Approaching someone with nothing but an idea doesn't put you in a position to start partnering with someone. Here what you need to have before going to others...

What's going on everyone? This is Steve Larsen, and in this episode I want to share with you guys when it's actually really cool to partner with somebody, but also I want to share with you when it's completely inappropriate.

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.

All right. Now when I first got started in this business, I started getting a little bit of traction, I was studying a lot of traffic strategies, and I didn't know it at the time but I literally was taking this piece of paper in the middle of my internet marketing class, and I was drawing out a funnel, a sales funnel. And I was drawing from a squeeze page, to a thank you page, over to an affiliate offer, and there was an email sequence.

And I was learning how to put all this stuff together. I had no idea that I was drawing what is now commonly known as a sales funnel. And it was super cool, and there was all these really cool things that I was drawing, this really detailed little map of how this was going to be all working out. And I walked up to my internet marketing professor, this was about two and a half, eh, this was way longer than that. This was probably three and a half years ago now, four years ago.

And I walked up to him and I said, "Hey, you know what? Hey, great class. I never want to come back." And he's like, "What?" And I said, "Look, it's like day two and you just asked me what SEO stands for. Like, I've been studying this stuff way longer than you probably have been." I didn't say that part. But I was like, "Look, I don't want to come back."

And he's like, "All right, fine." And I held up this piece of paper, that funnel, and I said, "I'm gonna go build this instead," and he, I thought he was going to say no. But he said something that probably changed my life. He said, "Okay. You can leave, don't come back the rest of the entire semester. And what you're going to go do is you're going to hold a class on your own. And at the end of the semester, I expect some kind of deliverable."

And so what I did is I looked around in class, and I looked for the other kid that looked like he was just bored out of his mind because he just knew this stuff already, and I was like, "Hey, let's go." And we left class for the rest of the semester. And we, every single day, held class for three hours. We called it class, but literally all we were doing is we were trying to make as much money online as we possibly could. And that's what our class was. And it's super unique, it was really, really cool, I can't believe he actually said yes to that. And so that's all we did.

We sat down and we just started executing the plan. I said, "Hey, okay, here's the plan." And I, his name's Ben Wilson, he's one of the first interviews on my podcast, by the way. He's about to launch his own. Anyway. And he ... I was like, hey, here's what this is. I didn't know it was a funnel that I was drawing. But I was like, first we're going to send it to this and then we'll go do this, and then we'll go do this.

You know, it was all this cool automation and I was kind of patch working together these different systems that weren't really supposed to work together but I somehow in weird ways got them to.

And we went and we got a Clickbank offer and the coolest thing happened. We went and we grabbed this Clickbank offer and we put basically together an affiliate funnel. Using some free software for some crappy landing page thing. And we thought through all the lines of copy and we thought through the headlines.

All that we could, we were just focusing as hard as we could on when to say this line, and when this line. And we took this video from here. It was just really, really fun.

And I was like hey, I have no money. We're gonna put fifty bucks in, let's say, on ads, and I learned some really awesome traffic driving strategies. This is literally before I even learned who Russell Brunson was by like a month before I learned who he was. And it was really, really cool. I went and we put fifty bucks in and I was like, okay, let's see if it works.

And we went to bed. And that night, I woke, the next morning I woke up and I was really, really excited. I had a hard time sleeping because I was so excited to see what would happen.

I was like, we're gonna be rich! We're gonna be rich! This is gonna be amazing!

And not from fifty bucks, but just to prove the concept and knew we could scale afterwards.

And so we put fifty bucks in, and I open up my account, and there was fifty dollars in there. It was like fifty-something. Anyway, we basically, we broke even. And I was like, God! No way! Oh my gosh, we broke even, we broke even! Dude! And I called him up and I was like, "We freaking made it!" And he's like, "Are you kidding me man?" And I was like, "Yeah, meet me there."

So we go and I get on my bike, because we only have one car, and I wanted to like, to have the car for the kids. And I'm riding my bike as fast I can, rah! Go as fast as I can. I get to campus, get to the room that we always stole from the other people so that we could try to make money every day.

And I pull my computer up and he comes running in and I show it to him and we were like, "Oh my gosh, it worked!"

Well the news of that spread. And part of me was like, yeah, whoa! And the other part of me was like, eh, we broke even. We had 17 people opt in and one person bought and then bought the upsell which made fifty bucks. And I was like, huh. Well, it looks like we failed on that, I guess what else should we try?

And it's so funny because until I just kicked myself. We made a break even funnel our very first try, which, just so you know, in the sales funnel world, is not a small feat. It was huge. And it was mass ... Anyway. What was funny was this onslaught of people with these deals that just started coming out of the woodwork for us. And news of that spread. And we were just excited. We weren't thinking. We were just like, "yeah, check this out! We did this, this, and this!" It was like, aw, so crazy cool!

Well, pretty soon everybody was a deal maker. And I was in the middle of my marketing classes and I'd go from class to class and these people would come out and be like, "hey, you want to do this?" "Hey, dude, I've got this great thing. Hey, you want to drive traffic for me and do x, y and z?" And I was like, "Yeah! Totally!" And I was just saying yes to everything. And we were saying yes to all this stuff, thinking, oh my gosh, this is huge, we've learned this cool little skill, we've just proved it, we have a case study now, let's go do, it's an actual business. And let's see if it works, you know? And I can't even remember what we did next.

Oh! We started doing all these little small businesses. And trying to drive, you know, driving traffic for them, and it was really, really fun. It was cool. And then one day ... I mean, we were just saying yes to everything. And then one day, this company called Paul Mitchell came and they asked the school for some help. And they said, "hey, we don't know what these kids are doing but you gotta go work with them. Their fame is spreading all over the place for whatever they're doing online."

Well, it was me and my buddy. It was Ben and I. And Ben and I went, we went out and we started driving traffic for these guys. And what was funny was just the ridiculous onslaught of deals, all right? We technically were not even that successful with it yet. I mean, we had just proven the concept. But the motion created attention.

Because most people won't even make any kind of action. They won't even get into motion because they're so afraid that they're gonna mess up. And so what ended up happening, it's kind of a short lesson for you guys today, but this is really, really powerful. What ended up happening is all these deals started coming out of the woodwork.

Just, I mean, I can't even believe it. And I went ... We were talking to tons of tons of people. We had 15 businesses on a waiting list to drive traffic for. Fifteen! It was nuts. We had investor wanting to help us create a platform where we could do our system that we had, you know ... Some of it was ours, some of it was proprietary, some of it was from other people, some of it was ... You know, like, we had an investor who was willing to place like, a lot of money.

Hundred of thousands of dollars into putting together this little system. And we were like, Holy crap! What did we make? Why is this happening so much?

And I remember sitting back and thinking, dude, we are just gonna be rich! Oh my gosh! And I remember getting really excited about it. And Ben and I would sit back and we'd talk about it and we'd have super late nights and we'd be on whiteboards drawing out all this stuff. I still miss those days. It was so fun. And always reminds me of it whenever I do it with Russell, you know?

And we would draw it all out and we'd put all these things, all these pieces and systems together. Big mastermind sessions and things like that. Really, really fun. And we'd go meet with these business owners. Millionaires. Even some billion dollar companies.

And we'd go show them the system and ... I mean, it was working by that time. It was pulling in lots of traffic, and it'd pull in more leads, and we were proving the system as we were selling it, basically. Which is a lesson in that alone.

And again, just deals and deals on deals from students, from teachers. Lots of teachers. And it was really awkward when I would tell them no. But that wasn't my initial knee jerk reaction. What ended up happening is that there were so many deals that started coming out of the woodwork, all these people saying, "Please, help with, do this with me, do this with me."

And I was just ... My resting state is nice guy, although I can get pissed off in very specific scenarios. My resting state is nice guy, so I'd say yes to everybody. And I was like, "Yeah, we could totally do that with you!" Pretty soon, I'm running ads for construction people, I'm running ads for someone's pizza company, and we're running ads for some guy's networking agency. And we're running ads for ... I mean, it was all over the place.

It was nuts. And this was literally in the middle of college. Okay? In the middle of my internet marketing class that was supposed to be Internet Marketing 101. And we had our own, like, freaking agency.

And we were building sites for all these people. I mean, it was really, really fun. Really, really enjoyed it. But what was funny, again, is how many deals were just popping out of the woodwork. And what was funny is that never stopped. But, but I did. I did it out of necessity. What ended up happening is I had to remember, okay. In this guy's business, he has this scenario going on, but over here it's different because of this.

And this guy's headline is this, this. And it caused so much noise in my head I could not sleep. It was so hard. There was so much pressure and this thing that initially was very exciting ended up being very, very, kind of demoralizing almost. It was like ... It kind of became depressing.

It became this thing that I did not want to work in anymore. And for months and months and months, it was this beast that we couldn't turn off very easily. And I learned just like so much from that. What honestly stopped it is Ben graduated before I did and he left. So I was like, well, I guess I'll just drop all these clients too and just, years were ... What money or ads didn't spend, here you go, here's it back.

And here you go, here you go, you know what I mean? And that's kind of how it went.

And ... But the deals never stopped. And one of the major points I wanted to put on this podcast is that guys, when you start to get into motion, motion attracts people. Motion in general attracts people.

Action attracts people...

I mean, the TV and its effect on humanity is a case in point of that very statement right there. You know whenever there's a car crash, everyone stops and looks. The crash is over. But something happened, right?

When you get in motion there are things that happen for some reason in other people's brains as they begin to look at what you're doing. And they begin to assign value to your action. And there's real power in it, but there's also a gigantic façade and mirage.

The power is that you're gonna get a lot of people who start to follow you because of the action. "Wow, this guy has the guts and, quite honestly, the straight-up cajones and balls to just do something with his life. And be vulnerable and go try and make some money and do something new and creative and be a business owner and entrepreneur and marketer." Right? That's where the power comes from.

The mirage comes though, by you thinking and mistaking action and progress with achievement and accomplishment. Action and movement is not the same thing as accomplishing. Right? I can jump up and down all I want, but I'm not gonna grow my lats until I actually start lifting them. "But wait, I'm in motion! How come I'm not ... "

You know? You know what I mean? It's very, very true for marketing in general. This is what I've learned.

People will go take motion, and they'll go take this action, thinking that it's achievement and accomplishment. And what they'll do is they'll go market it. As if it is accomplishment and action. And in my opinion, I think that's false. I think that's wrong. I don't think you should ever do that.

If you haven't actually accomplished something, what ... You're marketing a mirage, which is very scary because people are gonna find out about that.

We just had a guy who got caught recently in my Two Comma Club coaching group. We caught him lying and he was saying that he had built all these funnels and he had built all these funnels for entrepreneurs that I personally built.

Or these other million dollar funnels, saying that he was the one that was actually the one behind him.

And we caught him on recording and it was so sad, because I kicked him out of my community. I literally kicked him out. And I sent a message to him, I said, "I hope you learn from this.

Like, I have no room for that in my community...

I worked too dang hard for someone who's a fake, a mirage, a façade, to be in my community. You're not allowed in here anymore." And I kicked him out and I locked him out.

And ... That's a classic example of somebody mixing up motion and movement and action with accomplishment and achievement. You know? You're not done ... It's like when we, I'm a do, it's kind of ... here's a kind of like bridge, okay? It's kind of like when I would do sprints, you know? And we would do what we'd call 61 20s or we would sprint, just dead sprint, as hard as you could, like a cougar was gonna eat you alive.

We would sprint as hard as we could for 60 seconds. And then we'd walk for 120 seconds. And then we'd sprint for 60 seconds, and walk for 120 seconds. And we'd do that for like 50 minutes in the army. It sucked. Guys would throw up by the end. It rocks your lungs. It is not easy. Especially after round two, it's like, oh my gosh. It's just full out dead sprint like you're going to die straight to nothing.

Really, really intense...

Anyway, what was interesting about that is that when we would do laps, we had to actually do the lap itself. If I had done the entire race and the whole sprint perfectly, but then ended up walking out at the end, you know, the last turn ... Well I didn't finish. It's the exact same thing. You can't mix motion and action with achievement and accomplishment. They're not the same thing. You have to cross the finish line.

And so it's great that you get started. It's great that you get out and start doing something. But that's not the point. You guys, what I'm trying to tell you is that as you get started in your entrepreneurial journey, or as you're moving along currently, deals will continue to find you because it is attractive to humanity.

You will find so ... Opportunities are not something that you're gonna be in need of if you are a person who's in motion. People will find you. And guess what? Not all opportunities are made equal. Most opportunities are made really poorly, actually. Most opportune ... And you should ...

I have made far more money by saying "no" 90% of the time than "yes" 90% of the time. That was the biggest lesson I learned back in the story I was just telling you. We were saying yes to everything. The problem is that you really are saying yes to nothing. Because you've said yes to everything.

Just by definition almost. Like, yeah, we could do, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well it turns out, spreads your focus so thin that you end up dying. You can't dive in, really, on more than one thing. You know what I mean?

You gotta be tricky if you can do two. It's not easy to do more than even two things. Even more than one. Okay? So don't go and confuse those things. When we were going and we were doing ... One of the biggest powers that I started realizing ... We started having these deals come out, I'm trying to remember some of them specifically.

This is easily three years ago, I mean it was ... Anyway. We have these deals come out of the woodwork though.

Like one of them was for a construction company. And they're like, "hey we want to drive ads." It was like residential construction for residential pools and stuff like that. And we said yes at first, but around that time, that's when there were so many people who wanted the service. Which A, really solidified the value that I thought we were bringing to market, I was like, wow, people actually want this, that's really cool. But B, it became a little bit stressful.

And it was a side thing that I wasn't expecting to happen...

What, stress? Because of too many opportunities? What? That's real? I thought that was a joke. That's actually very real! Well, I just had that happen to me again today. It literally happens to me at least three times a week, I think? Where somebody reaches out and it's very flattering, but they're always like, "Steven, I got this sweet thing, I really want you to be a part of it. Please, please, please, will you build my funnel? Here's the idea. If you build the funnel and kind of help me create the product and drive the traffic to it, dude, I'll give you 50% of this awesome idea."

What's wrong with that? It means I'm literally building their entire business. And I get 50% of it? Like, no, no, no, no.

There's a guy who reached out to me, it was actually today. I won't say the name. Anyway, he was trying to pitch me on this idea and I was like, "hey, no. I have a ... My full time attention is working with ClickFunnels and as Russell Brunson's funnel building assistant. You know? It's really, really awesome and I really love what I do," and I was happy to do an interview or something, but I've had more success by saying no to the bountiful opportunities than saying yes.

Most of the time when someone wants to partner with me, I could've just done the idea on my own. Not trying to be rude here, but I'm just saying. Sounds like you want me to ... sounds like you want to pay me to build you a funnel, not partner with you. And then he jumped over and he said, "well, hey, I've made $8,000 a month. I've made $8,000 this month. Is that not proof enough?"

I said, "hey ..." I said, "if it's not mainstream ... " Anyways. He said, "I need a marketer, a marketing partner, not a funnel builder."

Okay, first of all, you all know my position on entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs are marketers! If you're not, you really need to get in behind the marketing wheel. All right? You already have lost control of your business if you're the entrepreneur and you're not also the marketer. Anyway. Ugh! That always drives me just bat crazy.

Anyway. But I said, "hey brother, there's more opportunity than I can handle. My focus is here and on my own projects. I appreciate the reach out." And I was just trying to like, nicely, back him off. He said, "all right buddy, at least I tried to get you on board." And he kind of, he kept saying all of this stuff, saying hey, this is super trendy right now, but I'm gonna adapt.

And he was trying to guilt me into saying yes. And to get into ... and to say ... I cannot tell you how many times this happens to me. And you're gonna get it too, if you're not already getting it now, opportunities are going to come out of the woodwork, and they are not all good! Okay?

And I said, "hey, what I'm saying is this, meaning you need to come out with, you need to come at me with more than just an idea. You need to already have brought it to life. Know how it sells before you partner or hire. The entrepreneur is the marketer." And he went through and whole, all this other stuff. And I was like, "hey man, I'm already partnered with Russell and the Two Comma Club Coaching Program. I'm not really for hire right now, but either way ... "

Anyway. What was just making me totally go nuts and actually really frustrated was the fact that this guy had not put two and two together, that just having an idea is not value. You guys, you buy your customer somehow. You either buy them with your time or you buy them with your money.

I prefer to do it with money. You know? Or some kind of value.

It's the exact thing when you guys go partner and you go hire. You only hire when it hurts. You bootstrap that crap. You don't go get VC money, you figure out how to sell it on your own. And you will have a way better, more sustainable business because of it. It's the same thing when you go partner with somebody. You don't partner somebody for the sake of getting a partner.

It's like getting a board. You don't go put a board together for the sake of having a board. It's the dumbest thing on the planet. Don't go just get a board because it's the MBA crap to do. That's not, that's not how bootstrapping business ... That's not how having your own business works. You don't just go get people in the business and try to pay them money for the sake of it. You know what I mean?

That's like me paying you allowance for crap you didn't do. That's like me paying allowance period. I don't pay my kids allowance, I don't plan on it. They're gonna work. You know what I mean? Anyway I get really fired up about this topic because deals will come to you, and they are not all good.

When you want to go partner with somebody, you do the exact same thing that Russell teaches in his books, which is the Dream 100 concept. You go provide value. I remember there was a guy who came out to me once and he was like, he reached out and, you know ... I get about at least a hundred messages a week, just on Facebook alone, let alone the billions of other platforms that are out there.

And it stresses me out. And anytime I go and I try hook up with somebody else who's also kind of farther along the path, and I want to do some kind of JV thing with him, I don't just reach out straight to them. Unless I know that they know who I am. And that there could be value and it could be awesome.

You know what I mean? But usually I don't just reach straight out to somebody. I try and figure ... I, I ... essentially date them.

And that's what this guy did to me too. So cool. What he did is he went out and when I was creating the Sales Funnel Broker website inside of ClickFunnels, I was like, "well I still want the SEO capabilities that WordPress brings." And so what I did was I hired this coder and basically she created this custom WordPress theme that synced up with my ClickFunnels website.

So it looked like you were on the same website even though you were really on a blog page, just for one of the pages. It was really cool. Super awesome. And I was like, hey this would be super cool if I sell this. I was just gonna use it for myself but it's awesome.

Well, I started selling it and it's awesome and it's this cool little upsell and I can't believe the amount of money that it's brought it. Totally, you know, to buy a product. Like the book Rework says, I'm still in my buy products and it's awesome.

Well, one day this guy reaches out to me and he's like, "hey I bought your thing." Notice he didn't even ask for it for free. He's like, "hey, I bought your thing. Your WordPress, your custom WordPress theme that's ... " He's like, "it's totally awesome." And he's like, "But by the way, I've got all these coders, and they're sitting on the side. And I just thought it'd be kind of cool, I saw a few holes inside of your WordPress theme. I thought it could be even cooler. And I thought you'd maybe want a start-up guide." He's like, "so what I did is I bought your WordPress theme, I handed it over to my coders, and for the next, last while, they went in and they ... I had, I paid for my coders to go make your thing even cooler.

Here you go, it's yours. And by the way, here's a video start-up guide so that these people don't, stop bothering you with questions on how to hook it up."

And I was like, "Who are you? Oh my gosh, you're the man! Are you serious? Whoa!" Right? He provided value to me first. And I had no idea that, later on, he was planning, he wanted to ask me for a ... all he wanted was an interview. And you know, I might have just said yes to the interview anyways.

But now I know anytime he comes out and he asks me anything, I'm gonna say, "hey, what's up?" And I'm gonna respond to him. He provided such deep value to me and my community. Why would I not give time and the day for him?

It's the same thing when you go partner. When you go walk up to somebody and you're like, oh, my gosh, you know what, I really don't want to do Facebook ads. Or you know what, I really don't want to be the guy who builds the funnel. I don't want to be the guy who's gonna do ... whatever. Whatever role it is, you do it yourself as long as you can. Unless you just truly cannot. But what you do is you go hire somebody and partner with them for that specific role.

You know what I mean?

This guy wanted me to build his entire company and then just him take 50% of it. That sounds like a great deal for him. Oh my gosh. Anyway, it just drives me nuts when people come out, they're like, "hey I've got this sweet thing, it's awesome." It's like, cool. You know how many sweet things there are out there? A billion.

