If I'm buying ads and I'm buying pay-per-click, I'm paying for every single person that clicks and it can get expensive, especially for the good keywords. But here it's like somebody else ranked here, they got the first click, then they went to the person's thing, and then they saw my ad, and then they clicked. So they're one, two, three clicks in before they come to my world, which means if you look at the funnel, all the people come and then the really qualified people come, then the hyper qualified people come, and then I'm just getting the cream of the crop.
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Looks like I'm live everywhere. What's up, everybody? This is Russell. Right now, we are on 25 bajillion platforms. I'm now at my own work-at-home, broadcast-from-home studio broadcasting everywhere. Man, this whole quarantine thing has got us all much more creative. I used to just do things halfway and now I'm like, "I got to do this perfectly because I want to make sure I get this message out to as many people as possible."
So we're live on Instagram. What's up, IG? We're live on Facebook. What's up, Facebook? We are also live in my Facebook group. We're also live on Periscope, which hits up Twitter and a bunch of other places as well. Hope you guys enjoyed the weekend. We are coming back and we are going hard and heavy back here into the Traffic Secrets book.
But, first off, I want to thank everybody. We have officially finished the pre-launch for the Traffic Secrets book. We did a three-week affiliate pre-launch which was happening in the middle of the corona lockdown craziness, which, it's been intense, obviously, for everybody. And drum roll, at the end of the pre-launch, we sold over 44,000 books through the funnel, which is amazing.
So thank you so much for all your help and participation, all you guys bought books. We also have sold, we don't know the exact number, but if you look at the funnel, there's an exit pop that pushes to Amazon and things like that. We sold over 1,000 copies on Amazon, I know, through that, plus I don't know about the other ones. Anyway, we sold a lot of books in the last three weeks, which is amazing.
Today is the day I'm recording this and making this video. It's April 6th, which means we're less than a month away from the book starting shipping. They start shipping May 5th, which is so exciting.
I cannot wait for all you guys to get it, even though most of you guys got the audiobook and you've been pouring this stuff into your brain and you know it all anyway, which is awesome, or you've been listening to the brand new Traffic Secrets Podcast, where I've been reading these things and going through chapter by chapter with you. If you haven't yet, make sure you go to iTunes and search "Traffic Secrets" and go subscribe to the new podcast. It's been really fun. But don't worry, it doesn't mean I'm going to stop talking about traffic. I'm going to continue.
You keep reading every single chapter in this book.
I'm going to keep talking about it. I got tons more interviews and Facebook Lives and everything, because 44,000 copies of the book is good, but when your goal is to sell a million, it's actually not that good. I still got a long, long, long way to go. So I'm going to keep talking about it, keep talking about it, and keep coming back and talking about it for the next year or two years or three years. Hopefully, this helps all of you guys who are entrepreneurs who are trying to figure out how to sell your product to realize that the key is not just going live once and doing the launch and stopping. The launch is just the kickoff, and now you've got to start talking about your product.
It's funny because, when we launched ClickFunnels, prior to that, before ClickFunnels, I'd been doing this business for over a decade, and what was interesting is, when I would do this, I would launch a product, I'd spend two or three months talking about it, and then I would move to the next product and the next product.
And every quarter, I was launching a new product, because it took about a quarter to create a funnel. I kept shifting from thing to thing to thing and nothing ever compounded or grew and it wasn't until ClickFunnels came and I was like, "This is something special. I need to really focus on this." We started focusing on it and for five and a half now years that's all I've really talked about. And, because of that, because of the consistency of the message, it compounds. It keeps compounding. It keeps compounding. And now, five years later, we got 100,000 members and it continues to grow.
And so, I want you guys to understand that the launch is the beginning, it's not the end. Keep talking about your product. Keep talking about it, keep talking about it, keep talking about it.
