Are You Watching The Magician’s Hands?

A quick glimpse behind the WHY of this funnel…

On today’s episode Russell goes on a mini tour of his new office and podcasts from two conference rooms and the kitchen. He talks about how you need to watch a magician’s hands to figure out what he’s doing, and how that relates to being a marketer.

Here are some of the cool things to listen for in this episode:

• What it means to be a magician in marketing.
• Why Russell buys other people’s products that he doesn’t need, and why you should buy his Marketing In Your Car MP3 player, even if you don’t need it.
• And why it’s good to grow a business organically, but it’s better to push it along faster by buying ads.

So listen below to find out why you need to be looking at a magicians hands instead of getting distracted by what he wants you to see.

---Transcript---

What’s up everybody, this is Russell, welcome to Marketing In Your Car. Now this is a special episode because I’m not in my car. In fact, I’m at the brand new office. We moved in this week and it’s insanely cool and I’m not only in the office, I’m in an actual conference room, which is the first thing I’ve done in this conference room is actually talk on this podcast. I’m looking out and everybody is working. We all have standing and sitting desks. So everybody out here working standing and sitting. So exciting.

Anyway, if you haven’t seen yet, I’ve been Snapchatting and I’ll probably Facebook Live Friday. Friday we get the big Clickfunnels sign in the office, which looks so cool. So as soon as that’s here I’ll Facebook Live this whole place so you guys can see it. You can see the bookshelf and everything.

What’s cool, Monday and Tuesday we had a certification event here in Boise. We were supposed to do it here in the office initially, but we didn’t think we were going to get the office done in time, so we moved it back to a hotel. Then Tuesday, at certification I make everyone do a hack-a-thon, which they stay up  all night building funnels. Part of the cult-ture that we’re trying to do is you need to get crap done, you just pull an all nighter and just get it done. So we taught them that and they did it.

And then on Tuesday they went and presented all their funnels and everything and we gave away awards and it was cool. Tuesday morning I woke up like, man these guys have been killing themselves. How cool would be if they actually got to come to the office. So we chartered a bus, had the bus drive to downtown Boise, pick them up and bring them back. And now they’re…….

Anyway, they came to the office last night and it was so much fun to have everyone here and showing off the new stuff. People were like, “Is that really your bookshelf? Are those all your books?” And I’m like, “Yeah, I’m kind of a nerd. Sorry about that.”

Anyway, it was so much fun. So now, today we’re here. This is the first day we’ll actually work the whole day. Everybody’s here and it’s exciting. One big fear I have is we have our FHAT event coming up Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday next week in the big conference room which is amazing. But it’s got echo. I don’t know if you hear echo in here. This is the conference room and it’s kind of echo in here as well. We have a sound engineer coming to try to figure out how to put up paneling and stuff so we won’t have those issues. But the problem is it’s like 2 to 4 weeks to get those things fixed. So that kind of stresses me out a little bit on that side. Hopefully we get some of it figured out. We’ve got people coming and they’re going to be hanging up sound panels and things like that in the conference room.

Anyway, someone just came in the conference room so I’m going to walk out here. Now I’m going into the kitchen. The kitchen also has got a lot of echo in here as well. But we designed this because we do a lot of videos in the kitchen, so we made it a really nice kitchen so we can do videos and stuff in here. So it should be pretty office.

So now I’m wandering. So fun to wander around the office, now I’m in the conference room. So anyway, I wish you guys could see what I’m doing, probably more interesting than hearing me talk about it. But it’s so exciting.

So what I want to talk about today, yesterday the Marketing In Your Car free MP3 player offer, we were paying affiliates $20 to give away a free MP3 player, and I think it ended last night at midnight. It’s been fun watching a lot of our affiliates promote it and then seeing people’s feedback. Tim Castleman, one of my buddies, he’s been promoting it. He’s like, “Just go buy it, you guys. Why are you not buying it?” and people are commenting why they’re not buying it. It made me laugh so hard. These are all people trying to learn marketing. And they’re trying to figure this whole thing out. They’re studying, learning, following Tim, following me, following people and they’re like, “that offer didn’t make sense to me. I don’t really want an MP3 player. I need to subscribe for free on iTunes.” All these things, all these reasons why they wouldn’t buy.

It made me laugh because we’ve sold a lot of them. I think we’ve sold, we’re almost at 4 thousand sold, which is cool. What we’re finding is for every single person who’s buying an MP3 player, probably 5 or 6 people are subscribing to the podcast, even if they’re not buying. So if you watch, I don’t know if you guys are watching, but if you go to iTunes right now, and you go to the business section, we’ve been in the top ten ever since this thing has launched. The business section is hard to get in the top ten.

Tony Robins is not in the top ten. Eric Ward is not in the top ten. All these legends are not in the top ten. Neil Patel is not in the top ten, we’ve been in the top ten for the last 2 or 3 weeks now. And it’s like, I want, since you guys are my best people. You’re hanging out, you’re here listening, I want to reveal, show the curtain, behind the scenes of what’s happening.

