works, and get into the ClickFunnels admin area and see okay, I can kind of tell from the URLs and the functions that are available how the backend pieces are pulled together.

That allows me to say, okay well if the backend works this way, then if I add this to the front end, then the backend should support it. Just having that visibility into both sides of how things work makes it easy for me to go in and know that if I can customize the front end a little bit it'll work with the backend. Also just being able to inspect the code that's being spit out by the ClickFunnels tools on the front end, and add some java script into them that just adds a little functionality or a little style or whatever. It just kinda comes easy so I figure, hey if I can throw some of that stuff out and help people out then that's, I would love somebody to be able to come in and help with all the things that I am not the greatest at.

Steve:

Yeah. I cannot even imagine what those topics could be because I mean, you've been in the ClickFunnels community for a long time and I have also. I got in right after beta. I was building stuff and it was fantastic, my buddy and I are making money together. All of a sudden I started seeing, whose Jaime Smith? You keep putting things like, hey anyone want some cool CSS that's going to make, yada yada yada. I was like, holy crap I don't know how to do that. Yeah. Then like the next day it'd be like, hey someone else want some java script I wrote that's going to make you're whole funnel act like an e-commerce store. I was like, what? Oh my gosh. It was like over, and over, and over again. I got to tell you, that's one of my biggest regrets. I went to college for, I finished with a marketing degree but before that I was actually a CIT computer degree. I remember I went through one semester, I was sitting in one of my coding classes. Maybe it was the teacher, but I cannot blame it on that with a clear conscience. I don't know what it was but sitting and coding, I remember getting out of there and going, I'm never going to sit in front of a computer all day. 

Jaime:

Yeah, and now you're doing it.

Steve:

It's the one thing that I wish I had learned, was how to actually program. My dad was an executive at IBM. He and I, we ran like a 120 port network inside of our house that we built together, running through the walls. We did so much stuff together and it was awesome. I just have never learned the guts of it. I'm totally jealous of your skills man, it's fantastic.

Jaime:

Yeah, well. Yeah it's a blessing and a curse sometimes because I see some of these questions come up like, hey can I do this? Then it's like that itch that you just have to scratch. Okay I'm not going to rest until I figure out how to do this thing. It's a lot of fun. I think, my background's kind of weird. I don't know what it is. I feel, I was talking with somebody actually I was just out in Boise here last week for an event there with Russell. The Ignite Inner Circle Program. That was great. While I was there I was talking to somebody and just talking about my background. I just felt like, what I said was I feel like my biggest blessing, and I hate to say my genius because I'm not trying to brag by any stretch of the imagination-

Steve:

Go for it. We'd love to hear it.

Jaime:

I feel like my biggest area of genius is my ability to extrapolate and apply a concept I've learned in one area to a completely different area. I started when I was young doing mechanical stuff. My family actually owned a hardware store and my dad did a lot of installations, hot water heaters, central air units, and stuff like that. 10 years old I'm installing furnaces, and air conditioning units, and hot water heaters, and running electricity, and doing all this mechanical stuff. Not really any training it was just, hey your dad needs a hand so I'll just watch what he does, he'll tell me what to do, and I'll go do it. I kind of took that and then when I graduated high school I actually went into the army and I was a helicopter mechanic for 4 years. I was able to take some of those mechanical skills and apply it and look at the engineering of things. I always felt like I could tear stuff down and reverse engineer how it worked. Then I've been able to take some of that reverse engineering skill and apply it to technology. That's what programming has been for me. Honestly I've only had a few actual college level classes in programming. Most everything is all self taught.

Steve:

You're kidding me?

Jaime:

No.

Steve:

Oh my gosh.

Jaime:

Over 16 years of reverse engineering other stuff that's already working or going in and saying, it's always kind of been on the job. Hey, you need to learn this. Okay great let me go get a reference manual and I'll figure it out. I've just been really blessed to be thrown into just a bunch of different projects in different languages, and different platforms, and used in different frameworks and technologies. Being able to say okay, these things all kind of have similar ways of doing things. If I can take the concept from one and apply it into another then it's going to get me to a solution that much faster-

Steve:

So, I'm sorry about that.

Jaime:

Oh no. That's what I've been able to do with ClickFunnels is be able to say, okay I know I can take the concepts I've learned from the backend programming and from the front end programming, I can combine them with this online marketing which I've also been a student of for the last going on 12 years now. Just come up with these creative solutions to these problems that people are having, and problems that I'm having.

Steve:

It's interesting because I was thinking about that. If you can step back and look at abstractly what you're doing with the funnel. I mean that's got to tie directly into what you did growing up.

Jaime:

Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, yeah. I've been extremely blessed to have some fantastic opportunities to get experience that a lot of people just don't get. Sometimes I have to remind myself, or I have people tell me this, that because I see what I do as just really easy, but then I'm like anybody could do it. In fact I've said that many, many times, I could train a monkey to do what I do. It's not that hard, it's just once you know the concept it really is pretty easy. It's just for me I've been exposed. I don't feel like I've got any special genius or any special intelligence ability that other people don't have. It's just I've had the great opportunity to be exposed to experiences where I've had to make a project work. It's just experiences that the majority of people don't get an opportunity for. I feel truly blessed to be able to do what I do.

Steve:

Well I think it's fantastic. For those of you who are listening and don't know, what Jaime does is he'll look at what everyone's doing in ClickFunnels and watch the community and the Facebook page, see where people who don't know how to code are running into these walls. He'll just come out there and, hey here's a free tool that I just built, or drop this piece of code in and now ClickFunnels totally changes. I mean it's amazing. It's incredible what you do.

Jaime:

Thanks man, thanks.

Steve:

I mean you're obviously working on CF Pro Tools. I'd love to hear a little bit more about that. I also want to ask, before we get into that, I don't know. It's a little weird to bring this up. Tell us about your failures you know. I want to know a little bit more, behind every success story there's always like this struggle I feel like. In marketing we tend to take whatever the best case study that we were able to get and market that only. Or whatever the best results are and market that only. The other 90% are like pure crap or it's just this massive, massive struggle. I was just wondering if you could tell us a little bit about, she the struggle that produces CF Pro Tools. What led you to get there?

Jaime:

Sure. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. There's plenty of meat there to chew on.

Steve:

Sure, there always is. Anytime anyone talks, oh yeah there's lots of that.

Jaime:

Oh yeah. Yeah. Like I said I've really been studying online marketing for the last 12 years of so. Really I've had this passion for hey, I've always wanted to be an entrepreneur. I guess that's the thing. I never wanted to be the guy that just had a job and just worked my job and just did my thing. Now every once in a while I look back and say, man I worked in a factory building cars for a while. That was kind of mind numbingly nice. It's like hard work, but every once in a while I'd like to go back and just feel like okay I can just do my job and go home and not have to worry about anything afterwards.

