If you don’t want your successful business to die, heed this warning now. On today’s episode Russell sends out a warning of why you can never stop fueling your fire. Here is some of the insightful advice in this episode:

-- Find out how Russell learned to always fuel the fire even when he wasn’t ready to sell his customers something.

-- See what kinds of things you can be doing to keep yourself relevant in the eyes of your customers.

-- And find out why even when you’re successful with a huge following you need to continually put fuel on the fire.

So listen here to find out some of the ways Russell fuels his fire, despite having millions of followers between all the platforms.

There’s so much noise, so much things happening, you have to always be out there. That’s the reason why I’m doing Instagram’s every day, and Facebook’s every day, and podcasts every day, and all these things every single day because we need to keep fueling the fire. Fueling the fire is what builds the empire.

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Hey, good morning everybody. This is Russell and I want to welcome you back to the Marketing Secrets podcast.

Hey everyone, it is a crazy rainy day out here. Our weather here in Boise is rainy. It wants to snow, it’s getting close to Christmas, but it’s too warm. It’s been raining like crazy, we’ve been praying it gets cold so we can get some snow, because that’d be really fun right now.

Anyway, I’m heading to the office and just had a recurring theme in my head for the last day or so and I was like, I need to share this with everybody. So I’m going to talk about first my own experience, and then a close friend’s experience, and then some of you guys, it’s going to be related back to you.

So the theme, the message today is you gotta keep on putting fuel into the fire. Now, I’ve experienced this about three or four times throughout my career, I’ve made this mistake and learned from it. And hopefully I won’t make this mistake again.

But a lot of times what happens is we start having success with something right, we’re like, “This is amazing.” And then you stop doing it, for some reason. So in our business for example, we’ll start growing a list, we’re doing something to get new customers, new people in our door. And we’re having fun with it and it’s working. And all the sudden we start building a list, then we start, we shift our focus from that to selling them stuff and doing things and all these things. And we forget about the fuel that was brining people into our business.

And at first you don’t notice it because you’re having so much success with the existing customers you brought in, but eventually it starts imploding and your company will eventually die. I’ve seen so many people who get into my world and they hear me talk about, “You need to do a podcast a week, every single week, for at least a year.’ So they do it for like a month, a month and a half, and they start making some sales, and they stop doing the webinar, because they’re like, “We’re making money, things are great. Let’s cut off the fuel that’s building our company.”

That’s what happens and logically you’re like, “I would never do that.” But how many of you guys are still doing your weekly webinars? Alright, that means you cut off the fuel to your business.

Alright, let me step back to like a decade ago when I was building my company. I remember one point for sure, I was having some success, I was making some money, things were working, and I was like, “This is amazing, amazing.” And started hiring the company, started building a team, had a bunch of people, had an office. And then I had this idea for this website that was going to be the greatest thing in the world. So we started working on it and it took us about six months to build that website.

I remember during the process I was like, “Okay, I don’t want to email my list other things. I don’t want to make them upset, I don’t want to freak them out. I want them to be ready so when I have this thing ready and launched and live, they’ll be ready to buy it.”

So for like six months I didn’t email my list, and then the new thing came out and I was so excited and we emailed the list. The list would normally get three or four thousand clicks if I send an email to them. I remember I had like 300 opens and like 12 clicks. And I was like, “Oh crap, they don’t remember who I am. I am screwed, I’m in such a bad spot right now because I need money very, very badly, which is the reason why I did this whole promotion.” And they forgot who I was. I hadn’t been putting fuel into the fire.

And it was a very sad, scary lesson. I had to fire a bunch of people, I laid off some staff and I had to scramble to rebuild my list, rebuild a connection with them, get new people. I remember in my head saying, “I will never not email my list because people forget so fast.” If I waited a week to email my list, if it takes me three weeks to email my list, 2/3rds of my list will have forgotten who I am by that point.

There’s so much noise, so much things happening, you have to always be out there. That’s the reason why I’m doing Instagram’s every day, and Facebook’s every day, and podcasts every day, and all these things every single day because we need to keep fueling the fire. Fueling the fire is what builds the empire.

