After a full day of funnel hacking over 300+ funnels, I want to walk you through what funnel hacking is again and make sure you’re doing it right. On this episode Russell talks about the difference between stealing and pulling inspiration while building funnels. Here are some of the interesting things to look forward to in this episode:

-- Why copying is stealing, but modeling and taking inspiration is not.

-- How taking inspiration from several different sources and not copying anything is exactly is the proper way to funnel hack.

-- And what Brendon Burchard said about how he avoids accidentally taking other people’s ideas.

So listen here to find out the difference in the right way to funnel hack, and the wrong way to funnel hack.

But one thing I wanted to do as I’m teaching different funnels and things like that, is I wanted some examples and swipe files. I’ve been building out the swipe file in trello with all my favorite funnels in there. And I’ve been doing kind of slowly for a little while and yesterday I was like I’m going to spend the whole day and go hardcore on this. So I basically, in trello you can have different columns and then in the column has different cards. So I made a column for every funnel type. So it’s like Lead Funnels, Cart Funnels, Book Funnels, Presentation Funnels, Via Cell Funnels, Challenge Funnels, all the different types of funnels.

-- ClickFunnels: Everything you need to start market, sell, and deliver your products and services online (without having to hire or rely on a tech team!)

-- DotComSecrets: Get a free copy of the "Underground Playbook For Growing Your Company Online With Sales Funnels."

​-- Expert Secrets: Get a free copy of the "Underground Playbook For Converting Your Online Visitors Into Lifelong Customers."

-- ​Traffic Secrets: Get a free copy of the "Underground Playbook For Filling Your Websites And Funnels With Your Dream Customers.

What’s up everybody? This is Russell Brunson, welcome back to the Marketing Secrets podcast. Today, once again I am marketing in my Tesla and it makes me laugh because all my Tesla listening followers all messaged me yesterday congratulating me on my Tesla, so thank you. Now I know who you all are. With that said, let’s jump into the theme song, and then come back. I got something fun to share with you.

Alright so yesterday was so much fun. Yesterday was funnel hacking day, but not like a normal funnel hacking day. It was like an intense, expensive funnel hacking day. So I’m working on, we have an event this summer called unlock the secrets, it’s for all my Two Comma Club X coaching members and my inner circle members and also their families. So it’s the first time I’ve ever done an event where parents and children can come. So it’s going to be really, really fun. There’s a lot of work going into it.

But one thing I wanted to do as I’m teaching different funnels and things like that, is I wanted some examples and swipe files. I’ve been building out the swipe file in trello with all my favorite funnels in there. And I’ve been doing kind of slowly for a little while and yesterday I was like I’m going to spend the whole day and go hardcore on this. So I basically, in trello you can have different columns and then in the column has different cards. So I made a column for every funnel type. So it’s like Lead Funnels, Cart Funnels, Book Funnels, Presentation Funnels, Via Cell Funnels, Challenge Funnels, all the different types of funnels.

Then underneath there I made a card for every funnel I like. And then I would go and in the past I’ve taken screen shots of here’s page one, page two, page three, so you can kind of see them really easily in this trello board. So what I did yesterday is I recruited two people on my team to help make this possible. I had Melanie who became the funnel purchaser, the funnel buyer, and then Leon who became the funnel screen shotter. So what happened is I would go through and find my favorite funnel, I’d post the front page link in a new trello, and then Melanie would go in and she would go through and buy it and buy everything, and then get the links for every single page in the funnel, post them inside of trello. And then Leon comes behind her and takes screen shots of every single page and posts them in there.

And it’s been interesting because typically I geek out on funnels. I’ll want to funnel hack something and I’ll buy two funnels and it’ll take me the entire day because I’m reading everything, and looking at and studying and nerding out. But Melanie, she’s immune to funnels so far. We’re working on her, but as of today she’s definitely immune to funnels. So she just buys without thinking twice. She just goes to the pages and I think conservatively she spent over $10,000 in funnels yesterday. There was one offer where she’s like, “This is a $5000 offer. You want me to buy that?” I’m like, “Nah, let’s don’t buy that one, but buy all the rest.’

So I’m going to be getting in the mail this week thousands of rand-o things. From nail polish, to kidnapping board game kits, to anyway, so many random funnels. So much fun. So anyway, that’s kind of what’s been happening.

But with that said, we were able to funnel hack yesterday, probably about 300 or so funnels. And the ones I loaded in there are probably close to a thousand now. So I’m done for the day, she’s going to be going in there and keep on funnel hacking and then Leon’s going to be taking pictures, and then we’ll have this huge data base of every amazing funnel that I love, the pictures and the screen shots, and it’s going to be so much fun. So I am pumped and excited and I cannot wait to get all the weird crap in the mail over the next week or two, of what we actually bought. So that’s kind of fun.