Steve:

Turn the brain off, yeah.

Jaime:

Yeah switch off and not be constantly on the clock. Then I remember that no, I hated that gig too. It seems like I always do that in the spring time. Be like, oh it'd be awesome to have an outside job putting on roofs or something like that. Then come August in Indiana when it's 95 and 100% humidity I'm like oh yeah now I remember why I don't do that. I wouldn't last very long. Yeah. I've been studying online marketing for a lot of years. Really felt like okay this is my opportunity this is where I can actually make some thing happen and really take a business, I always thought with minimal effort and the right scale I can just make this huge business and live that internet dream, laptop beach lifestyle. It's 12 years later and I'm still not on the beach, and I'm still not working at my laptop.

Yeah. I started, and honestly I've looked at so many things, and I'll say probably the biggest failure I've had in, and a lot of people talk about this but it's so easy to get sucked into, is the shiny object syndrome. That's biggest struggle. I'm finally learning after 12 years of doing this that that's been my biggest downfall, is constantly being attracted and constantly jumping ship and moving to the next thing. I've done pretty much everything you can think of in internet marketing, I've tried it. Starting out with running niche ad sense sites and building those up. I had a little bit of success there. I made a few hundred bucks here and there on different sites. Okay that's great. Then you run into a little struggle and you're like oh that doesn't work and you just dump it, you move onto the next thing.

In the process of doing that I actually built out, again using my technology background and as a developer I actually built a product around taking PLR content that I was getting in a monthly membership where you'd get 1,000 articles a month or whatever in different niches for free. Go and build your website around these, throw ad sense on it, you'll make money. Great. I did that and I thought okay, I'm going through and doing this and there's got to be a quicker, better way to build out a network of sites. I figured out a way to take word press, and this is back like word press 2 days, to use word press what was called multi user or word press MU, and use that to build a network of these niche sites, just on different sub domains.

I figured out how to do that and I actually was in a community similar to the Facebook group, specific to this product, had about 1,000 members or so. Kind of the same thing I've been able to do with CF Pro Tools, just jump into the community, help out as much as I can, show people what I'm doing and how to use the technology to build these sites up more quickly, and actually build a training program. Like 28 videos on how to use word press, and how to use the network, and how to drive traffic, and how to do all this stuff. Put that together and just poured a ton of time into it. That was probably my first little success where I sold like $1,700 worth of this course. I'm like okay awesome, this is going. Then word press came out and changed their version. I'm like I do not want to go back and re-record 28 videos.

Steve:

28 videos, yeah.

Jaime:

It was like 6 hours worth of video training. That's immense, I'm like no. I'm not going to keep up with this. I just kind of dumped it, moved onto the next thing. I probably could have been successful with that if I would have stuck with it. It got hard, there's surely some other shiny object that's easier to do over here, and jumped ship. I just did that repeatedly for the last 10-12 years. Have learned the hard lesson that that just doesn't work. Anyone of the things that you pick you can be successful at online. There's very few things that if you don't ... There's been plenty of plans laid out that will work if you apply the right leverage. I think you just have to pick one and go with it. For me the latest has bee CF Pro Tools and jumping into a community where we've got, what 20,000 plus active members now inside the ClickFunnels Facebook group. We've got ClickFunnels users I think, I heard recently is right around 20,000 active users of ClickFunnels right now.

Steve:

Yep.

Jaime:

It's a huge community, so it's a huge opportunity and that's great. That's where my focus has been. I actually enjoy it. I posted on the group not too long ago that ClickFunnels makes what I do easy, the community makes it fun. I do enjoy it.

Steve:

Yeah. I completely agree with that. I want to go back just real quick to something you mentioned. You just touched on it, and I'm learning this lesson, I don't know I fee like any of us who do anything entrepreneurial we all have learned this less every 6 months. It comes in a wave. The shiny object syndrome. It's huge. What's funny is in college I 100% had shiny object syndrome but I kept telling my wife, no, no I'm just at an age of exploration. I'm going around all over the place like, yeah I'm doing real estate here, writing e-books there, door to door sales here, I was all over the place. It was good for learning, but after a while you have got to drop an anchor and you have to learn to say no.

I'm laughing that you brought this up because like 3 days ago I was Voxing Russell and I was like hey man, someone approached and they're like hey got this cool thing, wondering if you want to jump in on it in your free time. Which is kind of a joke. Russell's like, you know what man as a friend, stop. You have so many cool things going on already. He's like don't, just as a friend you cannot say no anymore. By the way, he's like if you have time to focus on 2 things it means you're probably not doing enough in number 1. You know what I mean?

Jaime:

Right.

Steve:

I thought that was fantastic that he said that. I have not really ever had success in something until I became a mono maniac. You really have to obsess over it. It's the only thing you think about. All your time is put towards it. You don't go home and just like veg out on the couch. After a couple months then something will blow up. Anyways. I thought that was really key and wanted to just point that out. I remember when Russell said that I laid on my bed like for a long time. Just was like, man he just defined the last 4 years of my life. Why was I so close to it, I couldn't see it. It's so obvious when you hear it but you look at it you're like man, what can I simplify and cut it. That's usually not the mentality everyone's taking on. It's more of a, what can I be a beast at and take on more, and more, and more. It's actually very much the opposite of how you do things.

Jaime:

Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely, yeah. You know when somebody starts a conversation with, hey, as a friend. You know that's probably not going to be what you want to hear sometimes.

Steve:

No, no, no. 

Jaime:

That's what you got to like about guys like Russell that can jump in and tell you what you really need to hear, whether it's what you want to hear or not. That's awesome. It's great advice as well. Yeah.

Steve:

Do you mind bringing us to a little bit of CF Pro Tools?

Jaime:

Sure.

Steve:

I'd like to, feel free to go through it. I was wondering also, I probably should have asked you this before but, I mean everyone here obviously we like to hear the numbers. If you wouldn't mind a few things on that or take us through your funnel and kind of how it works.

Jaime:

Sure.

Steve:

If that's all right with you.

Jaime:

Yeah. Absolutely, absolutely. Yeah it really started out, CF Pro Tools was just, as a I thought through, you know I built out a couple of these custom java scripts. The first one somebody had asked for was the ability to add a checkbox directly onto the buy button. Normally we see this check boxes to say hey I agree to the terms and conditions. What somebody was saying was hey, I added this to my page and it's kind of cutting down on my conversion rate. I'd really like to be able to put this checkbox directly on the buy button, that way they're at least looking at the buy button when they have to check it. Maybe that will help with conversions. Maybe it will be a way to fill the bill of requirement for, you know some processors require that hey if you're going to sign somebody up for a trial subscription you need to have somewhere on the page that identifies that they agree that they're signing up for a trial subscription and they're going to be charged again in 30 days.