So what, why is yours any different? Why am I gonna take it on? You've gotta have ... Why are you so unique? You know what I mean? What's the thing that you already have built?

When somebody comes to me, it's literally the entire reason I stop focusing on start-up businesses when I was building funnels for people. It's because their business wasn't proven yet, they hadn't created value in the marketplace. No one in the marketplace knew who they were. And so how can I partner with somebody who's not done that? And I made that mistake for years. And I went and I was building these funnels for people who hadn't actually made it.

And as I build the funnel, if the funnel didn't work, they thought it was the funnel's fault and then I'm like, no! You haven't proven yourself in the market! Why did I ever partner with you? Ah!

And it took me years to realize that lesson. So if you're gonna go partner with someone, oh my gosh, only do it when it hurts. Same when you hire. But second of all, you don't just approach people and just say, "uh, I've got this sweet thing."

Here's the reality. If somebody approaches me ... This is gonna ... I'm not trying to be conceited, you know what I mean? But like, I have worked my butt off for the last, like, seven years. I said in a recent podcast I'm a seven year overnight success story. I've worked my butt off. And people who are successful are typically in motion, right? They're accomplishing things. They're getting out there, they're doing things.

They're in motion to get the accomplishment. They're already moving. You don't have to get them moving. They already are. You know?

If you walk up to me, and you say, hey I've got this sweet thing. And let's say I drop everything and I turn and I start focusing directly on the one thing that you have, what does that say about what I was originally doing? It means it probably wasn't that good in the first place. You know what I mean? So you ... quite honestly, when you want to go partner with somebody, expect to sell them a little bit.

Court them, so to speak...

Figure out how you can provide value for what they're doing. Show them how this is amazing. You're gonna need to sell them. It took us a long time to get this totally awesome person on the ClickFunnels team. It took us a long time to get them. Because we had to quote and quote date them. You know? We had to ... And that's exactly what happened.

I'm not just telling you crap, you guys, this is how we actually do it. This is how I do it. When you create cool stuff in the marketplace, there's gonna be people that come out of the woodwork who are asking for your services and who bring you opportunities. I'm just trying to tell you that not all of them are good. In fact, 99% of them are not going to be good. And it's because they haven't even proven the idea. They haven't even started it. Why would I jump ship on all the other crap that I've got going on that I just absolutely love?

Why would I just drop all that stuff and go to an idea that is barely proven? No, thank you.

And so what I did is I started focusing on businesses that already had, you know, x amount of cash flow and customers. And my strategies would bloom up. And that's quite literally what got me in a position where Russell noticed me. That's it! And I started focusing on all these other businesses that are already blowing up and I knew ... I still, you know ... I knew that hey, what I was doing, that was, what, three years ago? When I started doing that? And all I did is I changed my bait. I changed my customer. And the opportunities changed.

Which is super key. So if you have all these opportunities coming in, you've got all these people who are just hounding you, you probably aren't putting up the right message, A. B, please don't accept all of them. In fact, you should say no to all of ... I have made more money by saying no to things than yes. Seth Godin has got this great book called The Dip.

And in The Dip he talks about that very same principle...

He's like, look. There's this really stupid misconception in the planet that quitting is a bad thing. That is, and I'm just echoing him right now, that is complete, utter, ridiculous bull crap. I quit stuff all the time. And that's exactly what he said. He's like, he's like, the thing is that winners quit more than losers. They just quit the right stuff. You know?

When I decided to really get focused on stuff, I quit certain ... I quit watching Netflix all the time. I quit watching, I quit doing all sorts of, I quit so many things in my life so that I could say yes to the thing that was important. And that's all I'm trying to tell you, is that these people who are gonna bring you all these deals.

It's not that they're crappy deals. Some of them are just not fleshed out enough for you to go jump full, you know, full bore into. And it's gonna be a complete, utter waste of your time.

And so I urge you, if you're not ... If somebody comes to you with an idea and they don't have a history with a business that has any cash flow. If they have zero history of ever being successful in any kind of marketing, if they've zero history of the idea itself or it's in such a blue ocean that's so crazy and out there that no one's ever done it before, man, you should have so many freaking red flags going off in your head. And you should say, "thank you. Have a great day."

And you should walk away. Just literally turn around and walk away. Don't, don't ... No small talk. Don't try and make them feel good. Don't, just ... You literally turn around and you walk the other way.

And it's only because that kind of person is looking for somebody else to prove their idea. They have not, honestly, they hadn't had the balls to do it on their own. And so, I don't, personally, ever want to work with a person like that. And it's the reason I don't. And so this person who reached out to me, like "I got this great thing," it's cool, yeah. He already had cash flow, he was already doing cool stuff with it. I don't even know who he is. And his first thing he comes out to me with is, "hey! Bleh bleh bleh bleh! Bleh bleh bleh bleh!"

That makes me feel like he's a door-to-door salesmen. You know?

And I don't ... those deals come around, how many, so many times every week. So the Dream 100, you know, I can tell when I'm on someone's Dream 100 list because I receive packages in the mail every once in a while. And I get these things and I'm like, oh, cool little toys! Like, cool! Aw! That's this person. I get more than enough messages and emails, you know, so how do they break through all the noise? They send me packages, you know?

And I'm beginning to do the same kind of stuff. It's just a lot of fun. That's what people do to Russell, that's what Russell does to other people to let them know that they're serious. Anything that makes them stand out and guys, it's kind of like on Shark Tank.

Have you ever seen, I'm sure you've seen this show Shark Tank.

In Shark Tank, there's this super classic scenario that seems to happen at least once every episode where ... or every thirty minute episode. Where some guy has this fantastic idea. And he's poured in all this money and he's gone and he's done all these things and then it gets to the spot where they all want to know the numbers. And they're like, "hey that's really cool. Hey, hey, how much is it selling?" And they're like, "oh, I, I, it actually hasn't started selling yet." It's like, "oh. Dead already."

It doesn't matter if you had the idea to cure cancer. You know what I mean? Man, well, it depends on who you talk to I guess. But the thing is that like when it comes to these different business ideas and these different opportunities, it doesn't matter how good you make it sound, you have got to have some numbers behind it. So when you go partner with somebody who actually could be a heavy hitter, who actually could do great things for your business, man, you better have some numbers behind you.

Know your numbers!

And get to know your own weaknesses. You know what, I've done this and I've tried this, we sold two or three this way, but it didn't work that well. I mean, go door-to-door if you freaking have to. You've got to get results or nobody who actually could help you is even gonna look or blink an eye at you. Because you haven't proven it.

And so, anyway. That's enough on that. But I just wanted you to know that you guys, more money's made by you saying no than yes. Just get focused. And know, it's the weirdest thing. It's funny, my wife and I were just talking about this. Every time I put my foot down on something else that I'm gonna go start doing, and I'll be like, okay. That's my project for the next two years! I'm just gonna go do it. Every single time I do that I always get this onslaught of deals. It's almost like the world subconsciously is trying to test me.

"Are you sure that you're committed to that? Are you sure that you want that really bad?" You know, and it's the weirdest thing that happens, it happens every single time. It just happened again.

So I was like, cool, I'm gonna go do that thing. And I wrote it all a plan, I pulled stuff together, and I was like, cool. That's, wow, I could totally do that and it's actually not gonna take that long and I think it could provide some insane value in the market. It literally is the exact same thing, just deal after deal after deal every day for the last several weeks has just been hitting me and I'm like no! Just go away! Stop distracting me!

It's the biggest killer of me finishing. Of you too, anything.

Anyway. Guys, hey, thanks so much. Remember to stay focused and go prove your idea. It's very, very fun. It's very exciting. And if you have the nuts enough to just go do it, you're already gonna set yourself apart from so many people who are not willing. All right guys, talk to you 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 funnels for free? Go to salesfunnelbroker.com/freefunnels to download your pre-built sales funnel today.

"Steve, what mic and setup do you use?" Well, here that is too!

Hey, what's going on everyone, this is Steve Larsen and you're listening to Sales Funnel Radio. Now, this is the Power of Publishing, How to Create a Podcast, Part 2. The reason I did it this way is because, at the beginning, the first episode, part number 1 of this was really me diving into how I come up with my podcast content. It's something that I get asked frequently, how can you generate that kind of content over and over and over and repeatedly? Week after week? So, part number 1 was all about that, if you've not heard it I encourage you to go back and listen to it.

So, this episode though, what I want to dive into is more about a few more of the rules of podcasting, there are some rules if you actually want to be successful with it that I've noticed as I've not followed them and a lot of it's been haphazard, if I've not followed these rules then I've not been successful with that episode, if I have then they go great.

So, I want to share with you what those things are and then I'm going to share with you, how do I actually get this thing recorded now? I want to tell you real quick what the software is that I use, the kind of mic as well as how do I actually publish to fifteen different platforms with a single click?

I make this thing as super turnkey as possible, which I have to, because I have a full time job working at Click Funnels and so it's kind of a trick and I'm a true believer that stress creates fantastic systems and this has been no different. I'm really excited to share with you guys how I've actually finished this.

So, with that I'm going to jump right into this next episode.

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.

All right you guys, so let me dive a little bit more into this, only because I think the tech side and, what kind of mic do you use and all that stuff, I don't think it really matters that much, I'll dive into that in a second but I just want to run through some rules of podcasting.

Number 1, you cannot be boring. Everybody, I don't care where you are, what you're doing, unless you're in the gym, jack up your shoulder, raise your arm right now and say "I, state your name, will not be boring". What's funny is, most people are so afraid of messing up that they don't do anything anyway, ever, it keeps them from taking action and so by merely taking action you will set yourself apart from so many people because you're seriously just moving. Since you're moving, you might as well not be boring and you do that by telling stories, you do that by getting excited about your own message.

I love music, you guys, I love it. I love going to live concerts, it is one of my favorite things on the planet and I don't know if you guys ever heard the band Incubus?

I saw them live at Redrocks Amphitheater, 20,000 people, I was on the 4th row, anyway, I've seen a lot of concerts, total concert junkie in my day growing up and I love an artist that loves his own music and you can see it and you can tell it and I believe that's true for marketing in your message and how you interact with your community and the culture that you create.

People will love you if you love what you're doing, it's contagious.

It's not something that you can hide behind and so when you're creating these pieces of content, you can't be boring.

Get excited about your own thing, get passionate about it, act like somebody's threatening it, get really intense about it. Sometimes I do that, I will literally do push-ups here on the side of the desk before I get started. Stay controlled, get really, really intense about it, grrr freaking funnels, who's gonna tell me they're wrong?

You know what I mean and I get pumped about it and have courage to publish that stuff and that leads to the second thing.

Publishing is cool but you gotta publish with a purpose.

As you publish with purpose, meaning, I don't just put a podcast out there merely to just fill your air with my thoughts, I'm not doing for my own health, I want you to go to salesfunnelradio.com and subscribe and rate. I want you to go to salesfunnelradio.com and download the free website that I created out of click funnels for you. I want you to go do those things, when you go out and you start thinking through your messaging, you've got to put together the reason why you're actually doing it, which is really, really important. Just know that your publishing is a means to and end and while it's good to continually give tips, but what's the purpose for you? After a while you'll experience burnout if there's not a purpose and a theme that you're shooting towards.

I'm exhausted right now, I've only slept a few hours the last few nights and there seems to be this constant theme in the past and I would not have the wherewithal and the energy and the gusto do this if I did not believe that it's actually helping people who've been asking me this question. So, what I'm saying is to put call to action at every one of your episodes or whatever it is that you're publishing and putting out there.

Number 2, sorry, 1, 2, 3, whatever number this is. You guys need to practice inflections. Don't speak monotone, don't just sit there and say that funnels are fantastic, wow, I'm really exciting everyone follow me, I'm clearly a leader. You know what I mean?

You just can't do that...

Notice at the end of every one of my sentences, did you hear that? If I was to speak a sentence without word it would sound uuuhhhuuhhhuuuhh and it's really weird for me to do that on a podcast, you get the point? Okay?

You can't speak monotone and so at the end of every one of your sentences, you either go up or you go down or you do a little uuuhhhh in the middle of a sentence.

Does that make sense? You guys are gonna hear it and you're gonna be really, really conscious of it now for the rest of this episode and the rest of the things that I do.

Feel free to laugh like I just did...

The reason that I'm doing that is because there are so many people that I've been listening to lately who come from the corporate world or who are afraid that people are going to judge them and they are scared to death to just be vulnerable, that's the last rule here.

You have got to be vulnerable, I just told you I'm religious, I just told you stories of me failing, I told you I was scared to launch this podcast, I told you I was scared to get out there and do stuff and I made it up. There's a lot of thought behind it, I'm not saying I just winged it but do you guys get what I'm saying? You have to be vulnerable.

Anyway, that could start a whole other tangent but if you're not vulnerable, no one is gonna want to listen to you because you're gonna seem fake. Fair? Okay, check the box on that one, I'm going on to number 4 now.

Okay, let me get into the more of the strategy of how you actually set up the podcast itself and this is super important and it's very, very powerful...

Back in February, we were running what Russell and I were calling, the FAT event, the Funnel Hackathon Event, and for 3 days people come and we help them set up their businesses to make a million bucks, it's really, really cool. Great programs, absolutely fantastic and he asked me to MC, well, we introduced him each day and I was like oh, my gosh, how do you introduce a guy like Russell Bronson? He's Russell Bronson, you know what I mean?

How do you do that and thoughts going right through my head and I was like how do I do this? How do I do this? How do I do this? It was really cool, he could tell that I was excited to do it, my answer is almost always yes for everything when it comes to scary things. I just almost always try and say yes to scary stuff because I know it's going to push me.

So, I was yes absolutely, I'm totally going to do that and in that back of my head, he's starting in 5 minutes, I don't even know what I'm going to say and I've got to MC? I've got to introduce him and he could see that I was running through a whole bunch of stuff in my head trying to figure out what to say and he goes "good MC's, the whole point of MC's is to increase the state of the audience before I get on stage".

He's like, if you can increase the state of the audience before I get on stage, increase the energy level, increase their anticipation, just get them to a higher state, it's way easier for me because I don't have to spend a lot of time doing that, all I have to do is start teaching because they're already at a fast, high paced state because I'm going to be and if they're not it's weird and then I've got to spend all this time getting them to a state and it makes me look weird and not position correctly.

So, all you gotta do is go get them to a high state...

So, I told this awesome story and we got everyone laughing and jumping around and they were in a really high peak state to receive Russell. Guys, your podcast intro is the exact same thing. Any intro is the exact same thing. All right, when you go out and you create a podcast intro or video intro or any kind of introduction, it's all about state control.

It's not so much about saying, look what I did and here are my credentials, this is gonna teach you about x, y and z. I choose music very specifically for my podcasts or for the things that I put out there so that it gets people jazzed up and in a higher state, if I can get people in a state where they're like whoa, yeah oh my gosh, this is Sales Funnel freakin Radio, oh my gosh whoa! If they can get in that state, then whatever I'm going to say they're going to receive a lot better.

If I don't do that, if I just jump straight into it, it's going to sound awkward, it's going to sound weird. It becomes culture building for you to have that intro, people expect it, they like getting in state. People like to be happy, people like to go into a higher level of energy and oh my gosh I'm excited, whatever it is, I'm pumped about it now.

Which makes me want to switch to my podcast intro now because I like it but we're like 64 episodes in now and getting a little bit old, I kind of what to rinse and repeat a little bit. So, anyways, when you create your intro, state control. What I did is I went to the top podcasts in the business area, you can do this for videos on You Tube or whatever, Vlogging or whatever.

All I did was I went to the very top people in the business area, in the marketing area and I listened to all their intros and I transcribed every one of them by hand, I looked at all the commonalities and I was like, cool and I wrote my script from that and that's literally how I made my podcast script.

Then what I did, because I went to premiumb.com and audiojungle.com, and in there you can buy royalty free songs and they've got all these sweet jingles, a lot of the music that happens in b-roll and movies and stuff like that, you can buy those soundtracks and some of them are fifty bucks but it's fully worth it. You get your own and it's super awesome.

So, what's super cool about that though, is that you can sort by 30 second little segments and so I know, that I don't really want my podcast intro to be longer than 30 seconds, so I have this script now and I go find the sweet song with this cool, upbeat fast thing, I always look for songs that are 120 bpm or faster so that it makes the person feel like, oh yeah, what, yeah, yeah, yeah, let's get started, super cool, yeah, you know what I mean?

It's almost like you're at a dance, you know, like they went to some club or whatever.

Then what I do, is I go and find someone to do a voice over and I've done this several times now and I go back to the same guy, he's fantastic, took me a long time to find him and in fact, you know what, you know what I'm going to do?

If you guys go to blog.salesfunnelbroker.com, if you find this episode here, I'm going to call the Power of Publishing or How to Start a Podcast, it'll be one of those 2 and I'm going to put in there the link for my guy who does the voiceover intro because he's just so, so amazing.

Really enjoyed working with him, I've used him many times now but all I do is, I hit him with the script, I send him the song so that he knows the feel and he knows how he's mashing it and I say, cool, it's 30 seconds long, you have like 25 seconds so there's a little time at the front and the back, and boom, done.

Now, that's the really easy way to do it, to be honest, I love sound editing and I've been mixing music since I was in middle school, so I like to mix it all myself and put it all together myself and I've got a lot of sound editing stuff and things like that and I've created Russell's new podcast intro, marketingsecrets.com, I created the sound for that.

Same for the Drop Mic Show that he's got, that's super cool, I made that audio thing too and it's been really, really fun and I love to mix it by hand but if you aren't that kind of person, the easiest way to do it, is to go to premiumb.com or audiojungle.com, sort by 30 second clips and 120 bpm or faster, figure out something that's kind of cool, get your script, hand it over to my voiceover guy and tell him, hey, you've got this many seconds and he'll even lay it over for you, hey lay your voice over this, cool, done.

He'll send it back to you and boom, done, podcast intro. It doesn't need to be as crazy as people think it is. Boom mics and all this stuff and sound equipment, no that's crap. Like half the time I've used my phone to create my podcast, I doesn't matter if you've got great content and I'm just obsessed with sound quality so, let me jump into that part of it.

For my intro and and my outtro. My outtro, what I do is use a call to action, hey, go get a free funnel that I built for you, took 200 hours to build, then go to salesfunnelbroker.com and you can download it straight off the front page there, took 200 hours to build, there you go, merry Christmas. So, that's insane value, you've got to give something away that they should have paid for, that's the secret and so that's what I do for my call to actions on my outtros.

Or, hey, ask Steven a question...

My Hey Steve show, if you go to salesfunnelradio.com, click on the green button in the bottom right, I've got a ton of questions pouring in the last few days, it's been a lot of fun and I'll do these segments where I just answer people's questions and I actually love it and it creates engagement. So, long as I haven't run out, I'll send you a Hey Steve tshirt, you know what I mean?

That's really cool, it's awesome. People go wear it, they take a picture of themselves, they put it on Facebook, it spreads my brand, it spreads them and they get their question answered, it's really, really fun. So the outtro is super key as well.

You guys might notice that I'm pretty energetic on my mic, I'm pretty energetic on my podcasts and there's a lot of reasons for it. One of the reasons why, is because I know that if I'm excited, you probably will be too, you know. If I'm super low key, there are times for either and so I use energy as a tool to my advantage.

One of my buddies just reached out to me, he's launching his own podcast, I'm excited for him, he's really, really pumped about it, he's going to do great, he's got a good voice for it, he's got good content, I've know him for a long time, we actually started in this world together and he's actually one of my first interviews on my podcasts, but I'm excited for him. He's like, dude how do you set up your mic? So, I'll tell you guys.

I have an Audio Technica AT2020 mic, it's on a boom arm, which has only been there for the last 15 episodes, because we've just moved to a house and I've got a spit screen, I call it a spit screen, it's a windscreen. If I take it away it sounds like this and it's really loud and you can hear all my little huh hee huh, my umms and aahs but if I put it back over across like this, it's a lot cleaner sound. That's the reason I do that.

So, what's cool about this mic, and I'm going to go fast on this stuff because I'm assuming you guys don't care, and it's true, that you don't need to care that much about it, just put good stuff out there okay?

Sound is not going to make you a million dollars, sound quality you know?