A couple of things I want to talk about. Number one is funnel hacking. I’m curious how many of you guys actually still funnel hack. It was interesting, I went to my Two Comma Club X member’s and I said, “Hey, I want you guys to submit funnels that you look at, your favorite funnels so I can go and funnel hack them.” And I got a lot of really, really good ones back from a very few amount of people, which made me think for most of them, they haven’t been funnel hacking. They don’t know what funnels they like. How are you supposed to create something if you don’t know what you like? I know exactly, when people are like, when I have my bat meetings with my team, I’m like, “Okay, we’re going to build a funnel.” They’re like, “Cool, what do you want it to look like?” I’m like, “I want it to look like this one and this one, with a twist of this one, and a little bit of this one.” I don’t just create from scratch. That’s what morons do. Come on you guys. If you want to, this is art.

There’s a book I just bought the other day that said like, actually I don’t know the title. The title is something like, “Great Artists Steal.” And I haven’t read the book yet, so I don’t know exactly what it says, but I’m assuming it has something to do with that, right. We don’t create from scratch, we look at a whole bunch of examples of amazingness and then we build something off the back of that.

So it kind of blew my mind that there was only, I don’t know, maybe a dozen people that had any funnels to even post out of a group of almost a thousand people. I’m like, this is so crazy to me that nobody’s been funnel hacking. Nobody’s got like their favorite funnels, like at queue. I have links to all my funnels so that when I’m building something I can get inspiration. I say, okay I’m doing a webinar. Let me look at like 10, 15, or 20 different webinar funnels as I’m building this one out to get ideas for looks, color pallets, ideas, hooks, headlines, and ways they did things, and how they did the call to action, and all those kind of things.

I’m doing a squeeze funnel or a lead page funnel, or a lead funnel, whatever you want to call it, to generate leads. I look at a dozen or two or three dozen to get ideas. I think a lot of times what happens is that, and this is the borderline between funnel hacking and stealing and this drives me crazy. For example, we launched the Expert Secrets book. And I took inspiration from like 50 different funnels to build that one. I spent a ton of time and energy. Same thing with the copy, I studied a whole bunch of free plus shipping book funnels and things like that to get ideas for the hooks and the angles and the copy.

I did all this research and I plugged it in and we built this amazing funnel. And within an hour of us doing it, I see all these people like, ‘I funnel hacked Russell’s funnel. Here’s the share funnel link.” And they’re giving away my exact funnel with the same colors and the same everything. And I’m like, you missed it. Funnel hacking is not, look at something and then copy it exactly. That’s not how this works. Now there’s like 800 people with a funnel that looks exactly like mine. So what am I doing? I’m re-changing it.

The reason why we spend time on a funnel, a funnel I’m modeling stuff. I’m looking for proven things in a funnel. Like layout, structure, concepts, I’m looking for those things when I’m funnel hacking. I’m not stealing word for word, stealing the colors, stealing the headline, which for some reason that’s what people think funnel hacking is and it’s not. That’s illegal and immoral and evil and bad, and that’s not what I’m talking about.

Funnel hacking is about looking at a whole bunch of stuff and pulling inspiration. I heard somebody once say that if you copy from one person it’s plagiarism, but if you copy a whole bunch of people it’s research. That’s my belief on it. You’re looking at a whole bunch of stuff and then creating your own from that. I’m looking at all these different ideas as inspiration to model, but then I go and create something new, something better. And this is one of the main reasons why that’s so important. It’s because marketing is all about pattern interrupts. Do you guys understand this?

The reason why something works really good is because there’s the pattern and then I come and interrupt that pattern. So you’re on facebook scrolling through the thing, and it’s like for example, meme videos. I remember when meme videos first came out like two years ago. Nobody was doing them, and Brandon and Kaelin were one of the first to really do it and hit it hard, and their meme videos were killing it. And then guess what happened? Everybody saw their meme videos and they’re like, “Oh meme videos.” And then their software came out and they’re like, “We create meme videos.”

And it blew up and now everybody on the planet has meme videos and guess what happens? When Brandon and Kaelin came out they interrupted the pattern. They shifted it and everyone saw it and they’re like, “What is this?” and they captured their attention so they clicked on it. But then when everybody does it, you’re not interrupting the pattern, it becomes the pattern. It becomes the pattern and then it doesn’t work anymore.