That really was where the need came from. I thought you know [inaudible 00:19:48] they posted in the Facebook group and said, hey is it possible to do this? I just posted back and said hey it's not possible to do it out of the box but I can certainly add some java script that adds a check box to your button. I dug in the easiest way to do that and make it still flexible with the ClickFunnels editor. You can still edit the button text, you can still edit the subtext which is actually what I used for the checkbox agreement. Basically I just said hey we've got this subtext, I can just pre-pen a checkbox to that event. Or to that text. Then you've got a check box. It's like okay cool that works. It just kind of started there. Then a couple of other things come along. I'm like okay now I've got 2 or 3 of these things.

To me, if you've ever used AWeber, and you've heard of Jack Born there's AW pro tools which is AWeber pro tools. I thought you know hey, I kind of like that name. I like the product. I've used AWeber and AW pro tools for a long time. I thought you know that's kind of what I'm working on here, is little pieces that I can add to ClickFunnels that don't come out of the box. When I'm registered, CF Pro Tools. I thought well I'll just throw them in a free membership area and give people access. That way I can kind of keep up to date, add new scripts, I can send out emails, and do all that. Now it's a library of 16 different scripts that are in there for free.

I've had over the, well I think I was actually just recording a video early this morning, I think I registered my own account in that membership area March 13th. Just prior to funnel hacking live at the end of March this year. I threw it all together and since then I've had a ton of people say, dude why aren't you charging for this? How much can I pay you for this? All kinds of other things. It was just like, no it's always been my goal, I've heard many, many times. I always attribute this to Frank Kern is probably the person that sticks out the most in my mind as saying, "If you want to help somebody you need to show them how you can help them by actually helping them." I take that as kind of, lead with value.

Which complete side note, I was able to register the domain name a couple of days ago, leadwithvalue.com. I thought okay that's what I try and live by. Lead with value, show somebody that I can help them by actually helping them. I thought the best way to do that was to get in front of the community. The best way to get in front of the community is by actually helping them do things. The best way I can do that is just throw some stuff out for free and say, hey I'm going to throw this value out there and there's no strings attached. Just jump in and grab it. It's been hugely successful for me. I always feel like if you go into something and you provide value without any expectation of return, that value is actually going to return to you probably 10 times more than you put into it.

Steve:

100%.

Jaime:

Yeah. That's truly been how this has gone for me. It's been great. After doing this for quite a few months now, just providing as much value as I can. I've finally come up with a few scripts like wow this really is like a major game changer. After building up a pretty good sized library I felt like okay now I actually want to make something work with this, make something happen. I've had enough people say hey I want to pay you, I want to pay you, I want to pay you for this. I fell like you've given me all this value I need to pay you. Please make something available to us as a paid product.

I thought well I'll just add on a section to my membership that is a VIP club. Basically where I throw these kind of high value scripts in there. People can sign up and I'll just throw monthly scripts of these high value nature into this membership and let people join in. I rolled out the CF Pro Tools VIP club. Through, the first script I threw in there was my CF cart mode script which basically takes ClickFunnels which as you know out of the box, the order form just supports adding 1 product at a time to your order. You can have 3-4 products listed on your order form, but you have a radio button so you can only select 1 of those products to purchase. I thought well hey again looking at the structure of the code on the front end and seeing that hey I notice how some of these variables are named, and just from my experience on the backend I know that okay if it's named this way it probably means we can send multiple values into it.

Steve:

At the same time, yeah.

Jaime:

At the same time. I determined that hey I could probably send multiple products into the cart and have them process the order just fine. I tweaked the front end a little bit to change those radio buttons to check boxes. That was the first iteration. I tested my order and hey, guess what it all worked. I was able to send in multiple products to the cart and have them process in a single order, as a single transaction in ClickFunnel. I was like, awesome. Then I had people ask hey is there any way that I can have a quantity selector? I thought, hmm. I wonder if I could combine the 2.

I made the CF cart mode which is the combination of, it works probably best for say you're selling t-shirts. You have 4 different sizes, small, medium, large, extra large, and you want people to be able to order more than 1 at a time. The cart mode gives you the ability to have a drop down selector for quantity. The ability to add each of the products individually. You could say, hey I want 2 smalls, 3 larges, and 4 mediums and ClickFunnels will process that on the back end all perfectly. It adds up totals, sends everything across to your payment processor as your total amount and then your order confirmation page shows each of the shirts that were ordered. It works pretty awesome.

Steve:

I'm blown away that, I mean I have an account with CF Pro Tools. I logged in there and I just could not believe all the stuff that was in there. When you look at what, you know ClickFunnels is what people want as far as like the structure and the ease and stuff like that. Then there's all these little tweaks and features, and customizations people need based on what their business is, or what industry they're in. Yours is like, it's the other side of that man. It's like if you've got CF Pro Tools and you've got ClickFunnels, there's is literally no other product on the planet that is like it. It's pretty amazing. I like that you said that though about the bait. You decided for a long time to give tremendous value up front for free for a long time.

I kind of came to that realization, I don't know it was like 6 months ago also. It was like man, everyone wants me to build these funnels constantly. It's like the thing that everyone asks me to do. I was like, well I may as well toss all the ones that I've built and make them free and put them in a site. That's what salesfunnelbroker.com is. You go in there and you can download the entire website, salesfunnelbroker.com just for free. The amount of doors that's opened up is amazing. It's counterintuitive because people are like, whoa I don't know man. I could charge 5 grand for that easily, and it's true.

It's like ugh. That's kind of the realization I've had recently. What people would normally pay for, go ahead and make that free and you become this rock star in their life and [inaudible 00:27:27] like crazy. I'll get all these personal messages. I'm sure that you get them too, like man thanks so much, this is helping me, I've sold more because of this, or whatever it is. Anyways. I'm just saying I completely agree with that. That's fantastic. At what point did you decide to start charging for all of that?

Jaime:

Yeah that really was just in the last few weeks that I opened up the doors on the VIP club. Really what it came down to is okay, I'm still working I hate to say a full time job but I had kind of committed to a 25 hour a week job. That was, you know it's what I've always done so it's what I knew. It's always kind of that foundation, that safety net but I thought, this is only going to get me so far. I really need to ramp up and scale up my income potential. People are asking for this, let me just throw it out there and see what works. Finally I just flipped a switch in my head and said okay I need to make something out there. I just need to do it. This is the other one of my big failures, and that has been perfection. Always worrying about, well I'm not quite ready to put it out yet because it's not perfect. I really need to perfect my message, my sales letter, my report, my whatever. I'm working on a book here and I need to make sure it's perfect before I can roll it out. One motto that I keep reinforcing in myself and I try and share with everybody that I see having the same problem is, in my opinion perfection is the enemy of progress.

