Dealing With The Haters…

“If you haven’t offended someone by noon each day, then you aren’t marketing hard enough…” -Dan Kennedy

---Transcript---

Hey, everyone. This is Russell Brunson from DotComSecrets.com, and this is the “Marketing in Your Car” podcast. I’m actually heading to the office right now. It’s a little early today, because I’ve got a fun project I’m working on, and I wanted to get started before anyone else showed up.

Today I wanted to talk about something that hit me last night. The title of this podcast would be what we call “Dealing with the Haters.” If you guys watch “The Office,” which is wrapping up its last season, this week they had an episode where, they’ve been filming The Office for the last ten years as a being kind of like a reality show, and they released the trailer of that reality show on YouTube.

It was funny, because after they released it, all of these comments started coming in. One of the people mentions Andy Bernard and says, “Andy, are you the guy playing the banjo at minute 6:31? That guy is awesome.” He gets all excited and starts commenting back to people, and then when he does, someone comes back and says, “No, he’s not. He’s not cool. He’s stupid. We hate him,” and Andy takes this so personally. He’s like, “Arg!” and he starts responding back, and then the guy’s responding back to him, and there’s a big huge fight that’s going back and forth. Andy makes all of these personal response videos, and the people that hate him are going back and forth with him. It’s just the funniest thing how he deals with all of the people that hate him [laughs] and how it affected him so much.

I know what he’s talking about, because I had something like that happen last night, at the end of my day, and it just kind of put me in the wrong mood for a while. Now it actually got me into an even better mood today, because I had someone that sent me – and I get stuff like that. Anyone who’s out there, you’re going to get hate mail every once in a while, and I got some yesterday. Usually I don’t see that kind of stuff, but somehow they got to my personal e-mail inbox and so it really frustrated me.

Anyway, it was interesting because stuff like that used to really, really be hard for me. In fact, I used to do all of my own customer support, and there was a time when I was ready to just quit because I’m like, “I’m out here serving, and doing my best, and trying to help people as much as I can, and people are sending me hate mail. I don’t get it.”

I remember I had a mentor named Dan Kennedy, and I heard him say something once that really helped me a lot, so I’m putting this out here for you guys. If you’re in the limelight at all with your business, you’re going to get some of this. Dan Kennedy said that if you haven’t offended somebody by noon every day, then you’re not marketing hard enough. When he said that, it really gave me permission to blow those people off, and I want to give you guys that same permission.

When I was working with Tony Robbins, one thing he said to me was really interesting He said that there’s two ways to build the tallest building in town. The first way is to go out there and put a lot of sweat and effort and all of this stuff into something, and build the tallest building in town. The second way is to go around to everybody else’s buildings and knock them down, and that way you’re the tallest one.

That’s really the way that people are. Most people do not want to go out there and work their butts off to build the tallest building. They want to go and tear everybody else’s down because it makes them feel bigger, and that’s kind of how I felt with this thing yesterday. It was funny. They guy sent a nasty e-mail, “F-bomb this,” and what a horrible scumbag I am and all sorts of stuff. At first I couldn’t figure it out, like, “Who in the world is this guy?” I couldn’t figure out what he was talking about. Finally I realized that he was commenting on a promotion we did.

For those who are on some of our lists, we did this really cool local marketing webinar series where we had seven of the top local marketing experts in the world come on and basically show you exactly what they did in their business, and reveal the behind the scenes and show everything. They did each one of them like a two- or a three-hour webinar, so in all we had twenty hours of webinars. People could get on the webinars for free when they were live, and then at the end of the webinar, some of the speakers sold stuff, which is obviously how we monetized it.

What we did is we offered replays. –“We’re not showing anybody the replays, so if you want the replay, you’ve got to pay for it. It’s $97. You get the replay of all seven events, then you can go back and you can rewind it, you can listen to it, and learn all kinds of stuff. Plus as an extra bonus, I’m going to transcribe all seven of these events, so if you’re the kind of person that likes to read along, you can have the transcripts with it.”

I thought it was a good offer. I think for someone like me, I’d be like, “Man, if I can hear twenty hours of people doing the business that I want to be doing or the business that I am doing – seven people, some of the best in the world, and then I can actually have replays. I can watch it over and over and over again, and I can read the transcripts. That’s valuable to me.”

And so we priced it at $97, which I thought was a steal, and that’s what this guy was so upset about, saying basically, “How in the world dare you sell something digital for $97 where people can just… It’s something that’s just streaming off of your website. You shouldn’t be doing that,” and on and on and on and on. I was just shocked, and again, it really offended me at first. Then last night and this morning as I was getting ready, I was like, “You know what? He’s coming in and trying to knock down the tallest building in town. Why doesn’t he go out and provide his own value? Why doesn’t he go out and do something, as opposed to coming in here and just yelling at me and other people?”

It made me feel a little bit better, so I wanted to give you guys permission, right now, that if you get hate mail, if you get people that are upset or frustrated, don’t pull an Andy Bernard. Don’t go and complain and fight back and comment back on YouTube videos and stuff like that. Just ignore it, and then give yourself permission, like I said, from Dan Kennedy, “If you haven’t offended somebody by noon each day, you’re not marketing hard enough.” Let me give you that permission to go out there and do what you need to do. Just stop focusing on the people that don’t like you, and focus on the people that you’re serving. Focus on people whose lives are changing because of the good, the value, and the things you’re putting out there in the world.

We had over 10,000 people register for that webinar series. We’ve got hundreds of people sending e-mails and thanking us and success stories and all sorts of stuff coming in from it, and then there’s one dude who’s upset because we’re selling the replays. Don’t focus on the one dude that’s going to make you upset. Be grateful that you upset him, because that means you’re working hard. Focus on the people who love you. Focus on providing value to them.

I hope that helps you guys, and that’s about it. I’m at the office. I’ve got a fun day ahead of me today, so I’m excited. I hope you guys do, as well. If not, find a new job. Find a new line of work. Do something that you’re so passionate about. Right now, at 6:25 in the morning – I woke up early today, because I’m so excited to come in and start working on this project. Find something you’re that passionate about, and if you’re not yet, just go out there and seek it. You don’t have to do whatever you’re doing right now.

I have a close friend of mine who I love and care about a lot. He told me flat out, “This is what I wish I could do with my life,” and I said, “Why don’t you do that?” He said, “Well, I can’t because this.” He always had an excuse for why he couldn’t do it. He said, “I used to envy you, Russell, because you go out there, and you just do whatever you want to do.” I’m like, “Why don’t you just do it? It’s just a choice. You just have to do it.”

Figure out what you want to do. I ask myself probably once a month, “What do I want to be when I grow up?” and then I go and I work towards that. That’s a good thing to do –“What do you want to be when you grow up?” If you’re not passionate and in love with whatever it is that you’re doing, figure out what you want to be when you grow up, and go and do it. Just quit everything else and focus on that. Well, don’t quit everything else – obviously you’ve got to pay the bills. If you’re doing something, you know you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do, but work your face off to get towards whatever it is you want to be doing when you grow up, because this life is way too short to not do that.

Anyway, I appreciate you guys. If you liked this podcast at all, please comment on it. We’re six or seven episodes into this thing. , I think, and trying to get iTunes to give us some love. They ranked us on the first page. This is really cool. I was on iTunes the other day, and I was scrolling through the home page, and our podcast was in there, so congratulations, you guys, the listeners. We’ve got people listening, which is exciting. I just need you to go and review it so that we can get some stars in there and people on iTunes can find us. I appreciate you guys, and I will talk to you all tomorrow.