So I'm going to keep talking about Traffic Secrets, but today we are going into the Google-y chapter. How many of you guys are excited about Google? If you don't have a copy of the book, by the way, I would offend myself if I didn't ask you to go get your copy if you haven't yet. Again, you can go to trafficsecrets.com, you get a free copy, or you can go to Amazon and pay for one full price and they ship in less than a month from now. Yay. It's exciting. All right, so Google. Let me talk about Google for a little bit before we dive into this. Google, I've got such a love-hate relationship with. When I got started on the internet, Google was the thing. It was Google, that was it.
If you guys have heard my potato gun story, I started with Google ads and it was so simple back then.
There's this dude named Chris Carpenter who wrote a book called Google Cash and we all bought it for 37 bucks. And it was like, "Hey, go to Google and buy an ad and then drive it to a landing page, and you just made free money." And we all did that and it was amazing. That was literally my business and everybody's business for the first year or so. And so I had this potato gun DVD, I was making money going back and forth, and it was amazing until the first, the infamous, the Google Slap happened. And I'm curious how many of you guys listening right now actually went through the Google Slap, you felt that. It's funny because the premise of this book, when we read the introduction, I talk about how we're moving into the era where Facebook is in their history about the spot where they start doing the Facebook Slaps.
And you're already seeing it. They're shutting down people's ads accounts like crazy.
But with Google, it happened overnight. Everyone was killing it. And then literally overnight the first Google Slap happened and AdWords stopped being amazing. And it went from literally, if you knew how to read, you could read a book and be rich too. It got hard, really fast. I watched overnight as the first Google Slap or Thanos' Snap, whatever you want to call it, and I watched as the majority of the people I knew back then who had thriving businesses disappeared. And most of them never recovered, they never came back, which is, again, another big reason why I wrote this book, because I want to give you guys the stability.
But Google shifted that day. And like I said, most people's businesses died.
I remember, in fact, Daegan Smith, talking to him about this later. He's like, "I was in all these Mastermind groups and trying to figure out, what's the next thing?" And I ask everybody, everyone's like, "I don't know." Nobody knew. No one knew how to get traffic and it was this window where everyone was stuck and everyone's figured things out. And then the next little phase came in and it was SEO and SEO became the thing. And SEO at first was actually really, really easy. And I talk about it, I go through the history. In fact, if you've been following the Failure For Not Funnel Framework, we talk about understanding the history of the network and the goal and where they're going and all sorts of things like that. But it used to be really simple.
In fact, here's this image on page 211.
SEO initially was so simple. It was a linking game. Whoever had the most links, won. If the number two ranked website had 100 back links, if you got 101, you'd all of sudden be the number one. And first, in fact, Google's whole algorithm, if you read Google's history in here, I talk about the very first search and it was called Back Rub, that Google launched. Larry and Sergey, they were at Stanford University and they created their first search engine called Back Rub. It was based off this concept of, "Let's do this linking thing. We think that whatever website gets the most links to it should be the best website." That was their theory going into this. So they created Back Rub and it turns out they were right. It blew up so much so that Stanford servers couldn't host it anymore so they moved it off Stanford's servers onto their own, and they called it Google.
And that became the thing.
Now, this is the interesting pattern. This is what us entrepreneurs do. We find out this thing and then we're always looking for the loophole. What's the loophole? How does this work? Because, especially when Google took over and became the search engine, man, if you can get ranked for a keyword, if you get ranked on page one for a certain keyword, you can make millions of dollars a month or more. And so, because of that, it became this thing that we all figured, how do you win this game? If I win this game, it equals millions and millions of dollars. So I got to figure out how to play and how to win this game.
And so initially it was really easy, because as soon as somebody cracked the thing, they're like, "This is what it is. It's just links. If you get more links than the other dude, you're on top."
We're like, "What, that's it? How do we get more links then?" And so we literally we built software to spam links. We built so many things, and link farms and there were things called FFA pages back in the day where you could just drop links. If you just wanted to win, that's all it was. It was a link game. The new number one spots got 1,000 links. I need 1,001. And as soon as you got 1,001, boom, you'd switch spots with them. And it was so simple so we just got really good at spamming the search engines. In all honesty, that's what it was.