I guess unless you're selling sound quality equipment or something. It doesn't matter as much as people think it does.

What you're going to do, if you want the AT2020 mic, I really, really like it, Ive got a boom arm on it that attaches to my desk, the reason I like it is because it's retractable, I can put it in front of my face and then push it away from my face when I don't need to be doing anything, so I still work on my computer and it runs off, what's called Phantom Power, Phantom Power is 48 volts and I have a Phantom Power convertor that plugs straight into my computer, each was like a hundred bucks with the boom arm, I bet this whole thing was 400 dollars set up, that way it plugged USB straight into my computer with my boom mic. That's basically it.

Then all I do is I turn the levels down enough so that I have to yell into the mic for it to pick up all the things that I'm saying to you. Steven, why do you do that? Because it keeps my energy higher and it keeps your energy higher as you listen to me.

I literally yell into the mic, by the time my podcasts are over, my voice always hurts, my stomach hurts because I've been forcing through my diaphragm as much as I can, guys I am trying to spit into the mic, I'm trying to yell into it and I try and do that a lot and it's for the reason of keeping energy.

So, that's more of how I do my podcast, then what I do is, after this is over, I always stop, I put my intro and my outtro, front and back, I export it, I use a tool right now this is all recording on a Adobe Edition but you could use [inaudible 00:17:10] if you needed to, Russell just uses the voice memos app on his phone, like it doesn't matter as much as people think it does.

Do you guys remember that episode I did recently called The Tools I Hate?

The tools I hate are the ones that distract you from doing the thing right? Some people get so distracted on the tools, they look for tools to distract themselves with and they won't ever launch, the won't ever do anything because they keep getting distracted with tools and they keep getting distracted with tricks and gadgets and little shiny things.

It doesn't really matter that much, just start and eventually you get to it. I bootstrapped this whole thing, it wasn't only until recently when I started putting all this stuff up together.

So,  what I do after I actually I go and have the podcast done, I always export is as mp3, but what I do is take it to rev.com. That's REV as in Romeo, EV, does that make sense? Romeo, echo, I can't remember, envelope. That's a classic example of being vulnerable right there, I'm tired and I can't remember the phonetic alphabet okay?

So, it's REV, rev, like you're revving and engine, rev.com. It's cool because you can transcribe a dollar per minute. So, I go send it over to them and I get a transcription that I send over to my assistant, who actually is my sister, and she goes and she reads the whole transcript, make sure they did it okay. She throws pictures in there, she actually puts the podcast straight on the blog, then she publishes it to Libsyn and the Libsyn blast it out to like fifteen different platforms in one button.

I don't like Twitter, I hate Twitter but it publishes there and I have a following there. I don't hate Linkedin, I just don't really know what their unique proposition is, I don't know what their blue ocean is really, that much but a lot of people listen to my podcast on Linkedin, I mean a lot of people do, I'm actually shocked by the number of people that listen on Linkedin.

It automatically publishes there, it automatically publishes to You Tube, it publishes all over the place and you can do it for 5 dollars a month to Lip Sync, it's amazing.

So, it basically shotgun publishes to tones of platforms. Google player, I just figured out I can put it on Spotify, and all these different places, I'm going to go do it on Stitcher, so it blasts all over the place in one button and it pushes it out on iTunes and then what I do is I take a little stock.

I wait a few days, I see if the headline that I wrote, and usually what I do is I write some kind of intriguing headline that's highly curiosity based, sometimes the how to statement.

Regardless, it's like the subject line of an email, it's got to be so intriguing that it gets you to open the actual podcast, you know what I mean?

So sometimes I'm documenting stuff, sometimes it's how to stuff and then when I see that people have been listening to it, I go boost it on Facebook for about fifty or a hundred bucks behind it and I just go blast it all over the place so the podcast will keep growing.

Guys, that's a little of how I do my podcasts, I got nothing else to say about it, I've been going for 45 minutes, I will probably split this into 2 different episodes because of that but that's it.

It sounds crazy but to be quite honest, half of that's just techo babble crap that you can just kind of wing and figure out while you need to figure it out, you don't need to see the whole road, you know what I mean? Just figure it out when you're there and you need to figure it out, not before you get it all done.

Anyway, that's how I publish my podcasts and I love my podcasts and I'm so glad that there are so many people that have been joining it and loving it and all the awesome messages, I just really appreciate all the shoutouts on Facebook, it's been really, really awesome and I just want to thank you guys for helping me as much as the cool things I've been able to share with you about building sales funnels and putting things together.

I just finished another sales funnel today and I should be finishing 3 more tomorrow and it's awesome. So, anyways, guys if you like this stuff, please, please go to iTunes and leave a review, that helps me like crazy, helps other people find this podcast, if you leave review and share it and rate, that would be awesome.

I would love it if you shared it, share it on Facebook, share it wherever. A lot of people on You Tube listen, love to have you as a subscriber and if you've got any questions or whatever go to salesfunnelradio.com, ask me a question, there's going to be a green button, you can literally record your voice straight over the browser and it will email a copy of it to me and I put it on the podcasts, it's really fun.

Or, if you want to go get a sales funnel, I've got a whole slew of free ones, whether it's email, or membership sites or webinars or whatever it is, there's a whole bunch of them you can go download for free with your Click funnels account.

If you don't have Click funnels, I don't know why, but my funnels come with a free trial so anyways, super excited for this episode, I'm really glad I go to do this with you guys, thanks for the question. I've been getting enough, I just thought I should do kind of an exclusive big episode about it, so you guys are all awesome and I appreciate you and looking forward to the next episode as well, I'm really stoked about it, it's been on my mind a lot so, anyways, stay tuned for the next one and love to have you as big time subscriber here, talk to you guys later, go crush it, literally go crush something. Bye.

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

"Steve, how do you come up with content?" Well, here it is!

Hey what's going on everyone. This is Steve Larsen and you're listening to a special segment of sales funnel radio. Now, a lot of you have asked, "Hey Steven how do I set up a podcast? or how to publish or how do you come up with things to say every single time? How do you get consistent with this? What's your routine? What kind of mic do you use? How do what to say? How do how you should say it?" and all those different aspects. And I'm excited for this episode.

I think you guys are gonna enjoy it because I've had a lot of questions and I'm going to drop some answers here.

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 your host, Steve Larsen.

All right you guys are really, really excited for this. Now, right off the bat I'll tell you, this episode, I'm calling it the power of publishing and I'm going to ... I've talked about this before in the past. I've talked about how publishing is power. It helps you with so many things but I don't want to think is ... My podcast is growing like crazy. It's definitely not the top podcast out there. I know it's not. But my podcast is really only 10 months old. I mean, really?

Maybe, actually, not even that. The first month I had, I think, 1,100 downloads and it was all organic. 1,100 downloads than 1,400 downloads, then went to 3,000 and 4,000 then jumped up to 5,000 in a month, and then it did this massive spike and went to 8,000 a month and over 9,000. And we're not even halfway through this month as it is, and I can tell we're going to blow past this previous month as well. And it's been a lot of fun.

And so please don't think that I'm saying, "Oh my gosh. I am the expert. I'm the guru." But I have figured out a few things of how sales works and it's been working for me, it's working great.

So, and the followings been exploding and you guys have been great.

So, I want to show you guys, and beg you and urge you that in your personal business, and in the things that you're doing, whether it's a business or you just feel a need to podcast, or publish, or whatever, video, audio, anything, written. I don't really like to write that much unless it's a sales letter, or sales copy. But some people like that. Whatever it is, choose some kind of platform and just stick to it. The weirdest things begin to happen, the coolest things begin to happen. You become an authority figure you become somebody ... You start to build a tribe.

I think one of the coolest aspects of this, and why I've enjoyed it so much is because I have perfected my own craft far more. And selfishly, it's one of the major reasons I wanted to do the podcast in the first place. And it's worked. Holy crap, it's worked.

It's worked really, really well. I helped do the fulfillment for Russell Brunson's Two Comma Club Coaching program, and once a week for about four hours every week we jump on and I do a four hour Q&A call, and we dive into people's businesses and help them create products that will ... We're trying to them make a million dollars with that product. And it's really cool. Super unique offer.

But after six or seven times, I turned to Russell and I was like, "Dude one of the coolest aspects of this is that I'm getting better at my own craft. I already knew the material but the depth and how it fits, and all these extra scenarios is just so amazing." And he's like, "Yeah, it's one of the coolest reasons."

And it's funny because I remember way back in the day, it's probably what? Two years ago, three years ago, I decided I knew I needed to start publishing but I did not want to do it. There was so much mental ... huge mental block for me in publishing because it was like "What do I come up with every single time I do it? How often do I do it? How does it work? How does the tech work? What do I say? How do I say it?"

And those are all the big questions that I had and I've got a lot of those questions recently from you. So I'm excited for this episode and how to do it. It's funny, one lady reached out to me shortly after I started this podcast, and she was like, "Stephen were you a radio announcer?"

And I was like, "No." She's like, "It sounds like you got a radio style voice. I expect to hear your kind of voice on the radio." And I was like, "Aw, I appreciate that." She's like, "Keep going with that. That's awesome."

That's one of the first little wins that I had. It was shortly after I started the podcast and it kept me going, and I'm like, "Oh my gosh. it's so cool." But even before I started this, I had a periscope channel. A lot of you guys probably don't know that about me. I had a periscope channel.

I was following Russell Brunson. He had no idea who I was and we were ridiculously poor, and it was ... This was a story I was not planning on telling you guys. But I was in a period of college where I was in the middle of my marketing degree and the things that I was learning on my own was dancing circles around what I was learning in my marketing degree. I was learning from guys like Russell. I was learning from guys like ... all over the place. Ryan Levac, Jeff Walker, all over the place, all these people and I was doing it. I wasn't just learning it.

Some of my clients were like Paul Mitchell. Some of his hair schools, a billion dollar company really, really ... It's awesome stuff, really unique for a college student and I totally get that. And all along I kept hearing Russell say, "You got to start publishing. Got to start publishing." That's what he was saying when he would publish. And I was like, "I don't want to do that. That's crap. No, I don't want to do that. You know what? I'll do it ... I know better."

That was kind of the attitude I had, a little bit. And one day I was like, "Fine. The dude said to do it. I'm going to start publishing regularly." And so what it did is I took out my phone and I didn't even know what I was going to say. I just hit go, and I planned out some stuff, I put some things together as far as like the look in the feel. And I was looking at graphics, and I was heavily into ...

I never did any sports in high school or anything like that.

I was always in theater. I was on stage a lot. Actually, you guys probably don't know this about me either, I sang a lot, from 4th grade all the way through halfway through college, I sang a lot.

And so I took the lead in a lot of musicals and stuff like that, a lot of stage time, and I was a head editor for yearbook, doing a lot of layout design, and got a lot of Colorado state awards for my layouts designs and things like that. It was really, really fun, super cool. I enjoyed what I did, I do regret that I didn't do a sport.

But, honestly, it's really helped with all the things I've been doing, though. And fast forward, when it came time for me to actually start publishing, I was scared to death. And I had to lean on a lot of the other talents I had developed over the time to try and deliver stuff that's interesting that people could listen to. And you've probably thought that.

And if you're listening to this podcast right now, you've probably thought that before, you're like, "Aw, I should probably podcast," you know what I mean?

So one of the things I love is it just helps you get more and more clear on your craft itself. The inner action is insane. And honestly, as I was reading, I was just writing out a list of the benefits of publishing frequently. And really, though, what it boiled down to, was two separate things. And I guarantee you will always need these things, you are never done with them.

And the first thing that you need, is that you've got to find your voice. You have to find your voice. I remember, it's so funny, it was probably like two or three months ago, I was listening back to some of my first episodes ever on this podcast, and I was like, "Ugh." Like, "Ugh, crap, that's what I sounded like? Gosh. That was not a good story," or whatever.

And I leaned over to Russell, I was like, "Dude, I think I'm gonna delete the first few episodes of my podcast, they're not very good." And very seldomly does Russell turn with this level of fervor. And he turned to me, I still remember this, and he goes, "No!" He goes, "Don't delete it!" He's like, "That is part of your story! You need to leave it on there, that's part of your journey, man. People want to know that about you, that oh my gosh, he didn't turn out with this, whatever- he wasn't born perfect, he wasn't born in a suit! And you become real, and you become vulnerable."

And I was like, "Okay, that makes sense, that makes sense." And super helpful. So that's the number one true benefit, I believe, of publishing frequently, is that you find your voice. You figure out your own personality, you get really, really comfortable with who you are and what you say and how you say it.

And the stories you tell, and the analogies and the principles behind there. And the way you start and the way you end and the way you address your audience, the way they interact with you back and forth. It is so incredibly important because in the future, when you decide you need to go sell something, you know how to do it, and they have heard you do it before, right? They've heard your voice, it's not new. You get past the croc brain easier, you know?

All right, so that's number one. Second thing is distribution, you create a following. And like I said, it's really, really fun. This podcast now is at a time where the moment I publish it, within the first day or two, there are already four or 500 people who have downloaded it.

And I know that's not huge or whatever, but it's not ... It's not small either, and I know it's growing a lot and it's been a lot of fun too, so super cool.

So to me, when I think about publishing and I think about specifically podcasting, for me. It has become this therapeutic thing, I didn't want to do it and several years ago I went to Russell's Funnel Hacking Live event and he was like, "You gotta publish, you gotta publish, start a podcast, start publishing."

And I was like, "I don't want to! I'm not gonna do it!" And then I was like, "Fine. Gah. I guess he has more money than I do, I should probably listen to him." And I got really, "Fine, whatever, I'm gonna do it." And it was almost out of annoyance, I was like, "Gah, let me put this podcast together, freaking thing." And I put it together and I was like, "Crap, what do I do? How do I actually execute something, how do I execute publishing in general, let alone a podcast?"

I remember, I just started thinking of stories, I was like, "Okay, what does every publisher, someone who regularly publishes, what's a blog post? Okay, usually there's a story and there's some kind of principle in there. Okay, I'll kind of follow that format." And then it got more and more in-depth, and more and more in depth, and what I put into the podcast and how I structured them. And sometimes they're just ad lib.

I know there's stuff on my mind and I've got to get it out. And sometimes they're more for me than it is for you, and then other times I plan the whole thing out and I get it going.

Like, this episode right here, it's a full page of notes, I've got a lot of cool tips for you guys on how to publish podcasts and publish in general and I'm excited to jump into it here, it's taking a little bit. What's funny though is that I was so nervous, this is going to happen to you. If you've not ever published before, it's going to happen to you.

I was so scared that what I was going to put out there wasn't good enough, that I confused action with success. I confused action with progress, and so what I did is, I must have had 13, 14 episodes done and ready and still, I had not launched the podcast.

There was that much mental angst for me, I was just like, "Am I good enough, is this good enough? I think these are really good, what I'm saying in there is real, maybe my delivery is not polished enough yet, maybe I'm not the best at it yet, but I know this thing right here works, I should talk about it here on a podcast."

But I was so afraid, I wouldn't launch it for a really long time. I remember, I think there was two dates I set. I was like, "Okay. Okay, coming up, I'm gonna launch this podcast, it's gonna be awesome, it's gonna be so good. Okay, here's the date, I'm gonna do it on this date, here it comes, " and I had to psych myself up about it.

And the date came, and here it was ... and the date went. And the date left, and I didn't launch the podcast. I was like, "Okay, this is ridiculous, why am I so scared. What am I going to do, what am I going to say, so what, okay. Okay."

And then I went and then published the podcast and I put three of them out at once because iTunes cares how many episodes people are listening to, and so if someone listens to the first episode and they like it and there's not a second one for them to listen to, you're already shoot yourself in the foot, right?

And so I was like, "Okay, I'm going to launch with three episodes. I'll tell a story. You know what, honestly? I don't know that I'm good enough, and so what I'm gonna do is I'm just going to go interview other people." And that's what I did.

And I lined up, I think it was probably nine interviews. So if you listen to the first 20 episodes of the podcast, about eight or nine of them are interviews. And I thought, "You know what-" And this is not true at all, every single one of you have got something that is awesome inside of you that can bless somebody else's life, I'm telling you that that belief that I had before, that I had nothing of value to give, was false.

And it's false for you, if you believe that. It's not true. You have something that is worth to humanity, okay, to your market. And I'm so sad that I had that belief and I didn't launch it with more gusto, but it was just something I had to get over internally.

What I did is I just started interviewing other people around the subject of sales funnels. That is literally why I did those interviews in the beginning of this podcast. And some of you guys have asked, "Okay, well Stephen, why haven't you done interviews since?"

Well what was funny is when I started learning the pattern of how to publish and how to put value in the marketplace, and how to pull people together, and how to speak, and how to have confidence and all that stuff. I always reference this, but Robert Kiyosaki says, and it's always stuck with me, "The moment you move down the path of entrepreneurship, your character flaws blow up in your face."

Well, it's no different for any kind of publishing either. And I had to get over myself, you know. I went and I launched all these different episodes, and I was like, "Wow. Sweet. People are liking it, that's really cool."

And iTunes has 42 days for you to get on the new and noteworthy section, and I was like, "Cool, let me get out there." And there's a few people that say if you don't hit new and noteworthy section, that you should just abandon the podcast and I do not agree with that.

Now, it depends on the podcast and the purpose of the podcast. For me, this is me sharing with you tricks and tips that I am using to build cool sales funnels. I've built over 170 of them in the last year alone, working for Russell Brunson. And I have my own clients and I kind of left that path so I could focus on you guys with this podcast and specifically working with click funnels and with Russell Brunson as his funnel builder.

But before that, before I ever worked for Russel, before any of the others, I had my own clientele and it was awesome and that's how I broke into the industry. That's the purpose for this podcast, and so I don't think that by you missing new and noteworthy section that you should abandon the entire project.

I think you're still going to find the voice, you're still going to create a distribution channel, you're still going to go and make your own craft more perfect by you learning how to teach it and coach other people through it.

What I wanted to jump into here real quick now ... So all I was trying to say in the past, is just have some courage with it and just know you will always have haters no matter what. I am blown away at the number of people who take the time out of their freaking day to come tell me that they didn't like something I did. And I was like, "What on earth?" You've just got to be prepared, okay?

Here's the metrics, okay? Ten percent of your following are going to be slimy thieves who just take crap from you and never want to pay for anything and think that you owe them everything, that's just how it works. Just plan on that when you start in any entrepreneurship, 10% of them are going to be the slime balls.

And I don't care calling them out that way because I put a lot of sweat and tears- not tears, they're man-tears, right? But I put a lot of time and a lot of effort into things that I produce and I know that they're good. And if someone comes to me and says, "Hey, that's not good, I think I should steal it."

Russell told me once, "If people are willing to steal your stuff, it means that you did it right because there's so much desire to have it." And I was like, "Okay. All right, 10%, you dirtbags, go take it," you know what I mean? You just need to know, when you start publishing, people are going to steal your crap. So that's one of the metrics.

The other metric is that 10% of your following is going to become your raving fans. They're going to share your stuff, they're going to go on Facebook when you post things and they're going to re-share them and post them.

They're going to talk about you, they're going to do shout-outs, they're going to go and they're going to say, "Oh my gosh, Stephen, that was amazing, I absolutely loved what you did, this last thing helped me here, here, and here." And it is fuel. And you've got to learn to love that, and you've got to learn to attach yourself to it.

It's such a good feeling, it's so cool...

It's fun to know and legitimately know that there are people's lives that have changed because I started this podcast. And it's going to be the same exact thing for you when you decide to consistently start publishing, on no matter what. And as long as you're consistent with it and you are honestly trying to solve legitimate problems and help people out, it's going to be a great experience. It's this side benefit I was just not expecting, to be honest.

And there's just been times that I just fall asleep at night, I'm just like, "Oh my gosh ... man. That last episode was so good." And sure enough, people will come reach out to you and they'll be like, "Oh man, that was so sweet! Thanks so much, that helped a lot, it helped me do X, Y, and Z."

And it's this cool community that you have the ability to create as the entrepreneur and the marketer and the leader and guru or whatever. And it's very, very exciting.

Anyway. I was not meaning on having this be a rant of what it's been so far. My notes are completely different on what it is that I'm talking to you guys about right now, but it's all these side things that just have been really, really fun as I've learned how to do all this stuff, and it's been a lot of fun.