Steve:

Love it.

Jaime:

When I'm trying to make things perfect it keeps me from actually putting anything out there that could be successful. I really just, I had written several of these scripts, I had tested several things. CF cart mode was one of them that I built and I tested for myself. I thought okay it's not quite 1,000% ready so I'm just going to hold on to it. I thought, you know what, no. I'm just going to throw it out there. I'm going to put a separate section of my membership up and I'm going to put a sales page up and I'm going to put a buy button on it and I'm going to let people go and buy it. With my goal, within a 24 hour period to go from concept to completion. I did that and I turned on, flipped the switch, and 5 days later I was 5 figures. I was like okay. Now we're onto something. Yeah it was very cool. Very cool.

Steve:

That. Do you mind sharing with us the funnel a little bit? Or at least the way you bring people through? I mean I've been through it it's fantastic but, squeeze page, order form, whatever.

Jaime:

Sure. Sure. Absolutely, yeah. Really the first iteration was just to kind of capture the traffic that I already had. I had about 700 members inside the free version of CF Pro Tools. My thought was okay I just need to get in front of those people that already know and love me. I hate to say that in a boastful way but-

Steve:

It's true though, you're a brand, it's fantastic.

Jaime:

Yeah. I just kind of want to get in front of those people that are already hot prospects, that already know who I am and already know the value of the scripts. It's a pretty simple process. It's just a video that says, hey I'm Jaime I'm with CF Pro Tools. I'm the creator, this is what I've got for you. I've got a membership area where I'm going to be throwing these high value scripts in a monthly basis. I'm also going to be doing monthly share funnels. I'm also going to be doing some video training. If you want to jump in there's a monthly membership or there's a yearly membership. The funnel is basically that. You're signing up to either pay by the month or pay by the year. I kind of really just throw some spaghetti at the wall as far as price. I put a normal price, in my mind I thought o normal price should be around 67 bucks a month.

Then my thought on the yearly price actually came from a guy name Rory Mcnally I did a mastermind session with Trey Lowell and Harold a while back and Rory was there. He shared just this absolutely golden nugget that I will share with you. I give 1,000% credit to Rory because this is just brilliant. He said, in fact he won the prize. Trey did a little contest and there were 16 people or so in the room. Everybody got to give their number 1 tip. The prize was one of those new 360 degree cameras.

Steve:

Oh sweet.

Jaime:

Just see people doing all these videos. It's like a $500 camera. He said okay the person gets the number 1 tip gets this $500 camera. Rory won that and his tip was this, if you've got a membership area and you can figure out what your average stick rate is. Say your average stick rate is 4 months. People come in, they sign up, they stay for 4 months in your membership and then they bail. Then really what you want to do is offer a yearly plan at just 1 month more than what their monthly was cost wise.

Steve:

Oh man.

Jaime:

You just got an extra month of income out of them that you weren't going to get if you just kept charging monthly and to them when they sign up that seems like a huge bargain. You're getting all the money up front that you can now turn around and reinvest in even more advertising to drive even more traffic to that great deal. It's just the quickest way to scale your business dramatically. I thought, that is absolutely brilliant.

Steve:

That is brilliant.

Jaime:

Of course I'm just starting this so I have no idea what my average stick rate is but I thought you know what, I'm going to go on the 4 month premise. I'll just say okay if people were to stick for 4 months then lets charge 5. I just did a hey get 12 months for the price of 5 on my yearly plan. I basically wanted to do right around a 50% discount for the launch. For those people who have been around I want to give them the most value and the most love I can by being huge promoters and supporters of CF Pro Tools. I went with at $37 a month initial price that will go up probably around the first of September. Then $197 which is roughly 5 times the monthly to sign up for the year. I just put it all on a single order form, here's you're 2 payment options. I got a couple of buttons, I actually modeled the funnel university-

Steve:

Oh sweet.

Jaime:

The funnel [inaudible 00:33:43] .com funnel. That's what I used there. It worked perfectly. I threw that out there and right away had people start signing up, which was great. The one thing is that I did figure out is that, and I actually have changed the price now a little bit for the yearly plan, was because I was getting everybody into the 197 a year. Which was great to come up with a big launch, but as you're running a membership you kind of want to have a little monthly recurring, right?

Steve:

Yeah you want the continuity there, yeah.

Jaime:

Exactly. I thought I'm not getting any continuity here. I literally had like 95% of my sales were for the 197 for the year. I thought, well I've got to be able to support admin stuff in each month so I probably ought to make it a little less enticing to go with the yearly. I bumped that price up to 247. That's kind of balanced things out a little bit more. Whereas I'm getting new sign ups no, I'm getting a little better mix of the monthly versus the yearly.

Steve:

Man that's amazing. Okay. That's fantastic. I've been thinking of that, we have this thing above the door. Actually I can basically see it right now. The ready, fire, aim you know?

Jaime:

Yeah.

Steve:

I think that's so cool. You've just done that. You just put it out there, see what happens, and then tweak as you go. People get so stuck doing the other way around, just waiting, and waiting, waiting.

Jaime:

Yeah. That's huge. I need to get one of those and put it above my door, above my desk as I'm looking at the wall each day with the computer and everything. Yeah. It makes such a huge difference. I mean you're going to get a result. Tony Robbins talks about this, and I've learned over the years that there are no mistakes. There are no failures. There's only results. That result may not be what you want, but it's giving you a result. It's a lesson you can learn from it. Throw it out there and see what you're result is. You just have to have that sensory acuity, to use one of Tony Robbins' words, that sensory acuity to know is this a result I was looking for? If not, what kind of difference can I take out of this that I can make a tweak and maybe move in the right direction. A little 2 degree changes, expand it out and make a huge difference. Just making little shifts, and make little changes, and keep at it. Eventually you'll find the success you just have to get started.

Yeah. It's been very cool and I back into that, just to jump back into the funnel a little bit. I did [inaudible 00:36:05] I got the VIP club. Which a lot of people have been signing up for, I was converting about 10%. Which is really what I was looking for. My goal was to get 10% of my existing free members signed up into the paid membership. That's about where we ended up at. I fell like, okay I hit that target. Really that's just a number that I pulled out that I said I feel like I'll bee successful if I could get 10% of people that took something for free to actually pay for a little bit more.

Steve:

Now are you currently driving traffic as well? Are you buying adds for this?

Jaime:

I am not. I have not done any traffic generation other than sending emails out to the existing list.