That's how the game was played. And what happens at first, Google was winning because it was like, man, the best stuff rose the top, because it had the best links. But then it shifted to where the most spammed pages came to the top, which was good for people like us, bad for the rest of the world.
And so Google's like, "We have to change this." And so they started shifting their algorithm and they shifted it to where now it wasn't just the number of links, but it was the quality of links. So if you ever heard about all the Google Slaps that happened, there's Panda and Hummingbird and all these Google Slaps, I walk you through what most of them were in here. They're all about, basically, Google tried to beat out us marketers because we were trying to find, what's the loophole? How do we exploit it? What's the loophole? How do we exploit it? And I tell you what, it was a fun game for a long time for those who of us who had a chance to play it.
And I walk through the four phases of Google here so you can understand where they came from because remember my Failure Funnel Framework. First step is understanding the history and then the goal.
Because, for years, my whole business model was, how do we exploit the loophole that's there? But the problem with that is you get short term gains, but then it's always shifting and changing. I mean, at a time, we had a team of 80 people, a whole university in Peru that one of my buddies had set up that we were hiring people for. So we were like, "I want to rank number one for "make money" and "work from home", and all these things and we had a team of people out there just mass producing links like crazy. And we'd get to the page number one for the most competitive keywords and we're like, "This is amazing." And it would happen, we'd get page number one and it'd be amazing, and then unfortunately it would shift.
So we'd spend months and months of work, we'd get there, we'd start getting tons of traffic for a window, maybe a week, maybe two weeks, maybe a month, and then we'd shift and then we'd lose it again, and it was just you're always chasing your tail.
And that's when I realized, I'm like, "Man, if I want to be successful in this game," especially after we launched ClickFunnels, I'm like, "I don't want to be the guy finding the newest loophole and exploiting it. I want to be the guy who figures out, what do the platforms actually want and how do I align myself with them? If I can align myself with them and do it the way that they like, then they will give us traffic for free." So we stopped looking for the loophole and started looking for alignment. And that's really the big secret. I mean, this whole book, we talk about that.
The Google and YouTube chapters are heavy because we go deep into keyword research. We go deep into the publishing strategies. There are so many publishing strategies you can use.
I talked about Brian Dean, who's one of my favorite SEO guys right now, he's constantly called "The Skyscraper". And I'm not going to talk about that today, but he has this whole skyscraper model I go through on page 222, which is brilliant. It's what we're doing right now on ClickFunnels SEO and we're killing it, which has been really, really fun. And we go through publishing plans.
Again, this is one of the heavier chapters, but I wanted to share just one big idea from this chapter that I think will get you guys thinking differently and will be an easy, simple way for you guys to get traffic, especially in this time of chaos. Do you guys want that? You guys okay if I over deliver and just give you one solid gold nugget that'll just blow your minds? If you guys want that, just message down below. Be like, "Give me the gold nugget!"
All right, so here is the gold nugget that I'm going to share with you guys from Traffic Secrets today. So this is something back in the day, before we learned the SEO game, before we had any success at all, I was like, "Man." I would go to Google and type in my dream keyword. I'd type in "work your home" or "sales funnels", whatever yours is, "Lose weight."
And I would type it in and I would dream like, man, if I could be on page number one, this is the most ideal real estate in the world. But I was like, "But it's so hard and there's so many good people. How in the world am I going to get up there?" And a lot of people teach SEO or show you, "Just go for the long tail keywords and things like that because they're easier to get." And I agree with some of that strategy, but, I don't know, I want to be the number one guy or else, why I even try it?
And so I remember looking at all these sites and we had these teams, I was telling you, doing all the mass spamming stuff back in the day to get our links up. I say spamming, there weren't anything illegal or unethical. They were just getting links like crazy, just mass dropping links all over the internet to get our pages ranked back when that's how the game is played. And I was like, "Well, while I'm waiting for these things to come up, is there any other way I get traffic today?" Because traffic in the future's good, but traffic today's always better. And so I'd go to Google and I'd type in and I'd see all the pages, their ranked on page number one, and I was like, "What are they doing?"