So with that, let me jump in here real quick to a few quick things. I usually try and keep my podcasts no longer than thirty minutes, which to some people is way too long, but eh, whatever, it' my style, you know what I mean? You can choose your own.

The biggest question that I get from people is, "Hey, Stephen, how on earth-" and I'm not trying to pat myself on the back, but they'll say, "Hey, you've got great content, how do you come up with it all the time." Have you ever felt that way? I'm sure you have, especially if you listen to this podcast, my podcast is all about how to sell stuff. And teaching how we are doing it, how I'm doing it. Part of that is marketing, and what's marketing?

Marketing is education and belief re-building.

That's basically it...

You're basically re-building belief patterns by educating.

That's what marketing is, that's what sales is in the long run, and so I'm sure you've had that kind of question.

So what I do to actually come up with my podcasts, or come up with any kind of content creation piece, whether it's an email or whatever, is I'll sit back and I've got to get passionate about something. And I've got to collect my thoughts. And what I do is I go back and I think of, it's either a story or an experience or some ridiculous tip that has really helped or increased the bottom line or whatever, increased conversions or something like that.

And the trick is that I've got to get myself in the same state that I was in when I had that story happen to me. Or when I experienced that tip.

And what I have to do, is I need to covey enough emotion and I need to dive into the feeling and I need to dive into enough of what was going on around me when I'm telling the story, that you start to get in the same state that I was in when I experienced it.

Russell literally calls this the "epiphany bridge." If you've ever read the book Expert Secrets, you know exactly what I'm talking about, it's one of the best books on how to sell that I've ever read in my life. And I'm not just saying that because I work there, it's true. I have two huge bookshelves next to me, just full of marketing books. And I've read and I've studied like crazy for someone my age and I know that, it's not normal, and it's still is one of the best books I've ever read in my life.

Anyway. So what I do is I literally think through, "I've got to come up with, number one: an epiphany bridge. I've got to come up with a story." So number one, the epiphany bridge/story, you know, what's the story? And then what's the lesson that is attached to that.

And then what I do is I sit down and the first thing that I do on the podcast is I try to tell the story first. I tell the story first, because I don't want to come right out of the gate and go, "Did you know you can increase conversion rates by changing your buttons from orange to red?" That's not true. But, you know what I mean? If I jumped right out the gate and I started telling you all this tech stuff, it's going to be really freaking annoying.

And so what I do is I've got to tell a story, there's got to be pattern interrupt, there's got to be things that I do. Every once in a while, I start the episode, I yell. And I get really, really loud and I get intense. And that's literally the entire reason why, is because I need a pattern interrupt, I need you to know that this is not like what's happened the rest of your day.

You know what I mean?

And so I think through a story, I think through some kind of pattern interrupt, certainly the main lesson or nugget. But if I just come out and tell you the nugget ... Everyone thinks that, "Oh, just give me the bullet points, just give me the main ideas." And I'm not like that. "I wish that you'd just give me the main point and I'll just walk away."

Okay, but everyone I ever just give the main points to, they never go do a dang thing with it. It's- story is powerful. You have to hear the story, it's part of the medicine, okay? It's like the spoon that holds the medicine.

The story is super important to the whole thing. I come up with a story, like I said, some kind of lesson with it, and a hook or some pattern interrupt whether it's the headline or whatever it is. And that's kind of it, honestly.

When my podcast started out, I had a few episodes, they were only like seven, eight minutes because I didn't know what else to say. But what I do is, as I'm reading books, and as I'm going through courses and as I'm studying other marketers and I'm sitting next to these brilliant minds- I will have my ear always perched towards what I could say in the podcast. That doesn't mean I steal idea, but if there's something that's applicable that I know you guys could benefit from, I sit down and I write it down.

I've got a big, big, big list of lessons just from Russell because I sit there next to him. And it's a huge list that I call Brunson-isms, and there's just tons and tons of these different lessons, that- he'll say stuff when he's on another interview, and I'm like, "Oh my gosh, that was amazing," and I'll write it down. I don't always use it, but sometimes they'll pop up and float into my head in the middle of a podcast episode, or while I'm on an interview with someone else on their podcast, or whatever it is.

And super, super fun, I really enjoy that a lot.

So that's how I come up with the episodes, I hope that helps. The easiest way to do it is for you ... This is one of my rules. One of my rules, as you guys are going around and you're studying marketing and you're trying to learn how to sell you product and you're doing all this stuff. One of the biggest rules that has changed my life, and I started it about 10 years ago, okay?

Wait ... when was it ... yeah, 10 years ago, it was 10 years ago, I remember it to the date.

There was a guy who was mentoring me, and I was trying to make some changes in my life and all the things I was doing, and he said, "You know what you need to do." He said, "Every time you learn something," now keep in mind, this guy changed my life, I'm fully convinced.

And it's a story for another time, but he saved my life. And there was a time, I was just trying to make changes in my life, I didn't like how I was living, I was trying to fix a whole bunch of stuff in my life, and he kind of was this heavy hand. He was kind of a hammer with a pillow around it, he was blunt, he was extremely forward with me.

But what he did is he would sit me down, he would say ... You guys know I'm religious, okay. And so what he would do is he would sit me down and he would make me read scripture out loud and he made me put a shirt and tie on. And he was a strength trainer for the Denver Broncos football team. Big, big, big dude, this guy was massive, and he would put a thousand pounds on his back and carry it until his nose bled, that's not a joke.

He just won the strongest man competition for his weight class in America, ridiculously strong man. And I was super fortunate to have him as a mentor for things other than hi physical training, which was really, really cool.

And this is the lesson he taught me that's changed my life forever, and is one of the reasons why I'm able to, I think, come up with what I think are pretty good episodes for this podcast. He said, "Here's the rule. Learn for two." That's it. That's the secret, you guys, to content creation in my opinion and and how I come up with these podcasts. It becomes the foundation for everything. Learn for two, learn for two people.

Meaning, when I'm reading a book, when I'm going through a video course, when I'm attending a seminar, when I'm talking to somebody, any time I'm doing anything and I'm trying to learn, or even when I'm not. My ears are perked open and I'm learning for the next guy I'm going to teach it to.

I literally envision myself teaching this from stage. A lot of times, you guys don't know this because it's audio, I have my eyes closed when I'm doing my podcast, envisioning that I'm standing on a stage. Because I know that I was learning it, envisioning that I would teach it on a stage.

Does that make sense?

And so what I would do, is I'd go read through all these books and I'd go through all these courses and I would think through myself, and go, "Okay. How would I teach it to the next guy, how'd I teach it to the next guy," and I'm convinced that's one of the reasons I sit next to Russell Brunson.

Because in college and way back in the day when I was doing door-to-door sales, all these things, I literally was thinking to myself, it was a conscious thought. "How do I teach the next guy what I'm learning right now?"

You know the depth you begin to learn when you do that? It's amazing. The depth is insane because you're learning it with this, almost like a mantle that gets placed on you. You have this responsibility to teach it to the other guy. Now is that always true? No, but if you act like it is, and I learn for two, then I'm constantly in pursuit of what I can share with other people that is of value.

I have quotes all over my wall, I literally write them on legal piece of paper and I thumb tack them to the wall, and when I was in high school I did that too and I'd cover my walls, literally, so you couldn't see the wall, of just quotes. And I can't remember where the quote is, I'm looking at my wall right now. I can't find it, but one of the quotes is that basically any time you open and you communicate, you're either taking up space or you're adding value.

And that's the key, that if you want to add value, you have got to start learning for two. Well how do you come up with consistent, awesome content? It's not like things come to you all the time, you've got to dig the well before you're thirsty, you've got to put stuff in the well, so start learning for two. That is one of the biggest tips I can tell you for content creation, ever.

When Russell Brunson hired me, when they called and I couldn't believe it, they were like, "Hey, we want to offer you the job." And I was like, "Oh my gosh, are you kidding me?" I made a conscious choice right after that phone call, I remember this. I was like, "How am I going to make the most of this opportunity that is just insane? Well, I'm going to learn for two."

And I remember that went into my head, I was driving my car, I was going back home after the interview, and I had that conscious thought: "I'm going to learn for two." And doing that put more responsibility on my shoulders, but it also helped me formulate ideas and put pieces of things together. "Okay, this guru over here, they said this, and this guru over here, they said this and it pulled this together."

And some of you guys have come out and you've said, "Stephen, how come you can quote so many other people and their books?" Well, that's why. Learn for two. Okay? Anyways, that's not in my notes. Again, ad lib. but that's been a huge piece for me.

So now that you guys know how I come up with my content itself, what I want to do is I'm actually going to take a break here for just a second, and on the next episode, I'm going to share with you guys how I actually put it together.

I want to tell you guys how I actually- what kind of mic I use, how I actually get it transcribed, how I get it published to like 15 different places with a single click. Really, really cool and powerful stuff. For the fear of this being an extremely long podcast, I'm going to break it into two episodes here.

Stay tuned to the next podcast here, I'm going to push it out at the same time of this one. I just want to make sure I break it up here.

All right guys.

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-build sales funnel today.

Lets get one thing straight here... WHAT is an entrepreneur and are you one?

What's going on guys? You guys ready for the greatest episode of Sales Funnel Radio ever, until the next one comes out? Me too, let's get started.

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

Hey guys, I'm super excited for today, this is going to be awesome. A lot of you guys know we just got a house recently, we just got a house, and my wife and I were getting used to the new chores that come with home ownership, you know what I mean?

There's yard work, there's all sorts of stuff that you would not think about until you actually own your actual house, which is awesome, and it's been a whole lot of fun to do so.

Funnels certainly have played a role in our ability to do this and be this. We know that realistically, we'll probably pay the house off in just a couple years here, and we're super excited about that.

It's not a mansion, but it's much larger than we actually need, but it's very fun. I'm not bragging, but I just want you guys to know what's possible out there if you guys are just barely getting started, which I know a lot of you guys who listen to this are.

So anyways, I was outside the backyard, and I was doing yard work. Actually, I really enjoy yard work, it's therapeutic for me, mostly because I'll toss on some podcasts, and I'll just lose myself a little bit while I'm doing stuff. I was in the backyard, and I was doing a few things, and I always like to find new podcasts, I don't know why, I just really like podcasts. I've personally gained a lot from them.

Anyway, I like podcasts a lot, and so I'll go download tons of them. I have a huge list of them, and sometimes I'll just go open up my phone, and just start looking at random ones, and I always binge listen to someone's podcast, I'll listen to like 15 episodes at once, and decide if I want to keep going on it, you know what I mean?

Well, there was this new podcast, and it will remain nameless, but it was so funny.

I don't know if it was just episode number one, or what, it sounded like it was a podcast that was just barely starting, but it was this guy who was getting up ... And again, I'm not badmouthing him, but I am blatantly disagreeing with him, okay?

If anyone's offended by that, whatever...

Anyway, so this guy gets on and he's like, "Hey, thanks so much ... Thanks for joining my podcast." And he starts going into a few little pieces and tips, things like that, and he was extremely ... It always bothers me when people just get up, and they just try and prove how awesome they are. It's like, "Okay, let your content prove that," you know what I mean?

Anyway, so he gets up, and he starts naming all these stats, and it's very professional, and I can tell he probably starches his shirts, you know what I mean, you know what I mean? I was like, "Okay, you know, this doesn't ... Already I don't really want to keep listening to this."

But he said one line that about made me hit the floor...

I couldn't believe that he made this statement that he did, and when he said it, I actually rewound the podcast, because I was listening to him at two times speed, and you know, because you can listen faster than you can talk and read and all that stuff, or you know, out loud anyway.

I re-listened to it, and I was like, "Oh my gosh, he actually said it." He just listed all these stats out about himself. Is he just full of it, or is this a real thing, you know? It's not my podcast nature to typically go badmouth somebody else, so I'm so sorry if this is ... It's not the normal culture, but it's just, ah, what he said really threw me off. What he said was, "Entrepreneurs are not marketers."

And I was like, "What the heck did you just say? Wait, what?"

I went and I rewound it, and he said, "Entrepreneurs aren't marketers." I would like everyone on this podcast to know that yes, yes they are marketers by nature, because an entrepreneur is somebody who's proving an idea, therefore that means they're selling. What is selling? It's an arm of marketing, right? It's marketing, it's all marketing.

Me doing this podcast right now, whether or not I want it to be, is a form of marketing, does that make sense?

We've gone over the difference before, between what sales and marketing is, right? Sales is what happens when it's face-to-face, what you're actually saying to the person, right? What are you saying on the webinar, what are you saying when they're inside the funnel, what's on your sales video? That's why it's called a sales video.

However, marketing is the act of getting people to your face, so it's all the other pieces that go into actually getting them to walk up to you, right? What actually gets them to your funnel, what actually gets them to your webinar, or whatever it is. That's the act of marketing, and it doesn't stop when sales start.

Marketing continues to go all the way through the fulfillment of the product, as well as teaching them to consume the product, right? I think it was Dan Kennedy that said, "Marketing only has two ..." No, no, "A business only has really two responsibilities. The first is to innovate, and the second is to market."

That's it, those are the only two things that you really have to do, those are the only actual two responsibilities that the entrepreneur has, to innovate and to market, and all marketing is, is education, right?

It's a form of education that actually gets people to cause belief in your product, you know? That's basically what it is. And so this guy's coming out, and he's like, "Yeah, entrepreneurs are not marketers, and that's why my stuff's so good, and that's why I'm so amazing."

I was like, "Holy crap, this is episode one for you, you're a brand new podcast, but I cannot listen to you anymore, that's pure crap, pure crap."

You know what's funny? I've got this rule now, I never work with a business when the CEO, or entrepreneur, or person in charge of the business in general, whoever it is, president, whatever you want to call it.

If the person who's in charge of the business is also not ... if he's not also the person who's in charge of marketing, I 100% already just do not ever work with them, ever.

That comes from a lot of experience, that comes from a lot of places of me going, "Oh my gosh," it is so frustrating for me to go out and go, "Hey, person who's not in charge of the business, but who does marketing, but that makes no sense. How about we build a funnel?"

Well, then they got to go clear it with this guy, and then they got to go over to this guy, and they got to go over to this guy, and then finally the guy comes back, "No." And you're like, "What? Are you kidding me? Hey, you know what would be cool, what if we added an order bump?" "All right, well let me clear that through legal, let me clear that through this person, let me go through here."

I'm like, "Are you kidding me? It's an order bump, like what else is there to think about? Are you running through the benefits? Why are we not doing an order bump?" You know what I mean?

It actually came to such a point that for a phase there, for Funnel Hacker TV, I was building a lot of funnels with Russell for all these people, and it was a lot of fun, lots and lots of fun. The challenge was that most the time, the person who was in charge of the business was not also the person in charge of marketing. Oh my gosh, it was so hard.

It was like eating sand, I mean, it was so, so tough to get anything done...

I think I told you guys before, I think I told you this here ... I can't remember. He said, "Is one of my ..." I'm pretty sure I did. I told you about a professor that I had, who was a CMO of Denny's, right? He was in charge of all the marketing for Denny's, he was in charge of all the marketing for Pizza Hut, so maybe in gigantic corporate businesses that are Fortune 500 companies, maybe sometimes that guy's not also in charge of marketing, but I mean, okay, can you not argue with the fact that, okay, Steve Jobs was very much in charge of marketing, but also in charge of Apple, does that make sense?

Russell Brunson, very much in charge of marketing, in charge of ClickFunnels, all right?

Most of the time when a business is doing prolific things, it's because there is an entrepreneur who is in charge of marketing also at the same time, does that make sense? I'm sorry I always reference Russell so much in this podcast, it's just that I literally spend more time around him per day than in my family, you know what I mean? So that's where I work.

Anyways, it's so funny, he always makes fun of people, he's like, "Why would you outsource your marketing, that's like outsourcing your sex life," okay? If you're going and you're outsourcing your marketing, you're literally outsourcing your sex life. Selling is the sex of business, and the fulfillment is the remainder of what comes with the relationship, that's what he always says. Anyway, it's true though.

I had this teacher, right? This CMO of Denny's, and I spent a lot of time with him, a lot of one-on-one time, and he taught me a lot of stuff, and it was great. I truly learned probably the most from him in college than anybody else. What he told me was like, "Look, think of business as a car, and you're driving down the road, and you got the guy who's in charge of supply chain. He's the guy who's got the oil dipstick, and he's saying,

'Oh yeah, we could go this far, because our resources are this far.'

You know, he's the guy in the supply chain. 'Oh yeah, we can go this far, let me order as much as we can.' That's the supply chain guy. Well, the finance guy, he's looking at the rest of the gauges at the dashboard, he's sitting next to the marketer who is the driver. Right?

The finance guy is sitting to the side, and he's like, 'Yeah, we could do this, we could go this far at this space, at this speed, I advise you to turn this way, advise you ...' But who's actually in the driver's seat? Right? Whoever is in charge of sales." Nothing happens until somebody sells something, right?

The person who's actually in the driver's seat is the marketer, and he's the one who's driving the car, pointing out the directions, "You know what? Let's go this way. You know what? Let's go this way. You know what? I think that we've got ... there's probably a gas station this way, let's go refuel up supply chain guy, right? Finance guy, you take note of that, I'm going to go over this way." You know what I mean?

The marketer is the one who drives the company. Not always. I guess in that area, that other podcaster was right, but he said, "Entrepreneurs aren't marketers."

It's just so freaking false, I can't even believe it. Every time and entrepreneur goes out, and is entrepreneuring, what is he entrepreneuring? Something that is either brand new, or his own version of it, or something. Well, what does that entail? How does he know that the business is actually working? By selling.

What does that mean? It means you're a freaking marketer, you know what I mean? A lot of times people are like, "Oh, what is marketing, marketing seems so elusive, the term of it." Just think of it as educating, all right? You're educating, and you're pulling people in with a form of education.

That doesn't mean teaching, but you're teaching people how cool your product is, you're breaking and rebuilding belief patterns, you're getting people out, you're getting out there and you're saying, "Hey, check out this product, right? Change your current pattern of behavior, and go check out my product or my service. Change your view on the world, and go check out what I have."

Anyways, I could not believe ... Anyway. I don't know how much we want to beat this dead horse, I just want you guys to know that entrepreneurs are definitely marketers, and if you think you're not a marketer, I don't know what to tell you. Hard reality, you got to learn some sales, you know what I mean?

That doesn't mean ... you know what, let me rephrase that. I don't like to do sales face-to-face.

I used to do that when I did door-to-door sales, I learned a lot, I got good at it, but then one of the things I learned, is this is not the thing that I want to be doing, right? An entrepreneur does not have to be good at sales, I should say, but they do have to be good at marketing.

They've got to be out there, they've got to be showing their thing. People have got to gain belief in the product, therefore yes, you are a marketer, and feel excited about that.

What's funny, is that way back in the day, I used to think ... I remember going through just tons of angst over what I should do, like, "What's my major, what's my ..." And you know, what's funny is now realizing how little that actually matters, unless you're going to be a doctor or a lawyer, or something like that.

Oh gosh, anyway. It's funny, this same professor who's the charge of marketing for Denny's and all this stuff, he would sit me down, and we'd have these big long discussions, and I'd be like, "I don't know what I want to do, I feel like I could be good at that, I feel like I could be good a supply chain, I feel like I could be good at finance."

For a while, my major was CIT, I was learning programming, and all this stuff, you know? Then I went to finance, and I jumped around all over the place. I was going to go to financial economics, I really liked that stuff, I think it's fascinating, but the problem was I didn't know what I would actually have at the end of financial economics classes.

Oddly enough, economists typically don't make that much money, and that's something to take into account of.

What's funny, is I used to sit down with this teacher, and I'd be like, "Hey, I really don't know what I want to do." And he goes, "You know what? Bar none, marketers are problem solvers." And I was like, "Yeah, but come on, marketers are like the guys ... That's like the major that people do when they're just trying to skip out, and not have it be an actual challenge or learn anything."

I mean, that's what I thought, it's such a false belief, and he called it out on me.

He's like, "No, that's not how that works at all."

He's like, "The reason is because marketers are problem solvers, it's not that anyone else isn't, but marketers are problem solvers. What's an entrepreneur? They solve problems, okay? Marketers are problem solvers."

