In Traffic Secrets I warned you the storm is coming, now I’m here to tell you it’s almost here.

He said "I ain't panicking, but I am preparing, turning as many dollars as I can into assets rather than dollars. For me, that means farming equipment, SEO, email subscribers, and social following. Layers of redundancy. If they cut off my ads, I'll still have SEO. If they cut off my social, I'll still have my email. If they cut off my SEO and my email, I'll have my little farm to at least keep me indoors and fed. If it gets any worse than that, I'm pretty sure there's not much else I could do anyway. I pray that the worst it gets is they just leave us to ourselves in the woods. I'd be okay with that.

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What's up, everybody? This is Russell Brunson. Welcome back to the Marketing Secrets podcast. Today I want to talk about the intro of the traffic secrets book. I told you and I warned you that there's a storm coming. I want to talk about what's happening and how to prepare.

Hey, everybody. Hope you guys are doing awesome. All right. So I know this is like the last 12 months of our life, but especially the last month, there's just so much chaos, so much craziness happening. We've had social networks shutting people down. We've had investment things like Robinhood and the GameStop. There's just so much chaos coming around and I don't even know how to address all the things. I'm going to try to address all the things.

All I'm going to tell you guys is when I was writing the traffic secrets book two years ago, in the intro, if you remember the intro book says, "There's a storm coming..." And, I talked about how, just so you guys all are aware, there's a storm coming. We got to start preparing ourselves for that today. And I just know that it's getting crazier and scary.

Anyway, I'm very excited because last night when I was getting ready for bed, I opened up Facebook real quick and I'm scrolling around, and one of my buddies, Justin Brooke, he made a post, and I wanted to actually read that to you because it is exactly what's been on my mind for the last week or two. And so I wanted to kind of share it with you. So this is what he wrote. And if you don't know Justin, Justin's an amazing marketer. I actually met him, almost 15 years ago. He came and did an unpaid internship for me.

I was at the time trying to figure out how to get free employees. I emailed my list, "Hey, who wants to come work for me for free for a month?" And he applied and he said, yes. And he flew out and worked for me for 30 days and got to know him really well and been a friend and a fan of his since then, any who? So this is what he wrote. He said, "I ain't smart enough to know what's going on, but I ain't dumb enough to not see something's going on. You know what I mean?"

He said "I ain't panicking, but I am preparing, turning as many dollars as I can into assets rather than dollars. For me, that means farming equipment, SEO, email subscribers, and social following. Layers of redundancy. If they cut off my ads, I'll still have SEO. If they cut off my social, I'll still have my email. If they cut off my SEO and my email, I'll have my little farm to at least keep me indoors and fed. If it gets any worse than that, I'm pretty sure there's not much else I could do anyway. I pray that the worst it gets is they just leave us to ourselves in the woods. I'd be okay with that. Think I'm nuts. We've gone from haters, wash your hands to, Hey, if you don't vaccine, you'll get fired and no tests, you can't travel. And that's real, no hype, no theory. Just explaining the God's honest truth of exactly what happened and happening. Something's going on. It's just like, if you think it's going to rain later on, you bring an umbrella, same thing here. No need didn't change a way of living. No need to go buy up all the toilet paper in town. No need to spiral on the fear. Just have a plan B and C. Work kinda slowly in your free time. So you got fallbacks on fallbacks. You do it in your business. Why not in your life? It's just good, old fashioned sustainable thinking."

So I read that and I was like, yes, that is so true. And I've been doing the same thing. If you've noticed in our business, I've been trying to diversify our traffic even more than it already was. Right. I have been getting people to join my texting app, the community app, right. And growing people there, moving over there. We have been focusing super hard in SEO recently and trying to get our SEO rankings up and focusing hard on building our email list. Building our text messages, building our desktop push list. Just different things to prepare for traffic, different things to prepare for if our audience gets shut down, right? If our emails got shut down, what would we do? How would we survive? How would we pay for the bills? If our merchant accounts got shut down, what would we do? These are all the things that we don't ever think about when times are good.

