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Update on Launching Secrets of Success to $100M Per Year

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Update on Launching Secrets of Success to $100M Per Year

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Episode Recap:

We’ve launched! A few episodes past, I made my plan public to create a $100M per year business from scratch in the next 24 months. This is an update on how that business is doing, from our initial launch to our weekly and monthly activities (including why marketing math sucks). We’ve made some adjustments and followed a lot of pieces to plan (with a few adjustments). Get all the updates and follow along with me step-by-step to build your business with me by joining the 2CCX Coaching Program at https://www.twocommaclubx.com/

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I wanted to give you guys an update though because a lot of you guys were at Funnel Hacking Live and you talked about my goal, me calling my shot, how to go from zero to a $100 million in recurring revenue by following linchpin. And so we're on the path of it right now and it's growing, it's doing well. And so I want to give you guys an update on the things that are happening.

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Transcript:

What's up, everybody? Welcome back to the Marketing Secrets podcast. Today is an update podcast. We're going to update you on some cool stuff. So a lot of you guys know, over the last little while, I launched a brand new company called Secrets of Success, which has been so much fun. It's fun to get back into getting my hands dirty and doing all the things again. And really the goal of this company was to create something that everyone else could follow along with. Inside of the Two Comma Club X Coaching Program literally. It's been fun because basically, I'm doing something. We launched the MIFGE and we come back and I'm like, "Hey guys, here's what we did. Here's how we launched MIFGE. Go launch yours." And so everyone's following along on the journey. It's been really, really fun.

So I wanted to give you guys an update though because a lot of you guys were at Funnel Hacking Live and you talked about my goal, me calling my shot, how to go from zero to a $100 million in recurring revenue by following linchpin. And so we're on the path of it right now and it's growing, it's doing well. And so I want to give you guys an update on the things that are happening.

So number one, first phase after Funnel Hacking Live, and I called the shot. We came back and a month later, we launched the membership site, which was really fun. Putting it all together and thinking about how do we create a membership site that's sticky, that's going to be unique, that's going to be different? And I think overall, it's been great. Membership to site's been fun, but I had one thing that we tweaked in January, that I want to share it with you because I think it was important. So when you join the Secrets to Success, why is somebody joining? Because they want to learn these principles, they want to hang out with me, they want to talk about success and personal development and things like that, which has been fun.

And so what's cool is you go in there in the members area and right now, there's a success path, which is each month, I teach a principle. A lot of these principles are coming from the new book I'm writing, but it's fun because I get a chance from the stage here, to go deep into these different principles. And we do it live with the group, and so everyone gets to interact and hang out with each other. And then it becomes a module in the members area. And so right now, we're going month by month each month doing a new module and that's been really fun. And getting people to stick and getting people engaged in this stuff. And it's been a fun place for me to also test the material that for the book that I'm writing. So it's been multipurpose. It's been really good.

The number two thing, we have the library. It's a digital library where we're scanning and getting audiobooks done of all the most amazing lost files of all time, these books and these works and these manuscripts. And so each month, people go in, they got credits they can unlock like Audible, they can unlock a book. So they can unlock a book and sometimes it's a PDF or an ebook or an audiobook or both or all three things. Sometimes it's the course from Nightingale-Conant, it's an ever-growing library of just amazingness. I'm spending a 100 grand a month on books and courses, and then we're putting in the best of the best and putting them in there. And so this library keeps growing, which is really cool as well.

And then we added a book club where every single month, we're picking a book. We got Whitney Dixon on our team, who's the book facilitator or not... What do we call it? She's doing the book club. And we're in the virtual mastermind. So every single week, there's a virtual mastermind where we're all reading a book together. We jump in and basically, she shows some best practices, and then we do these breakout rooms where everyone breaks out and you have a chance to discuss it with other people in the community. And it's been so cool. And so it's been building a really strong, really solid community and membership site, a really cool base.

Oh yeah, I'm jumping around because I'm talking about membership. I'm trying to talk in a timeline, but I'm going to jump out of the timeline for a minute because in January, one of the big things I saw is people were canceling, is like, "There's so much cool stuff here. I don't know how to keep up," or, "I don't have a chance to read a book every single month. There's a lot." So I was like, "Okay, how do I for people like that," and I'm probably one of those people, I listen to a lot of audiobooks all the time, but at the same time, I'm busy. So sometimes, it's like, "Just the meat. Give me the CliffsNotes. What's the most important thing?" And so in January, we started doing this thing where basically I look at... Because I was spending at least a 100 grand every single month just on... In fact, most of the profit of this company is getting reinvested back into books. So thank you guys for supporting my addiction, but it's been fun.