Steve:

That's amazing. 5 figures, internal launch, and you just crafted it as you went.

Jaime:

Yeah.

Steve:

That's awesome. That's awesome.

Jaime:

Yeah. I was very happy with it. Then the other layer of it is I thought okay, I've got the monthly membership on the front end. I need to have something to offer on the backend. I want to be able to work with people on a little more personal level. What I did was I'm going to create the Platinum club. Everybody wants to be a VIP and everybody wants to feel important. The Platinum club is again another level of exclusivity. I learned this from Russell, everybody wants, well people will pay extra just to feel a little more special. My goal is always to provide more value. The way I can do that is with the Platinum club we offer monthly group coaching calls. Where I'll get on the phone I'm guessing, we haven't actually done the first one yet. It'll be probably coming up in the next week or so.

2, 3, 4 hours. However long it takes to go through, address the training. I'll be doing training on technical topics, and how to use ClickFunnels, and how to integrate different things. We'll be doing these on a monthly basis and go through all that. Answer any questions that come up during that process, and then also do some coaching. Then also do hot seats where if I've got a member that has a funnel that they're working on that they want to review, we'll pick somebody from the group and we'll go through their funnel and help from a technical perspective as well as just a conversion and just strategy perspective so that everybody can benefit. Everybody always learns from seeing somebody else going through the process.

Steve:

Oh yeah.

Jaime:

That's a great way to provide some value. Then I'll also be doing some much more in depth training videos on how I work. I've been completely blessed to work with some of the biggest names in the ClickFunnels world at least. I've worked with Liz Benny, I've worked with Trey Lowell, I've worked with Dean Holland, I've worked with Joel Erway. I've worked with all these people so to be able to see what all they're working on, and kind of be involved in that process, and to help them with different aspects of their funnels. It brings great experience. If I can take and share some of that experience with other people, then I would love to be able to do that. This is, the Platinum club's kind of my way to be able to do that.

Steve:

That's fantastic. I mean that's exciting. It's fun too like when ... I don't know I just feel like there's energy and movement and momentum is such a huge part of this. Cannot wait to launch forever. That's fantastic. Well hey. Okay. I take notes like crazy. I've got a full page of notes going.

Jaime:

Awesome.

Steve:

Just to kind of recap. You said some cool stuff. Perfection is the enemy of progress.

Jaime:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Steve:

That's huge. There's not failures, only results which is so big. Oh that's such a huge lesson. I mean you think about the mental I don't know, I call it mental shelf space. It's like how much your brain can kind of handle at once. I mean think about how much mental shelf space these people dedicate towards making sure they don't fail.

Jaime:

Right.

Steve:

It's very, very freeing to realize there aren't any. Anyways people will pay more just to feel special. I 100% see that all the time. Yeah. I'm pretty sure, because I sell my own funnels also like in the ClickFunnels marketplace, and all over. I think a lot of people don't even use the things that they're buying. They just want to feel like they've made progress. Anyways.

Jaime:

Yep.

Steve:

That's fantastic.

Jaime:

Yeah, that's the other thing too. This honestly, I'm guilty of this myself. I definitely know that people do this, a lot of people do this. It's probably the majority of people do this is, they go into something and they have an itch. They need to scratch that itch. As soon as somebody buys your product, they have scratched that itch. A lot of people will never consume your product because just the fact of purchasing it made them progress towards scratching that itch. That was just all they needed. That's what, get that shiny object syndrome because if we don't actually completely get rid of the itch, we just scratch it for a little bit, it's going to come back. Then we figure well this thing that I just kind of scratched the surface with, it kind of got rid of the irritation for a little bit. Now it's back. I'm going to have to try something else and maybe that will finally get rid of the problem. It usually doesn't because we didn't fully scratch it. People will do that. They'll buy your product and not consume it. It's just part of human nature.

Steve:

Yeah, yeah. Which isn't always a bad thing.

Jaime:

No. I mean absolutely not. It served well. As long as you do a good job and do it ethically and actually deliver something that could fulfill their need if they actually followed it, then you've done your job. That's another reason why you don't have to worry about being perfect with everything. You just have to get it out there. You've got a lot more chance of helping people actually be successful if you release something versus sitting and working on it constantly.

Steve:

Well I'm looking at this huge page of notes. I know you just kind of gave it, but I guess what kind of advice would you give here as we end? As you get started, I mean I'm looking at, you have quite the journey. You have quite the story going on here. This is awesome.

Jaime:

Yeah. yeah. Honestly the biggest advice is just, stick with it. Here's a little story I've shared before. I love this story. This story actually, I heard originally from Joel Osteen. I just thought it was brilliant and just a huge indicator. To me it attaches perfectly to internet marketing. That is, that there was a psychology study done with some apes. These scientists build this enclosed facility and in the center of this enclosed facility they've got this pole. At the top of this pole they've got this big bunch of bananas. Then they put in these 3 monkeys I think. They put in these 3 monkeys into this enclosure and of course monkeys love bananas.

This first monkey runs and scurries up the top of the pole to grab this bunch of bananas. As soon as he got to the top the scientist, through the top of the enclosure, squirted him with a hose. He got doused with this bunch of water. Man he shoots back down the pole, never got the bananas. Gets to the bottom, then he's afraid to go back up the pole. Then the next monkey does the same thing. He's like hey I'm going to go up and get these bananas. He runs up to the top of the pole to grab these bananas and they dump this bucket of water on him. Again he gets doused with the water and back down the pole he goes. He's like, I'm not going back up, scared to even get near the pole now. The third monkey starts to make his way up the pole and the other 2 monkeys grab him and pull him down.

Steve:

Interesting.

Jaime:

They do this and they think, okay well let's take one of the monkeys out and we'll put a new monkey in. Now they've got a new third monkey. Again this monkey sees this pole, sees the bananas, goes and tries to go up. The other 2 monkeys grab him and pull him down. Then they thought well okay. Let's pull one of the monkeys out, put a new one back in. They do the same thing and this happens again. They do this again, and again, and again to the point where now none of the monkeys that are in the enclosure have ever been doused with the water. For whatever reason it's become inherent that you cannot be successful at getting these bananas and they all will pull each other down. Now nobody will even try to go up and get the bananas.

I see that as kind of internet marketing. You get in it sometimes and you will get excited and jazzed about something. You'll go and talk to your friends, or you'll talk to your family, or talk to somebody else online. They'll say ah, that's never going to work. You don't even need to try. I knew a guy that got into that and he failed. You need to just stay down. People are going to pull you down when you think you've got something, you're going to be successful at. You're always going to have people around you that will pull you down, but if you persist, don't let the doubters, don't let the haters pull you down and keep you from being successful.

