RUSSELL BRUNSON!🔥The $10M Webinar Blueprint 💸 GUEST!! ClickFunnels' Russell Brunson | Ep. 469

0:01Jay Schwedelson:Welcome to Do This Not That, the podcast for marketers. We share quick tips, things you can do right now, and then we add a little bit of chaos at the end of every episode. We also keep it short, like this intro. Let's check it out. We are back for Do This Not That, and I got a big dude here. I really do. I got one of the biggest names out there. Who's here? We got Russell Brunson. Now, if you don't know who that is, I don't know who you are. But this guy, he didn't just build this software company, okay? He created an entire generation of online entrepreneurs. And I'm not just saying that. He's the co-founder of ClickFunnels, but everybody knows that already.

0:41Jay Schwedelson:And if you don't, ClickFunnels has over 150 ,000 customers and its users have generated over$10 billion. That's like a B. That's a big deal. This all sequences and guide visitors to the single action. And Russell's all about driving to outcomes. He's written all of these books. He's done all of these things. If you've ever heard the word funnel or offer stack or webinar launch or any of these things, it's Russell's fault. It's all his fault. We're going to get into it all. Russell, welcome to the show, man.

1:18Russell Brunson:Yeah. Super glad to be here, man. I appreciate you. And I'm looking forward to this. It'll be fun.

1:22Jay Schwedelson:All right. Awesome. Let's get into it. For anybody out there, when we say the word funnel, like what does that mean is that the thing you pour like a drink into what it's a ridiculous

1:31Russell Brunson:question as you of all people but what exactly is a funnel a funnel cake yeah so when I got started 20 years ago in this business everyone had websites and so I I tried to put up a website and nothing happened I didn't make any money I was like what's happening and um I started meeting these guys who uh you know I think a lot of co-friends we have nowadays but 20 years ago they're trying to figure out this internet thing how do you make it work and I don't know who stumbled upon at first, they found out that like, um, a confused mind always says no. So if you give somebody like a bunch of options, a lot of them just do nothing.

2:02Russell Brunson:And so they're like, well, let's build, let's build a website, but make it where it's like, there's only one page and there's only one thing you can do on it. And then the next page, there's one thing you can do on it. And like make it simple and walk them through a step-by-step process. And back then we didn't have a name for, we called it sales processes or whatever, but they were very simple websites that just, you know, the first page would have a headline and say, give me your email if you want more information. So you give an email, then go next page. And there was a video or a sales letter, something that would talk about something else.

2:27Russell Brunson:And like, give me a little money and I'll show you the next page. And it just walk them through a step-by-step process. And so that's what a funnel is. It's just, it's a really simple way to take your potential customers through a very strategic process that eventually helps them to become customers and hopefully become customers for life. And, um, that's kind of a funnel. There's a million different ways to do funnels. It's hard to say just this. There's a ton of ways, but, but basically that's the gist is it's this very simple step-by-step process. You take somebody through, it makes it simple and easy for them and helps you as the business owner to collect the most amount of money and serve them at the highest level.

3:01Jay Schwedelson:So as a broad statement, when, uh, you're looking at somebody's business, like, you know, we're, we're getting a lot of traffic to our site, or we think people keep talking about our stuff. We're just not making sales. Is it that their, their closing process, their actual sales process is just too complicated there's just too much noise as they get closer to

3:19Russell Brunson:actually closing that deal oh yeah a lot of that or they're like they'll see a video views and they click on the thing they go to your website and then there's like links and and they're like okay i'm gonna go follow them on social and then you go on this path and they just get lost versus like okay if i get someone's attention i'm gonna take that and like i think about this like if i met someone in the street and they're like hey i'm trying to start a business i'm like oh i can help you let me tell you the first thing and the second i would walk them through a process right i would never just be like oh yeah we'll go to the mall there's a bunch of stuff hopefully you'll figure it out like that's what we tend to do online and so this is just basically taking somebody it's like it's like replicating the greatest salesperson of all time and just tell them what they need to make the first decision what they need to make the second decision you just kind of walk them

3:56Jay Schwedelson:through very simple process so all right i've been watching you forever and there's a lot of stuff that you say that's kind of evergreen that's like okay i could have watched it a year ago two years ago and it still makes a lot of sense like what you just said right now that'll work five years from now, but I'm just curious. Everybody's, oh, everything's changing. The planet's changing. The world's different, whatever. So in the last, you know, let's say 12 to 18 months, has anything like changed in your world, in that whole process and what it is that you talk about, or is it basically, nope, still the same thing, no matter what's going on, no matter about AI or whatever?

