Last week has been legitimately insane!

Books have been flying off the shelves since we launched our $20 CPA. Instead of paying affiliates 40% commission, we guaranteed a $20 payment for every book they sell.

We knew it was going to get crazy but it went beyond what we expected. There’s been three crazy things happening…

1. it’s caused bonuses galore i
2. it’s created a whole bunch of fights
3. it’s caused a lot of fraud

I’ll get into those in a minute. But first…

This week kicked off with me doing a Facebook Live with Tony Robbins.

Tony is someone I’ve looked up to for years. It was so cool to have him interview me for the new book.

Here’s the stats so far on Tony’s video: 

Here’s the video:

Besides Tony, we did a whole bunch more Facebook Lives as usual. The book sales keep on increasing.

Here’s our total stats as of 5/12/2017:

Because this is a book launch, we’re trying to figure out new ways to keep the affiliates and customers engaged and excited.

Last week, we flew out the world’s fastest reader, Howard Berg to do a workshop. We used this as a tool to sell more books.

On Friday he flew in. We recorded a Facebook Live where he read the entire Expert Secrets book in 4 minutes and 33 seconds! If you want to see that video, check it out here:

We and our affiliates promoted the page and had over 200 people sign up for Howard’s course. This means we made over $25,000 for Howard before he even delivered the workshop. This was super cool because Howard is one of the coolest people in the world and totally deserved it.

He then came in on Saturday and trained everyone for five hours. Every single person in the room or online more than doubled their reading. That’s the power of what Howard Berg does.

If you want to double your reading go to www.DoubleYourReading.com and take the Howard Berg challenge. You don’t pay anything unless Howard doubles your reading (which he always does, so you just pay him $100… it’s totally worth it.)

The Double Your Reading funnel helped us to sell a lot more books, but it also made Howard a bunch of money. We’ve been running that now as an ad and it’s one of the most successful sales funnels we’ve ever had.

Here’s the video from Funnel Friday where we rebuilt this funnel:

Here’s the numbers on the funnel so far…

Right now we’re averaging $7.98 EPC. That means for every click we’re getting on the video, we are making $7.98. Our average cart value is currently $135. So for every $34 we’re spending on Facebook ads, we’re making back $134.

Yes, that is a huge win for us!

So we’re helping Howard increase people’s reading, making him some money, as well as selling a whole bunch of books through the new ad.

For any promotion you’re doing, think of fun ways like this to share a different message with your audience. It gives you another reason to email and promote without coming back to the same thing over and over again.

Affiliates have been increasing bonuses. We’ve had people giving away $1,000 courses just for buying the book.

We’ve even had affiliates who were paying people for every book they buy (which I think was against our terms of service, but people keep doing it. We’re trying to get them to stop, but it’s hard with so many affiliates promoting for us.)

This has caused some affiliates to get into fights and resulted in some angry posts on Facebook. We’ve had to do a lot of damage control just to keep everyone happy.

The last thing we had to deal with was fraud. Anytime you offer something like paying $20 for every free book someone gives away, it always calls out the fraudsters.

We had one affiliate who went from zero to #3 in the book launch rankings overnight. At first we were really excited and celebrating until we started getting dozens of calls from people who were pissed off because they had a bill on their credit card from us and they had no idea what it was.

We did more research and found out that all 900+ books this guy sold had all come from an India IP address (but a US-based mailing address). All the orders came through in alphabetical order with one per minute for 900 minutes. Unless he somehow coordinated 900 Americans from around the country to fly to India, line up in alphabetical order, and systematically buy at the top of every minute… then this was totally fraud.

Right now we’re working with Stripe to reverse the charges so it won’t damage our merchant account. We’re also looking at taking legal action against the affiliate as well.

Just so you know, if you ever decide to do a $20 CPA, look out for fraud.

Now we’re down to the last 48 hours before the book launch officially ends. We’re tying to increase urgency and scarcity to get affiliates to promote again and get people who are sitting on the fence to buy the book.

The $20 CPA for affiliates ends within 48 hours. (By time you’re reading this it will probably be over.)

What I’m doing is when someone buys the book right now, on the thank you page, there’s a 90 minute video of me teaching the first 3 chapters of the book.

I emailed list today telling them that the video is going to disappear on Sunday, so they got to go buy the book today if they want to get access to that video for free.

Remember, the two most important words we have in marketing are urgency and scarcity.

The official book launch will be over by time you’re reading this post. We’ll be transitioning into the next phase where we’ll actually be monetizing all the customers in a cool way that will help them a lot.

We’ll be doing a new type of funnel we learned from our friend Brendon Burchard called the “7 Day Launch Funnel.” We’re doing that to launch our implementation and accountability program that will go with the Expert Secrets book. I will share more stats and details on that after next week.

As of today, the book funnel has sold 50,695 copies of the book. The gross revenue we’ve collected is $1,507,034. Not too bad for giving away a free book.

Don’t you love funnels?

Thanks,

Russell Brunson

P.S. I almost forgot…

Yesterday, we had so many people asking us about ClickFunnels and how it relates to Expert Secrets that we decided to do an impromptu Facebook Live.

We quickly printed out a bunch of the boards from my normal PowerPoint presentation, put them in the conference room, coordinated a bunch of people, and did a Facebook Live teaching people about ClickFunnels and selling them access to it. You can see that Facebook Live here:

If you don’t have your ClickFunnels account yet, watch this video about why it’s so important and how to get a special offer at the end of it.

Thanks again, and I’ll talk to you guys again next week.