They go through and they said, "Okay, you know what? Look at my second OTO, my second upsale, it looks like it's not working very well. I wonder what's wrong with it? You know what? Why don't I take it out, I'm going to switch it in with this new offer, let's plug it in, let's see if we get a higher conversion rate from it, right?" Or, "Let's tweak this," or, "Let's tweak that, and let's see if we get a better result from it."

They're problem solvers, they're a scientist of sorts. They go and they say, "It's like adult legos, they pick out pieces and say, 'What works here? What works here?' And they experiment, and they go put things out there." I mean, that's what a marketer is, that's what an entrepreneur is.

When I think about what is most related to an entrepreneur, it is marketers. They're so related, they're so related. What I've learned most by sitting next to the man, Mr. Russell Brunson, is that when a person takes charge of that emotionally, and they say, "Yes, I'm going to be the marketer, I'm going to try and make sales improve in this company," and they're the person who's also in charge of the company, who owns it, or runs it, or whatever? Man, great things happen.

That's why I stopped taking ... It's just miles of red tape whenever somebody goes ... You know how I can tell when the marketer is also not the CEO? When something needs to be changed, and it runs through so many legal people that it ends up not happening, you know? Or people start freaking out over a certain word, like, "Well, maybe we shouldn't say that exact phrase, because it could mean X, Y, and Z."

Now, obviously be legal, be ethical, but there are some tall tale signs to see whether or not the entrepreneur is also the person in charge of marketing, and you hope that's the case, otherwise ... I'm not saying that they're not an entrepreneur, but you know, sorts.

Marketing helps sales, you know?

Entrepreneurs, that's their only job, is to get sales and to prove their concepts. Anyway, beating the dead horse now. Guys, go out there, take charge of it, and super excited for all the things you guys are going to be doing, and love hearing about it. Okay guys, talk to you 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.

You're not alone, but it'll sure feel like it sometimes. Here's how to deal with it...

What's going on guys? You guys ready for the greatest episode of Sales Funnel Radio ever, until the next one comes out? Me too, let's get started.

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

Hey guys, I'm super excited for today, this is going to be awesome. A lot of you guys know we just got a house recently, we just got a house, and my wife and I were getting used to the new chores that come with home ownership, you know what I mean?

There's yard work, there's all sorts of stuff that you would not think about until you actually own your actual house, which is awesome, and it's been a whole lot of fun to do so. Funnels certainly have played a role in our ability to do this and be this. We know that realistically, we'll probably pay the house off in just a couple years here, and we're super excited about that.

It's not a mansion, but it's much larger than we actually need, but it's very fun. I'm not bragging, but I just want you guys to know what's possible out there if you guys are just barely getting started, which I know a lot of you guys who listen to this are. So anyways, I was outside the backyard, and I was doing yard work.

Actually, I really enjoy yard work, it's therapeutic for me, mostly because I'll toss on some podcasts, and I'll just lose myself a little bit while I'm doing stuff. I was in the backyard, and I was doing a few things, and I always like to find new podcasts, I don't know why, I just really like podcasts. I've personally gained a lot from them.

Anyway, I like podcasts a lot, and so I'll go download tons of them. I have a huge list of them, and sometimes I'll just go open up my phone, and just start looking at random ones, and I always binge listen to someone's podcast, I'll listen to like 15 episodes at once, and decide if I want to keep going on it, you know what I mean?

Well, there was this new podcast, and it will remain nameless, but it was so funny.

I don't know if it was just episode number one, or what, it sounded like it was a podcast that was just barely starting, but it was this guy who was getting up ... And again, I'm not badmouthing him, but I am blatantly disagreeing with him, okay?

If anyone's offended by that, whatever. Anyway, so this guy gets on and he's like, "Hey, thanks so much ... Thanks for joining my podcast." And he starts going into a few little pieces and tips, things like that, and he was extremely ... It always bothers me when people just get up, and they just try and prove how awesome they are. It's like, "Okay, let your content prove that," you know what I mean?

Anyway, so he gets up, and he starts naming all these stats, and it's very professional, and I can tell he probably starches his shirts, you know what I mean, you know what I mean? I was like, "Okay, you know, this doesn't ... Already I don't really want to keep listening to this."

But he said one line that about made me hit the floor. I couldn't believe that he made this statement that he did, and when he said it, I actually rewound the podcast, because I was listening to him at two times speed, and you know, because you can listen faster than you can talk and read and all that stuff, or you know, out loud anyway.

I re-listened to it, and I was like, "Oh my gosh, he actually said it." He just listed all these stats out about himself. Is he just full of it, or is this a real thing, you know? It's not my podcast nature to typically go badmouth somebody else, so I'm so sorry if this is ... It's not the normal culture, but it's just, ah, what he said really threw me off.

What he said was, "Entrepreneurs are not marketers." And I was like, "What the heck did you just say? Wait, what?"

I went and I rewound it, and he said, "Entrepreneurs aren't marketers." I would like everyone on this podcast to know that yes, yes they are marketers by nature, because an entrepreneur is somebody who's proving an idea, therefore that means they're selling. What is selling? It's an arm of marketing, right? It's marketing, it's all marketing.

Me doing this podcast right now, whether or not I want it to be, is a form of marketing, does that make sense?

We've gone over the difference before, between what sales and marketing is, right? Sales is what happens when it's face-to-face, what you're actually saying to the person, right? What are you saying on the webinar, what are you saying when they're inside the funnel, what's on your sales video? That's why it's called a sales video.

However, marketing is the act of getting people to your face, so it's all the other pieces that go into actually getting them to walk up to you, right? What actually gets them to your funnel, what actually gets them to your webinar, or whatever it is. That's the act of marketing, and it doesn't stop when sales start.

Marketing continues to go all the way through the fulfillment of the product, as well as teaching them to consume the product, right? I think it was Dan Kennedy that said, "Marketing only has two ..." No, no, "A business only has really two responsibilities. The first is to innovate, and the second is to market." That's it, those are the only two things that you really have to do, those are the only actual two responsibilities that the entrepreneur has, to innovate and to market, and all marketing is, is education, right?

It's a form of education that actually gets people to cause belief in your product, you know? That's basically what it is. And so this guy's coming out, and he's like, "Yeah, entrepreneurs are not marketers, and that's why my stuff's so good, and that's why I'm so amazing." I was like, "Holy crap, this is episode one for you, you're a brand new podcast, but I cannot listen to you anymore, that's pure crap, pure crap."

You know what's funny? I've got this rule now, I never work with a business when the CEO, or entrepreneur, or person in charge of the business in general, whoever it is, president, whatever you want to call it. If the person who's in charge of the business is also not ... if he's not also the person who's in charge of marketing,

I 100% already just do not ever work with them, ever. That comes from a lot of experience, that comes from a lot of places of me going, "Oh my gosh," it is so frustrating for me to go out and go, "Hey, person who's not in charge of the business, but who does marketing, but that makes no sense. How about we build a funnel?"

Well, then they got to go clear it with this guy, and then they got to go over to this guy, and they got to go over to this guy, and then finally the guy comes back, "No." And you're like, "What? Are you kidding me? Hey, you know what would be cool, what if we added an order bump?"

"All right, well let me clear that through legal, let me clear that through this person, let me go through here." I'm like, "Are you kidding me? It's an order bump, like what else is there to think about? Are you running through the benefits? Why are we not doing an order bump?" You know what I mean?

It actually came to such a point that for a phase there, for Funnel Hacker TV, I was building a lot of funnels with Russell for all these people, and it was a lot of fun, lots and lots of fun. The challenge was that most the time, the person who was in charge of the business was not also the person in charge of marketing.

Oh my gosh, it was so hard. It was like eating sand, I mean, it was so, so tough to get anything done.

I think I told you guys before, I think I told you this here ... I can't remember. He said, "Is one of my ..." I'm pretty sure I did. I told you about a professor that I had, who was a CMO of Denny's, right?

He was in charge of all the marketing for Denny's, he was in charge of all the marketing for Pizza Hut, so maybe in gigantic corporate businesses that are Fortune 500 companies, maybe sometimes that guy's not also in charge of marketing, but I mean, okay, can you not argue with the fact that, okay, Steve Jobs was very much in charge of marketing, but also in charge of Apple, does that make sense?

Russell Brunson, very much in charge of marketing, in charge of ClickFunnels, all right? Most of the time when a business is doing prolific things, it's because there is an entrepreneur who is in charge of marketing also at the same time, does that make sense? I'm sorry I always reference Russell so much in this podcast, it's just that I literally spend more time around him per day than in my family, you know what I mean? So that's where I work.

Anyways, it's so funny, he always makes fun of people, he's like, "Why would you outsource your marketing, that's like outsourcing your sex life," okay? If you're going and you're outsourcing your marketing, you're literally outsourcing your sex life. Selling is the sex of business, and the fulfillment is the remainder of what comes with the relationship, that's what he always says. Anyway, it's true though.

I had this teacher, right? This CMO of Denny's, and I spent a lot of time with him, a lot of one-on-one time, and he taught me a lot of stuff, and it was great. I truly learned probably the most from him in college than anybody else. What he told me was like, "Look, think of business as a car, and you're driving down the road, and you got the guy who's in charge of supply chain.

He's the guy who's got the oil dipstick, and he's saying, 'Oh yeah, we could go this far, because our resources are this far.' You know, he's the guy in the supply chain. 'Oh yeah, we can go this far, let me order as much as we can.' That's the supply chain guy. Well, the finance guy, he's looking at the rest of the gauges at the dashboard, he's sitting next to the marketer who is the driver. Right?

The finance guy is sitting to the side, and he's like, 'Yeah, we could do this, we could go this far at this space, at this speed, I advise you to turn this way, advise you ...' But who's actually in the driver's seat? Right? Whoever is in charge of sales." Nothing happens until somebody sells something, right?

The person who's actually in the driver's seat is the marketer, and he's the one who's driving the car, pointing out the directions, "You know what? Let's go this way. You know what? Let's go this way. You know what? I think that we've got ... there's probably a gas station this way, let's go refuel up supply chain guy, right? Finance guy, you take note of that, I'm going to go over this way."

You know what I mean?

The marketer is the one who drives the company. Not always. I guess in that area, that other podcaster was right, but he said, "Entrepreneurs aren't marketers." It's just so freaking false, I can't even believe it. Every time and entrepreneur goes out, and is entrepreneuring, what is he entrepreneuring? Something that is either brand new, or his own version of it, or something.

Well, what does that entail? How does he know that the business is actually working? By selling.

What does that mean? It means you're a freaking marketer, you know what I mean? A lot of times people are like, "Oh, what is marketing, marketing seems so elusive, the term of it." Just think of it as educating, all right? You're educating, and you're pulling people in with a form of education.

That doesn't mean teaching, but you're teaching people how cool your product is, you're breaking and rebuilding belief patterns, you're getting people out, you're getting out there and you're saying, "Hey, check out this product, right? Change your current pattern of behavior, and go check out my product or my service. Change your view on the world, and go check out what I have."

Anyways, I could not believe ... Anyway. I don't know how much we want to beat this dead horse, I just want you guys to know that entrepreneurs are definitely marketers, and if you think you're not a marketer, I don't know what to tell you. Hard reality, you got to learn some sales, you know what I mean? That doesn't mean ... you know what, let me rephrase that. I don't like to do sales face-to-face.

I used to do that when I did door-to-door sales, I learned a lot, I got good at it, but then one of the things I learned, is this is not the thing that I want to be doing, right? An entrepreneur does not have to be good at sales, I should say, but they do have to be good at marketing.

They've got to be out there, they've got to be showing their thing. People have got to gain belief in the product, therefore yes, you are a marketer, and feel excited about that.

What's funny, is that way back in the day, I used to think ... I remember going through just tons of angst over what I should do, like, "What's my major, what's my ..." And you know, what's funny is now realizing how little that actually matters, unless you're going to be a doctor or a lawyer, or something like that. Oh gosh, anyway. It's funny, this same professor who's the charge of marketing for Denny's and all this stuff, he would sit me down, and we'd have these big long discussions, and I'd be like, "I don't know what I want to do, I feel like I could be good at that, I feel like I could be good a supply chain, I feel like I could be good at finance."

For a while, my major was CIT, I was learning programming, and all this stuff, you know? Then I went to finance, and I jumped around all over the place. I was going to go to financial economics, I really liked that stuff, I think it's fascinating, but the problem was I didn't know what I would actually have at the end of financial economics classes. Oddly enough, economists typically don't make that much money, and that's something to take into account of.

What's funny, is I used to sit down with this teacher, and I'd be like, "Hey, I really don't know what I want to do." And he goes, "You know what? Bar none, marketers are problem solvers." And I was like, "Yeah, but come on, marketers are like the guys ... That's like the major that people do when they're just trying to skip out, and not have it be an actual challenge or learn anything." I mean, that's what I thought, it's such a false belief, and he called it out on me.

He's like, "No, that's not how that works at all." He's like, "The reason is because marketers are problem solvers, it's not that anyone else isn't, but marketers are problem solvers. What's an entrepreneur? They solve problems, okay? Marketers are problem solvers." They go through and they said, "Okay, you know what?

Look at my second OTO, my second upsale, it looks like it's not working very well. I wonder what's wrong with it? You know what? Why don't I take it out, I'm going to switch it in with this new offer, let's plug it in, let's see if we get a higher conversion rate from it, right?" Or, "Let's tweak this," or, "Let's tweak that, and let's see if we get a better result from it."

They're problem solvers, they're a scientist of sorts. They go and they say, "It's like adult legos, they pick out pieces and say, 'What works here? What works here?' And they experiment, and they go put things out there." I mean, that's what a marketer is, that's what an entrepreneur is.

When I think about what is most related to an entrepreneur, it is marketers. They're so related, they're so related. What I've learned most by sitting next to the man, Mr. Russell Brunson, is that when a person takes charge of that emotionally, and they say, "Yes, I'm going to be the marketer, I'm going to try and make sales improve in this company," and they're the person who's also in charge of the company, who owns it, or runs it, or whatever? Man, great things happen.

That's why I stopped taking ... It's just miles of red tape whenever somebody goes ... You know how I can tell when the marketer is also not the CEO? When something needs to be changed, and it runs through so many legal people that it ends up not happening, you know? Or people start freaking out over a certain word, like, "Well, maybe we shouldn't say that exact phrase, because it could mean X, Y, and Z."

Now, obviously be legal, be ethical, but there are some tall tale signs to see whether or not the entrepreneur is also the person in charge of marketing, and you hope that's the case, otherwise ... I'm not saying that they're not an entrepreneur, but you know, sorts.

Marketing helps sales, you know?

Entrepreneurs, that's their only job, is to get sales and to prove their concepts. Anyway, beating the dead horse now. Guys, go out there, take charge of it, and super excited for all the things you guys are going to be doing, and love hearing about it. Okay guys, talk to you 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.

People always ask, "WHERE SHOULD I START"? Well... here you go :)

What's going on everyone? This is Steve Larsen and you're listening to Sales Funnel Radio. Now, I don't know about you guys, but I would love to hear maybe a new podcast intro. Now, I've not made one. However, I do want to know if you want to have a new podcast intro. If you wouldn't mind, reach out to me and let me know.

We're almost to Episode 60, which is crazy, but I honestly, I wouldn't be ... There's been many times I fall asleep and the podcast intro that I currently have right now just keeps running through my head so anyway, super excited for this episode. 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 your host, Steve Larsen.

All right, all right, all right. Hey, and I'm so excited for today and for what I'm going to share with you because I got some really huge news.

Hope you guys had a great weekend. It was Memorial Day Weekend recently and my family was all out. We were having fun. We got up early. We went on a run. We went to the park. We hiked just a little, small little ... It was really steep for my little girls. I have a 1-year-old and a 3-year-old so whatever they can handle, but it was really fun. It was awesome.

After we went on this hike, right, a park was nearby and what we did is we went down to this park. We're playing and having fun and my little girl's 3 years old, she's running around and there's tons of people there, right. As a parent, you're on red alert. You're looking around like crazy all over the place, making sure everything's fine, making sure there's no creepers around. You know what I mean?

Now, I am all for my kids getting their own scrapes and bumps in life. You know what I mean? I'm not going to let them get hurt on purpose, but it's going to happen anyway so, I might as well not be helicopter parent and rather actually go and just prepare them for those experiences. You know what I mean? There's a point to this story, I promise.

I wasn't too surprised when there was some kid politics that started and these kids started getting in my little girl's face and just screaming at her. At first, I sit forward, I'm sitting on the side and it was crazy hot out so I was sitting in the shade, but I was watching her.

I was watching closely, seeing what's happening, and this little kid starts getting off on my little's girl's face.

She's 3, right. She's 3 years old. What are you going to do? She's a little girl. She barely understands what's going around her still. You know what I mean? She's barely becoming self-aware kind of. You know what I mean?

My resting state is nice guy personally. Steve Larsen, I'm a nice guy. That's my resting state. That's how I currently am. However, there was this ... Man, there's few things that will set me off and make Papa Bear come out and I have no ... I actually like when Papa Bear comes out.

I invite Papa Bear to come out whenever it can. It's kind of fun.

Anyway, this kid starts almost physically getting at ... His brother was standing nearby and he started getting really close to my little girl. Suddenly, the brother is holding back this younger kid from, I don't know, hitting or tackling whatever my girl. My little girl is so funny. She's so much like me. In the face of danger whenever there's high stress or whatever, I tend to laugh and it's not always that it's a funny experience or whatever that's going on.

It's literally just that sometimes there's nothing you can do about it so you just laugh like whatever and it makes really serious things calm down.

That just egged on this kid, right. My little girl starts laughing. It just egged him on and I was ... Anyway, he starts getting too aggressive though with her. I'm watching from across the playground. I stood up real fast and I walked over there because he was trying to push her and shove her really hard and there wasn't anything behind her. She would've fallen off the playground pretty far into the ground. Papa Bear comes out, right, and I come out and I start getting out and I'm hoosh, I'm trying to be cool, but at the same time, I want to throw this kid through a window.

You know what I mean? I get really pissed off about that kind of stuff.

There's no reason to be a jerk in life.

Anyway, I go over and I walk up to this kid and I was like, "Hey, chump, why don't you stop throwing my girl around, huh?" The kid started bawling and it shocked him so much that I was standing there and I guess you would say I was calling him names. I called him a chump, all right, whatever. There's worse things I could probably say to him, but the kid starts bawling loudly.

I was like, "Uh, whatever," and I just walked around, I was like, "Come on, Brinley," and I took my little girls and we went into another part of the playground. It was a big playground.

Two seconds later and I'm like, "Crap," and I can feel parents eyes on me and I'm like, "Uh, whatever," like I don't ... Anyway, whatever. We're playing around over this other part of the playground and pretty soon, this really heated mom comes walking up to me and she goes, "Excuse me. Did you just call my kid a chump?"

I turned around and I was like, "Yes, I did." She's like, "Why?" It's like, "Because he's pushing my little girl around. He can't do that. You understand?" She just stood there for a little while and then, she just turned around and walked away.

Look, there's no room to be a chump in this life, all right...

If you're going to be a chump and if you're a chump and you're on my podcast, you can get out of my community. You know what I mean? That's my attitude about it. Life's too dang short to be a chump. Don't be a chump. Don't be a chump in business. Don't try and be all sneaky. I got people who steal from me. I can't stand people like that. If I ever find people who's stealing from me, I just block them out immediately and I ...

I was talking to Russell about this, you guys.

My mentality is to give and give and give and give and give as much as I possibly can, overdeliver every freaking time I launch anything, every time I put anything out, any time I do anything so that when somebody turns around and they come back to me and they say, "Hey, you know what, I think that you should've done this or you're not doing enough here or you're not doing this or you're not ... "

I'm like holy crap, I am bleeding, bending over backwards, giving way more than I should, that sets me off. You know what I mean?

I know that probably a lot of you guys are probably the exact same way if you're in this community with me, right, the Sales Funnel Broker, Sales Funnel Radio, stevejlarsen.com community. You know what I mean? If you're in this, we're very similar people is what I've noticed. Birds of a feather flock together.

I actually truly believe that and it's one of the major reasons that I wanted to start a podcast thing was because I was tired of the people I was hanging around and I wanted other people who thought like I did in my community. You know what I mean?