4:29Russell Brunson:Yeah. Well, nice thing is that human psychology doesn't change. We're still humans, right? And so for me, it's changed dramatically, but the foundation's exactly the same. Like the structure. I look at, we did a challenge two weeks ago, highest converting thing I've done in my career to this point. But if you look at the outside, the structure was identical. Cool. Like it's just like, if you build a house, like the framing of the foundation, the framing house looked identical. But I think what, what I'm seeing now is the AI has given us the ability to write better copy, to make better videos, better persuasive arguments.

4:58Russell Brunson:And so, but the foundation doesn't change. I mean, I look at my book.com secrets or a decade ago, and I'm going through it to do an edit for like they want me to do like an ai version update i'm going through i'm like this stuff's all the same the only difference is i can use ai to speed up maybe writing the videos or you know knowing you know analyzing more people's stuff before i build my own but for the most part the foundation doesn't change human psychology is the same whether ai is there or not and so that's what i love about this is so many of the principles are evergreen and i'm sure that someday instead of looking at monitors we'll be on our phones instead of phones maybe we're on goggles but the psychology between like where i'm taking somebody what i'm trying to get them to do i think that'll be here forever so that part never changes which is which is kind of nice

5:40Jay Schwedelson:so wait a minute so you just had your your greatest launch ever all of that what happened what did you do what did you do that you didn't do before why why was this a success yeah so for

5:50Russell Brunson:me whenever i i launched a new campaign or funnel or whatever um i have a process i call funnel hacking so my people always call themselves funnel hackers so i'll go and i'll i'll look at like if I'm launching a book funnel. I'm going to go and find 200 other book funnels and look at them all and see what they did. And then from that, try to take the best practice and make something really good. But that takes a lot of time, right? So I was doing a five-day challenge and so I'm like, well, I know the structure of the five-day challenge looks like, but I'm like, what are people doing now that I didn't know about, I haven't seen.

6:17Russell Brunson:And so I was able to go and I found, I found about a dozen challenges that had done anywhere from 10 to a hundred million dollars in sales. But if I was to watch all of them, they're like five-day challenges, like five hours every day. I get so much to consume. So instead I went and I transcribed every session of every single thing. We also set it up. So when we opted into it, we got every email, every text message, like just everything. And then we threw all that in AI is like, analyze this and tell us what you found out. And then look at mine versus mine. Like what are they doing different? And it just pulled out all these things like, Oh, well your VIP sessions at the end, which means you're getting off to really move your VIP VIP sessions to the first and try this.

6:50Russell Brunson:You are, you introduce your offer over here and said, try it over here. And like, we just moved the pieces around a little bit the framework um and then emails like you're only sending out x amount of emails these people are sending out 90 emails like here's the structure that you're missing you know so we're able to identify all these amazing things these best practices so we did our new version took the same framework but we kind of added in these new like the things that we saw other people discovered and then ran ours and just it was like night and day it's like i feel like i was just a brand new beginner uh having you know because it was just like i hadn't had success like that in so long.

7:21Russell Brunson:I was like, I just feel like I figured out a secret and just came from using AI's ability to scan through and look at a lot of data and then give me back the best, the best of the best.

7:31Jay Schwedelson:You know, what's really cool about what you just went through? It's that, um, you don't, you, you, you grind, right? You just, you just went through a series of things where you were like, I basically worked my butt off. I gathered all this stuff. I didn't use some crazy AI tool that nobody has access to. It's like what everybody has access to and you grind and you put it in there and you made whatever yours was better. There's, am I, is it fair to say that anybody out there can literally do what you just did to improve their business?

8:00Russell Brunson:Oh, a hundred percent. It's so simple now because, um, I get like for us humans, we went to wade through a lot of stuff to find like the, the nuggets. In fact, I had a, I can't tell you the person's name is, but there's this guy who I was to hire for consulting. He wanted$150 ,000 plus 10 % of everything that this thing we're building made. And I was like, Oh, that's a lot of money. So I went to his YouTube channel and he had a whole bunch of really smart videos, him talking about what he does. So I just took the videos, I uploaded them to, uh, I use Madness, which is one AI and upload, I said, transcribe all these videos that transcribed all the videos.

8:32Russell Brunson:I took the transcripts, I put it into Claude. Those are the two that I really use. And I was like, I was like, read all these and tell me what it's saying. And then I was like, and then it became like a consultant. I asked a couple, like, if you were, if, if I hired you as, as a consultant, based everything, you know, for all these, all these YouTube videos, what would you do in the situation? And it just tell me, I'm like, wow, that cost me$0. And I got, I believe as good as, if not better than I would have got, if I would have paid him the consulting fee. So for me, I'm doing the same thing.