I did that for a long, long time. You talked to people and they said, oh yeah that's crazy. That's a scam. You cannot make money online. It's just not possible. We see all over the world people that are being successful on the things we want to be successful with it. It's absolutely possible. You just have to stick to it. You have to pick the thin, the vehicle you think that's going to give you the success, and stick to it, and do that. You can be successful. That's one of the big things. Don't let the haters drag you down. You can make it to the top and you can grab your banana too.

Steve:

That's fantastic man, what a great story. I appreciate that.

Jaime:

No problem.

Steve:

Man I don't even want to say anything else because I don't want to ruin it. There's a glow right now. The room I'm in is actually a little brighter.

Jaime:

Awesome.

Steve:

Hey where should people go to check out your stuff?

Jaime:

CFProTools.com is just the quickest way, you can get signed up, get into the free membership area there. Once you're inside there's great buttons if you want to get upgraded. If you're not already in the ClickFunnels Facebook group, jump in there. I'm in there all the time so jump in and connect with me there. I'd love to connect with everybody.

Steve:

Mr. Jaime Smith you have dropped tons of gold and I appreciate that so much. Thank you so much for taking the time to do this.

Jaime:

Awesome man I appreciate it Stephen.

Steve:

Awesome. Okay I'll talk to you later.

Jaime:

Take care.

Steve:

Bye.

Jaime:

Bye.

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

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All right. All right.

This is actually one of the "HeySteve!" segments.

I should maybe get like a different intro or something like that, so it's not the same "Welcome to Sales Funnel Radio", you know. I paid some guy like, I don't know, like ten bucks on Fiverr to do that. I mixed it and everything. He just did the voiceover.

Anyway, this question comes from Aaron Jordan, so I'm just going to put it in here.

"Hey, Stephen. What's up, man? This is Aaron Jordan. First, I just want to start by saying I love your MLM Funnel. It's excellent. It's everything as good as you said it was. I just wanted to ask a quick question. I wanted to know what was the name of the company that you used to send out the million SoloAd emails. All right? This way I could do some test marketing. Talk to you later."

Hey, man. That's a good question. Aaron, thanks so much for chiming in and thanks for talking about the MLM Funnel, too.

That thing is selling like hot cakes.

I'm loving that thing and so is everyone else. It's awesome when you make a product and ... I kind of just made it as a hobby project and then I kind of forgot about it. I was in the middle of college and it was just a fun thing. It turns out it was actually really good.

Hey, so for the SoloAds and if you guys are listening and you don't know what SoloAds are, a SoloAd is ... Let's take this scenario.

Let's say that I have a huge following of people. Right? I have lots of emails on my list, tens of thousands, a thousand, five hundred. It could even be two hundred people on an email list.

You can sell with what's called SoloAd. Now it's illegal for me to give you the contact information of that person but what you can do is you could pay me to put an ad out to my list.

That way, you still get your message out and I follow the law by not giving you all my emails because you don't have permission to take someone else's contact. They didn't opt into you. Right? That's called a SoloAd. You're sending one ad by itself, solo, you know, to an email list.

Typically, it's to an email list. Usually, in the Internet marketing world, when you say SoloAd, it just means the email, usually not to followings, but you can do the other following, the different mediums.

It's funny I actually just mentioned it. I actually use the company called Fiverr and Fiverr is a place ... There's some caveats with Fiverr. Fiverr is like a ... You can go pay people five dollars to go to crazy stuff. I've had people beatbox my name. I've had people beatbox ... I like the rap ones. I think they're funny.

This dude rapped "Happy Mother's Day" to my mom on this video. It's really sweet. It was like five bucks. You can do lots of Internet marketing stuff, also, so pay somebody to do SEO for you. You can buy back links there. It's a little bit more of what we call grayhat in Internet marketing, meaning it can be like dirty traffic.

Sometimes search engines like Google or YouTube or Facebook or whatever can tell that you're buying likes or they can tell that you're ... Like I've gotten ten thousand likes to a video on YouTube in twelve hours. Most of them weren't real, though. It was just to test it, just for fun and then it ended up blowing up because people created a perception.

YouTube saw that and they took off the likes, so I lost some money on that but that's okay.

The only reason I'm telling you that is because it's a caveat. It's a warning for what actually happens when it comes to SoloAds on Fiverr, also. SoloAds are great but you need to know that from Fiverr, they are kind of like the trash traffic. Do you know what I mean?

Not always, maybe there's a couple that are really good. I know what you're talking about. In one of the videos I was talking about, in that five-day free course that comes with the ... You can white label for yourself with the online funnel. I sent a hundred and seventeen million emails in forty-eight hours.

Here's why it's trash traffic. We got fifty-three thousand people to visit our site in two days. It was fifty-two thousand, four hundred eighty-eight or something like that. A hundred and seventeen million emails go out and only fifty-three thousand of the hundred and seventeen million actually showed up. That's why it's trash traffic because it's kind of garbage.

I buy SoloAds from a whole bunch of people at the same time just because I don't know. Some of them might be crap. From that fifty-three thousand, only a hundred bought and got on our pre-buy list. Now we only paid a hundred dollars for that so we got a hundred people to sign up for a hundred dollars, basically. Fifty-three thousand people jumped on.

I could retarget those people. If you don't know what retargeting is, you can just look it up. It's meaning I follow you around on the Internet with my ad and it looks like I've been there all along. It kind of can pull people back into your funnel. Retargeting is like remarketing to people who have already seen you stuff so you don't lose them. That's basically how it works.

I would go to Fiverr and I would look up a guy name Travis Sago and I would use his email format, mixed with Russell Brunson's email format. He writes what I call short style. Keep it a very brief email.

Most of them don't let you add images anyway. It's going to be plain text. Say in there like, "Hey, look!" Use a really catchy headline or subject line, something that is just loaded with curiosity. The whole point of the email is to not answer any questions. It's to keep curiosity on the line. If you look at a lot of commercials or movie previews.

A lot of times, they do not tell you what the movie is about or they don't tell you what the product actually is. All they do is tell you what it's not. That's kind of what you want to do in a SoloAd. "I'm doing x, y and z without this, this and this." Do you know what I mean? "I gained a six pack without doing any situps." Or "How to gain a six pack without doing any situps." That might be a pretty catchy headline for a SoloAd for someone who has a following in the workout space, obviously. Right?

You might open up the email and say something like "I don't have to do any situps. Actually, I'm still eating carbs. I actually love eating hamburgers. That's my go-to meal every single lunch every single day. Click here to find out more."

You didn't tell them what it actually is. You just told them what it's not and I've found that that actually really works quite well to drive people in. Now one caveat with this also is that you should probably set up your own tracking.