You know how they say, magicians are doing a trick, but he’s distracting you with stuff so you don’t see what’s actually happening, so you don’t see his hands move when he’s doing whatever that thing is that makes the trick possible. So he’s doing misdirection stuff and leading you places and stuff like that. With marketing, it’s kind of fun, my job. Most businesses is, it’s like you’re doing marketing, selling your product. Whereas, I’m doing marketing, selling my stuff. But for those who are watching, I’m hoping you are watching. Watching my hands, watching what the magician is actually doing because that’s the most valuable lesson.

Me giving my MP3 player, pre-loaded episodes is kind of a cool little thing, but why did I do that. Why am I doing that? What’s the magician actually doing and watching that. I always tell people, I buy everybody’s products. Usually I do not go through most of the products, but I’m buying because I want to see what the magicians are doing. What do they learn? If you saw the stuff I’m buying. You’d be like, “Russell, why are you buying another weight loss course?” and I’m like, “Because the weight loss dudes are really good at funnels.”

“Why are you buying a thing on stocks? You don’t even know what the stock market is?” I’m like, “I know, I have no idea how to do stocks. I don’t even want to know how to do stocks. But the stock guys are really good at funnels, so I want to watch what they’re doing.” I want to see what the magician is doing. So for those who are listening and those who are paying attention, and I hope you guys are paying attention, is watch these processes. Don’t say, “I didn’t buy Russell’s MP3 player because I don’t want an MP3 player. I’d never listen to it anyway.” Dude there’s a lesson here.

I’m not just doing these things for fun. I’m creating things and testing things and if they’re working, you’ll see me keep pushing them and keep pushing them. I look at right now, our podcast has grown insanely over the last little bit. We’re in the top ten, we’re consistently in the top ten, which is amazing. We’re getting tons of, I mean tens of thousands of downloads a day, which is amazing. And it’s because these things we’re doing, if you’re not watching, if you’re not looking you will miss it.

It was kind of cool, I did a podcast interview last week with Paul Colligan, who’s the podcasting guy and he’ll be, I think it goes live to day. And Paul is someone who’s watching the magician. He messaged me like, “Dude, I’ve seen your podcast funnel, I gotta know what and why.” It was really cool. A really cool podcast with him, kind of explaining. All of his followers are podcasters. Podcasters are out there and they’re trying to create good content to organically grow.

And I’m like, “Organic growth is good, but it’s hard.” I did a podcast every day for 3 years. We had 300+ episodes while I was organically growing it, it was good, we got followers, we got traction, but it wasn’t until I created something that I could stimulate with paid ads that it grew dramatically.

So for you guys, looking at that, look I can go on a blog all day long, but if I can’t stimulate with paid ads, man that’s a long time. Same with podcasting or whatever it is for you. But for this funnel, for the one you guys went through, a lot of you guys to get here. That was the vehicle, was the podcasting funnel. And it was a way for me to be able to pay for ads. And he, Paul basically was like, “There’s nobody that can do this. You’re the only person that can pay for subscribers profitably.”

I’m like, “Yeah, because of the model.” Anyway, I hoping you guys again, are watching the magician’s hand. Because prior to that we’d try to grow Marketing In Your Car and what we were doing is we were buying Facebook ads, trying to get people to subscribe. I’d ask John, “How many subscribers did we get from the Facebook ads?” And he’s like, “I have no idea. There’s no way to track it through iTunes.” He was like, “I’m basically just crossing my fingers and hoping that somebody subscribes.” We have no way to track it and test it. We’re just dumping money at it and crossing our fingers. That’s a horrible way to do business, stupidest thing in the world. That’s what branding guys do. That’s what companies that are backed by VC cash do. They just burn cash and they’re stupid.

Funnel hackers like us, we’re smarter. We’re looking at the ROI and it’s like, I had to create this thing to be able to create the ROI. So what’s cool about it, right now we’re driving traffic through these funnels. We’re paying affiliates $20 to give away a free MP3 player. But we know our metrics and we’re profitable on the front end. I think we’re close to about $30, might be a little lower than that. Somewhere around $30 we’re making. And we’re spending $20 to affiliates, but our ads are making about $10 – 15 to sell an MP3 player.

If you look at that, we pay for the ads, we pay affiliates, get the MP3 player, we’re profitable so we actually make a little money there. Not a lot, but enough to cover our costs. Then after we’ve covered those costs, like I said, a big percentage of people come to the page, never buy the MP3 player, but then subscribe to the podcast.

And everyone who’s, again iTunes doesn’t give us the best numbers possible. But based on my guestimations, for every single person that’s subscribing to, or that’s buying the MP3 player, we’re getting 4 or 5 people that are subscribing to the podcast as well. So I’m paying for that growth profitably. It doesn’t cost me anything.

So anyway, I just wanted to kind of lay that out for the guys who are paying attention and just thinking through that. Because organic is good, but if I could stimulate that with paid and be profitable with it, that’s great. That’s how I build a company fast. That’s how I do it without VC cash and all the other crap we’ve been told you need to do to build a company. You don’t if you’re smart, the market will back you. They’ll cover for you.  That’s the magic of funnel hacking, what we all do.

With that said, you guys. I appreciate you. I’m going to bounce. Get back to work and probably do some more podcasts from the office, find different cool locations and go from there. Thanks everybody. Talk to you guys soon.