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The Dream 100 (Part 1 of 3)

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Episode Recap:

On today’s very special 3 episode series Russell speaks at Dream 100 Con about traffic and how to build your list. Here are some of the awesome things in this portion:

-- Find out how Russell got started building his list, and what he learned about spam free emailing.

-- Hear why everyone around him made half a million dollars a month with Adsense while he was still just building his list.

-- And find out how Russell figures out and narrows down who is dream client is with a simple diagram.

So listen here to part 1 or 3 of Russell’s super informative presentation at Dream 100 Con.

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Best Quote:

My entire goal of our business, if you look at everything we’re doing from a traffic generation standpoint, is to convert traffic I can control, traffic that I earn, into traffic that I actually own. Because if you own the traffic, that’s the secret sauce. When I own it, I can do whatever I want with it. You can be like zuckerberg and you can rent it to people, you can do a product launch and sell your own products. You can do affiliate stuff, you can do whatever you want. But the goal is to own the traffic, that’s the big thing. You own the traffic, we own the platform, that’s how you win.

Sponsors: 

-- ClickFunnels: Everything you need to start market, sell, and deliver your products and services online (without having to hire or rely on a tech team!)

-- DotComSecrets: Get a free copy of the "Underground Playbook For Growing Your Company Online With Sales Funnels."

​-- Expert Secrets: Get a free copy of the "Underground Playbook For Converting Your Online Visitors Into Lifelong Customers."

-- ​Traffic Secrets: Get a free copy of the "Underground Playbook For Filling Your Websites And Funnels With Your Dream Customers.

Transcripts:

Good morning everybody, this is Russell Brunson. I want to welcome you to a special three part series of the Marketing Secrets podcast. Over the next three episodes I’m going to be sharing with you guys clips from a presentation I did at Dan Derricks Dream 100 con. I told you guys before that I’ve been working on the Traffic Secrets book and testing my material, so the first time I ever taught parts of this publicly was at Dana’s event.

So I wanted to share it with you. It’s not the whole process, just a piece of it, but hopefully it will get the wheels in your head spinning about how Dream 100 works, how you buy your way in, and work your way in and how customer life line would work, and a whole bunch of other amazing things. I’m doing this as a tease, to get you excited for the Traffic Secrets book that’s coming out next year. So that’s kind of the game plan. Hopefully it gives you guys some ideas.

This is part one of three, when we get back from the intro, we will start right into that presentation. So thanks so much you guys, I hope you enjoy behind the scenes from my presentation from Dream 100 Con. To begin with, I just want to thank Dana. It’s been so fun, I’ve been talking about Dream 100 for the last decade or so, and almost nobody ever listens to me, except for Dana.

And then Dana took it and has taken it to such bigger, such a big mass level. It’s so funny, yesterday I was watching as he talked about Chet Holmes, who is kind of the originator of the Dream 100, and Chet was a personal friend of mine who passed away a few years ago, and his daughter has actually taken over his company since. I messaged her yesterday to let her know that you guys are here in this room, talking about a concept that was pioneered by her father, which is really special for her and for Chet and for everything.

I’m just so grateful for everything Dana’s put together, and doing this. Isn’t he just one of the coolest humans you’ve ever met on earth? He’s always giving and always serving. Alright, to kick today off, I actually wanted to talk about something and get it on film so that when I pass away someday you guys can watch this and then fulfill what I need to be done. Does that sound good? So I have a friend in our community, his name is Mark Holverson. Does anyone know Mark Holverson?

A couple of you guys. Mark Holverson’s an amazing human being in our community, one of my peers and he passed away last weekend of cancer, which was a really tragic thing. But what’s interesting is, right after he found out he had cancer, about five years ago, he was onstage speaking at an event like this, and Vince Reed actually published it on his Facebook page and I had a chance to watch his whole presentation. And it was right after Mark found out he was going to pass away.