So basically what happens is I buy all these old books and courses, the magazines, all these things are coming in. And so now I'm doing a newsletter each month, but basically it's like, "Hey, here's all the stuff." I'm telling the stories of the treasure like, "I found this over here and this over here." The newsletter is fun because I'm telling you about the treasure hunts behind the scenes. You can see what I'm acquiring and how I found them, what they are, so you see what the gold gems are. But then on top of that, I'm saying, "Okay, I bought this magazine. This is a $30,000 magazine. I bought it, here's story Why. And I read the whole thing, but it is great. But there's this one article that so-and-so wrote that's like..." Orison Swett Marden did this thing on achievement that was amazing.

So I actually pulled it out and have it in the newsletter. And I'm like, "Here's this bookset I bought and the bookset's amazing. But here was the golden nugget, these three principles, here they are." So I'm curating all the stuff and I'm making the CliffsNotes version. So if you're like, "I don't have time for everything else, Russell, but what's the best of the best?" Now that newsletter's in there. So I've published January's and February's. I'm writing Marches actually today and tomorrow. So that'll be in there soon as well. But again, it's curating the best stuff, finding the gold nuggets and handing it to you on a silver platter. And people have been loving that as well too. So those are some of the pieces that have been happening.

Let me step back to the timeline now. So after Funnel Hacking Live, I got the memberships site done, the MIFGE offer, which was insane. And then we launched it to my list, to everyone's list and affiliates' list and it was amazing. I think we ended up getting, I can't remember the exact numbers, it's like three or 4,000 people, I think, during the launch who bought the MIFGE, who came to the membership site, which is awesome. And one of the coolest things for the Funnel Hacking nerds out there, if you go through the funnel, the uptake rate for yearly was insane. 20% of people bought yearly, which if you do math on that, it was almost a million dollars in sales, just came from people upgrading yearly, which was amazing. We hit Two Comma Club just from people buying the yearly upgrade. So the funnel is converting really well, especially to warm traffic. And so it was amazing and a lot of affiliates made a lot of money.

In fact, I'm flying out tomorrow to do the affiliate event for the top 10 affiliates. We were actually flying to Chicago. Why are you flying to Chicago, Russell? It's like, "Well, Chicago happens to be the home of Mr. Earl Nightingale, Nightingale-Conant's from there, Earl Nightingale is one of my favorite authors, speakers from this time period. He had a daily radio show for 10 years or 20, I don't know, forever. He was the very first person to have a spoken word record go gold, platinum, which is called The Strangest Secret, a whole bunch of cool things. So the top 10 affiliates, we're going to Chicago and we're going to have an Earl Nightingale Day.

I'm going to be teaching them about Earl Nightingale and we're bringing a record player. We're going to play an original record of The Strangest Secret, so we can as a group, hear it together. And we'll have a cool mastermind, Vic Conant who runs Nightingale-Conant is going to come and he's going to do some Q&A. It's going to be a really fun thing. But all the top 10 affiliate made a bunch of money. We have this really cool experience with them now. So that's the next step in the journey.

And then after that, I was like, "Okay, now we've got to figure out customer support, make sure everything..." All the systems part. It's after you do the launch, then it's the cleanup, the dust, find things that are broken. We found a little tech error. So it was probably a month and a half, two months of just trying to fix everything so the members are having a good experience, making sure there's no problems happening, getting all of our everything in a row, all our ducks in a row. And then it's like, "Cool, now it's working." And now it came back to like, "Okay, now how do we start growing this?"

So the first thing we started doing as we were cleaning things up is we didn't want to spend money on ads yet. We wanted to just start this process. So we started doing these little mini dramatic demonstrations. So what we do is each month in the membership site, we would do a book club. So for example, month number one was Elsie Lincoln Benedict's book set, which is called How to Get Anything You Want, which is one of the greats of all time. If you do nothing but join Secrets of Success for that bookset alone and listen to the audiobook and read the PDF, that alone is worth the value of a year worth of the membership. I'm not kidding, of all the gold I found, it might be my favorite thing I found in $18 million now of buying... I don't know the exact numbers, however, a lot of money in buying books, that is probably one of my favorite gems of all of them.