So I had a friend over last night and we were talking and he’s going through a bit of a tough time now, and we start talking and it was funny because he’s got a couple of different businesses and in all of them he had stopped putting the fuel. For his local business he had stopped the fuel. He just restarted it and he was like, ‘It’s killing. We’re doing awesome again.” And I was like, “Yeah, but what’s the lesson?” and he’s like, “I’d forgotten to put fuel on the fire.” I’m like, “yeah, you gotta keep doing that.” Even when things get successful, you gotta keep doing the things that are bringing fuel to the fire.

And then that same person has a webinar, and he was doing a weekly webinar for a long time, making a bunch of money and then he stopped because he started selling other events and things like that to this list, and it worked for a while and then attrition started happening and atrophy, or whatever you want to call it. And then it slowed down. I said, “Start doing the weekly webinar. Get back with it. That’s the fuel that builds the business, that keeps doing it.”

That same friend has a podcast and he’s like, “I used to podcast a couple of times a week and I haven’t podcasted since June.” It’s like, you gotta keep fueling the fire, you gotta keep fueling the fire, even when you have success over here, you can’t stop fueling the fire.

So that’s just kind of the message for you guys today. This is a very short one, I know. Partially because Funnel Friday starts in like 5 minutes and I gotta run in there and get it all set up. So I’m a little late.

But I just wanted you guys to think through that because you guys are going to go through these cycles of like, you’re focusing on how do I make it rain, how do I fuel the fire, how do I bring people in here, and you’re doing that and doing that and all the sudden your list and your customer base will start growing. And then what’s going to happen, I’m warning you, for those who haven’t done it yet, and I’m reminding you for those who have. You’re going to shift your focus, and you should, you should be shifting some portion of your focus to that audience and serving them and what’s the next thing I need and how else can I, what can I do? Is it an event? Or whatever, but the big thing is you can’t stop. You still have to tie in, I have to keep fueling the fire. I have to keep fueling the fire.

In our company we now have John Parkes on my team, who literally, his entire job is adding fuel to the fire. He’s running the traffic side of things. He’s always doing things. And for me, I’m content. I keep creating podcasts. I gotta do at least two podcasts a week. I gotta do at least this many emails a week. I gotta do at least…we have these metrics we have to keep doing.

We have to keep running the webinar. We have to get at least a thousand people a week to register for the webinar, we have to keep doing this to have all these numbers that we just keep doing because we know that’s the fuel for the business.

I could easily stop right now, I could stop doing all this stuff. People are like, “Why are you still on Instagram? Why are you still on Facebook?” I could stop all those things, but I know what would happen in six months to a year from now, if I stop those things today. I can’t tell you how many friends I have who have been in this industry as long or longer than me who were killing it at one time. They had built up this huge following of people and then they stopped and they kept messaging this following. And the problem with that is it’s either constantly growing or shrinking.

So if you stop bringing new fuel in the fire, new people in front end, your existing list, while they might be hot and responsive now, it will continue to get worse and worse until eventually you’re out of business.

So this is the warning to you all. Continually put fuel on the fire. Initially when you start your business it’s going to be a hundred percent of your effort, because you have no fuel, no people, nothing to sell, no one to sell to. So it’s focusing, focusing, focusing a hundred percent of the time. And as customers start coming, you start shrinking it and shrinking it.

But I would say, I would spend at least 50% of all your time fueling the fire and the other 50% on serving the people you  have in there. But I wouldn’t drop below that. Because if you do, it will start to shrink and shrink and eventually disappear, which is the worst thing for all of us.

Alright, there’s your word of warning. Fuel your fire, keep it going. Do not stop even when it seems like, “I don’t need to do this anymore because I got this big following and people love me.” Look at me and say, “Wow, Russell’s got over a million people between all the platforms.” I think we’ve got a million and a half on the email list, we’ve got 700,000 on Facebook, 200,000 on Instagram, all these different places, yet you keep fueling the fire, fueling the fire, because I know I will become irrelevant if I stop.

Alright guys,I’m getting a message from Melanie saying, “Where are you? Funnel Friday starts in two minutes!” I gotta go, appreciate you all, don’t forget to fuel your fire continually, consistently. If you do that your business will live a long happy, joyful life. Thanks everybody, talk to you soon.