If you go to salesfunnelbroker.com/resources, I think I have a ... I'm going to fill it in for you. She says no, but I think there might be a free trial with a company called ClickMeter, if you use that link on that page.

ClickMeter is cool because through that link, they'll give you a thousand tracks every single month for free. What's kind of cool is I'll use them and I'll take whatever link I want them to go to, so if it's a landing page and it's a product that teaches them how to do something with situps or their abs or whatever, I'll take that landing page link, run it through ClickMeter so that anytime anyone hits that link, it gets tracked and I can see if it's from a bot, if a spider is crawling it like a Google Spider or if it's a natural person and where they are in the world.

Then I'll take that link, though, and that's the link I'll put in the email so I can track it myself. The reason I do that, especially with Fiverr also, is that they'll tell you you've got nine thousand people that come to your actual website and click on it when ninety percent of them are bots. I use my own tracking and go back to those people and say, "Look, I use my own tracking. I know that's crap. I use my own tracking and you didn't send all those people. Half of them are bots." Usually, they'll give you an extra few cents for free for that.

Fiverr is good. Just know you kind of have to do more handholding and you have to grab them by the leash a little bit more because it can be crappy traffic, but it also can be a good way to test.

I usually will use Fiverr only in a scenario that I need to go and just make sure the pages are all converting, meaning I'll have done on my test, I'll go through my funnel and make sure that I think it's working. Then I want to make sure, though, that it's still working for other people, that it's not just because I'm cached on my browser, meaning my browser has saved parts of the website so I'm getting a different experience.

I test it incognito in Chrome and then if it's working for you, then go do a small test also and then after all those things are done and you've seen that even just a couple of people hit it and do some minor things on there, then I'll go buy a Facebook ad or whatever traffic it is you're basically funnel hacking because now I know. Right?

Anyways, that's what I'd do. Go to Fiverr. If you just literally search the term, email SoloAd, you're going to find tons of people. Then filter by rating or popularity or something like that and you'll see all the people that have been buying from this person, which typically means that they're pretty good. Most people don't keep buying crap over and over again.

If you can look through the reviews and see that there have been repeat buyers, especially, that's a great cue. The other thing you can do, too, is let them know that you are watching them, meaning send them a message before you buy and say, "Look, I know that it looks like you have a few upsales here.

For an extra ten bucks, you'll put it here and you'll do this for an extra twenty and that you just want to make sure that it's not all bots. If you can get an answer back from them and at least just let them know you're watching them, sometimes they'll send you an even better list.

That's just a few little tricks and really, that's true for anything you do freelancing. You have to weed through ninety-five percent of people just to get a good gig usually. Once you find them, you keep them for life and you keep them busy so they only work with you.

Anyways, that's a very long answer to your question. Usually, these segments are not that long but that's how I do it. Go to Fiverrr.com. It's F_I_V_E_R_R. It's two R's. Usually, it's five bucks. The upsales are typically worth it so if you use an extra five, ten, twenty dollars, and that's usually where they make their money, they make it even extra cool.

That's kind of how it works, man.

Anyways, yeah, you sent me over your address so I'll send you over your t-shirt and anyone else that's listening to this, know that if you ask a question and if it's is applicable and if it's not a dumb question, go ahead and go to salesfunnelbroker.com/podcast, scroll down on the right and there will be a green button.

If you click it, it will record your question to me. Send it in an email file and then I'll put it on the podcast and send you a free "HeySteve!" t-shirt.

Just send me your shirt size and I'll send it on over to you for free kind of as a way of saying thank you.

All right, guys. Thanks so much and I will talk to you later.

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

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Screw this ONE THING up, and you'll cripple any chance of living like a rockstar in every way...

Oh man.

It's funny because when I listen to other people's podcasts, sometimes they're really boring.

I'd rather throw in a little weird foils here and there and actually be entertained myself.

Anyways.

I've had quite a few people reach out to me lately. Honestly on average, about one person a day. One new person per day, sometimes two, reaches out to me and they say, "Hey. I've got this sales funnel," or "Hey. I've got this business idea," or "Hey. I've got something I want to put into the marketplace and try and get money for it."

One of the first questions I always ask is, what's your plan? What's your, we call it a value ladder, leading from one product to the next. You just increase value and increase price as you go. What's your offer structure?

I was telling them, remember that the offer is not the same thing as the product. What's the offer?

You don't sell a pile of rocks.

You sell a rock bed next to a sidewalk with bushes in it, next to a rock wall where people are going to admire you as they walk by.

You sell the experience.

It's all about an offer.

I've had quite a few people recently who've been approaching, and I've noticed this trend that I don't know if they're trying to impress me. I don't know if they're trying, it's possible I guess.

They'll say, "Hey. I'm going to go make an e-book, and I'm going to do this and write an actual book, a physical book. I'm going to get it in the stores. I'm going to do this, this, this, this, this, this, this." It's like they start beating their chest a little bit. "I'm the man." They go, and I don't know what it is. I can understand that I guess. I wake up and I'm excited.

It's not even seven o'clock yet, and I am recording a podcast. Yeah, I call it world domination. I want to take over the world also.

The trend that I've been seeing is that a lot of people will compare themselves to an ideal. I've been listening to Dan Sullivan. If you ever listen to his book or his presentation, "Pure Genius," it's very good.

In there he said something, and I was like, oh my gosh, that's so true. He said, "Part of the part of the problem is that we'll get to this spot in our lives, and we've been planning forever to get there.

Say like, well I don't know, we're just going to say a trip. Let's say you're planning on going on a trip. It's a big one. Let's say you're going to go overseas somewhere. You're planning the trip. You're thinking about it and the months are coming. The months are leading up to it.

You're planning out the, I don't know, the meals, places you want to go, people you want to see, the different events you want to attend. You're starting to imagine as you get on the plane what it'll look like.

If you're going to Hawaii, what it'll smell like, what's the experience going to be like. Then you get there, and you're like, "Oh this is awesome."

While you're in the middle of experience, you start planning your next trip. You start saying things like, "Oh man. What would it be like instead of going to Hawaii, what if we went to Spain?"

You start planning in the middle of your trip, Spain. You start going, "Oh, what's it going to be like? What is it going to smell like? Who am I going to talk to?

What events am I going to attend?" You get home, and you immediately get on plan and go to Spain. When you get to Spain, it's like, "Oh this is awesome," for the first day.

Then you turn around, and you're like, "Oh. Let's go visit Germany." In the middle of Spain, you actually get on a plane and just fly to Germany. That's what it's like when I'm talking to a lot of people about their business.

Like, "I'm going for this, and going for this, and going for this." Like wow, that's really cool, but you're not actually focusing on anything.

You're not actually going to win at this. You understand. To a degree, especially at the beginning when you're just trying to get a product out there that actually converts, you have to be a little bit of a monomaniac.