And during his presentation he talked about legacy and where he was going and all sorts of stuff. And it just got me really inspired. And I’m not going to pass away, that I know of, so don’t think that that’s what I’m saying here. But I was thinking about, if I was to pass away how do I leave this whole thing? What would I want my legacy, at the end of this? I’ve heard other people say, “My goal is to get a million people at my funeral, that’s my biggest thing.” I don’t really want. In fact, I don’t any of you guys to be at my funeral. I want my wife and kids and family to do that.

But the day my funeral is over I need all of your guy’s help. So everyone’s got to remember this, someone’s going to be here and remember this part of it, and I need you to take this part out. So the day my funeral is over, I want to build out the biggest Dream 100 campaign of all time. Every single person I’ve ever had a chance to influence or impact I want to invite them to the last ever Funnel Hacking Live. I want to get, Dana, if you’re still alive at this time, I want you to be in charge of this whole thing. But I want Dream 100 voxes going out to all the biggest influencers, all the people, and I want to throw the biggest party ever.

This actually happened a little while ago, there was a guy who was a legend in our industry, his name was Marty Ellison, he owned a company called Board Room. Anyone ever heard of Board Room? And he owned that company and when he passed away, his partner Brian Kurts did something similar. They threw a huge marketing party, it was called the Titans of Marketing Summit. They had all the best speakers come in and speak. And I remember listening to that event, that course and I thought, when I die this is how I want my legacy to end.

So we’re going to do a big, huge Dream 100 campaign, we’re going to get everyone in the world to come to the last Funnel Hacking Live ever, and then I’m going to have all my friends and colleagues come and speak about what we’ve all learned on this journey together. So that’s my game plan, I’ve got it on video now, so that someday you guys will know my wishes. So that’s the game plan, does that sound good?

There’s a little twang that keeps happening, is that from….anyway, I don’t know if it’s from I’m talking too loud. Okay, one other story and then we’ll get to the good stuff. So this is going to hopefully help you guys understand the importance of what you’re learning here at the Dream 100. So I had a chance, I actually flew here from Jackson Hole, Wyoming. I was in Jackson Hole at a secret Illuminati, maybe it was the Bilderberg, I don’t know a secret group of marketers who all got together for like three days and we did a whole bunch of manly stuff, which anyone who knows me, I’m not very good at manly stuff.

We were shooting guns, I took last place. We were fly fishing, I caught the least amount of fish. We went hiking, all these things that I don’t normally do, but it was fun because I hung out with all these guys who were all amazing in their own spirit, in their own businesses. One of the guys who was there is a guy named Tom Bilyeu. How many of you guys know who Tom is? Oh good job, a bunch of you guys do.

So Tom, he started a company called Quest. Who has ever had a Quest bar before, Quest nutrition? So he started this company and it blew up to a value of over a billion dollars before he sold his portion of the company and retired. Now he’s doing Impact theory and a bunch of other cool things. But he built his company up to over a billion dollars, and as I’m asking him, “How did you start this thing up?” And he explained how he started the entire company. And what’s cool, after he told me I talked to Dave about last night, and Dave’s like, “let me see if he said it anywhere else.”

And Dave found an interview, an actual quote of this. So I want you guys to hear this. This is a quote from the podcast where he explained how he launched Quest. But what’s interesting is he did the same thing that you guys are all doing here in this room today. So this is what Tom said about launching Quest. He said, “We had a very different approach that got a lot of people excited, not just about the product, but they felt good about the way we treated them.

We went old school (old school dream 100) researching several hundred health and fitness influencers, then sending them hand written letters and free samples. This was all about showing an understanding of what others were trying to achieve, that Quest was interested in helping them connect with their audiences. When people are building community they have real sense of service to that community. We would send them a free product and say, ‘if you like it, tell people about it. And if you hate it, tell them about it too.’ “Not trying to steer people’s comments, gave us a pretty good reputation. Some didn’t like it and said so.