And so the first month, that became the book club. And so what we did is we a little mini challenge for three days. Day number one, I interviewed Joe Vitale about that bookset because he knew about it. And then Eileen Wilder and then Annie Grace. So we each just did these little mini interviews with each person and then basically call to action was like, "The book club is starting Friday, go get in there." And so we did that through the list and we got a handful, maybe five or 600 and more members that came in from that campaign. The next book club is Robert Collier's book, Secret of the Ages, which is another bookset that's insanely cool. And so this time though, instead of doing a three-day challenge, I was like, I want to do a mini version. So we did a one-hour webinar, people registered. I talked to people about the book, Eileen talked about the book, Annie talked about the book. They pushed people to join the book club that was starting, and we got a whole another big slew of members coming in.

So each month, we're doing, basically we know what's going to be fulfilled in the membership site. So we pulled that out and we do a little mini dramatic demonstration talking about it, sharing the best principles, why we're excited and then push people to join so they can be part of the book club to go deeper in it. And those little campaigns have been great. They've been great for us, they've been great for affiliates. They're not like, "We added 2,000 members overnight." But it's getting a consistent stream of just members each month coming in because we're taking one gold nugget from the membership site, bringing it out, shining a spotlight on it, talking about why it's so cool, and it gives people a reason to want to get access to jump back in. So that's been really cool as a monthly thing to do is we're just building things up.

This last month then, we decided, "Okay, now things are working, everything's in place. We have an email sequence, we have a newsletter, all the linchpin steps are working really well. Now let's start turning on paid ads to the MIFGE funnel." And so we turn on paid ads to the MIFGE funnel. And you know how tracking is, how it never really tells you the truth. It doesn't matter. You have Facebook stats, you got ClickFunnel stats, you got Hiroles stats, you got all the stats. None of the stats ever match. People are like, "Why isn't ClickFunnel stats matching here?" None of the stats ever match anywhere. They're all different. And then you have strike stats on the sales and you got the accounting... Stats is the most annoying thing. When somebody actually makes stats flawless, you think that this is just math like, "How many people clicked on this link?" And anyway, I'm not going to go on a rant right now. Anyway.

So we basically have 20 different places we track stats and we tried to sync them all together, figure out the best case scenario. So we had everything, we're running it and based on what we thought was the correct stats, we were at a 1.4 to two ROAS, return on ad spend. So every dollar we spend on ads is making 1.52, two bucks back, which was amazing. So we started growing and scaling. We're dumping money in, were like, "This is insane." Everything's hitting. And then my accountant who's looking at his version of the stats which was different than all the marketing version of the stats is like, "Hey, this month we lost $60,000." I'm like, "No, we didn't." I'm like, "We're at a 2X ROAS. We're making money." And he's like, "Well, not according to the bank account, which is the new stats." So we're looking at the bank account like, "These are not working, something is happening."

It took us almost two days to reconcile everything and we found out the problem, and I love Hyros, it's probably the best of the tracking platforms right now by far. But for everyone who set up a free trial, it was attributing $97 towards the free trial because in a month from now, you'll be billed $97. And so we were looking at it like we've collected a $100 that we hadn't, which made all the stats work on this side and not work on the actual money in the bank side. And so we had to turn off the ad, slow everything down. So everything is screeching to a halt, everything stopped like, "Okay, what do we do? What's happening?" And we realized that the funnel we had, as great as it was for warm traffic, JV traffic and stuff like that, it wasn't the average order value. The average cart value wasn't high enough for paid ads to actually work.

And so it was coming back to the drawing board saying, "Okay, how do we tweak this funnel now so that when it's going out to warm and cold traffic, it'll continue to convert profitably?" And so this is the game, by the way, you guys. If you heard me talk about funnel audibles and things like that, this is the game we play all day long. It's always figuring things out, looking at the numbers and like, "Okay, it's working now." Or it's not. Then it's like, "How do we fix this?" "I don't know. Let's throw something against the wall and see what sticks."

So yesterday was fun. We actually had the entire marketing team out here in Boise for... Not marketing team, sorry, the funnel building team was here in Boise for the last two days for a funnel hackathon, which was really cool. And we had everybody here. And so it was fun because this is about the time we realized it wasn't working. It's like, "Hey, all right, we need something different. What should we do?" And so we started talking about other things and the biggest thing we came up with was like, "We just need one more upsell. One more upsell would get us over the numbers." And it's like, "Well, what can we sell? We have nothing to sell yet." So we're digging through all the content in the archives like, "What do we have?"