I want to rewind back a decade ago. That's crazy. 10 years ago when I was building my company the first time, somebody had heard the story and I was trying to prepare. And I had a lot of employees and a lot of things were selling and all this sorts of stuff. And I thought we were doing well. In fact, the first year and a half, two years of the recession we were doing great. And then something happened and it was crazy. It was like at my one choke point, and one thing we had was only one merchant account and that merchant account got shut down.

And at the time it took my entire company, almost a hundred employees, everything we're doing to a screeching halt, because one is the scariest number. And so in your business, you've got to start being prepared. If you got one merchant account, how do you get two? If you've got two, how do you get three? If you got one traffic source, how do you get two? If you got two, how do you get three? Right? If you got one way to contact your following, look for a second or third, right? If everyone's on Instagram, how do you get them on to Facebook. If everyone's on Facebook, how do you get them to YouTube? If everyone's on YouTube, how to get them on email. If everyone's on email, how do you get them to text? Like how do you have some diversity so that when the storm hits and hopefully won't hit any of us, hopefully it doesn't hit me or you or anybody.

But if it does how are you prepared for that? Because we've seen the last 30 days at a blink of an eye, your social media can be gone. Your Facebook can be gone. Your Instagram, your email, everything could disappear. And so it's just being prepared for the worst case scenario. And what's interesting is I've been reading this book and it's one of my favorite books now all time. It's called Outwitting the Devil, it was written by Napoleon Hill. And what's crazy about it, it was actually written in the 1930s and Napolean was too scared to publish it. So he didn't and when he passed away, his wife had the manuscript and she didn't dare to publish it. So she didn't, and after she passed away, then the family got it and found it and decided to publish it. And the book is called Outwitting the Devil. By far of all the Napoleon Hill books, it's the best.

It's amazing. It's this whole conversation he's having with Satan and Satan literally laying out, here's the playbook. Here's how I win. Here's the secret. This is what I do. And this is how you get people to come drifters. And explains the whole thing. And it's crazy from like a spiritual standpoint. It's like, Oh, there's the playbook that Satan's literally using to try to take us over. From a personal standpoint, It's like, Oh, here's the playbook that Satan's using to try to get me to not produce and succeed in life. And either way, it's one of my favorite books. In fact, I want to write a book about the book. That's how good it is. But regardless, the reason that I'm bringing that up, in the book initially talks about there's two things, there's fear and there's faith, right?

And everything Satan's trying to do, the devil is trying to do, is trying to get you into a state of fear and everything that Christ is trying to do. Or, the God's trying to do is get you into a state of faith. And it's just like, man, I don't want to say anything to try to get people fearful but to get you to prepare and have faith in something greater that's coming and being prepared for that. So anyway, I hope that this just comes as kind of a warning for everybody whose got a business now and who hasn't thought about that. When I had a hundred employees and we were killing it and all these things were happening. I thought we were untouchable until we weren't. And all it was, was one merchant account decided they didn't like us.

And what's crazy is I actually had 14 merchant accounts, but they're all the same bank and that one bank said they didn't like us and they were gone in a minute. And so it's just like having diversity, having backups, having all those kinds of things. Do you back up your email database? How often? Do you have it somewhere besides your auto-responder company? What if they decide they don't like anymore? Do you have your- just all those things, it's just, be smart, be prepared. Anyway, that's my podcast for today. Thank you Justin Brooke for the post and for getting my head spinning on that. And for all you guys listening, there's a storm coming, but don't be afraid, just have faith and prepare yourself and set up some backup plans so you're ready. And if you do that, then you're not going to be going to be scared when the storm gets here. And if you haven't read Outwitting the Devil yet, seriously, it is such a good book. You can get it on audible. You can get the book version. It's worth reading. So, all right, guys, appreciate you all. Thanks for everything. And we'll talk to you all soon.