The missing step that most people forget, before you create a product or build a funnel.

Over the weekend, my personal team’s funnel builder…Nick…and I launched a funnel at the spur of the moment just because we thought it would be fun. It’s from an idea I’ve had for 8 years and it’s just been sitting on my hard drive. The funnel was literally hatched, built, and launched in 2 days.

And already we’ve had a bunch of sales! Now here’s the crucial part. This is the place where many entrepreneurs mess up. They spend a ton of time…weeks, months, even YEARS…developing and creating something, only to find out that when they launch it, nobody buys. Nobody wants what they have.

And that’s because they didn’t ask themselves this ONE CRITICAL QUESTION… The one question that will tell you whether you should spend the time creating a product, service, or offer, or you should pass on the project.

If you want to save yourself a ton of time, frustration, and stress, then tune in to this episode of Marketing Secrets to find out what the question is and WHY it’s so important to your entire business.

I failed a lot initially and I failed more than you've tried, I guarantee that. Hundreds of times we launched funnels that did not actually work. And I would say in the last five or six years, pretty much all of them have worked. And so the question was like, "What do you do differently? What do you know? What's the answer?"

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What's up everybody, this is Russell Brunson. Welcome back to the Marketing Secrets Podcast. I want to teach you a trick today to make sure that every campaign and every funnel you build, always wins.

All right, everybody so I wanted to do this episode because I was bored this weekend, not really bored, I'm never bored, we’ve got a lot of stuff going on, but Friday we were about to leave the office and then one of the guys on my team, Nick Sanders, was like, "Hey, do we have any fun project you want to do on the side that'd be kind of fun?" I was like, "What is a fun project that we have on the side that we can just do real quick?" And he's like, "I got some time this weekend, I'd love to just bust something out". I'm like, "Okay."

We started thinking back and I remembered that eight years ago, I had this idea for a site called T-shirt smackdown. And the concept was picking two competing concepts or philosophies or whatever, and make a t-shirt for each one and let people vote with their wallets.

So, they come to the site and they're like, "Oh, I want this one to win." So they buy the t-shirt to make sure that that one wins, right? And so, I remember I designed this... the site we had designed eight years ago because... So funny, because it was back when Obama was running against Romney. And so, in fact, the initial PSD files we found had the Obama versus Romney thing, and so it was kind of fun.

Anyway we found those PSD files and were like, "Dude, let's make this." So, he took it and he got it all working inside ClickFunnels, and spent his whole weekend doing that.

Obviously, the elections are coming up right now so I was like, "Let's do some Biden/Trump shirts." And so we got designers to go and design the t-shirts and all sorts of stuff. And, anyway, it's just been this really fun project that we put together, literally in no time. It's crazy, it's been sitting on my hard drive for eight years now. I can't believe I found the PSD files. It looked so cool. In fact, if you want to see it in action, but I'm not sure when this podcast episode will drop, my guess is hopefully the site will be live by then, but it's tshirtsmackdown.com, so you can go see it there.

Anyway, so the concept is we picked two different shirts to compete. When the movie Twilight came out, we could have done like Edward versus Joseph, or during The Bachelor season, it could be this person versus that person, or whatever. You pick two competing things, you put them out there and you let the communities of the things all go and vote on it.

And so, with this one, we're like less than a month before the election, everyone's really angry about both sides like, "We should capitalize on this as capitalists do." And so, we put this together. And so, Jake on our team went and got a whole bunch of really cool t-shirt designs that he made some for Trump, some for Biden, and we threw it up on the site and... Anyway, they've been killing themselves and it's almost ready to go. So we're excited. It's going to go live. And again, all you guys should go pick your favorite. Go to tshirtsmackdown.com buy which shirt you want to prove... To vote with your wallet.

But anyway, I'm telling you this because a lot of times, we have an idea for something. And you're like, "Man, do I spend the time and energy doing this? I have no idea. It's going to take me all this time and I have no idea if it's going to work or not." And all this fear.

The reason why I'm able to do crazy things like this without any fear is before I said yes, before we started the process, the first question that we asked was, "If we do this thing, where are we going to get the traffic for it?" That was the question. And if I don't know the answer to that question, then the answer's always no, we're not doing this thing. I have to know that first. And so, that was the first question like, "Where do we get traffic?" And I was like, "Okay well, to get traffic for this means we need a conservative Republican people and we need liberal Democrat people." So, I'm like, "Where do we find these people?" Okay, there's email lists so we can write here, here and here. And then there's email lists we can write here, here and here.

Then here's these Facebook pages we can target. Here's the liberal, here's the conservative, here's the... and so we really quickly, as quick as we could, found as many different variations as we could of both sides to know where you get traffic. So, very quickly okay, boom, here's the traffic. I think conservatively we probably said 10,000 to 20,000 clicks in a three to four day period of time, which is how long one of these smackdowns probably end up lasting. And so, "Okay, let's do it." Right.

And so now, Nick and Jake and Jamie, have been working on the site on their free hours, after hours and the weekends and stuff. While they're doing that, I just went and texted all these people, "Hey, can I run add your list?" Yes. Can I run run add your list?" Yes. How much does it cost? Okay I want this date? I want this much." And within, I don't know, within 12 minutes, 10 minutes, maybe I had enough traffic lined up to get about somewhere between probably 10,000 to 15,000 clicks, half on the conservative side, half on the liberal side. And so now when the live site flied, I clicked a button and that fast sales will start coming in.