But the vast majority loved it and were grateful that we showed an understanding of who they were and what they were trying to do so they spread the word.” The foundation of his billion dollar supplement company all started here with the dream 100. Is that awesome? Okay so this is the foundation, you guys, for all these things. Alright, so what Dana’s talking about is true. Okay, so some of the, what I’m going to be talking about for the next couple of hours, so you guys can context. I’m in the middle, well not the middle, the beginning of writing my third book, which is called Traffic Secrets.

So there’s Dotcom Secrets, there’s Expert Secrets, and this is the last and final book in the trilogy, and then I’ll never write a secrets book again, because I’m out of them. But the third one is called Traffic Secrets. So I’ve been working on the framework for the whole thing. And I messaged Dana about two or three months ago, “Just so you know dude, this is so good for you.” Because the entire framework for the Traffic Secrets book is based on the Dream 100.

So a lot of the stuff you guys have been talking about is the foundation of everything that is going to be inside that book. But I spent all day, the last month or so, working on the outline and getting things done. And then yesterday I was sitting in the back of the room doodling out all the key frameworks for the book. And I got them back this morning at 4:30 in the morning. So I’m really excited they got done in time.

So I’m going to be going through seven different images that are kind of the framework for the book, but it’s also the framework for how we do the Dream 100. There are, well you’ll see. It’s taken it to a whole other level. And hopefully this will give you guys, those who are beginning will give you guys a really good foundation. And those who are advanced, it’s going to give you the next five or six steps in the process. Does that sound like fun? Alright cool.

So I’m going to start off, this is the very first core thing that you have to understand to really understand Dream 100, understand traffic, understand everything. There are three types of traffic, this is the framework for the entire book, the entire concept, if you can understand this everything else becomes really easy. So there are three types of traffic. The first type of traffic here on the top left hand, is traffic you control. This is traffic where you’re going to buy your way in. So if you think about that, how many of you guys run Facebook ads in here?

So you don’t own that traffic, right. Zuckerberg owns all that traffic. He built the platform, he owns the thing, but he gave us the ability to come and to buy some of that traffic. So we can buy some of that traffic and we can control it, we can send it wherever we want to. We send it to buy a product, buy a service, listen to a podcast. We can control that traffic, but we don’t own it. How many of you guys have ever gotten a Facebook account shut down before?

There’s proof you don’t own it right there. We’ve lost hundreds of them, so don’t feel bad. It’s just part of the game. So traffic control is the first thing. So whenever I got any kind of thing I’m buying, it’s traffic that I control. The second type of traffic is traffic that you earn. This is where you’re working your way in. The first one you’re buying your way in, the second one you’re working your way. So for this it means, you’re getting traffic, you’re not paying for it, but you’re earning it.

You’re getting on a podcast interview, you’re doing a Facebook live with somebody, you put out really good content and people share it. You’re earning that traffic. How many of you guys, the majority of your traffic comes from traffic that you’re earning? And how many of you guys, the majority of your traffic you’re buying? About 50/50 split. So it’s important to understand, there’s traffic you control and traffic that you earn. The third type of traffic, and this is the best and most important is traffic that you own.

My entire goal of our business, if you look at everything we’re doing from a traffic generation standpoint, is to convert traffic I can control, traffic that I earn, into traffic that I actually own. Because if you own the traffic, that’s the secret sauce. When I own it, I can do whatever I want with it. You can be like zuckerberg and you can rent it to people, you can do a product launch and sell your own products. You can do affiliate stuff, you can do whatever you want. But the goal is to own the traffic, that’s the big thing. You own the traffic, we own the platform, that’s how you win.

How many of you guys have your own platform, your own list, your own following, your own whatever? How many of you guys don’t yet and you’re like, “That’s the thingy I think I need really bad.” Okay, cool. This is the goal, this is the big secret about internet marketing. I remember when I first started learning this game I was struggling because I couldn’t figure it out. There were so many things that were happening. And this is pre all the stuff that you guys do every day. It was pre-facebook, pre-myspace, it was actually pre-friendster.

