Despite the fact that others are saying that videos are dead, I want to show you what we’re doing now that’s actually working better. On today’s episode Russell talks about how Chrome stopped allowing auto play videos and how that has lead to the rebirth of the squeeze page. Here are some of the awesome things you will get to hear on this episode:

-- Why it’s so important to re-focus on the squeeze page to bring people in, when you can no longer rely on auto play videos.

-- How Russell used a couple of squeeze pages to 2x his listeners of the Marketing Secrets podcast.

-- And where you need to put hooks in order to get people progressing through your sequences.

So listen here to find out why Russell believes that the rebirth of the squeeze page has begun.

It made me start thinking, the VSL’s don’t auto play anymore, what changes? And I want you guys to think strategically through this, right. Because this is how we win this game, by thinking strategically, not running around like chickens with our heads cut off. So I start strategically thinking what’s the power of the video auto playing? If you come to a page and the video starts auto playing, the goal is to try to hook somebody as fast as you can.

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Good morning everybody, this is Russell Brunson. I am standing in the middle of the Maasai Mara looking at a bunch of zebras and I wanted to bring you a very special episode of the Marketing Secrets podcast.

Hey everyone, I hope you guys are doing awesome. We are on the last day of our Kenya trip. We’ve seen, we’ve been, if you’ve been listening long, we’ve spent the first three days with children building schools which was insanely cool. And then we came back and now we’re on a safari. We saw elephants and lions and about a billion zebras and we saw leopards. We saw a leopard that pulled an animal up in a tree and was eating it up in the tree, which is kind of crazy. We saw millions of hippos, it’s crazy.

In fact, I’m sitting on my deck right now in this little tent we have and last night when we came to bed there were two huge hippos walking next to our tent eating grass. It’s kind of crazy and amazing. So it’s been a lot of fun, it’s been a really cool mastermind group with all the people that came, and it’s just been really special.

But as you know, with most entrepreneurs, when you are off the computer for you know 12 days, your brain is going crazy with ideas. And I just wanted to share with you guys something, and I wanted to actually do a podcast on this before I came to Kenya, but just ran out of time. But it’s been on my mind this whole time. Before I left I got an email from a really cool guy who I respect a lot, and you know people always have an angle because they’re selling something. But he wasn’t talking about how VSL’s…because now Chrome took away auto play, “VSL’s are dead and it’s the end of this era of how we used to do things. Come to my event and I’m going to show you guys how to change things.”

It made me start thinking, the VSL’s don’t auto play anymore, what changes? And I want you guys to think strategically through this, right. Because this is how we win this game, by thinking strategically, not running around like chickens with our heads cut off. So I start strategically thinking what’s the power of the video auto playing? If you come to a page and the video starts auto playing, the goal is to try to hook somebody as fast as you can.

So if Google takes that away from us, where we can’t auto play a video, it’s like what was the goal of the auto play? The goal of the auto play is to hook. So if the hook can’t now be in the first 5 seconds of the video, how do I hook them? Where’s the hook happening?

So now it, it’s so funny, it’s coming back to old school. Everything comes back to the core fundamentals, it’s like having the hook in the headline. So it’s like having a really good headline. The other thing that’s interesting is, and it’s funny the progression of this business and how it shifts back and forth, back and forth. When I first got started the big thing that everyone used was squeeze pages right. You have a really curiosity based squeeze page and someone opts in and you can follow up with them through emails to get them back to the message. So if someone doesn’t buy the first time, they might buy message 3 or 5 or 10 or who knows, right.

Now days it’s like people have almost forgotten the core fundamentals and they’ve gone to send somebody to a video and you re-target them, that’s how you fall, is through re-targeting, which is still amazing. Don’t discount re-targeting, but I think we’ve thrown the baby out with the bathwater.

So what my message for you guys today is, I believe that right now we are going through a rebirth of the squeeze page. If you have been listening to the marketing secrets podcast or if you are in a new recent list, or you probably saw a campaign we did last week to get all you all to come subscribe to my podcast. And just getting people to subscribe to a podcast from external source is hard, we’ve tried a ton of different ways.

So what we did, that’s working amazingly well, in fact if you want to see the campaign go to marketingsecrets.com/blackbook what we did is basically we took, Julie Stoian on my team, she went through 500 plus episodes of initially the Marketing in Your Car podcast, then it was the Marketing Secrets podcast, and pulled out the biggest 99 secrets and then kind of re-wrote them in really cool 500 word article that you can read really quick to get the gist of the big secret and then it has links back to the different podcast episodes, if you want to go deeper and hear me actually talk about it in the podcast.