8:57Russell Brunson:Like I want to learn something like, okay, who's wrote the, who wrote the book about it? Usually I would go read the book and try to like get the information from them. Maybe I'd hire them to, and I might read the book, find their YouTube videos, find their podcasts have AI analyze everything. And then let me ask it questions as if it's a consultant. It doesn't cost, I mean, it costs you whatever, 20 bucks a month for AI to run it. It's like the cheapest employee ever.

9:17Jay Schwedelson:That's amazing. That's amazing. If you took every one of my podcasts, you upload, you'd find out every bad TV show I watch. So I don't know you get a lot of consulting out of it, but that's okay. I want to pivot here for a second though, because I've now seen you say something over and over again, and it sticks in my mind, which is webinars. You have this video out there that says if you do a webinar every week right for a year you will be financially well you'll be doing great financially okay what is that what is going on there because i literally could see the video in my mind it's everywhere some good marketing but what is with

9:50Russell Brunson:you and webinars and doing them a lot yeah so webinars is um like i did webinars a lot in my early career that's you know first we would speak on stages and then we were doing teleseminars then became webinars, but I would just kind of do them sporadically. I have an idea for an offer and make a webinar and sell it. And then, and maybe I do the webinar to more of my friends list and they would be kind of done. And it never really, like it wasn't, I mean, it was kind of what a lot of people's experience the webinars. Yeah, I did. I made some money. It was, it was great. But when I launched ClickFunnels was, it was interesting because my business partner, Todd Dickerson built ClickFunnels, you know, he, he had spent so much time on it.

10:23Russell Brunson:So he was like, I need you to focus on just this for a year. If you focus on just like, cause I'm ADD entrepreneur, I'm doing 50 things. He's like, just focus on this for an entire year. And I was like, okay, I promise you I'll focus on this just for a year. And so the way we launched it is I wrote a webinar, we launched it and it worked. And it was interesting because when the webinar got done, typically I would just do the same webinar a bunch of, because it did well. In fact, I remember the launch day of the webinar, we did it. And I actually had two webinars happening that day. One that happened earlier in the morning, like 10 or 11 o 'clock AM.

10:53Russell Brunson:I did the webinar and I think we had 800 people on, I'm not going to remember the numbers perfectly, but 800 people on and we sold like 30 or$40 ,000. So I'm like, yeah, that was a, that was a big win. My business partner, Todd, like, as I'm like celebrating how good I did, he goes into, I think it was go to webinar back then, or maybe zoom and he exported all of the questions and he's, he'd come back and he's like, Hey, at minute 13, everyone's confused here. I was like, what? Everyone's confused. And so I look at minute 13, I find what slide is like, Oh, well, let me just add this, the sentence in here.

11:20Russell Brunson:Let me add a slide in here to explain that. And he's like, Hey, minute 24, everyone's asking the same question. So I went to back my slides, I added a slide in there to address the question. Then in the offer, they're confused about this. And so we went through the webinar. We just tweaked it a bunch of times. And then a couple hours later, I was doing it again live. And so I jumped back on live again. This time, similar amount of people, maybe 700 or 800 people did the same presentation, but I had these new little things that were added to it. And that time we did over a hundred thousand dollars in sales.

11:46Russell Brunson:I was like, what just happened? And then Todd in his infinite wisdom went and download the chat from that. I was like, all right, here's what I get stuck now. And so he would tell me and we add it. And so we did that back and forth. And I was doing the time three or four webinars a week. Um, sometimes two or three a day. Every time we did it, we export the things, tweak the slides, and it got better and better and better to the spot where like, uh, every time we get on the webinar, I knew depending on how many people had registered, I knew exactly almost to the dollar, how much money we would make because it was so scripted so perfectly.

12:15Russell Brunson:And I did it live. I think it was between 70 and 80 times. I did it live before we ever, ever greened it. And in that first year, we went from zero to over $10 million in ARR and ClickFunnels all off of just doing that webinar every single week. And so I've been telling all my students for years now, it's like, because what happens, they'll do a webinar, sell their course, their coaching, and then they just try something new or whatever. I'm like, no, just focus on that. I said, if you do a webinar a week and I set up, I do a webinar every Thursday and you have Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and half a Thursday to promote it.

12:42Russell Brunson:Then Thursday, you do the webinar, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, you do the replay sequence and you close it down. And then Monday, you launch a new webinar, you start driving ads to it. And if you do that, what happens in the year is you get better and better at the pitch. More and more people come into your ecosystem. And between those things, everyone who's done it in a year, they end up with a list of 30 ,000, 40 ,000 people. They've generated tons of money and their presentation is just flawless. They can do it by memory because they've done it so many times. It's so, so good. So that's been my experience.