How many of you guys remember Friendster? Melanie was on Friendster, she’s still buying ads on that one. Just kidding. That was like the original social network and it was like, this is amazing, and then Myspace came out and crushed Friendster, and then Facebook came out and crushed Myspace, and soon the next thing is going to come out and crush Facebook someday, hopefully. Actually, I love Zuckerberg, I hope he keeps doing what he’s doing. But l was out there trying to figure out this whole game, and there’s so many things and I could not figure out how this whole game was played.

And one day I was at the good old Google searching for probably how to get rich on the internet or some key word like that, like a lot of us start with. And some guy wrote an article and in this article he was talking about, he’s like, “how many of you guys have seen those stories online where people say I made $30,000 in an hour, or 100,000 in a day? You probably thought those things were lies, right?” I was like, “yeah, I’m sure they’re inflating their numbers.” He’s like, “No, actually those things are true.”

And I was like, “Wait, what?” And he started explaining, he said, “This is the way it works. Imagine this, what these marketing people do is they build up a list of a thousand or ten thousand or a hundred thousand people and then they send an email to that list, and they just get a percentage, like 2 or 3% of that email to buy, and then do the math. They have 100,000 people, 2% buy a $50 product, how much is that?” It’s whatever the math is, $15,000, and if they send an email out every day, they literally can be doing what they’re talking about.

And me, as a 20 year kid, sitting in my college dorm room reading this article, I’m like, “Oh my gosh, that’s the secret. I just need my own platform. If I had my own list of people, that’s the magic.” Now I, unfortunately, went about it the wrong way. So I had that idea and I was like, “This is the key, I’m going to do it. It’s going to be amazing.” So the first thing I did, of course, I went to Google and I typed in, because I wanted my own email, so I typed in “buy an email list” and then I was reading about spam, I want to spam for email address.

So I went to a website and I think it was, spam-free email addresses dot com. I was like, this is awesome. And they were selling DVD’s of email addresses. And you could buy like a hundred thousand, a million, 5 million. I was like, “Oh my gosh. I’m going to buy 5 million, I’m going to start with the biggest platform known to man.” So I bought, I think it was $67 or $69 for a DVD with like 5 million email addresses. I was like, “Oh my gosh.” And I ordered this thing, it’s coming to me, I’m like telling my wife the math. I’m like, “Collette, okay so 5million people, let’s just say we get 1% to buy the thing we sell, 1% of 5 million,” I’m doing the math, “That’s like 100 grand every time I click send.”

And then I’m like, “wait, but let’s just say I can serve only 1% of 1%..” I’m doing the math, I’m like, “Even if we screw this up it’s like $30 grand every time I send an email out.” And I’m so excited because at the time my wife’s working, making $9.50 an hour, while I’m at school wrestling and trying to not fail. So this thing comes and I get this disc, and I remember I plugged it in and there was this software that would send the emails out for you, and I put it in and I remember queuing it up and I saw the little software of all these like 5 million emails out there. I was like, “Oh my gosh, this is amazing.”

Now, I didn’t have a product at the time, so I was like making up a product. I’m like, “What would people like to buy.” So I made up an idea for a product, I wrote an email that was probably, I don’t know, 60 words, with a link to my paypal account. Like, “Click here to send me $10 for this product.” And then that was it. I was like, “If people buy it, then I’ll go make the thing.” So I queued up the email, back then it was pre-high speed internet, so I had to crawl under the desk, unplug our phone line, plug in the internet, bleep, bleep, bleep, all that kind of stuff pops up. I’m like alright, click send. I’m like, “Collette, let’s go to bed.

By morning we are going to be rich.” I see like, “Email 1 sent, number 2, 3, 4, 5….” And I’m like, “Oh my gosh, this is it. This is going to be the greatest day of my life.” So I go to bed, all night long I’m dreaming of how many sells are going to come in the night, what’s going to happen, how amazing it’s going to be. And I wake up in the morning, and Collette’s getting ready for work because she’s still working at the time, and I’m just telling her, “I haven’t looked at the stats yet, but my guess is you can probably quit after today. If a just a fraction of a fraction of a fraction buy, that’s more than you make in an entire month.