Anyways, the types of people out there who are going to steal from me and stuff like that, I do believe in an element of karma. It's going to come around. It's going to nip you in the butt. You know what I mean?

The other part is that man, if that parent and the same is true for you as an entrepreneur, if you're not bridled enough to function in society or let's say parent ... Anyways, I'm not trying to get into parenting stuff, but what I feel like is that if my little girl goes out and she's doing something that's stupid, it's my job to correct it or else society is going to correct it for me later on down the line and they're going to be way less nice about it. You know what I mean? I feel like those kinds of thing ...

Anyways, I'm not trying to get into a big ranting thing about that, but my gosh, I was laughing so hard. Finally, I was like man ... I was talking to my wife, like, "Alyssa, we should probably get out of here because these parents are going to rage at the fact that I just called this kid a chump and made him bawl."

I don't really freaking care. Anyway, I think it's funny.

It's the same attitude when people come to me like, "What? You gave all this stuff to me and it's super, super cheap, but you're not bending over backwards to make sure that I'm successful with it."

I'm like, "Dude, it is not my fault if you can't figure it out. I have overdelivered. I've given tons of walkthrough guides. I have given so much stuff like crazy. If you can't figure it out, I'm sorry. You can hire me as a coach, but I'm not going to keep giving stuff away to you for free. My time is more valuable than your feelings."

You know what I mean?

It was weird for me to cross that threshold as an entrepreneur and as a business guy just because in the past, I was all about just giving and giving and giving and I still am, but eventually, I was like, "My gosh, I got to self-preserve here.

I've got to create a way for me to still live, still have a family life." You know what I mean? Still do the things I want to in life or I will literally spend all day every day ... I had 100 notifications in Facebook just two days ago. It was in a single day. My email was at 200 a week ago. It's at 900 now in a week. You guys know what I mean?

You all are going to be there. I know especially, you all are going to be there for sure if you're not already. Anyway, don't be a chump.

Hey, I got some good news though. That wasn't the good news. I told you I had good news at the beginning of this episode. I got great news. I've been working ... Over Christmas, my dad and I, we got together and I flew over there a few days early and I did it for the explicit reason of sitting down with him and beginning to build out his webinar.

He's got this cool software that lets him trade the futures market, E-mini specifically, and he's been doing it for about six years. He learned that basically for him to be successful, he's got to create this thing that didn't exist before and he's a software engineer so he could create it.

He created this cool software that sits on top of a trading platform and it tells him whenever to get in and out of a trade and he wins like crazy on the thing. I can't tell you legally because I can't make any kind of income claims, but he wins a lot.

He's like, "Do you think anyone would ever buy this?" I was like, "Oh, my gosh, Dad, yes." He showed it to me and my jaw dropped. I did some stocks and options trading for a while and I definitely understand what he was showing. When he showed it, I was like, "Oh, my gosh, that's amazing."

Anyways, fast-forward, so over Christmas, we were building out a webinar, putting all stuff together. He ended coming to what Russell and I are calling the FHAT event, the Funnel Hack-A-Thon, FHAT event. It's F-H-A-T. He came to this for a three-day intensive and he figured all this stuff out and then he's like, "Okay, Stephen, at the very last Saturday in May, I want to launch this thing." I said, "Cool. Let me help you."

I slept probably three, maybe four, sometimes five hours every single night for the last week and we got this thing put together. It was really cool.

If you want to check it out, you can. I'm not promoting it. It's just so you can check it out if you want to and actually, I know there's quite a few of you guys that are stock traders or financial markets traders in my community as well, which I think is really cool, super, super awesome industry there. Anyways, you can go to financialinvestingsecrets.com. It was a good webinar and I was so proud of him. We got out there and he went and he just launched it and made money and it was his first webinar ever.

You know what? He did half of it wrong. You know what I mean? He just did it though. He just did it. He got out. He executed. He just did it. I was so proud of him. It was so cool.

He wasn't expecting to make any money.

I was wondering. It was his first time ever doing anything like this. He's just barely launching his own podcast, barely getting these things up and running. Super smart. You know what I mean?

He's not a salesman, he's not ... but he's, oh, my gosh, such a smart engineer. He's created a lot of industry standards in the software world, anything from watches to NASA rockets. He's very smart. Much of how things are coded and as far as on a code sense architected is because of the way he has put stuff together.

He's very, very smart...

Anyway, he ... I'm just really pumped for him. He went out. We had 55 people register and about 13 showed up, which actually for the metrics that Russell always teaches is the exact same metrics that always will happen, about a fourth show up and we had ... I haven't looked at the final numbers yet, but then we had people buy.

It was really exciting. His first webinar ever, it's so cool.

A lot of people will sit at this point and go, "Okay, now what do we do next?" You know what I mean? It was from you guys, I asked you guys if you wanted to come and 50 of you guys signed up and 12 of you showed up or 13 of you showed up, which is what I was expecting. We were expecting.

We're just testing it to see how it worked, right. What do you do next at this point? You do what we call the Dream 100. I don't know if you guys have ever been doing this. If you haven't been doing it and you've been actively driving ads, you are leaving so much freaking money on the table. I can't even believe it.

At the last Funnel Hack-A-Thon event, it was the third day. I was on stage the whole day. I was speaking. It was really, really exciting and I really, really loved it, but one of the whole things we teach you guys about is this concept called the Dream 100 and we hope you guys go through it.

What I'm having my dad do right now is he's got his webinar and we're continuing to make tweaks.

We're continuing to make little adjustments here and there, but honestly, the thing that I'm having him do now is writing out a list of all the people who are podcasting in the financial market world, all the people who have blogs in the financial market world, all the people who have YouTube channels, who have live trading rooms, anybody who has an audience, anybody who has any kind of list or a following where my dad would want to sell to them.

While we're getting Facebook ads up and running, we are starting to "date" or "court" these people on this Dream 100 list. We're starting to reach out to them. We'll probably send a package out to them soon. We got to smoosh them up just a little bit. You know what I mean? This is a relationship business.

Internet marketing is still a relationship business especially, especially for the way you do sales funnels and the way we teach because what we're going to go do is we're going to go ... we want them to promote his webinar. He's got a great software that he personally wrote that helps him trade the E-minis with great success. You know what I mean?

Anyway, that's what we're doing right now though.

When you think about this ... I'm trying to think where to start on this because when you think about where we came from and this whole journey that he's currently on right now, a lot of times what people will start doing is they're like, "Okay, I've got this webinar, and I'm going to go build this webinar."

Let's say they're just starting out, brand spanking new. They haven't done anything yet. They've never even put anything together. They've never even sold anything. They've never ... You know what I mean? Brand new. What a lot of people do we've noticed is they'll create what we call the value letter, right.

They'll go, "Okay, first, we'll have low ticket items and it'll be in this whole funnel. Then I'm going to send them to this mid-range funnel and there's a whole funnel for that. Then I'm going to send them to this really high ticket thing and then the whole funnel for that as well."

The tendency for people is to turn around and build a tripwire funnel or a low ticket funnel first, and I will tell you that is not the way we do it. That is not the way we do it whenever Russell and I build for a client. That's not the way I personally do it whenever I build for a client.

There's very few circumstances where we actually start with a low ticket front end funnel, very, very, very few scenarios. The reason is because it's so much harder to make the numbers work. If I'm selling a $50 knickknack versus a $1,000 product, I can spend so much more money to acquire a customer, right.

Now that my dad needs some sales, he can spend a good chunk of money to get one person to buy and I doubt it's going to cost us $1,000 to sell a $1,000 product, right.

Now it's just the big rinse and repeat game...

How much can we tweak it? How much can we get more traffic into it? How can we fill it up? Does that make sense? That's the reason ... I don't know if you guys have heard of the Two Comma Club Coaching Program that Russell and I are doing. It's so, so fun.

My gosh, just oh, I absolutely love what I do on that thing. Anyways, we teach people though how to make $1 million funnel and we help them hit what we call the Two Comma Club, right, $1 million.

We don't actually start with a tripwire funnel and I've had a few people reach out and ask that like "Cool, I got this sweet webinar. You guys help me plan. When do I start the tripwire funnel?" Like you know what? Probably not 'til like six months of it being successful are you even going to start thinking about that. People are like, "What? That's so crazy. Oh, my gosh. That's nuts. How is it that you can do that?

How is that you ... You know what I mean? People will start to do that and they'll start to think that.

I understand why that would be a temptation because as you read a book like DotCom Secrets or you read other books where it talks about increasing value or monetizing your audience, things like that, the tendency is to think I must start with this low ticket item and then I will go to this mid range item and then I'll go to this really high ticket item. I will tell you that the majority of the time when we actually build funnels, it's actually the opposite.

We start at the top and we work down.

Here's the reason why. It's funny. We had this four-hour Q&A last Friday with the Two Comma Club Coaching Program and a lot of these guys are out there and they're asking this very same question. They're like, "Why would you do it that way?" Let me take you through it. Here's why.

Here's why. Number one, I already told you that the numbers are going to work better, right. You're just going to do better just simply by starting at the top because if you start with a high ticket item, how many people does it take to really start turning some revenue? One? Two? You know what I mean?

You probably know where to find those kinds of people. You know where those communities are. If people aren't willing to give you that money yet, it means you haven't proven yourself yet. Go do it for free for a few people, all right. I'm talking about high ticket application style funnels where it's 10,000 to 15,000 to 25,000 to 50,000.

You know what I mean? Higher than 10,000 is usually what I'm talking about when I say high ticket application funnels. People are applying to work with you, right. You got to go get crazy results, lots of great results, right.

Either you're starting at that spot or you're starting one step down, which is what we teach at the Two Comma Club Coaching level, which is the webinar funnel, right.

At the webinar funnel, what you can do is you start to get all these people in, right, tons of people, and you start tweaking the offering, you start tweaking the message and you start tweaking your traffic sources and you start finding out which ads convert the best. You know what I mean? You start figuring this whole thing out.

What happens after a while, right? What happens after a while? What happens after a while is you're going to start getting a ton of questions, lots of questions. Man, you know what, I wish that the products from your webinar, I wish it did this. Or you know what, I wish it was this? What if it had this capability? Or how come this isn't here? You know what I mean?

You're going to start to get questions. You'll start to get support questions. As those come in, document them because what's going to happen is very, very slowly, sometimes slowly or suddenly, whatever it is, but clearly, there will be this area that starts to rise up and you'll be like, "Oh, my gosh. You know what, I wish that I was selling something like that," right, and you'll go over ...

What's happening is the market is showing you which product to create next. Does that make sense? If you are able to go through and massage out a $1,000 to $2,000 product offer and actually get it converting, get it selling, you've already laid so much groundwork for a smaller low ticket front end product funnels in the future. It's just the way it works.

Because all of a sudden, what's going to happen is you're going to turn around and people are going to say, "Oh, my gosh, I wish I had X, Y and Z." What are they doing? They're telling you what they want and then all you do is you go create it.

Why did Russell go make something like Funnel Scripts? Because people asked for it. He didn't start with Funnel Scripts, right. He made Click Funnels. He figured out his $1,000 webinar. He figured out how to sell something for $1,000 that sold Click Funnels, that got continuity going, right. That was the hard part.

Once he got this hard part down, then he can turn around and he starts going, "What are all these [funnel 00:19:47] things? You know what? Let's build this thing called Funnel Immersion, Funnel Scripts. You know what? How about Funnel Graffiti." It's all these things related to the core offer, right, that eventually ascend somebody up into the Click Funnels level.

It's the exact same thing that I'm trying to tell you to do. It's the exact same thing I was trying to tell my dad to do. Don't worry about small ticket stuff at first. That would be my advice.

Now, other people would tell you different, that's totally fine, but my advice, do not start with something small. Start with something at least $1,000.

There was a lot of people on the call who were like, "A thousand dollars? You really think people are going to give me $1,000?" I can hear your questions right now as I'm saying that. The answer is it depends on if you charge $1,000. What's easier to do is simply just put down the price point, 997 and then figure out how you can justify that price point.

What is an offer that is so ridiculously cool that someone would give you $1,000 for it? Does that make sense? Instead of thinking, "Oh, no one will ever do that," and killing yourself the other way around. Start with $1,000 product.

What's funny is at one of the last events ... Actually, I'm sorry, not one of the last, the last Funnel Hacking Live Event, beforehand ... I think it's okay if I tell you this. Beforehand, Russell was trying to figure out something he could sell at the Funnel Hacking Live Event.

What's fun for me is to sit back and watch ... You know when you're so good at something, you don't realize you're that good at it? I think that happens a lot for Russell and it's understandable why it would because he's been doing it for so long. It's fun with my fresh eyes to sit back on the side and be like, "Oh, my gosh, what a cool process you're going through." You know what I mean?

Anyways, he's preparing for the event. He's putting together different presentations and he's about to put together a presentation and here's how he starts it. "Gosh, I just wish I had something I could see for like $3,500." That's how he started it. Guess what came from that? The Fill Your Funnel Program.

It's okay to start with the dollar amount. I know it must feel like I'm all over the place right now, but the only reason I'm hitting this really hard is because there's been several people who reach out saying, "Where do is start, Stephen, where do I start," right? I've had tons of people come ... I don't know why, but definitely in the last month, there's been a lot of people that ask that, "Where do I start?" What I would tell you to do is to start by figuring out how you can charge $1,000 for something, turn it into a webinar or an invisible funnel or black box funnel. Then what I would do is I would move to high, high ticket, right, because there's going to be a percentage of the people that buy my dad's $1,000 product who want more one-on-one coaching, right. I would not put yourself in the fulfillment or inside of the offer of the $1,000 product. Rather make them pay you more to work with you more. Does that make sense?

I would start with this $1,000 product in the middle and then I would go put you into this implementation and coaching area where it's done-for-you services, but it's more high ticket, like 5, maybe 10% of the people who buy your $1,000 product are going to be interested in that kind of thing. That's great. You're only going to sell one or two of them to really make a huge difference. You know what I mean? A really easy way to do that.

You guys see what I'm saying? Should I trial close you? Are you guys getting this? Are you guys seeing this could work for your business? What would your spouse say when this actually works for you? Can you imagine what it's going to be like when you walk out and you've made that kind of money?

You imagine when it's automated?

Should I keep trial closing you guys? That's true though. Does that make sense? Then what happens is then we go out and we start going on tripwire funnels and we start going for breakeven funnels and we start to ...

When you do it the other way around, you're totally guessing. It's so much harder to make a tripwire funnel breakeven if you do it the other way around.

Instead, do it the other way where you start at the top or in the middle, right, and make the tripwire funnel last or last-ish. People will tell you what they want so then just go make that and the chance of success is so much greater. It is so much less risky to do it that way.

It's pretty funny when I sat back and realized what was going on with that and that's the way we do it that it just blew me away because I remember the first funnel that I built, it was low ticket continuity. That's the hardest category I can even think of to sell ever. Continuity stuff in the front, that's wicked hard. That was crazy. It's more challenging as a category usually to sell continuity, especially low ticket, anyway, upfront.

Anyway, so it just reminded me of all these different funnels that I put together and I think part of the reason why they would fail and stuff like that.

What's funny is I have really low ticket free plus shipping funnels right now. I have also ... You know what's funny? It is just as much work for me to sell the mid-range stuff than it is for me to sell the low ticket stuff. The support tickets that come in are almost the exact same. It's so funny.

When I actually go out and start selling $1,000 stuff, it's easier for me to do that than it is the lower ticket thing. For whatever reason, it brings in a higher level customer. It brings in somebody who's in a different position in their life, someone who I want to work with.

Anyways, I don't know how to sell you on this. When I was thinking about my dad's webinar, when I was thinking about all the stuff going on, and those of you who are trying to make this business succeed, I'm not trying to tell you to abandon everything if you already have a funnel, a tripwire funnel on the front end. What I am trying to tell you to do is charge more money, just charge more money.

Then what you do is have some person in the back end after someone buys your mid range product, your $1,000, $2,000 product, have somebody calling them up in the back end saying, "Hey, you want to work with Grant Larsen for 15,000 or whatever?

He'll give you one-on-one coaching for six months," or something like that. You know what I mean? You only close two of those a month, that is seriously massive revenue boosters right there.

Anyway, guys, I hope that what I'm trying to say is coming across clearly because the type of question that I've been getting recently, which by the way, I've been loving the questions. I hope you like the mass Q&A sessions I just did, the last two podcast episodes. Those were a lot of fun.

As a by product of that, people have been asking more and more questions. It's been a whole lot of fun. Really, really enjoy that.

Usually, the type of question is like, "Hey, where do I start?" I'm trying to tell you please for the love, from a guy who did it for years at the low ticket price thinking that he was serving better or thinking that he was making it more affordable, but in reality causing a harder headache and I actually had to sell it harder sometimes. It's not fun.

I'm telling you, please start with something that's at least $1,000...

I'm saying that over and over and over again because it doesn't take many of them to really change your life. It does not take many of them to have seed cash for your next ad campaign. It doesn't take many of them to really start figuring out also what people want in the next tripwire funnel. Start with something high ticket.

It's so funny. There was a few people I was coaching this last week and they're like ... I kept telling them $1,000 price point, they're like, "Awesome. I'm selling for 497." I said, "Why? I keep telling you," and it came down to it ... Now if you have a legitimate reason like sometimes there's a legitimate reason and that's fine, but most of the time, there isn't one.

You literally are just afraid to charge more money and I'm begging you not to do that...

I'm begging you to get out and actually say, "You know what, I'm going to charge $1,000. I'm going to figure out how I can charge $1,000. I'm going to figure out how to sell at that price point," and when that becomes your focus, oh, man, it's so rewarding when $1,000 comes in. It's like, "Whoa."

Just emotionally, it's so nice. Holy crap. How many of those does it take to actually cover the mortgage or rent? Not many. You know what I mean? I guess it depends where you live, but still even then, not many. That could fit a really wide range of households, but I guess it's on my mind because we're in a house now.

Anyways, guys, hopefully that helps. Super excited for this week and what's going on here and I appreciate you all like crazy. Just gosh, I just love our community. It's so, so, so fun. I remember I was posting different pictures, what we were doing and things like that and just the engagement, I just really, really enjoyed it and I really appreciate all you guys are doing. Anyways, keep at it. Funnel on, my friends and I will see you at the next one.

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 prebuilt sales funnel today.

Ha, well there was so many questions (which I LOVE) that I needed to break up the episodes. Here's round two!

Hey, hey, hey, what's going on everyone? This is Steve Larsen, you're listening 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. And now, here's your host, Steve Larsen.

Hey, what's going on, this is the second part of my mass Q&A kind of segment. This is a segment of the show I called "Hey Steve".

I haven't done one in a long time, so I'm doing part two right now because there were so many questions stacked up, I want to make sure that I get to a lot of the questions that are out there. I had to break it up into two different sections and even then I'm still leaving a lot of questions behind just 'cause they didn't fit for the broad listener, you know what I mean?

I want to get into details, but at the same time we get a lot of people listening now. I was laughing because so we just moved into this house about six weeks ago and it was right before spring started and there's a whole bunch of stuff we want to do in the backyard. I did sprinkler systems for a while. It was one of my summer jobs growing up and we didn't have a trencher so I'd had to hand dig massive trenches for sprinklers.

Anyways, it was a lot of fun, which a lot of people might be confused when I say that, but it is. I like working with my hands. I like working outside so one of the things I was excited about owning a house for was the fact that we were gonna get to do yard work, which again I know a lot of guys might be like, dude, your weird, but I don't care, man. It's fun.

There's a therapeutic aspect to work yard for me.

I was excited about it and it's summer now. It's been raining a lot, but that's slowed down. It's gotten really hot. It's time for me to turn the sprinklers on, getting the sprinkler system up and going. I went and I was like, cool, I've done this before and for some reason, I could not figure out how to turn on our dumb sprinkler system and get it running. I was like, I did this for a while. I hand dug these.

Why am I not figuring this thing out?

Luckily, at the same time, there was this company at our neighbor's house here who had lawn guys there and they were doing sprinkler stuff. I walked over I was like, hey, how do I? Where is? Is this a special kind of? The normal places that I look on houses that turn water on things like that, it's not there. I don't know where it is. He's like okay, you know, well, give me a little bit and I'll come help.