13:09Russell Brunson:It's how we built ClickFunnels. And it's how so many of our students now have done it. Because man, the webinar week is like an apple a day. It keeps the doctor away. Webinar week keeps all the cash flow problems and business problems away.

13:19Jay Schwedelson:so i got a real question here because i've struggled this i've been in the game now for 27 years and sometimes i feel like i'm repetitive sometimes i get sick of talking about the things i've been talking about forever and i also feel like everyone's got to know what i'm about to say because i've been saying it for 400 years and other people have been saying 400 years do you i mean do you ever feel that way because i feel like not that you are repetitive i don't mean that in that way but i am on the webinar i mean you know by design your business even what you just laid out you know do you ever feel that way or you're like no no that's not the way to think about it you're trying to drive home a point like where do you what what's your vibe on that

14:03Russell Brunson:no great great question my uh one of my early mentors named dan kennedy he said that he's like you'll get bored of your stories way before the marketplace ever does but for me i'll get like the people who've tried this they haven't had success is they have an existing audience and they'll do the webinar to the audience one week and they do the webinar to the audience next week and by the third week it stops working. It doesn't work anymore. I'm like this webinar week strategy is not something you're doing to your existing audience. This is the front end where you're bringing new blood and new people into it, right?

14:29Russell Brunson:So that's happening and then after someone goes to that webinar they buy something then over here I do other stuff. I'm telling them the cool strategies and I have upsells, I have other events and like all the cool stuff happens over here where I can be a creative entrepreneur, share the fun things I want but if I don't have new blood coming it every single day, then, then this all disappears over time. And so the only way the model works is knowing that like, okay, I can do it once. In fact, the way we structure it internally for us is like, I do my webinar once a quarter to my entire audience.

14:57Russell Brunson:Cause that point they've all three months, they've all forgotten and it works again. Um, so once, once a quarter to my own audience and then every single week to bring new people in and new blood in, what happens is, is for them, they first time they show up, it's brand new. And yes, I get so tired of telling my stories about potato guns and tired of my, of the supplement, like all the things like I, you know, but it, but again, you get tired of it way before the market does. I got asked last year to speak in London and it's coming out and I was trying to think of a new thing. And the promoter is like, I want you to the, your funnel hacks webinar.

15:27Russell Brunson:I'm like, no, everyone's seen it. It's been a decade. Like everyone's seen it. He's like, no, my people haven't seen like, and so I went out out there and I was just like, kind of embarrassed almost like, ah, this is my old stuff. I wrote a a decade ago, right? But I did the presentation and it was crazy because people were like, just like at day one where I was doing it, they're running the back room, they're buying, they're like in tears, like you shifted everything, it finally makes sense to me. And I was just like, I forget that like, this market's always replenishing new things. People, new people are coming all the time.

15:55Russell Brunson:And it's like, these stories are brand new for them. And so that's why like on the front end is having that message that we know we've curated, we perfected it, new people come in there and they, it helps to like turn them into your dream customer. And then after that, then you can be creative. with everything else you do with those audience. But that webinar week on the front end, it's what makes the businesses consistent and grown.

16:15Jay Schwedelson:I think it's so valuable for everybody here out there because you think you're being repetitive. You think that people already heard it. They haven't. Keep pushing, keep sharing. So, all right, listen, we're gonna put everything in the show notes. We're gonna tell you how to follow Russell on Instagram and go to clickfunnels.com and all the things. But Russell, how do people get involved with your world that don't know you? Where should they go? How do they consume it all?

16:35Russell Brunson:Yeah, there's a lot of, I've been doing this a long time. there's a lot of stuff so it kind of depends you know we have things for different audiences and stuff but um honestly like you know i think the the best way to get started with me is like just go read one of my books like my books are kind of you know like the the foundational framework so i have three books one's called dot com secrets if you're in funnels that's like the bible on funnels the second one's called expert secrets that's the book that's like um like how you do the messaging inside the funnels the stories you tell how you persuade people and things like that and third's called traffic secrets, which is how you get people to show up.

17:08Russell Brunson:So in your business, wherever you're at, if you're like, I don't know what a funnel is like start.com secrets. I got a funnel, but it's not working. Go read expert secrets. Like I got a funnel, but no traffic and traffic secrets. It's kind of plug in wherever that makes sense. Um, and then just come join, you know, jump in. We're having a lot of fun all the time. Like I've, uh, you know, we have such a cool community of entrepreneurs and we're all just talking about these nerdy things all day long. It's so much fun.

17:28Jay Schwedelson:It is true. Click funnels is more than just a platform. It is a community. I'm not just saying that. It's for real. The whole thing is a business vibe. And Russell Brunson is a legend. I appreciate you being here, my man. Thanks for doing it.