This is going to be amazing.” So I’m all excited, telling her the whole story. And then she’s like, “Okay, I gotta use the phone.” I’m like, “You can’t use the phone.” This is pre-cell phones too. “You can’t use the phone, it’s mailing..” I look at the thing, $65,000 emails have been sent. “you can’t.” She’s like, “I have to call, I have to use the phone.” I’m like, “Ugh, you’re going to ruin everything.” So I crawl under the, pause the mailing thing, I crawl under the desk, unplug the modem, plug back in our phone line, and while I’m still under the desk the phone rings. I stood up and hit my head and I’m like, “Oh, dangit.”

So come out under the thing, answer the phone, and on the other end is my internet service provider cursing me out on the phone. “What are you doing? Why are you sending these?” I’m like, “No, no, no, sir, I didn’t send spam.” He’s like, “No, you sent out tons of spam.” I’m like, “No, you don’t understand, I bought this DVD, it was called spam free email addresses dot com. You can go check out the site, they’re completely spam free.” I explained the whole thing to him. I still remember he told me, he’s like, “Son, that is the definition of spam.” And I was like, “what? Their spam free.” And he’s like, “How do you think that, that’s not a thing. You can’t buy spam free email addresses.” And I’m like, “But the domain name….” and we were going back and forth.

And he’s telling me he was going to sue me and a bunch of stuff, but the last thing was, “I’m shutting down your internet.” And then it was gone. I hung up the phone and then Collette’s like, “Who was that on the phone?” I’m like, “Oh just some guy who had some questions about the thing. You shouldn’t quit yet though. Let’s just go to work, enjoy it, we’ll recap in the morning or tonight when you get back.” So she leaves out the door to go to work and I’m sitting there, and I can’t even check to see what happened because our internet is now gone.

I have no access to even get back on. So I’m all depressed, I get ready for school, I go to the school and I get to school and I get to the computer lab, and I’m like, “I’m going to check to see what happened.” And I log in, still in kind of a depressed state, and I open my email, and then my email though, I see order notification from paypal, order notification paypall. Boom, boom, boom, boom, probably 20-25 orders had come through for like $10 apiece through paypal. I was like, “Oh my gosh, it worked. I gotta go create a product.”

So I had to go back and figure out what I sold and make something to send out to these people. And I realized at the time, what I did was wrong, I didn’t understand the ethics or how to do it, I did it wrong. But what happened was right. The goal was to get a platform, an email list, to get something. And that was the whole secret to the game. So after that was done, I went and found a new internet service provider and I spent the next year of my life trying to figure out how I build a list the right way, where it’s not going to end me up in jail. There’s got to be a way to do it. What I learned is basically this process.

I can buy ads, I gotta send them somewhere to join my list, or I can go work my, do things, and get people to come to my website and give me the email, but that was the goal. So I started focusing from that point forward on building my email list. That was my core focus, building a list, building a list, building a list. And I started growing it. It’s been interesting, that concept of list building became my whole life. I started looking, over the last 15 years I’ve been doing this, I’ve see a lot of people who have built huge companies, are no longer in our industry.

Now back at their day jobs trying to survive. And I’ve seen things over and over and over again. How many of you guys remember back in the day when Adsense first started and it was like Christmas every day? A couple of you guys. So let me paint this picture. So this is in the middle of me trying to build my list, my first mentor, his name is Mark Joyner. He’s like, “Focus on a list, focus on a list.” I’m like, focusing on a list. And all the sudden this shiny object pops out of nowhere called adsense, and what adsense was back in the day, you could buy this software for $97, there was a couple of them, Traffic Equalizer, there were probably a dozen or so that ended up coming out.

You load up software on the computer, you click a button, it would go out there and it would pick a keyword, so let’s say whatever, it would find a keyword that people were paying a lot of money on, go to the internet, scrape all the sites that have written about that, pull them in, and then you publish a site and have like 8,000 pages in like a minute. And then it would put ads in all the site, and because of the way it structured the pages, Google would instantly index it and you started making money.