After a little while, they ring on the door bell and they come over and I was like, sweet, awesome. We went to the backyard and like three seconds they found it. I was like, oh, sweet, well. I'm totally willing to pay. I'm not here to just freeload on anybody. I paid him and he was awesome. They did a walk through, the entire sprinkler system.

Well, there's this whole section that we want to go resod and I have been pulling out tons of weeds that were as high as me. You couldn't even see the fence. There were so many of 'em. I've been de-shrubbing, de-weeding, you know what I mean? Doing a whole bunch of stuff.

When I saw that they were literally sodding the neighbor's ground. I had to ask. I was like hey, how much is it to, for you guys to come sod, just so I just know. I had to ask the dude.

Like, oh, my gosh. I ask the guy probably six or seven times. I was like, hey, how much is it to do this? He's like, "Oh, it's really, really expensive right now." I was like, okay. I'm asking how much. How much is it? He's like, "Oh, well, it's like $140 per pallet of sod." I was like, oh, it's not bad at all. It's more of a time thing.

I don't want to go spend the time to do it. I'd rather spend time with my family or building a product or what. You know something. I like doing yard work, but I don't. That would be. That would talk me two or three Saturdays and I am moving way to fast right now to spend the kind of time to do that.

I had to ask this guy. There were. That was not the first time I asked him to please sell me your thing. I asked him several times. Hey, how does this work? How much is that? How much is that? We walk in the backyard and there's all these blank spots. Why did you not put two and two together and try and freaking close me. I'm walking around holding a checkbook. I didn't know how else to pay him. So, I was like, ah.

Anyway. It drives me nuts. When people are asking you buying questions, you have to know the difference between a normal question and then there's buying questions, right?

Questions are questions. There's just questions. Hey, how are you guys doing?

That's just a normal question...

There's a whole bunch of different questions out there, but the buying questions are questions that turn into. The questions where they start to put themselves in a scenario mentally where they see themselves owning or doing or being the thing that you have.

Hopefully, that made sense what I just said, but the moment they switch into this mode of like I could see myself doing that or gosh, I really wish that we could do that.

How does that not throw red flags up going like, well, hey, shoot, if you want. I mean, we do this for you. Is this something that you're wanting done? Here why don't you just show me. What do you got going on in the backyard? You know what I mean? I don't. Anyway.

I love being sold and so I critique the process like crazy, especially since I was a door to door sales guy for a bit and I did telemarketing and I did you know. I like sales. I don't necessarily like it that much face to face. I'd rather automate it through marketing onlines now, but it at least taught me the principles of what to look for and what to do online.

Anyway. Sorry for the little side rant, it just, it made me laugh so hard 'cause finally he was like, well, it costed maybe 15, $1600 for us to do this and put these things in. I was like, great, cool. Just tell me. Like what.

Anyway. I seriously. I asked him. He didn't say anything. He just kind of started walking away. I was like hello and I didn't know that he was looking at what we have. He just kind of just. I don't even know how to describe it. He just kind of came back and was like, well, maybe the. I mean, I blatantly had to ask the guy at least four times how much money is it to do this?

I don't know if it's, anyway. Whatever. But don't do that, okay?

If someone's asking you questions and you can tell they've switched into buying questions, man, just start closing 'em. They're asking you to sell them. They may not even know it, but what they want is they want you to answer their problem, which is your product. Just, anyway. Anyway, let me get back to this.

This is part two. This episode is part two of the mass Q&A I've been doing. I got another three or four questions lined up for you guys in this one. They're great questions and anyway, I'm gonna dive right in here and go person by person. I'm gonna play your message and then I'll give you my response on how I would do that or ... please know, I don't know.

I feel like I should put a disclaimer in this sometimes like please know that is, I'm not a lawyer and this is not legal advice and please, you know what I mean? But, this is. I'm gonna answer right now as to how I would do it or how I am doing it or how we have done the thing that you're asking about.

Anyways.

Hopefully that helps. Let me jump right here.

All right, here the next question here is coming from T.J.

"Hey, Steve, just wanted to follow up with you and ask you about a funnel that you mentioned that you did for a school that automates fundraising. I was wondering if you've ever covered that in any of your podcasts or if you're willing to, to basically just set you on a funnel for a non-profit or school to automate fundraising. This is Tamar, also known as T.J. We met at Ad Con 2017. It was a pleasure meeting you and I hope to hear from you soon. Thanks."

Hey, man, great question here. Yep. There's a funnels that I've done that for. One of the funnels that I wanted to prove myself with. It was a few years ago actually. Was a funnel for, it was a mud run that we were doing. It's ... I'm in the army and we were trying to do some fundraising for this, it's called the Fisher House Foundation.

The Fisher House Foundation is, it's a foundation that collects money that so when a soldier gets wounded, they can fly the family of the soldier to whatever hospital the soldier was taken to and take care of them and lodging and food and stuff like that. It was really, really cool. Anyway, that was an awesome one.

What we did is we're like, hey, what ... we had a commander at the time and he's like, hey, why don't you do x, y and z. Let's put this stuff together and I started to telling him like, sir, I got this skill that I've been developing and I'm getting quite good at it. Why don't we do a little fundraising thing and you know what you could do is ... basically have upsales and things like that, you know what I mean?

Anyway, it was basically an event funnel and the first page of the funnel was a page that basically said, hey, we're gonna do a 5K Mud Run.

It was really fun. We had a fire pit people jumped over. It was a mud run. Army crawled through this massive vat of mud. We clothed them in all this body armor and they ran through thick forest with all these smoke bombs and massive artillery sim rounds going off around 'em. It was really fun.

It was awesome, but we ended up raising seven grand...

We had 650 people come. We had the news come several times. It was awesome. Got interviewed, anyway, it was great. It was a great experience, so anyways, it's cool because we first found something that was cool and attractive.

It was a mud run near campus so a lot of people were already like, hey, already excited. The next thing we did though is we tied more meaning to it by telling them the story of what the money was going towards. That got it shared like crazy and that's what got us on the news and the next thing we did is we went and we started doing a raffle, as well. That was really. We raffled off AR-15's and other various stuff. It was really cool.

Then we started going to these local businesses and we're like hey, we're about to do this event do you want to come and just be there and you know. Just as far as value for the person who's there. We don't care that you're there. We don't care that you self-promote ... just heck, come have a good time. It was really fun. We got other recruiters there.

We got all these big blow up things. It looked like a fair. It was a huge production. It was amazing and it went so, so well. Anyway, it's just great. It was really a great experience. It was just an event funnel. It was two pages. I wish I could tell you it was more complicated than it was.

All I did was when somebody came in. It told 'em about it. What it was. It was a sweet video that we shot. In fact, I might have the. I don't know if the page is still up or I still own the URL, but I still have the funnel and the video and all that stuff. That was really, really cool.

Then we just said hey, buy your ticket now. Ticket prices go up in x amount of time. We did a count down clock and we said, hey, there's early bird pricing. Then the pricing went up. Then I went and got into the school newspaper and website and all this other stuff and I got us name dropped all over the place and the word got spread.

That's really all we did. It really wasn't that much work. There was more work on actually setting up the course itself and all the things that we had to do. It was super fun. All these hail bails you had to jump over and all these massive towers to go climb. It was just a cool experience and we did that. It was great.

The other one. I think I know the one you're referencing, though. I've built for several fundraising style companies. One was Flex Watches that got on that TV show, "The Profit." I built 11 funnels for that.

The day of the show that it was going nationals, a long story behind that, but it was crazy. They turned out so well and that was honestly just a normal trip wire funnel with some upsales and down sales. What's funny is it's still a funnel. Don't think that because ... what's the fundraising funnel style.

Well, it's the same thing as any other kind of funnel. You just change the message to let people know hey, this is for fundraising.

The thing that I was teaching on stage to all those DECA kids. DECA asked me to come. I don't know if it was DECA directly or a contractor, but anyway, I ended up speaking on DECA. There was 3,000 kids at an event. They asked me to come teach on stage and teach 'em how to automate the fundraising for their school and their DECA programs.

All I did is, there was a company that said hey, we would like to donate all of the water bottles, all of the materials, all the whatever it is that you're gonna put inside that funnel, we're gonna donate 'em and we'll just put our logo on 'em and there'll be a portion of the profits that gets sent over back to the DECA. I was like sweet. You guys realize that you're gonna automate your fundraising. Who likes going door to door? Not that many people.

I was like so here. Here's how you can do it. How many guys been going to door? What's the strategy you guys been collecting money? Oh, door to door. Okay. Well, you should probably listen then. I went through and I showed 'em. Basically, it was a trip wire funnel. It was a free plus shipping water bottle that they got with a cool logo on there.

That had a cool story behind it. Then the next thing was a upsale for two of 'em. The next thing was a upsale for something else. The next thing was a upsale and there was two or three up sales, like a normal trip wire funnel and all it was a normal product. It looked like a normal product funnel. Then, we just changed the messaging so people knew, hey, here is a super cool product, but at the same time, there's a cool message and meaning behind these things that we're doing.

Anyway...

Hopefully that helps. Don't overthink it. It's just a normal funnel. You just change the messaging and tell people why you're doing what you're doing. That was it. Super cool. I mean, they work well.

All right, here the next question here comes from Micen Jones.

"Hey, Steve. It's Micen Jones here and a quick question about contracting. On page 46 of "DotCom Secrets," Russell talks about the entrepreneur's role and how he should be or she should be a contractor, not a person putting up the sheet rock or framing the house....

My question for you is have you hired from freelancer.com on more than a project basis? For me personally, I can build the majority of my funnels except for the graphics portion, some little minuet details and custom portions. I want to move a lot faster like I said and have help with that, but instead of waiting for a week and a contest, I'm feeling on freelancer.com, I would like to have a day or two days turnaround time.

Do you have any suggestions. Would you suggest Upwork and if so, what kind of language would you use in the job description to make sure that I attract the right kind of person to help build these funnels faster? Thanks for your answer, man and be blessed."

Hey, dude, so yeah. I got a few. I definitely have some (sharply inhales), anyway. I've got some opinions on this. All right, so when you're first starting out, I understand the need to do things on your own because you have no cash flow or very little cash flow. The thing that we always stand by, what I always tell people to do is hire when it hurts.

Don't just jump out and start grabbing people just because other people are saying to. It's like when people say diversify your portfolio. It's like you don't do it for the sake of doing it. Focus on one thing. You do want to make sense. You know I mean? I know you know I mean, but anyway so as far as freelancer tactics, hire one at Hertz.

I know you said you don't like the seven day contest thing, but my gosh, it is one of the coolest strategies and if you take the time to do it, you'll find some of the rock stars who are the V.A's that just are amazing. I recommend Freelancer. I've used Upwork a little bit.

I've used Fiver a lot. I've used Freelancer a lot. Those are the main ones that I've used and that I still use. I gotta a surprise here soon for all you guys. I'll have to show you guys here soon, but I had guy in Lebanon code something for me that is so cool.

Anyway, in a future episode here, I'll tell you guys to go get it and it's awesome, but anyway, it totally makes fun of our competitors. Russell's dying. You guys 'ill see it on his vlog here soon. Hopefully, you guys have been following his vlog on YouTube. Anyway, side tangent. Over.

All right, with freelancer tactics just for those of you guys who don't know, the thing that I like to do and the thing that I like to recommend is to create a contest and it doesn't have to be seven days. You can do it in three days, but then inside Freelancer what you do is you make the contest boosted.

You can boost it and it will stay in front of all the freelancers more like it'll invite the good ones. It'll stay on top of all their feed so all the freelancers are seeing your thing. I always do that.

I always press yes on those options, not all of 'em otherwise you spend an extra $100 bucks, but I go through and I choose the ones that highlight, feature, ping the very top freelancers, stuff like that.

Then what I do is I sit back and I create that contest and I wait usually two or three days and I wait and to see. There's always like, please be aware that I'm trying to be sensitive right here, but there's always a huge number of people that will spam back to you tons of responses and try and get you to hire them all the time. You gotta be aware of that, okay?

The moment that you and you can always tell when it happens because the moment you submit some contest or the moment you submit a job out there, you're gonna get a lot of people who just immediately respond to you and you're like okay, there's no way you even read the details or saw the video that I shot to tell you how to do it or what I need done.

There's no way and you're already begging me. It's like okay. Those are spam.com comments so I always wait two or three days to wait for all of those to leave and I see who the really hungry people are. I go through and I read carefully each one of 'em and I try to view and measure intentions. I try and measure what they want and what they're trying to do.

Anyway, it works. It works really, really well when I do that...

Then the next thing I do is I will go, delete out all the ones that I know that are the immediate no's ... and again trying to be sensitive here, but I only speak English and so if they don't ... if I can't understand 'em how am I gonna go the project, you know I mean?

So I go out and I delete out all the ones that I know that I won't be able to work with regardless if they could get it done really well. I can't talk to them so it's gonna be a hard thing.

So anyway, then I create the contest and I go launch the contest and then I publicly criticize the comments and you can set your comments to public. I'm actually pretty harsh and I go through and I publicly criticize every single submission as I do the contest.

For a second there I was talking about contests and also for a second I was talking about hiring specific people for one task, one person for one task so I go through and I vet out all the individuals that are like, okay, I'm not, I just know I can't work with you, but if it's a contest, then what I do is I make sure the things featured and I put it out there and I'll go and I publicly criticize the comments because all the other people who are submitting can see them ... I will take a $100.

I just did this and I was like, okay, I got a cool idea for a logo, but I want to see what other people can come up with also.

How I did it is I went out to freelancer.com and I was like, hey, here's $100 bucks whoever wins can get it. I got 323 submissions over seven days. I was very active. All I do is just once per day during that week I just log in real quick, I publicly criticize what I like and don't like on each one of them, and then I come back ... just piece by piece by piece and basically, the submissions start to improve. The quality goes up by about day three, four or five.

Then you will start to see who is immediately following you and I'm like, hey, I really want this though ... an hour later, there's all these other submissions with the exact thing that you asked for and you're like, okay, I'm starting to see who the rock stars are so I know it kind of stinks a little bit to go, gosh, that takes a week to do it, but honestly my speed is increased like crazy as I do that. I now know who exactly to go for great voiceovers and I use 'em over and over now with the same tactics.

I know several people who are very, very good at graphics. People who are very good with some video stuff. People who are very good, You know I mean?

Then the parts that need to be creative that I'm not personally creative at ... I mean, I will make up projects just to find who those people are and find the rock stars. Anyway, I still would do that and just know that that seven days is gonna do great things for you in the future. Just make a list of 'em. Keep a list of 'em and let 'em know, hey, you know what I do also to increase all submissions is I say inside the project details for the contest, hey, you know what?

If this works out, I would love to think about doing some future stuff with you 'cause I have more projects that need to be done, I just want to see who really wants this. It's like (explosion sound) these people go crazy. They get out there. They go oh, my gosh, I want this so bad. It's really, really fun when that happens 'cause there's some veracity and you can tell that they want it and they get out there and they really start crushing it.

Okay, so what do you do though if you need to hire somebody internally as well. I just got a guy whose doing amazing with support. What I do is I find the people would work for me for free. I find the people who want to be in doing things with my brand so strongly that they're willing to do things for me for free. It's not that I'm not gonna pay them. I just need to know that they believe in the message, that they believe in my mission.

They believe exactly what I'm trying to do and accomplish before money because I've gone a long time without getting paid before just to get this going. It's not true anymore at all, but you know I mean? I got know do you really want to get in this because I move at a crazy pace and I need you to do the same and you know I mean.

What I do is I wait. There's always people who will reach out and go, hey, what can I help you with? The people who do that and don't ask for money who ... I can tell they're genuine, I say, hey, that's so nice of you, I appreciate it and I say nothing back to 'em. Well, the ones who reach back out and say, "Hey, I'm being serious. I really want to work with you." Then I go, "Okay, hey, there's really, really awesome, what kind of thing do you see yourself doing? I don't want to take you out from something if you know that you're really good a certain tag, a certain thing.

Tell me what your super power is." If they keep coming back at me, well, I'm this. Like cool ... take what I'm about to say also with a grain of salt. I don't give them something crappy on purpose, but I give them a task that is not easy, that is challenging because I need to see how they'll react to it. It's a test. It's totally a test.

I'm doing this with one guy right now and he is killing it. I'm absolutely loving working with him. He's so, so cool, but he's done, I mean, he's done this. He's grabbed my attention by giving value first and I can tell you, I can't wait till the time for my next project to come up 'cause ... I wanna hire the guy. I'm gonna do it so long as everything keeps going awesome with him.

I'm actually the weak link in this relationship now.

He's dancing circles around me, getting all this stuff done that I didn't even know that I should be doing, like that kind of guy. Anyway, let me jump to the next question here, all right?

"Hey, Steve. This is Matt Kaple. I have a question for you. I wanted to see if you could teach us all how to do a ninja way to do a favicon icon so we could import that and use that into our funnels and clip funnels. I figured you're the guy that could teach us how to do that. Thank so much."

Hey, what's up, Matt. Thanks so much for the question. I'm laughing because Russell always makes fun of me for how much I love favicons. I just hate it when there's at the top of the page in the tab there, there's just like. There's either nothing up there and then just a whole bunch of words or there's like that blank piece of paper little icon. It's funny.

He'll send me some funnels some times, be like, dude, what do you thinks wrong with this funnel? I'll write back. Dude, there's no favicon that's why the whole page isn't converting well and he'll be like whatever, that's not it. Anyway. They do nothing for conversions. I don't think so. Well, they might little bit. I feel like they do for authority when you actually see a favicon, you see something up there. You see a logos.

Well, like again, logos, they do nothing for conversion. They're just for our own egos, but I like it as far as keeping the same branding for the page. Honestly, they don't matter that much, but for me what I do is I will go into Adobe Illustrator or Photoshop and all I do is I create a 40 pixel by 40 pixel so it's wicked tiny. 40 pixel by 40 pixel and what I do is favicons are something to make after logos so I'll go grab whatever icon or something like that is inside of the actual logo.

I'll grab the logo and put it inside of the 40 pixel by 40 pixels. The name of the game on favicons is simplicity. Just, you gotta be so simple with them. Don't try and have more than one letter or a couple of letters if you are doing letters and if you do they gotta be really, really simple.

Second thing is that make 'em transparent backgrounds so that it doesn't export. You gotta export 'em as a png and then upload them. If you click on settings up in the top right inside your click funnels account, and then you'll click on digital assets.

If you upload it as a digital asset and then right click on the download button, copy the link address and you can actually go paste it inside of a favicon area underneath the funnel settings. Hopefully, that makes sense.

I usually don't get to technical inside a podcast because some of you guys who have never used click funnels are like what the heck is he talking about? He just totally lost me. Anyways, that's what I do though. Keep 'em very simple, transparent background, 40 pixels by 40 pixels and I usually just make it out of the logo, a smaller version of it or something like that. When you do it to a funnel inside of click funnels, it does it to every page.

You don't have to do it to each page individually. It'll globally do it the pages inside of that funnel so anyways, great question, man. Next one.

"Hey, Steve, this is Grant Tanner. Question is for the podcast that I started listening to. Good work. Question is I have a client who is trying to drive traffic to her website and get people to sign up for her digital magazine. It's actually a print magazine as well, but the whole point of her website is to drive subscriptions to a magazine so it's kind of a model that I'm having a hard time figuring out a good sales model to try to drive people to a certain landing page. What sales funnel do I use to get people interested in signing up for a magazine subscription essentially. Wanted to get your thoughts. Thanks. Bye."

Hey, what's up, Grant. Hey, great question. Honestly, I get that question more frequently that you would expect. Not so much on magazines themselves, but on selling continuity right out of the gate. That's not an easy thing to do and it's actually something that I usually don't suggest, not that you can't do it, but personally I don't do that. The reason is because when you. It is easier to sell a $5,000 one thing than it is to sell a monthly continuity $60 a month thing, you know what I mean?

You're just. I don't know. How should I say this? The mind is so funny because if we just ask for five grand one time on a high ticket thing a lot of times, people are gonna be like, yeah, sure, I'll go ahead and do that because I have five grand right now, but if I start to say, hey, it's gonna be a couple $100 every month, indefinitely.