So I started going to them, and I'd go to the first one and I'd go to the second one, and I'd go to the third one.
And what I found interesting is, typically, in the top 10 for most keywords, there's going to be one that's some brand that's just amazing and just owns it. Bow to them. They own this thing. They've been around for 50 years and they deserve that traffic so they're there. And then you look at other ones and I started seeing this pattern where they're these blogs or these sites that they weren't amazing sites. They were structured in a certain way. They ranked really well But I started looking, I was like, "These are sites run by marketers like me. These are sites run by SEO people who are really good at ranking in the search engines." And so I remember specifically the keyword at the time that I was trying to get was "work from home", something like that.
So I clicked on one of them and I saw this guy's page and it was the page, and I saw a big old banner ad on top and then an article. And like that was it. He wasn't selling anything.
I'm like, "How is he not selling something? He's on page number one for the best keyword ever?" And so I messaged the guy and I was like, "Dude, I don't understand this. You're on page one for my dream keyword and you're not selling anything." And I started getting to know this guy and I was talking to him and he's like, "Oh yeah, I'm an SEO guy." I'm like, "Okay. Does that mean you hate money?" He's like, "No, no, no, no." He's like, "My model is just different than yours." He's like, "I get pages ranked really high on Google and I sell ads to people on these pages." And I was like, "Are you kidding me?" I was like, "How much would it cost for this ad?"
And he was like, "Oh, well, this banner ad up here, you're going to pay X amount," and he had different ad placements and stuff like that. And I was like, "Are you kidding me?" So I bought the whole top block of his page and then I was like, "What else can I buy?"
I'm like, "Can I put a popup on your site?" He's like, "I've never done that before." I'm like, "Well, I would love if every single person who came here saw my popup and joined my list." And so we negotiated back and forth and he was like, "Sure." I can't remember what we paid. This is seven or eight years ago. But we negotiated for a popup on his page and a couple things like that. It was his article. He was ranking page number one, but everything was leading back to me.
And so within an hour of talking back and forth with this human being, no SEO, no keywords, no ranking, no nothing, I had it where basically my funnel was number one for "work at home". Does that make sense? So what happens? Somebody would type "work at home", they'd see his article, they click on it, they'd go there, they'd read his article, but then they'd see a big old banner ad for "Get Russell's free book."
That wasn't the offer at the time, but go to Russell's free book and then a popup like, "Hey, give me your email I'll give you the first three chapters for free of Russell's brand new book." And all of a sudden, overnight, boom, I was getting this huge surge of traffic. I was getting tons of leads and opt-ins and traffic and sales for the keyword that I was working for to try to hopefully someday rank for.
And it instantly came into being that fast. Did you guys get that? In fact, if you go to page 230, I talk about this strategy a little bit. So the other thing that's amazing is the quality of the clicks. The person's showing up. If I'm buying ads and I'm buying pay-per-click, I'm paying for every single person that clicks and it can get expensive, especially for the good keywords.
But here it's like somebody else ranked here, they got the first click, then they went to the person's thing, and then they saw my ad, and then they clicked. So they're one, two, three clicks in before they come to my world, which means if you look at the funnel, all the people come and then the really qualified people come, then the hyper qualified people come, and then I'm just getting the cream of the crop.
I'm coming in and I'm just scooping the cream off the top of it and that's what I get is the best traffic of all, is just the cream on the top of it. And that's how this whole game is played. That's one of the things I teach inside the Google strategy. It's so simple, it's so easy, and you don't have to buy ads. You're not doing pay-per-click. You're not doing SEO. And we talk about how to do those in here. Those strategies are in here, but there's stuff that's just easier.
And it's understanding that, how do I find the people that are already ranked and I go directly there and get the traffic from there. Does that make sense? I'm reading all your comments right now. Awesome. That's just what one idea. What I recommend for you guys to do today, this is your homework assignment for today, is go to Google and think, what's the dream keyword? If I could have any keyword phrase, what would it be?