It was like the easiest, most stupid way to make money. We had teams of people in the Philippians, like 30-40 people, that all day sat there and build another site, build another site, build another site. Just cranking out sites like crazy. Not me, a lot of my friends, they built these assembly lines of people doing that. I had friends making a half a million bucks a month or more just cranking out crappy little sites. And it was amazing for about a year, year and a half.

And so I’m watching all these people make so much money, and I’m over here building a list, building a list, and stressing out because I’m seeing all these people make all this money. I’m like, “I’m just going to do that, that’s easy. It takes no effort at all.” And my mentor, Mark, was luckily like, “No dude, focus on building a list, this will go away.” I’m like, “No, you don’t understand. This is the greatest thing in the world. It’s going to change….$500,000 a month..” How many of you guys would that radically shift your life right now?

Yeah, I was just like, “And they’re doing nothing, providing zero value to the world. They’re just clicking a button over and over and over again. I could get a million button clickers. I’m going to be the first adsense billionaire.” And he’s like, “No, build a list, build a list.” And I’m like torn. And luckily for me, I’m really coachable. So I’m like, “Fine, I’ll build the stupid list.” So I’m doing this, and sure enough about a year later, boom, the algorithm changed, Google found all the software that was building the sites, deindexed every single page, and I had friends go from half a million dollars a month to zero over night.

I was like, “Oh my gosh.” But guess what I had? I had been building my list and it didn’t affect me. Now anyone who knows my story, who here thinks that I’ve always done everything right in my business? Only Dave. I haven’t. So what happened is I built my company up really, really big, and then I bankrupted it almost. Luckily both times I didn’t. The second time I built it even bigger and then I almost bankrupted, I’ve told those stories before, at Funnel Hacking Live.

But what’s interesting, the thing that got me through the ups and the downs every single time was this platform I’d built, this list. I got to the point where everything is collapsing around me, I could still send emails to my list and people would buy because we have a relationship, and it kept us through the down times. So when you do this and build a platform, it’s the key. I still see today, it’s unfortunate, I still see today people in our industry who get the next object where they’re like, “Oh, I can do this thing.”

And they start buying Facebook ads to sell this, and doing this, and doing things like that, but they’re not focusing on the fundamentals. The fundamentals are what will protect you over the long haul. The reason why I’m still in business 15 years later, and a lot of the people I know that have made a crap ton of money along the way aren’t, is because this has been my focal point, building the platform, building the platform. So why do you need a platform?

The platform is the key for so many reasons. How many of you guys watch the Apprentice, back when it was still on? How many of you saw the season where Arsenio Hall was on the show? How many of you guys have no idea who Arsenio hall is? Okay, for the younger generation, Arsenio Hall was a dude that had his own late night show. He’d come out and get everyone excited and be like, “woo, woo, woo.”

And get everyone pumped up, and he was the man on late night for, I don’t know, a decade or so. So then his show got cut, and then he’s like normal Arsenio Hall, no one heard from him, and then 20 years later he pops up on Celebrity Apprentice because at one time he was a celebrity apparently. It was fascinating, they’re on celebrity apprentice, competing with all these other celebrities. And there was this one task that was like a fund raising task, where they had to go and raise money.

So they’re all going through and trying to raise money for their charities and Arsenio is back there, he’s got his rolodex of people and he’s calling the first person, the second person, the third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth, tenth, and what’s interesting, while all the other celebrities were doing deals, Arsenio couldn’t get anyone to return his call, couldn’t get anyone to pick up the call or anything.

And it shows him that night, sitting on the couch and he’s all depressed and frustrated and upset, and they’re talking about it. And they’re like, “dude, you’re Arsenio Hall, how come you can’t get any money?” He’s like, “I don’t know man. When I had my own show, everybody returned my call and now nobody will.” And when I heard that, I was like, “Oh my gosh, what a lesson that is.”