So I want to share with you guys, number one because I want to show off and brag about my fun little idea that we had eight years ago that we're finally actually executing on, but number two is for you guys to start thinking about this. That's one of the biggest things people have is spend so much time and energy and effort on their idea and their thought, and then they go and they build their sales message and they build their funnel, and then they're like, "Where do we get traffic?" And that should have been the first question. Not the last.

I remember... Man this is pre-ClickFunnels, no, it wasn't pre-Click, it was right when ClickFunnels first came out actually. So maybe about five years probably. I was in London and I spoke at this really cool event. And afterwards, my wife and kids were still gallivanting around London while I was finishing my speaking things. So I sat in the hallway and talked for two or three hours to all the people there, which was really fun. Definitely intimidating as an introvert, but it was still good. Talked to everybody and they ask those questions.

I still remember one person asked me this question that I'd never answered before. No one had ever asked me before, but he asked the question he said, "Man, you've been doing this so long, how do you know that something's going to be successful before you do it now?" And I started thinking and he was right, I do know. I haven't failed at this game in a long time.

I failed a lot initially and I failed more than you've tried, I guarantee that. Hundreds of times we launched funnels that did not actually work. And I would say in the last five or six years, pretty much all of them have worked. And so the question was like, "What do you do differently? What do you know? What's the answer?" And before I give you that answer, I'm going to catch a really quick sponsor from myself and I'll be right back to answer it here in a second.

Okay. You text me at Community, come on let's just do it. Anyway. All right, so let me answer the question. The question goes like, "How do you know the funnel is going to be successful before you build the funnel out?" And the answer I told him is, the first time someone ever asked me that, first time I ever answered, I told him, I said, "Hey, the reason why I do this is because I find the traffic source first. I don't go and create a product that I want to create, I'll go and take my best idea, I go and find the traffic source first and figure how much the traffic is going to cost, what does it looked like. I figure things out, and then the question I ask myself, "Okay, here's the traffic, here's the market, what does the market actually want?"

And then I started brainstorming ideas. That way when the idea is done and the sales message is done and the funnel is done, I know the traffic so I just click a button and traffic shows up. And so, while you're thinking about that, as you're building your businesses where you are, in any spot you are right now, they just imagine like as soon as your thing is done where's the traffic going to come from? Where's that place? Do you have it already? Do you know where it is? If not stop everything and just go figure that out. Go figure out where is the traffic going to come from before you spend all the time and the effort and energy trying to figure out what you're going to create. And honestly, when you figure out what the traffic's at and you figure out how in the world to get access to this traffic, what's it going to take? Who do I need to get to know?

Who's the person that's going to sell me the ads? How much does it cost? All these things you're going to start figuring out at that time. Then when you find that traffic source and the best things to do, like let's say it's email traffic you're going to rely on, get on that email list and get all the emails come in, and then that way, as you see the emails like, "Oh, I see this offer and this offer. Here's all the offers that are being sent out to this group of people now I know what this kind of person is responding to," Or if you're following them on Facebook pages and you start seeing your everybody's adds you're like, "Oh, now I know what this type of person is looking for. What kind of offers are working," it'll stimulate the ideas for the offers and the products that you actually want to create.

So that's the key guys. That's what we help understand is that a lot of times, most of us do it backwards instead of doing it backwards, the first goal should be where's the traffic? Where's the traffic at now so I can go find it and then go and figure out your product, figure out your funnel, figure out your sales message. Find the traffic first. If you haven't yet, I'd highly recommend reading the Traffic Secrets book. I talk a lot about this. In the first phase for me how I find the traffic is going through the Dream 100. In fact, it's crazy in our 2 Comma Club X Coaching Program. It's 25,000 a year coaching program. People come in and I think everyone thinks I'm going to give them some magic sauce that I've never talked about before. And module number one, literally I force them to actually build out their dream 100 list.

They be like, "Why? I thought I was here to make money." Exactly. Right now, our job is to figure out who are the people who already have your traffic. Where are they at? The better I understand that person, that group, the more successful I'm going to be because now I know what are all the other offers they're going out there. Who's controlling the traffic. How do I get to know them? Can I buy my way in? Can I work my way in? All the other things. And so, anyway, that's the one I shared yesterday, just looking at things a little differently. We were able to launch the site. My guys spent the weekend plowing through, getting it done, getting the designs, getting the program and getting it all into ClickFunnels and everything. And then I spent 12 minutes texting the people who I know have the traffic and now we're ready to rock and roll. And that's how the game was played.

It was fun. For the T-shirts smackdown is every week, we're going to have a new smackdown. And so right now the smackdown is... next two or three weeks is going to be the politics. And after that guess what's going to be? I don't know yet, but I know I'm going to know where the traffic's at before I go in and do the thing. I'm going to go say, "Where's the traffic at for... " Let's say it's some movie coming out. Or maybe it's the finalists on The Bachelor, maybe it's who knows. I'm going to go and find the traffic first, like where I'll actually get that traffic from before we design the t-shirt, before we get the thing created, otherwise it's just going to be a waste of time, energy, and money. And that's how we play the game.

All right. Hope that helps you guys. I appreciate you all. If you got any value from this episode, please take a snapshot, post it on your social profiles and tag me in it and let me know your biggest takeaway. It would mean the world to me. I read every one of them and I'll definitely read yours as well. Thanks so much guys, and I'll talk to you all soon. Bye everybody.