A lot of people won't do that.

I keep trying to explain to some people, you have got to simplify. Probably the number one thing I've learned working for Mr. Russell Brunson, is that, that's my day job and I absolutely love it, but probably the number one thing I've learned from him is that the man simplifies like crazy, and then just executes. It's insane.

We do not get caught up in the details when he and I build a funnel together. I sit next to him all day, every day. He's like, "We're going to go do this." Cool. Then we figure out the details as we go, but it is our only focus until we get it done and it's converting and making money.

Does that make sense?

Because I get these people, and a lot of people that do that. I realize when I was listening to Dan Sullivan's program, he said something in there that was very fascinating to me.

He said, "A lot of times people have," I'm not going to say it exactly or whatever, but the major point was, sometimes a lot of us will just go compare ourselves to an ideal rather than what has actually happened.

Does that make sense?

Here's a scenario, excuse me. Let's say you really want to lose some weight. Let's take someone who's really, really overweight.

They go and they lose like fifty pounds in three months, which is amazing. That's fantastic and almost like borderline healthy. That's a lot of fat loss or weight loss. They get there and they've lost this weight. They get on the scale. They feel fantastic. It's a lot of fun for them.

They're feeling great, but then someone who's really, really, really in shape.

Let's say it's an Olympian, walks in front of them and just keeps going. The guy notices, and says, "Oh, but I don't look like that." They get really depressed.

They bring themselves down. "Oh crap. I can't handle what's happening in front of me right now. I might as well not even try for this. I'm never going to look like that."

That's what Dan Sullivan was saying. He didn't say that example, but he's like, "Look, what happens is that we'll go from our current state to a better current state, and rather than comparing to our own selves where we came from, we'll compare to this ideal."

Every time you compare to an ideal, you will always end up not happy. You'll always end up getting depressed.

You'll always shrink back. It'll take away your steam from wanting to move forward.

I was thinking about that in terms of a lot of businesses that I've done, especially when I was in college and I was just getting into this game.

About four years ago is when I really started doing this stuff. I have to say, I totally have done that. I think we all have. We'll go through, and especially when you see these other internet tycoons, and you're watching their stuff online or just other business people in general.

You go through, and you've got your thing. It's starting to work, and you're excited about it. You've got this inner fire, this drive to go produce it and make it cool.

Then, all of a sudden, someone will walk in front of you and go, "Yeah, but you're not making 100 million a month. Oh yeah, but it's not passive income. Oh yeah, it's not like this opportunity over here."

You look at this greener grass on the other side of the hill mentality all the time, time after time after time after time, and it just wears you down.

You start feeling like crap because you are comparing to an ideal, someone else's ideal, when in reality, it might be this side job that you created that's making extra income that's paid all your bills.

That's amazing, right. They might be right.

Maybe it's time to kick it up a little bit, but when you compare you're person value with an ideal, like you're going to suck every time.

That's when I realized that. I went through and I was making these e-books. A couple of them sold. That was the first time I ever really got in a sale funnel, and I was like, oh man. I'm not good at traffic. That was a good compare. I went and I learned traffic. That ended up me working for Paul Mitchell.

I was working for Paul Mitchell, and I was driving their internet traffic for about eight of them in California and one of them in Idaho. I was like, oh crap. None of this traffic is converting.

That was another good example of personally comparing well that propels you forward. That's a good way to compare. All right, let's go learn how to convert traffic.

Then I learned how to convert traffic.

That's a good way to follow the rabbit holes for whatever you need to do to improve and make your business better. That's been fantastic. When you compare to this ideal and this way, here's a really bad example. When I was doing door to door sales, that was in college.

It's really one of the major ways I started getting into how to drive ads, which was a weird thing to do. My first summer going with these people, I was the number two first year guy. The number one guy had actually been out there two months before me.

I don't count it because he had a two month lead on me on selling. What started happening is instead of just keeping my head down and just working with my pace and working my own speed, I looked up, which was, for me, not a good thing.

When I looked up, I started seeing the other people and what they're doing. Oh they're doing this level. Oh they're doing this level.

When people started looking at me and my work, and they start saying, "Oh Stephen, you're so amazing at what you do. You're so good at building sales funnels."

If I look at that and I allow it as an input, that I actually do worse. I start sucking because I start comparing to an ideal. Oh crap. I didn't realize I was doing so good with this. I just really want to do my own kind of good.

Then I start comparing, and I'm like, oh. Then when I'm on the doors and I was talking to people and starting to, what if this guy's going to say yes. They start to read that on my face like a dog smells fear, and I start losing sales, more, and more, and more, and more and start sucking.

I'm just in this downward spiral. I'm in this huge tailspin.

Three weeks go by and I haven't sold as much as I usually do in one week. That's how it starts to happen, I feel like, for everybody. I had to pull myself out of that and realize, okay, just you were really good at this before.

Stop looking at what other people are doing. Stop caring that people are watching what you're doing because that's what puts you in the tailspin.

That's actually one of the reasons I've been nervous for this podcast. Thanks for being a faithful listener. That's my whole message is I just want to say that remember not to compare yourself to an ideal.

Compare yourself to what you personally can do, and what you're personally good at, and where your own personal history is from. Keep your head down. Just work hard. It's to want a little limelight. That's not bad. It's good for marketing.

It's good to be able to want to be seen, but when it becomes the object and you start saying things like, "Oh but I'm not doing it like he is," you're going to suck. Just the natural, it's going to happen because you start comparing. "Yeah, well that guy over there has a different, unique ability than you do. What's your own, unique ability is one of Dan Sullivan's things also. Just focus on your own thing, whatever you're crazy good at, he's probably not crazy good at.

You're right. He's probably better than you at something, but you're better than he is at this one are.

Go just focus on your one thing, blow it up, make it successful, and keep your head down. Stop comparing to an ideal. Anyways, I've said that like twelve times now. It's a trend we all get into. It's the reason we like pop culture is we're going to look at someone else and compare. Well, I've got to wear what this celebrity's wearing. That's the whole basis of that industry.

Anyways, that's all I got for you. It's a short one. It's a powerful thought. It started changing things for me. It's this breath of relief for me. Oh yeah, that's right. What's my actual one to my actual two, where I started to where I am now and look at the progress. That's amazing.

You failed out of college your first semester, which is true. Then you started getting straight A's at the end. That's true. Look at that personal progression and from where you are.

All right guys.

I'll talk to you later. I actually have a podcast interview very soon with a very cool guy.

He is in the UK. I'm pretty excited to interview him. I love their accents, so I'm actually really excited about it.

It starts in five minutes, so I got to get prepared. All right guys, see you.

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