Immediately there's this long because it's associated with time, work immediately becomes this secondary emotion that comes in the side of it. I don't typically suggest that you go and sell magazines subscriptions right off the bat, but if you are, which you are and that's great so this is what I would do.

If you've ever seen Funnel University, model how we do that. It's very strategic. Every single time we offer anything continuity based ever, it is always with something else. Like this okay? Magazines. Who does this? Sports Illustrated does. Have you ever seen this TV infomercials or whatever, they're talking about Sports Illustrated Magazine. You don't just get the magazine when you actually get a subscription set up, do you?

What you do is you actually get a clock, a football clock. You actually get an actual football with someone's fake signature on it and then you get this. You get a blanket. Then you'll get a foam finger. Then you get, you know what I mean? They make an offer out of it.

If you're selling straight just subscription, it's very, very challenging. It's hard to do it. Watch how Frank Kern sells his memberships. Watch how Russell sells click funnels. Watch how. It's always bundled with something else. What's funny about that especially when the subscription based product is actually digital, they always ship something physical. That's the pattern. That's the model.

That's how we do it and so when you go back and you start looking at. How is that whole thing actually works, don't think in terms of how can I just sell magazines? Turn the thing into an offer and be like how can turn this physical that they get in the mail when they get a magazine subscription, right?

The magazine subscription also we don't sell it. We don't sell subscription as the main thing. We give it away as a bonus. When you get click funnels or when you get the funnel acts course, I'm gonna give you funnel acts, but I'm also just as a thank you, I'm gonna give you six months free of click funnels, right?

That's how Russell does it...

When you go and get this clock and football and foam finger or whatever, then we're gonna give you three months free on your subscription to Sports Illustrated Magazine, right? They give away the physical thing. Sorry.

When you get the physical thing, they give you as a bonus, the continuity thing, which is really what they want you to buy. Does that make sense? That's how I would do it. That is how we do it.

Funnel University usually would cost us $120 out of the gate, typically, in ad spend just to get somebody to join. That's the numbers when I saw it a long time ago so I don't know what they are now, but there's a lot of money just to get one person just to. You don't even know if they're gonna stay that long and so how do you actually recoup that cost?

Well, first, we have 'em get. We actually sell the package of the other stuff. We sell the offer not the subscription. Does that make sense? When you do it that way, you're profitable off the bat far faster so anyway, hopefully that helps.

Guys, this has been a long podcast. I had to break this into two different episodes because there's so many questions and I still didn't get to about 10 of 'em. If you want to keep asking questions, go for it. I just make sure that the ones I put on here are not so particular to your business so that they'll be advantageous for everyone to hear.

If you don't hear your question on there, please don't get offended just know that sometimes the question may not be advantageous for the whole group.

Anyway, thanks so much guys. Thanks so much for listening to Sales Funnel Radio and anyway, super excited for all of the great things go. There's so many awesome things going on here. Go get the free website funnel that I created if you want at salesfunnelbroker.com. Also, I have a whole bunch of free funnels there you can go download and a whole bunch of the little helps as well.

That's literally the entire reason I built that entire thing. I do broker funnels, but not that often anymore. I should probably change the name of that place to sometime, but anyways, 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. Wanna get one of today's best internet sales funnel for free? Go to salesfunnelbroker.com/freefunnels to download your pre-built sales funnel today.

It's been awhile since I've done any Q&A on "HeySteve"... I'm kinda already in the Q&A zone this week so I just kept on goin'.

Woo! What's up, everyone, good morning. My name's Steve Larsen and you're listening 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 your host, Steve Larsen.

All right, all right, all right. Man, I'm kind of just a happy, excited individual in general but particularly this last week has just been such a personal win, it's just been so awesome. Many of you guys know I went and I got to speak on Russell's stage for three days, it was crazy. Oh my gosh, it was so much fun, I had a lot of fun with it. It was ... A lot of guys know we just launched the Two Comma Club Coaching Program and it's been awesome, it's been a lot of fun.

We had hundreds, and hundreds, and hundreds of people join in and ask for Two Comma Club Coaching training, all the material. Those people who also purchased it they came for ... The last time we opened it, just this last week they came for three days. We went through their messaging, we went through their webinars, we built a funnel out, we built the sales portion, we indexed stores, it's really intense.

The first day we went from I think was about 8:30 in the morning and then we'd leave at about six. Not bad, right? There's no breaks, we don't take breaks the entire day. We let everyone out for lunch once just to grab some food but besides that there's no breaks, there's nothing else. The second day what happens is we get up and at 8:30 everyone's back in there and then it was me. I went from 9 am to midnight.

It was crazy. Russell came in and he taught a segment of it but man, we were on there for 17 hours. That's a ton of energy. I've always thought, "Oh my gosh, this is going to be such a ... I'm going to be exhausted," but I didn't realize how much. At the end of the day I was like ... The whole day is built around just us trying to help you get your slides done so you can do a webinar.

It's very intensive and we stop slide by slide, by slide by slide...

We walk around the room, we're like, "Hey, that doesn't look right or switch this or change the messaging to this or switch this word around or okay now pitch it to that guy over there," you know what I mean? It's like, it's intense and it was a whole lot of fun. What I wasn't expecting is how incredibly sore my body would be just being on stage keeping high energy, keeping big, loud, and proud, and keeping my hands all over the place.

You know what I mean?...

I didn't expect that part of it. I remember I laid that night at about 1:30 in the morning by Russell and I did a little strategy session for the next day. I laid down to go to sleep and my feet just started throbbing, not like, "Oh, they're sore," they actually hurt. I said, "Oh my gosh, I truly am an indoor animal now because I'm not used to ... that would not phase me in the past."

Anyway, it was great. The next day I got and we went again from about 9 am to about six, five or 6 pm. It was great. We went through and people had all their stuff done.

Anyway, last time we did this the people who actually implemented it and got out there, they'd make 19 grand on their first webinar. Another lady, she already did 700 grand, $700,000 in the last two months since she launched it, when we did this event last time.

Anyway, this was a great event...

When Russell invited me to come teach part of it, it was really honoring. I was shocked he asked. I was like, "Are you talking to me?" He's like, "Yeah dude, you know this stuff so well come teach it with me side-by-side." I was like, "Okay, cool."

It was a lot of fun, just super honoring, very, very honoring...

Anyways, that's what's been going on...

My dad flew out and we had him over and he was doing that also for his webinar. Anyways, it was just a really, really good experience but I feel like I've been in recovery mode. It's Saturday right now and this all just happened just this last week. Then Friday we had all these people who joined the Two Comma Club Program.

There's a two week program that we put you through before that you can even come to Boise so that you can be prepared for it. I had my first Q&A session over the phone, it was over Instant Tele-seminar. These guys went in, they got ... It was about 70 people on the phone with me and I was on for three hours straight. It was crazy. It was so funny because at the end of the day I walked back into the room where Russell was and I sat down at my desk there.

Russell was like, I think he started laughing, he goes, "Hey, how you doing?" I was like, "It's going really, really well."

I didn't expect ... I was like, "I have so much more empathy for how you feel after your events, that was really intense." A solid 17 hour day, another eight hours after it, I only slept ... I went to bed at 5:30 in the morning a few days before the event started just because I was preparing, I was trying to get ready.  I got a pretty big home office here, at least floor space-wise.

Man, I was walking around and I was teaching as if people were in the room. I was getting really intense, really animated. I got whiteboards all over the place, I was drawing stuff out, doing all the things that I would to help concepts sink in deeply for when I was going to actually be on stage and teach.

One thing to note, it's another totally different thing to teach it...

Anyway, so that's what's been going on with me. I'm so sorry, I feel like I haven't been, I guess I have launched a few podcasts lately but I realized after I was doing the Q&A session I was like, "Wait, I have a Q&A session of my podcast and I haven't done that in probably ..." I don't know, it's been probably 30 episodes at least. I went and I looked at the app that I use for people to ask questions to me.

Now, if you guys don't know what I'm talking about go to salesfunnelbroker ... Sorry, salesfunnelradio ... salesfunnelradio.com. Scroll down a little bit, there's going to be a green button on the right that says record voicemail. You can record a voicemail question and it'll be straight across your browser, it's really awesome. It'll email the copy to me and what I do is I kind of vet the questions to see which questions could apply to everybody.

Those are the ones that I place inside the podcast.

I'm going to do that. I lined up about one, two, three, four, five, six, seven. I lined up about seven questions so I'm going to play the questions so you guys all hear it and then I'm going to answer them real fast, does that sound good? This podcast might go a little bit longer than normal but it's only because I have not done a hasty segment of this podcast for a very long time and I'm so sorry.

It just hit me while ... I got so tired in the middle of my three hour Q&A session yesterday I actually sat on the floor for a while with my laptop answering questions. Russell came in and Melanie came in and they were handing me snacks and treats because I was just going, and going, and going.

It was really fun. We had people from all across the world on there, it was so fun. Anyway, so let me play this first question here. I'm just going to kind of shotgun fire over several of these questions, that sound good? Cool. Al right, that's the plan. Let me put the first question here.

"Hey Steve, how's it going, it's Adam here, 20-year-old college student out of U Mass. I just had a quick question for you. You had mentioned before how you started off by providing a free service where you would build sales funnels for companies that were already established. I kind of want to take that same approach as I have a pretty in depth knowledge of how to use ClickFunnels. I've been using it for a while now, I know all the tools inside of ClickFunnels.

I use actionetics setting up email sequences, all that fun stuff.

I kind of want to take the same approach where I provide a free service to go into a company and build a sales funnel for them. I was just wondering if you can give me some insights on what approach I should take. I feel like that would be really beneficial for a lot of others out there. Thanks for your time, I really appreciate it."

Hey Adam, that's a great question. There's a lot of ways to do it. If you don't have any ... Okay, let's start with this. It's all about results. If you've never built for anybody ever then you need to do it for free. You got to get out there and you have to do it for free. That kind of sucks a little bit but that's how it's going to work. Do it for free because this is now very much a results based economy. What you 100 other people can do in their immediate area.

They may not know it but the moment they realize it, it's like, "Oh my gosh, why are you different?" The way I actually got started was I just started ... I was like, "Okay, what industries do I want to work in?"

There's a little bit of a checklist I used to actually get started with the stuff. The thing that I started doing was I said, "Okay, number one. I want to work in an industry where there's a lot of money that flows into it and it's a normal thing to do so." You think real estate or cars, people expect to spend a lot of money in those areas.

I wanted to spend ... What's nice is if I was to get them an extra two or three sales a month that would change their whole business. Rather than going for something worth really low ticket eCommerce drop-ship style where there's hardly any margin in it. If I was going to go choose and try and prove myself to a market like that I'd really have to increase volume to show massive improvement.

Does that make sense? It's the power of the high ticket.

That was the first criteria that I was looking for. The second criteria that I was looking for was that they already needed to be in business with a customer base. I did not ... I did the startup game for so long just going person to person, startup to startup. Great, super, awesome to do that but you know what? It was really, really hard because if for some reason the sales funnel didn't work the first time we launched, and half the time Russell and I launch a funnel it doesn't work the first time. We have to see what happens and we make tweaks and then launch it again.

Usually that's when it starts to really make money. Does that make sense?

These guys would come back and be like, "Oh my gosh, you must not know how to build funnels." I'm like, "Actually no, you're a startup and you haven't proven your market, you haven't proven your model, you haven't proven your product, your business isn't proven. You don't even know what you're doing." They thought the funnel was the business and that's not true at all.

Anyways, if you're going to go do that, what I did is I just started making a list of the industries I wanted to go do that stuff in to fit those criteria. Then all I did is I ... Go to Google, search locally different businesses with those industries. I literally started shotgunning this email out or I'd go find them on Facebook. I'd be like, "Hey, I know this is weird ..." If you say that then people for some reason put their walls down.

If you don't say that then they're going to be like, "This is weird," so you just call it out. "I know this is weird but I build these things online called sales funnels and I just wanted to know if I could do it for you. I know it's totally out of left field but I love the industry, I love ..."

You can talk about their business specifically so they know that it's not spam.

This works really well on Facebook Messenger by the way also...

"Hey, I really, really want to be able to show the market that I know what I'm doing in this area. Let me build what I call an internet sales funnel for you for free, it'll come out of my pocket. I'm literally just trying to get results as big as possible for anybody right now. Could I do it for you? It will be completely free to you. The only thing I ask is that when it works, only pay me if it works. If so, I would love to get a video testimonial."

That's how I did it and I shotgun blasted that style of message to tons of people and I started getting a response.

It's funny, any time I wanted to get into a new industry, I still do that. I did that probably a couple months ago. It was before I moved to our new office but I was thinking about going into the real estate area. I was like, "Okay, who can I go build for for free?"

I just started blasting the same message across so many platforms that I think Facebook thought I was spamming people, which I kind of was because I was trying to get my message out there and ask who I could build for for free. That was basically it. I got back great people. A few days later I was building for free for a lady who was a realtor to prove myself in the real estate niche. Anyways, that's how I would do it.

Hopefully I answered your question, Adam...

All right, and there's the next question.

"Hey Steve! I just wanted to know do you do your own graphics or do you outsource it? If you outsource it what's your process, how do you do it? Thanks, have a great one. Love your podcast."

That question was coming from Greg Grimsley and that is a great question. Graphics-wise, if you've been in any kind of funnel building you know that graphics is a heavy part of it, graphics, and video, and copy, which is pretty much all web pages in general. Yeah, you got to solve that problem. I do my own graphics. I

'm pretty sure you're talking about those little funnel box graphics that I made. Yeah, I made those, I used the Adobe Illustrator for that. One of the things that I learned from Russell sitting next to him is he is so good at taking complex things and turning it into a simple picture. When you can do that your ability to teach is going to go through the roof.

Sometimes what I'll do is .. I still do it. I got whiteboards up here over on the side and if there's something that I need to explain better I will draw a picture.

It's one of the major reasons why half of his ... He's got a lot of pictures in his books and that's why he does it. It's on purpose, it's not just because ... It's so that we can explain things that otherwise would be very hard to see without a visual.

A lot of times what I'll do is I'll sit down and I'll draw the picture.

If you're not personally a graphics guy, man you can go on Fiver or Freelance.com or whatever and go and pay someone to make a little graphic out of it. If they charge you more than 50 bucks they're probably charging too much money for you.

Anyway, that's how I do it though and that's how I do it. I use Adobe Illustrator. I was a layout head editor and designer in high school and I've kind of always just liked layout and design so I do it myself. If you don't have that skill that's fine, that should not stop your progress.

All right, this next question comes from Art Boyd.

"Hey Steve, Art Boyd here! I do have a question for you. First off I want to say you're amazing, I listen to all your podcasts. You bring tremendous value to the marketplace and I just appreciate all that you share with us. My question is this, how come you give away your free click funnels website that you spend over 200 hours on? Why are you giving that away for free and not charging for it? What's the real marketing ninja tactic that you're using that pays you on the back end? Let me know, I appreciate it man. Talk to you soon, thanks."

Hey, that's a huge, huge ... Thanks for bringing that up. The reason I do it is because of, well really two different things. Okay, how many times do you go to a ... Have you ever been to a used car salesman? You go to a used car place or a new car place or any place where there's supposed to be sale happening. You walk up and the biggest thing you know that you're going to run into is the moment you pull up somebody is going to be there as you open the car door and just hounding you.

They're going to be hounding you, that sucks. I hate that. Anyway, I love to be sold but I do not like to be bullied. That makes me feel bullied. I feel like I'm being backed into a corner like, "So do you want it? You gonna get it? Okay, we could buy this."

People who will jump out and immediately show you how your objections are worth nothing rather than actually valuing the objection and dealing with it. The reason I do that is because I read ... Anyway, the free thing ... A lot of you guys get hung up on the free thing.

"Well, I got to have a free thing in the front."

Not always but it really helps to have something free on the front end to start building your list. I haven't been doing this podcast that long, I've barely spent any kind of advertising dollars behind it but because I do that I gained like 2,000 people on my list in the last little bit.

It gets shared. The reason I do it is because it gets shared and it's something that I should be charging for. When you guys are starting to come up with the free thing, the bait to pull people into funnels or pull people into your world or whatever it is, the thing that you're doing do it for free for somebody else. Also do, maybe if you can, depends on the industry, depends on to make sense what you're doing but man, I would take something that should be paid for, especially for branding yourself.

Especially if this is a coaching, author, speaker, consultant, whatever it is.

Myself, man take something that's free or something that people should pay a lot of money for, help them feel that they should be paying for it, which is the reason I reference the fact I spent 200 hours on it. I'll charge 20 grand for funnels now, however I don't usually take any kind of funnel ... build products anymore.

Got my own stuff going on which is awesome...

Anyway, take something that should be paid for, something that's crazy so that when people like, "Oh my gosh, this is crazy. I get it for free? Oh my gosh." That reaction right there, that's what I'm trying to cause inside of them, inside of their psyche because they'll go share it.

If they go share it, it means I won. How do I grow a business almost completely organically while working on the side for one of the most intense entrepreneurs that is even out there? Like that, that's how I do it. What happens is I know that if there's ever a product in the future I have delivered so much freakin' value. Personally I just know. I have delivered so much value.

My goal is to deliver so much value. If I can deliver so, so much value and turn around and say, "Hey, you know what? For months I have helped answer questions, I have helped give things away that you should have paid a lot of money for. The next that I do come out with a product ..."

I say, "You know what? This product, I actually can stand behind it. It took me a long time to make it but it's going to help you do this. Here you go." There's going to be a lot of people who are fine paying me money for that. It's completely the law of reciprocity.

The book "Launch" by Jeff Walker, I really like that book. There's a section or chapter in there that talks about the nine ... There's nine principles of persuasion or something like that. Nine principles ... Gosh, I can't remember the name of it. Anyways, it's any of those categories. One of them is reciprocity. If I give you something for free or ... This happens all the time.

Oh, here's a good example. This happens all the time during Christmas or holidays or whenever.

If you're in a spot where there's all these neighbors and you walk up to someone ... Someone rings your doorbell, let's say in the middle of dinner time. You're like, "Who's at the door?"

You walk up to the door and there's a neighbor there and they've got a plate of cookies for you and a card. They walk in they're like, "Hey, Merry Christmas or Happy Holidays or whatever." What's your immediate gut reaction? "Oh my gosh, thank you so much. I wish I had something for you. I wish there was something I could give you back. Stay right there, stay right there."

How many guys would turn around, run back into the kitchen and you grab a can of beans or something to give them to try and show appreciation back. You feel the need to reciprocate, that's literally the reason why I do it.

I want to pump value in the marketplace and it also sets me apart like crazy. I get tagged all over the internet for being a resource for people to go get things they need to in order to be successful with funnels.

"Well shoot, if you just want to get started right off the bat I got a really great funnel for you and it's free. It took me a long time to build it. Well there you go, you can have it, it's yours. It's a template, I took it out of my content, you can go grab it."

Anyway, that's why I do it. That's why I'm a little bit bossy about it. I have an exit pop. If you go to salesfunnelbroker.com it's at the bottom but there's also an exit pop. Some people feel like exit pops are a little bit aggressive but I know that what I'm asking for in the exit pop is such ridiculous value for the funnel and what it gives you that I don't feel bad.

I feel like it's totally fine. I don't feel like it taints my image at all by being annoying one more time before somebody leaves the site. Anyway, that's the answer to that one, that's why I do it.

I thought about it a lot, there's a lot of strategy behind that and there's a lot more that I'm about to put into that as well. Great question man. Right now what I'm going to do is I'm actually going to break this into a second podcast because there are so many questions. I don't want this to go, it's going to go like 40 or 50 minutes if I keep going here.

Let me break this into another episode here. I want to thank you guys. Go ahead and tune into the next one, I'll make a part two on this.

Anyways, if you guys got a question though please go ahead and ask me. If you go to salesfunnelradio.com, scroll down to the bottom, green button on the right, you can go and ask one. Just make sure the question is something that can be advantageous for the entire group and no so specific to your business that I can't answer it in a broad way.

You want to be detailed as possible but also ... I've had 8,000 downloads in the last ... This podcast has taken off guys and I really want to thank you all for being avid listeners and for being supportive with it. That being said, I've got to make it still applicable for everybody and funnels in general. All right guys, thanks so much and I'll see you in the next episode. Bye.