Some of you guys are starting the dream 100 right now at the very beginning, you don’t have this platform, and it’s tough. It’s tough initially to get people to return your calls, to say yes, to look at your vox, whatever those things are. At first it’s hard right. But when you have a platform, everyone returns your call. When I first met Tony Robbins back in the day, my platform was little tiny. I even became friends with Tony, we hung out for 10 years, and Tony never promoted me, we were just kind of, I got to know him, a couple of times we hung out and helped consult him, that was while my platform got bigger, and bigger, and bigger.

Last year we launched Expert Secrets book, I was like, “Hey Tony, will you help me promote this book?” And Tony’s like, “Russell’s platform is huge. Yes, Russell. I would love to.” There are few people in our world right now that I couldn’t pick up the phone and be like, “Hey can you help me do this deal?” Because they know my platform is huge.

And because of that, they will say yes. So the dream 100 gets better and better and better as you build your platform. At first it’s going to be more difficult, but as you focus on this building your platform, it becomes easier and easier and easier, because the bigger your platform is, the more likely people are to return your call. So this should be the focus, again, if I come back to this. Everything you focus on is this, traffic you control, buying ads, traffic I earn, earning ads and we’re going to go deeper into this in a minute, but the goal of both of those is to turn it into your own platform.

Now platform can mean a lot of things. When I got started, all a platform was, was your email list. I still think focusing on email is one of the most important things because if an email service provider shuts you down you can move your email list to another. So that’s an asset that can follow you. But your platform is also different things like, how many of you guys are on Instagram right now? Your Instagram following is a platform. How many of you guys have a podcast right now? Your podcast listeners are a following.

How many of you guys have a Facebook following? YouTube subscribers? All those things are platforms. So what I’m going to be talking about, and I’m going to break this down, the platform doesn’t always have to be one thing. In fact, usually there’s a platform on each of these different channels that we’re going to talk about. And you should be building more than one. But the biggest problem I have with other ones is like, the reason I like email so much is because, again, if you get shut down you can move it.

If Facebook shuts you down, you’re done. If YouTube shuts down your channel because you did something aggressive, you can’t do much about it. So always focusing on email is one, but then a secondary and more as we go through is a big piece of it. So that’s the key, building your platform. Alright, so that’s the first step here. Step number two, so now that you have got this stuff figured out, and I’m going to go deeper into this. All these things will kind of layer upon each other and the end will be this beautiful picture like, oh crap, that’s what it is. This is so much easier than I thought.

Okay, so this is the first part. What I want to do, I want to kind of, before we go deep back into this part right here, I want to go deeper on this right here. So you have your own platform, what most people don’t think through, all they’re thinking about is themselves initially. Like, I’m going to build a platform, have a big email list, a big podcast, a big whatever…

That’s our focus, because that’s who we are as entrepreneurs. We like significance, we want a big, huge following. But what I wish I would have done, from day number one when I first got started in this business is spend more time thinking about the person. Who do I actually want on my list? If you read the Dotcom Secrets book, the very introduction in here I talk about you finding your dream customer. I talked about for me, I had 5 or 6 years in my business and one day I woke up and I was depressed.

I was so upset, I wished, I remember sitting there in bed, laying there thinking, “I wish I had a boss so they could fire me, so I could separate myself from my customers.” But unfortunately I had built a company, I had built a platform, but the people who were in my platform were not people who I wanted to serve every single day, and it can be depressing. I promise you, if you build the wrong platform, it can be really, really frustrating when you show up one day and you’re like, “I hate my customers.” How many of you guys have ever hated your customers before?

So many of you. Good, I’m glad I’m the only one. It’s tough. If you don’t think through who is my dream customer ahead of time, you’re going to wake up one day with a customer that you hate. So I want you thinking like, who is my dream customer? Who is that person I’m trying to serve? So what I want to do, I want to talk about your dream customer’s journey. So who is my dream customer? I want to understand their journey. So the first thing I’m going to do, I’m gonna draw a picture here. So this is your dream customer. How many of you guys know who your dream customer is in your mind?