And all of a sudden, we realized there was a product we created that we were going to sell but we haven't sold yet. And it was the Charles Haanel Master Key Systems home study course, which is another gold gem that I found, and it's something we're going to sell for probably $2,000 in the future. It was going to be something where someone would pay 500 bucks and then it's $97 a month and they get this newsletter every single month. It was something really fun we were going to put together, but we'd already printed a 1,000. So we've got thousands of these in the warehouse. What if we, instead of selling these for $97 a month, what if we compressed it, made it $297 and just see if that gets cart value to the point where we can make it work? Because if we can get cart value to where it works, now we can blow this company up again.

And for those who don't understand cart value, basically cart value, I call it average cart value. Other people call it average order value. It's the same phrase, same term, it doesn't matter, but it's basically when somebody buys your product and they go through the upsell downsell sequence, on average, how much money do you make for every person who buys the front end? So for a book funnel, let's say it's Expert Secrets. For everyone who buys Expert Secrets, we have upsells and downsells. On average, how much do I make for every Expert Secrets book I sold? So let's say we make $50 on average for every book we sell in the Expert Secrets book funnel means I can spend $50 on ads to break even. So that's what average order value is. So if I spend $50 and I make $50, it means I have a one-time ROAS, which stands for return on ad spend. I spend $50, I make $50, one-time ROAS. So these are some of the metrics we talk about, the marketing nerds talk about. That makes sense.

So right now, again, we thought we were spending, for every dollar we spend on ads, we thought we were making a $1.50. So when you spend a dollar and make a $1.50, what do you do? You spend as much money as you can like it's Christmastime all day. But it turned out it was like we spend a dollar on ads and we're making 40 cents. That's what was actually happening. And it was just like... Yeah.

So the goal then is how do we increase the average order value? So again, if it was Expert Secrets, instead of spending $30 or making $30 from every book we sold, how do we get to $40, $50 or $60? If I can get to $60 per book and I'm still spending $50, now I can scale this offer like crazy. So that's always the goal. That's all we're doing in this funnel game is how do we lower ad spend, increase average cart value or average order value, and so to the point where I'm making more than I'm spending and then we can blow it up. That's the game. It's a fun game. It's just you're tinkering, you're trying things. As soon as you get it to work, then it's like, "Boom, scale it." And that's how you go from zero to building a ClickFunnels empire. You get the return on ad spend where you're spending way less than... Anyway, so that's the goal.

So we're coming back, we decide we're at upsell number three, we figure out the price point we need to make it work is about $297. So we made a $297 version of this. And it was fun because people are like, "Well, how do you make funnels, Russell?" So this is what we do. So all the teams here in the office, I was like, "Quick, grab the physical copies of the products." We grabbed the product, we put it on this thing right here, I turned the camera. I'm like, "What's up? This is Russell Brunson. I got one last special offer for you." And I told the story about the thing like, "This is really cool." I told the story about this thing I found.

I'm like, "We made it a physical version, check it out." I show the things. In the future, we're going to sell this for $500 one time, the $97 a month, it's a two-year program. So it's about what, $2,997 for this? But right now, we're trying to get case studies and beta people to prove this is actually a good product, of course. And so what we're going to do is we'll give you a huge discount, we'll give you a 90% discount. So instead of paying the $2,997 to people pay in the future, you can get the whole thing for $297. If you want to add this to your order, click the link down below now. Boom. So that was one take best case scenario. Actually, I think it took three or four takes, but I finally nailed it. It was like, "Hey, we got it. Go."

And then send it to the video team like, "Go edit this, get it online, get it uploaded to Voomly," which is our video hosting platform, "Upload to Voomly as quick as you can." And then we're running back like, "Okay, now for the page, we need some pictures." And so we get a camera out, it's laying out the things, and I get my iPhone out, taking some pictures. And then one of the guys on our team who's got a better camera, he's taking pictures and we finally get a picture. We're like, "Okay, cool, here are the pictures." So he's running over on Photoshop, he's editing it.

While he's editing it out, I'm on ClickFunnels. I create new page, upsell number three. And then I'm like, "Okay, I need a headline. One last special offer." About that time, we get the edited picture back. So I throw the picture on the thing, boom, there's the picture. And about that that time, the video guys sends the video back. I get a video, boom. And then I put an order form or excuse me, a one-click upsell. I'm like, "It's $297 for digital, or you want the physical, it's $497." And that was it. We just threw the page together. And then I handed it over to one of the funnel builders who were better than me to go and connect the upsell to the downsell. Make sure the mobile version works. And within an hour, we had upsell number three that was in the funnel and they were like, "Okay, turn the ads back on. Let's see what happens."