So we made that ebook, it’s like, I don’t know, we spent a lot of money, probably $10,000 plus on Julie going through creating this book. And then we put up a good old fashioned squeeze page and said, “Hey to get a free copy of the Marketing Secrets Black Book, give me your email address.” And we also have Facebook messenger on there as well, so somebody opts in through email or their messenger, and now we have a list of specifically people who are interested in the Marketing Secrets podcast.

It’s been funny, the Marketing Secrets podcast was the number one, excuse me top ten for over a year. A year and a half or so we were in the top ten and then we got iTunes slapped, which is really annoying and some of you guys know that. So we had to create a new feed and I’d say probably 2/3^rd of you are now listening to the new feed and 1/3 of you guys are still listening to the old feed, but they don’t let people re-subscribe to the old feed. Anyway, I don’t know why I’m telling you all this.

But basically we were trying to figure out how do we build that up? So the only way in the past that we had was people that found out about the podcast through other avenues, and that’s how it grew and then we got listed in the top ten, more people found out about it, but it was hard to organically, not organically, what’s the opposite of organically? To grow it through us pushing.

So we had this idea for the thing, so we had the squeeze page now, and we did a whole bunch of campaigns through email, through Facebook messenger, through ads, all sorts of stuff. And with the first week we’ve had over 35000 people opt in over at marketingsecrets.com/blackbook to get the black book.

So they go and they opt in and from that our downloads have more than 2x’d because now people are, two things, number one is the black book gets them hooked on the story and then it pushes them to the episode, so more people listening to different episodes deeper than they used to. But now they opted in, now we have a whole sequence push them to subscribe to the podcast, and now every time a new episode comes out you will notice that if you subscribed to that, if you’re one of the 35000 people that have subscribed to that, you’ll get an email saying, “Hey, here’s the new podcast, you should and go and listen to it.”

So it gives us the ability to push people to go and listen. And it was all through a good old fashioned squeeze page, which is so funny. I haven’t been using squeeze pages for a long time, most other people aren’t either, but the old school works. Now I got 35000 people I can push out every single time a new episode comes out to instantly go and listen, on top of notifications that come from iTunes and things like that. So it actually creates two squeeze pages, one of them is at marketingsecrets.com/blackbook, the other one is at marketingsecrets.com/binge and we actually made a binge guide, where you can go binge listen to all the episodes.

So if you go to either of those you’ll see some old school, vintage squeeze pages that I dusted off from an earlier life and they are converting amazingly. The first one’s at 89% conversion rate, it’s insane. And it’s getting tons of people now to subscribe to the podcast, which now gets you guys listening to this.

So I think that there’s a big, so let me step back to kind of where I started, with the VSL, the auto play disappearing. It’s like how do we get someone in? The key is becoming better at the hook, but not the hook in the first 10 seconds of the video because people aren’t going to see that. We have to have the hook to get them to click. So that comes down to the headline and the design around the video. What are we doing to hook them and get them to click on the video, to pull them in?

So hook starts pre-video. Hook is headline, landing page, what are all the elements to get them hooked, to actually watch the video? But I think on top of that is because, I think going a step back is having a hook on the squeeze page, to get people to opt in, then you push them over to the page. Now you’ve got more abilities to follow up with them to get them to actually click the play button and get into the hook, story, offer of your video.

So I’m a big believer, it’s the re-birth of the squeeze page, and it’s the re-focus on the hook and not just the hook in the video, but the hook on the copy of the page. Hook on the squeeze page, hook on the video page, that’s the re-focus we all need to get doing, get better at doing.

In fact, I was Bill Glazers event, I met somebody who said that when the whole auto play thing happened they were all freaked out because they thought that their conversions were going to drop, but what actually happened is conversions went up because they had a really good hook above the video that got people to push play.

So now people they don’t just come to the page, and it started auto playing, they did nothing. Now they come and they have to click play, and he said just the action of clicking play on the button actually increased conversion overall. So I don’t think it’s the end of anything, I think it’s the rebirth, coming back to the old school.