Make money. Work from home. Lose weight. Boise dentist. I don't know, figure out whatever your thing is, and then look at the top 10. Click on every single page and see, which one of these people do you think would allow me to actually buy ads on these pages? And then contact them and just be like, "Hey, what would it take?" It's funny, my man, Dave Gambril just said, "It's like SEO Dream 100." It is 100%.
In fact, I believe that's what we talk about in here. It's going through, so what are the Dream 100 pages that you wish you could rank for? So what I tell you guys to do here in the book is pick 10 keywords. We talk about one. Pick 10 keywords, and then each keyword, there's 10 pages.
So 10 times 10 equals, what? 100. Now you have your Dream 100. Now let's go into the Dream 100 and say, "Okay, boom, how do I work my way and how do I buy my way?" So the same stuff we've been talking about, just using it at the SEO standpoint. So, anyway, just start thinking about that, you guys. Get the wheels in your head spinning. Again, find 10 of your dream keywords, go to those pages. Look at the top 10. Click on all of them. Look at those things and then start contacting people and say, "Hey man, I love your blog. I saw. It's awesome. Just curious if you sell ad space. Can I get an ad up here? Can I get a popup?" whatever.
"Do you have an email list? Can I buy an ad in your email list? You've been harvesting these leads for the last six months you've been ranked here. Can I have you email your list for my thing?"
And so on and so forth. Anyway, there's so much more in the Google chapter, but I wanted to give you guys something tangible today you could grab and then you could like start using. So, if you guys want to learn more about how to use Google, both paid and free and all the other stuff, plus other tips, strategies, things that we're doing, it's all here inside of your free book called Traffic Secrets. If you haven't gotten it yet, all you got to do is go to trafficsecrets.com. Again, you cover the cost of the shipping, I already paid for the book, and then we'll ship one out to you ASAP. And in the last three weeks, they've sold 44,000. So you know what that means? 44,000 entrepreneurs can't be wrong. This book is something that you need to get. And so now is your time to go and get your copy ASAP.
Again, books start shipping on May 5th. So less than a month away, we start shipping the books.
But the audio book is available right now so you can get the audio books. Listen to it today. Also, if you've missed, I've been going live every single day since the quarantine started reading chapter by chapter. If you missed any of these, they're all on our podcast, the brand new Traffic Secrets Podcast. Right now, it's only in the iTunes directory. Eventually, it'll be everywhere. But if you go to iTunes and then search "Traffic Secrets", you have a podcast where basically I've told stories like this on the first 200 and something pages and they're all in there. And we're doing a contest right now where someone who write and reviews the podcast is going to be winning a signed copy of the Secrets Trilogy Box Set.
So if you want a signed copy of this entire thing, the only way to get that is to rate the Traffic Secret's Podcast and leave a review. And if you do that, you have a chance of winning it.
So, anyway, someone said, “send those books out”. I know, it's killing me too. I'm just hoping and praying that shipping gets back in place from Amazon and all the places in the next 30 days. I think it will. Anyway, where's the link for the book? The link is simple. It's trafficsecrets.com. That's the game plan. Anyway, with that said, you guys, thanks for hanging out today. I appreciate you all.
We had a great show up on all the different channels and everywhere we're at. Thanks for hanging out live. If you've enjoyed this, please comment down below. Please share this. Again, I'm going free for you. The payment in return would be to share this with other people you think would benefit from it. Either tag them down below or share it with them.
So, anyway, with that said, you guys, I appreciate you all for hanging out today.
Thank you for everything. If you don't have your copy of the Traffic Secrets book yet, now is the time. Go to trafficsecrets.com and start listening to the audiobook tonight and we're coming back tomorrow. We're going to talk about YouTube. So I'll go through the YouTube chapter here and then we're moving into some other fun. This week's going to be a fun week in the Traffic Secrets book. All right, that's it. I appreciate, y'all. Thanks for everything, you guys, and I will talk to you all soon. All right. Bye, everybody.
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