So right now, ads are on, and I don't know what happens. One of two things will happen. Number one, it'll increase cart value to the point where it's higher than our ad spend and now we're back in business, babe. We can start growing and scaling and driving traffic. It's going to be amazing. Or number two, it's not going to work. And it's like, "Okay, why didn't it work?" And you guys have been with me for a while now. Why didn't it work? Well, it's either the hook, the story, or the offer, one of those three things.

So we'll go back, look at upsell number three and say, "Okay, this is the hook." The hook was like, "Here's this rare book I found. It's so cool." The story behind the book was great or the offer is the offer. So it's the hook, the story, or the offer, and we'll tweak those. And if it doesn't work again, we'll probably test the hook first. We'll tweak the hook, so I'll tweak the headline. Did it work? Tweak the headline, did it work? And if that doesn't change, "Okay, let's tweak the story, then make a new video." Come back and make a new video. Put it back in there. Doesn't work? Then we'll tweak the offer. Doesn't work? We'll try three or four variations. If it doesn't work, it's like, "Hey, upsell number three is not the right upsell. Delete it. What else we got?" Okay, we run around like, "What if we did this? What if we did this?" And we figure something out, plug it in there, turn the ads back on, and sit back and watch. Okay, it's going to happen.

And then one of two things happen. One, it increases our average order value, now we're at a profit on ad spend or it doesn't. If it does, sweet, we have a party. Spend as much money as you can and let's go out to eat. Number two, if it doesn't, "Okay, is it the hook, the story, or the offer?" Tweak, tweak, tweak, tweak, tweak, tweak, tweak. And either it works or it doesn't. Doesn't work, we kill it, and start over again. And that's the process over and over and over and over again. And that's the game we play here.

So anyway, that's what's happening. So the update on us getting to a million dollars, or excuse me, a $100 million a year business, we still have a long way to go, but this is how we're doing it. This is the game, this is how it plays. We get one good offer, we can scale this thing infinitely. That's what we're trying to get to. And so the MIFGE offer is getting better and better and better. If we can scale this thing correctly, if we get the numbers to work, we probably can be adding pretty consistently, I would say 150, 200 people a day to the continuity, which is just huge. And the next phase for us is then what's the next big dramatic demonstration? And so now we're working on the big dramatic demonstration for this business and this brand, which will be happening in April. It's called the Think and Grow Rich Challenge. So that's actually a project I'll be working on the plane tomorrow as we're heading out to get all the people and the places in place.

And as you guys know, then that's going to be the next big affiliate push. Affiliates promote a dramatic demonstration and it gets people in the MIFGE. Then we'll promote it, ads will promote it, we'll do the whole thing. Hopefully we double or triple the size of continuity. After that happens, then we go back, we evergreen the Think and Grow Rich Challenge, and then we turn the ads on that. And then the game starts again. Tweaking, tweaking, tweaking, increasing average order value, decreasing costs to the point where we got a winner. When it wins, then we start scaling it and we just sit back and watch it until that number gets back to normal.

This is what always happens in the campaign. We launch a book, what happens when we launched traffic Secrets. Initially, we were getting $70 average order value. Every book we get $70 and we're spending $20, and that's the best. But over time, what happens is the ad cost starts going up. It goes from $20 to sell a book to $30 to $40. And then the cart value as you go from hot traffic to warm traffic drops from 70 to 60 to 50, and somewhere in the middle, they meet in the middle. And as soon as they drop the other direction, that's when I have to make new ads to get the ads cheaper so that it gets cheaper and I got to go and make new, or I got to increase the average order value of the funnel. I got to tweak the funnel or tweak the ads. But that's the game we're playing all day long.

As soon as you get some of this positive ROI, you just run it as long as you can. Right now for ClickFunnels business, Your First Funnel Challenge is our number one converting funnel. It's positive ROI. And so we're spending millions of dollars a month just dumping it into that for as long as we can. And eventually, that offer will stop working and then we'll go back and tweak it, change. It doesn't work, and boom, create a new offer. But that's the game we play here as funnel hackers. So I hope you enjoy the game. I love it. I hope this episode was helpful for you guys from a lot of different standpoints. We talked about so many cool things. Hopefully you got something of value. If you did, please let me know. Please drop a comment wherever you listen to this podcast. That means the world to me. Share this episode with other people and that'd be awesome.

So with that said, thank you guys so much. I thank you for being part of the Marketing Secrets podcast. I love serving you guys, and hope this episode is useful. Thanks so much and we'll see you guys on the next episode.

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