It’s interesting, whenever new platforms, like Facebook or Instagram comes out, there’s always hacks and everyone goes through the hacks for a while, and then the hacks get taken away typically. And then it always comes back to the revisiting of the fundamentals.

The same thing in wrestling. When I first started wrestling, I remember there was a guy that lived two doors down from me and he started like 2 or3 weeks before me, and so when I showed up at the first day of practice, he was doing all these fancy throws and all this stuff and I was like, “Oh this is going to be amazing.” And   I wanted to do those things. And my dad told me, “No, you have to do the fundamentals.”  And he forced me to do single legs, double legs, just the basic fundamentals, over and over and over again.

And it’s interesting because I remember when I went and I wrestled my buddy probably 4 weeks later, and he’d been working with the more advanced team on the tricks, the tactics, the big secrets, and I was just doing these dumb fundamentals. We went out there to wrestle and he tried to head throw me and I did a double leg and took him down and I ended up beating him.

And it’s funny, as I watch kids in junior high wrestle, doing these crazy throws and insane things, and high school is the same thing, and you start getting to college, people start moving back to the fundamentals. You look at the Olympics, you look at the dudes in the Olympics, almost every Olympic match is won by a single leg or a double leg, that’s it. There’s no flashy flare, it’s the core fundamentals.

And the same thing is true in marketing. As you get bigger and bigger, the next level, it’s like re-visit back to the core fundamentals. List building, which was, I’ve been preaching out for a decade and I feel like our industry as a whole has gotten away from it, because now they’re like, “Oh, I’m going to build a re-targeting list, I’m going to do these things….” Thos things are good but the core fundamental of list building, list building, list building is key.

We’ve been doing list building off of webinar registration pages, and two step order forms, but now I’m coming back one more step and re-visiting the squeeze page with an insanely good hook to get someone to opt in, both through email and through messenger, next page amazing hook to get them to play the video, and then boom, the video moves immediately into hook, story, offer. So it’s pulling people in there.

So for you guys I just want you to kind of think through that. If you want to go see some squeeze pages that are doing really well, look at the campaign’s we’re doing. Go to marketingsecrets.com/binge, to go see the binge guide. Or marketingsecrets.com/blackbook to see an old school squeeze page. Again, it’s like 89% conversion rate, we’ve got 35000+ people opt in the last two weeks since it’s gone live. Now I’m able to follow up on every single episode and it’s building, it makes it easier to communicate with everyone that’s interested in this podcast, that’s number one, and then number two you’ll notice moving forward…..

Oh man, there’s a monkey chasing a warthog in front of my eyes. That’s that noise if you can hear it.

Anyway, if you look at moving forward, you’ll start noticing how we’re using hooks to get people to click play on the videos. If you go to clickfunnels.com homepage, you’ll see it. If you go to, some of the other ones? Some of the other ones we’ve got coming up, you’ll notice the gif on the video is optimized to get people to click, the headline above it, everything on the page around the video is all optimized to get somebody to click on that page. Because I’m not assuming that they’re going to click, so I have to create a good enough hook to get them to have enough desire to actually click on the play button. I can’t leave that to hope. I have to leave that to a really good hook that gets them to want to click play to find out the next thing.

So I think we’re at a spot where the rebirth of the squeeze page, I think it’s coming back. I’m going to be doing a lot more of it, as you’ll see here. And I think that a core focus back on amazing hooks for each step, what’s the hook to get them to open the email? That’s your subject line. What’s the hook to get them to click? That’s the email. What’s the hook to get them to opt in? That’s the squeeze page. What’s the hook to get them to click play on the video? That’s the headline. What’s the hook to get them to buy the product? That’s inside the video.

Coming back to hook, story, offer. Hook, story, offer. I did a podcast episode a little bit ago about hook, story, offer. Go back and listen to that ten times, twenty times, a hundred times, because that’s the core fundamentals that are going to help you win this game as we keep moving forward.

So with that said, I’m going to go actually, we’re going to go finish plotting and scheming, we’ve been working on book three, the traffic secrets book, we’re working on the one comma club challenge, we’re working on 10x secrets stage course, we’re working on a one comma club, two comma club board game, we’re working on some amazing things for you guys out here and I cannot wait to show you. But for now, there’s the tease, there’s the hook, and hopefully we got to keep you guys interested, and keep engaging with this podcast and everything we’re putting gout.

Appreciate you guys, thanks for listening. We’ll talk to you all again soon. Bye everybody.