The same thing with hand sketched videos. Vince Palko was the dude who did the very first hand sketched video online, he did it for Mike Geary in the fitness space for Truth about Ads. And he did this video and I saw the stats about six months later. I was at a mastermind retreat with Mike Geary and he’s like, ‘Hey, yeah, Vince Palko’s the dude who hand sketched my sales video and look at the conversion.” And it was like 300% increase in conversion, something crazy. I think it was higher than that. But it was this huge increase.

And I was like, “Oh my gosh.” And that was the first one I’d seen. And then what happened? Everyone in the fitness industry is like, “Ah, new videos.{inaudible}” and all the sudden the next thing you new, every single video the fitness space was a hand sketched video. But I saw Geary’s first so I contacted Vince and I’m like, “Hey, I want to do one in my market.” Because no one had done it yet, right.

So there was a pattern of like, everyone was doing these Power Point VSL’s and it became the pattern so everyone was doing it, so it stopped working, and stopped becoming effective. So I was like, “I want to do the interrupt.” So I hired Vince to do a hand sketched video for us, for the original Dotcom Secrets Local webinar. We used that, and boom, it became the pattern interrupt and it worked so good. And that was the funnel, man, if you guys have heard my One Funnel Away story, that was the funnel that got me out of the brinks of bankruptcy and gave me the ability to pay off the IRS and a bunch of other craziness, because it was the pattern interrupt that grabbed people like, “What is this?” and it worked.

But then, guess what happened? Everyone’s like, “Oh look what Russell’s doing.” And they all got hand sketched videos and now it became the pattern and then it doesn’t work nearly as effectively.

So what you’re looking at with funnel hacking is you’re looking at the pattern. And there’s elements of the pattern that are essential. So understand that this is the model, this is the structure, this is the layout, this is the flow, this is how it works. Then your job as the artist, as the marketer, say, “Okay, this is the pattern. How do I interrupt it?” and the interrupt can be something as simple as the headline, a color tweak, a way you do your video, things like that.

If you saw the affiliatebootcamp.com you guys notice the pattern interrupt there. It’s literally almost the same concept as 30days.com. You look at both pages and you’re like, “Oh, these pages look almost the same.” I funnel hacked myself. In fact, if you look at the funnel structure, it’s literally the same. The upsell flow, everything is the same. But we needed a different hook because that’s a pattern interrupt. So affiliate boot camp versus 30days, it’s a different hook. Then I needed a different, obviously the color pallet is different. One’s blue and everything, and the other one is green and more army like.

But then I needed an interrupt for the video. If the video was the same, I sat in the same spots, said the same words, said the same thing, it wouldn’t work. So I gotta interrupt the pattern. So what I do then is I did the video with the cards. So if you go to affiliatebootcamp.com and look at the top you’ll notice I did these cards, and it’s a pattern interrupt and it’s killing it right now. And I guarantee what’s going to happen is all of you guys are going to do card videos now, so there’s going to be a million of them and it won’t work anymore. But I interrupted the pattern with that thing.

So what your job to do as a marketer, when you’re funnel hacking and you’re looking at stuff, is you’re looking at stuff not just in your lens of like,  ‘I’m a dentist, therefore I will look at other dental funnels.” Look at all these funnels in different markets and see it.

Guess how I got the idea for the hand sketched videos. A couple of years ago my wife and I were watching YouTube flipping through stuff and we saw this kid with his hand, with these cards. And I was like, “That’s interesting.’ I clicked play and started watching it. And it was this kid telling a story about how he was dying and he told his whole story through cards. He didn’t say a word, just held up card after card. And I sat there, it was like a 25 or 30 minute video. And I watched the whole thing with my wife and we bawled our eyes out, and I think the kid ended up dying and this video had gone crazy viral. And I was like in this emotional state where I was like, I sat there for 30 minutes waiting to see, reading each card to pull me through the story. And I was like, “That is powerful.”

And that night I was just like emotionally messed up. And the next morning I woke up and I said, “Holy cow, look how that triggered me.” I had to read the whole thing and I couldn’t stop reading it. So that day, literally that day I was like, “That is a pattern interrupt.” So we did our very first hand card video, which also happened to be for affiliatebootcamp.com, but it was one from 8 years ago, whenever we did the original one.

And after that time, a whole bunch of people knocked me off, did hand card videos, and then I stopped and then everybody else forgot about it. And then we brought it back. So the other thing nice about pattern interrupts is you, something that is the interrupt, then it becomes the pattern, then people forget about it, then it becomes an interrupt again in the future.

Anyway, so that’s, I want you guys just understanding these concepts of funnel hacking. So often we think it’s just “Oh I must find a funnel, I will copy it.” No, that is not what I said ever, ever, ever. That is unethical, immoral and wrong. And it’s stupid too because it’s not going to make you more money. It’s looking at the pattern, so I find the funnels that work and looking at the pattern. I keep the structure of the pattern. I keep the structure so it’s like, I know this layout works. The logo here, the button here, the box here, the structure will remain the same.