You’re like, “I know exactly who that person is.” If you don’t, I encourage you. People are like, “Uh, I want to serve awesome people.” Spend time actually thinking through this. Who do I actually want to serve? Who is that person? What do they look like? What are their fears? What are they excited about? What is the pain that they are trying to get away from, and what is the pleasure they’re trying to move towards? If you ever studied NLP you learn a really cool thing about the human mind. All humans are doing one of two things, number one they’re trying to move away from pain, and number two they try to move towards pleasure.

And what’s interesting, most people are more dominant on one or the other. I’m curious, how many of you guys make most of your core decision because you’re trying to move away from pain in your life? You’re trying to lose weight so you’re moving away from pain in that. You want to make money here because you want to get rid of your boss. You’re in pain and you want to move away from pain. How many of you guys make most of your decisions based on moving away from pain?

Now the other side, you make choices like, I’m moving towards pleasure. I want that nice car. I want to have six pack abs for the girls. I want to have all these things like that. How many of you guys make your choices moving towards pleasure? Interesting, it’s like 50/50 in this room. Typically, what I find in an entrepreneurial room, most entrepreneurs make their choices towards pleasure, not all but most of them do.

Whereas in the real world, most humans make their decisions moving away from pain. But regardless, you as someone who is going to be serving this dream customer, you have to know what those things are. What is the pain they’re trying to get out of? You have to think about that and figure it out. What is that pain they’re trying to get out of? If you don’t know what that is, it’s going to be really hard for you to serve them. The second thing is like, what’s the pleasure they’re trying to move towards? What is it that they actually want? What’s that thing that, the biggest desires they have?

You have to know that, you have to know everything about that with your dream customer. The next thing I want you guys to think about and this is going to come into a lot of the dream 100 stuff here in a minute. If you draw a timeline of your dream customer’s life, this is all the stuff that they’re dealing with before you come to them, and this is all the stuff they’re dealing with after. So as I start building out my dream 100 list, I look at my customer and I’m like, let’s say for me, I sell funnels. Do you guys know that’s what I sell?

Okay, so that’s what I sell, so my dream customer, they need a funnel. But what do they need before they need a funnel? Most people more and more are like, “I need a funnel.” But what do they need before they need a funnel. Before they need a funnel they need, so I’m thinking about what’s the thing they need before they get my funnel? And what do they need before that, and before that, and before that? I’m taking them backwards on this journey.

So if they’re going to get a funnel, before they get a funnel they probably need a business maybe. Somebody here got that they needed a business. Maybe they needed a logo, they need branding, they need…..there’s probably things that happened before they come to me and they’re ready for me. And then after they’ve got a funnel, what are things they need after they have a funnel? They might need traffic, they might need graphic design, they have other things afterwards. So I look at this customer journey, where’s my customer at?

So this is the first phase. How many of you guys have ever thought about this before? Jay Abraham taught me this initially, he said, “Look, if you’re trying to find joint venture partners, or dream 100, the first thing you got to think about is will your product or your service fit in the timeline of your dream customer? And you gotta figure out what are all the services they need before they come to you?

And what are all the services they need after they come to you?” When we identify that, we know exactly who your partners are, right? So if I go to somebody else who is selling funnel software, which is like right here, which is where most people go. If I’m selling weight loss product, why would they promote my weight loss product if they have one too?

They probably won’t because they’re selling the same thing. You’ve got to go on this customer journey prior to that, before they wanted weight loss, what else did they get? What did they need? Maybe they had high blood pressure, oh my gosh, if they have high blood pressure, maybe I could dream 100 all the people who have a list with high blood pressure, because that’s something they need before they lose weight.

So I’m looking at this customer journey, like what are the things that are happening before they come to me? And the things that happen after? Because that’s where you’re going to fit in. Your dream 100 partners are going to be better here and here probably, than the other place away. Alright guys, thank you for listening to the first of the three parts of my presentation at Dream 100 Con. I hope you enjoyed it.

Hopefully it’s getting the wheels in your head spinning about traffic and kind of how traffic works. Tomorrow I will give you guys part two. Thanks so much and we’ll see you guys tomorrow.

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