Are You Publishing Or Promoting?

How to make the shift from a “promoting” company to a “publishing” company!

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Hey everyone, this is Russell Brunson, on a cold, foggy morning, here in Boise, Idaho, and welcome to the Marketing In Your Car podcast. Hey everyone, so I have not done a podcast in a while because I’ve been listening to a new course on my drives that Perry Belcher put out called The Secret Selling System. And it’s amazing, so if you’re looking for a course to go through on how to sell better, I would say by far it’s probably the best.

One of them, like, the top two or three courses I’ve gone through in the history of my life. It’s really that good. So, I highly recommend it. Anyway, so I wanted to talk what’s been going on in my mind, a little bit, because we are in December now. My twins just celebrated their eighth birthday, last Wednesday. We had a huge party.

And the year is winding down. I have about one more week with my staff, also going on vacations for Christmas, and just planning and preparing for next year. And I wanted to kind of just share with you one of the big epiphanies I had for myself. And it may be an epiphany for you as well, so I thought I would share it.

So I talked a little bit of our couponing company that we bought about a year and a half ago, and it didn’t really do too much. We kind of fixed up the site and stuff, and it was sitting there. I didn’t really have the time or energy to spend on it, so I really didn’t do too much to it. And it was kind of stagnant. It was only making about $300 a month.

And that was kind of frustrating. And then, I was able to recruit Xan Spencer and Jenn Spencer. Who, if any of you guys have followed me at all you know that they are one of our huge success stories who went into the hair bone niche. Now we’re making $30,000 a month, and then they sold the site. Anyway, I recruited them to come and help us on this project.

And they came in and the very first month they came in, we went from $300 to $6000. They sent me an income report last night for December, and we are officially half way through December and they’re already at $3800 and it’s growing rapidly. And I think that in the near future, that site will be making $40, $50, $60,000 a month. And it’s exciting.

And what’s interesting is I look at the way we’re monetizing that site and it has very little to do with selling your own products. It’s all about publishing. And we’re publishing offers for people in the couponing niche. People who are looking for discounts and deals. And all we do is we find deals and we post them. And we’re posting 10, 20, 30 deals a day on Facebook.

And then each day we send one email that recaps all the 30 deals we found for the day. And that’s kind of the business model. And it’s really interesting, because that was the big change we took, was going from where we were posting once or twice a day to like 30 a day. And Xan went in, and Xan is really good researching.

He went to all the other couponing sites in our space, and looked at how many average posts per day they have. And most of them are posting 30, 40 times a day. That’s how they’re making so much money. And have huge followings, obviously. So our old strategy in business is, boom, first off, build a bigger fan base, second off, publish things more often. And that really got me to start thinking about my core dot com secrets business.

And we’re really a publishing company as well, except we have our own products, but what do I publish? What do I —I mean, outside of the page stuff we have, like, we are not publishing that much stuff, you know? I may make a post to Facebook once or twice a week. I may send out three or four emails a week, and that’s only when we’re out there publishing, like free stuff.

And I started thinking, like, if I started treating this less like an internet marketing business where I’m selling stuff, and more like a publishing company, where we’re publishing things. We’re publishing offers, we’re publishing information, content, and looking at it from that standpoint, I realized that, you know, because of things like Facebook, we don’t have to — you know, email.

If I were to send you guys 30 emails a day you would get upset. But on Facebook, if I post 30 times a day, it doesn’t really matter. Only the things that really relate to you will rise to the top, and the ones that you click on and the ones that you scroll through. And because there’s so much noise, so much stuff, like, the way to win in social media, I believe, is you’ve always got to be top of mind.

If you’re posting once a day, you are not top of mind, okay? You need to go from $300 a month to $6000 a month in one month, and all it was, was being top of mind. Having, every time they’re looking at Facebook page, we’re there. Over and over and over and over and over again, which is exactly what they want. And so, I think one of the big changes for me, this upcoming year, coming January, is I’m taking some outsourcers who were doing SEO stuff before, and I don’t really believe in SEO anymore.

And we’re just going to kind of let them go, but now shifting to like we’re a publishing company. Let’s talk about this, and so I’m going to have one of our guys who full time, all he does — because Filipinos are obviously different hours than me, is while I’m asleep, he can go and research my topic. Let’s say, like, this week I’m going to be talking about copywriting or about whatever.

And he’ll go out and find blog posts and articles and just constantly, every day, be finding me 10 or 20 or 30 new resources on that topic. And he’ll be pulling in all of this aggregate information for me. Giving it to me, so I’ll wake up in the morning and look at it all, and from that, I’m going to block about an hour to two hours a day where I’m just focused on publishing stuff.

I’m going to take these articles, I’m going to turn them into blog posts, I’m going to turn them into Facebook posts and, you know, cue them up so that throughout the day there’s 20, 30 posts going out. All there is, just giving me awesome information about that topic that we’re talking about. And I will be pushing people to the thing we’re selling. So, for example, we’re going to be having a visible webinar, there’s topic based ones, twice a month.

So one of them is going to be Inception secrets, which is my copywriting course. So for two weeks, I have these guys find everything they can find about copywriting and ads and all this stuff I can be posting for free. And all these things will be pushing people to our live copywriting course, will be happening. And then I’ll be publishing the stuff on Facebook.

So 20, 30 times a day, everyone who is following me, people we’re advertising to, that we’re targeting on Facebook, will be seeing this content we’re publishing, that again, all brings back to our core topic. And if you think about it, if 30, 20, maybe 10, I don’t know how many times a day we’ll do it, say 10 times a day.

There is a new cool exciting copywriting thing that we posted, all of them pushing back to our thing that we’re targeting copywriters. You know, within a week’s period of time we should be able to get 2 or 3 or 400 people to join us on our live class. And that’s kind of my game plan, and so, I think one of the big shifts for me is that I’m going to be shifting away from my promotional company, which is where I think us and most information people are.

And switching to a publishing company where we are actually publishing content and information, and putting it out there, consistently. And making us the lead magnets so we’re bringing people back to our offers. And that’s kind of where my mind has been at, and I’m trying to kind of organize and create that machine right now. I still have one Filipino who all he’ll be doing is just finding topic ideas and interesting things for me to write about.

And then after I make the post, then I have another Filipino who, his job then will be to promote. We’ve got John and Shirley who will put everything on Facebook, but then there are so many other avenues and ways and places to go and promote that. Each blog post, each content, everything at that, and he’ll be focusing on the mass distribution from that side.

And so, that’s what I’m kind of doing right now. I’m shifting myself away from a promotion company and turning it into a publishing company. And I think that by doing that, where we’re putting out so much value and information and ideas, that I think on the other side of it it’s going to have a lot of big, hug, positive impact on everything, including our SEO, which is kind of funny.

It will be the sneaky way we do SEO. So, that’s my game plan moving forward next year, you guys. I recommend, and I highly encourage all of you guys to become publishing companies as well, in whatever niche you’re in. We’re doing the same thing with neuropathy, we’re going to do the same thing in our weight loss. All the businesses we’re doing, we’re doing the exact same thing, and you guys should be too.

So that’s the game plan, everyone. Thanks so much and have a great Christmas. Hopefully I’ll do another podcast before then, but if not, we wish you Merry Christmas, and thanks, you guys, and talk soon.