But now I gotta come in and add my art. So I’m changing color pallets, changing things like that. I change the copy, and then I’m looking for a pattern interrupt. So what is it? Is it hand sketch videos, card videos, no video, different headline, a bold headline, a picture of me flexing in my mankini? I don’t know. I would never do that. But something that becomes the pattern interrupt.Every single ad is an interrupt.

I saw Dean Graziosi with his book a while ago, lighting his book on fire and I was like, “oh my gosh, that’s a pattern interrupt. He did it in his market, which is like personal development, I’m going to do it in the marketing nerd market.” So I lit my book on fire, and that ad did awesome for a long time. It worked. And now, that one didn’t catch on.  No wonder you guys wouldn’t burn your product, which is probably good. I do know Stephen Larsen last week, went and blew up his product, it was crazy. You’ll see it soon in a funnel, I’m sure. But do you guys get what I’m saying though?

Anyway, I love funnel hacking, it’s really, really fun. But it’s not stealing. It’s getting ideas to pull inspiration from. So when I know the next time I’m pulling a webinar, I log into my trello board, I look at the 400 webinars I funnel hacked and I start looking at the images. I’m looking for ideas, I’m looking for patterns, and I don’t do it where I open up the screen and then I open up Clickfunnels next to it, and I’m like copying. I don’t do it that way because it’s plagiarism.<

In fact, I was talking to Brendon Burchard, it was interesting. He said that when he has an event coming up, “I can’t listen to any Tony Robbins thing for at least 6 months before my event happens because I get heavily influenced. I’ll hear Tony saying stuff and I’ll like it. And I’ll be onstage talking and all the sudden this thing will come out and it’s like, ugh, that was Tony’s thing. That was not my thing. I know that how our brains work, is that we model and we see things we like to pull inspiration. If I listen to Tony too closely to stepping onstage, then I start saying Tony things and that’s not what I want. I want this to be my stuff so I have to stop listening to it.”

And it’s the same thing with funnel hacking. I don’t open up, you know, Jim Edward’s webinar funnel and copy thing for thing for thing. Because then I’m copying and it’s not going to work. And it’s just like a not cool thing to do. Instead what I do is I go back and say “Okay, let me look at 5, 10, 15..” I look at all these things and I get ideas, I get inspiration and then I close the board, and then I start building something. Now I’m not copying anything, but I’m pulling inspiration. I did a bunch of research ahead of time, and now I’m like, “OH I remember this part. I liked that. And I like this and I like this.” And now I create something new, genuinely new. And that is how you grow in your market. That’s how funnel hacking can and should be used.

So I hope that helps. Alright, well I’ve been in my Tesla driving around in circles for the last 14 minutes as I’ve been talking with you guys. So I’m going to go drive to the office now and get started because funnel hacking day is done and today I gotta be working on the Traffic Secrets book. I have to get chapter four done today. It’s halfway done. I have to get done today or else I will be beaten by my publisher who gave me a deadline.

It also is crazy, this is the first time I’ve used like a traditional publisher and they, it was so funny because we did the whole book deal, and I didn’t read the contract because I’m not a contract guy, but I had Dave read through it and then Dave came over he’s like, “Did you know they’re giving you an advance?” I’m like, “What’s an advance?” He’s like, “That’s where they pay you before you write the book.” I was like, “Really? That’s the coolest thing ever.”

Anyway, so I asked them, I was like, “This is cool.” He’s like, “Yeah, well most people they take the advance so that way they can take a year off and write a book. You’re kind of insane because you’re running a business and a million other things. But we…” oh, my kids turned on the whoopee cushion fart on the Tesla. That’s not me farting, that’s the whoopee cushion turn signal. Oh my Tesla drivers know what I’m talking about. That is embarrassing. Anyway, my kids are dead to me now.

What was I talking about? They gave me this advance, right. So that was pretty cool. And they send me this money and I’m like, “This is awesome.” And then with that it’s like the chains, it’s like, “We gave you money, here’s your deadline.” I’m like, “What?” Anyway, it’s kind of funny. So I gotta write my book because I contractually have to now. But I’m also excited. And this turned out really good. I spent a lot of time in the RV on the way to Lake Powell last week and on the way home writing. My wife is amazing, she drove while I was typing it up. And man, it’s coming along really, really good. At the end of chapter four I’ll be done with the first section, which is, I’m excited for it.

Alright, that’s all I got. I hope you guys are doing amazing. And I will talk to you all again soon. Bye everybody.