DotCom Secrets

by Russel Branson

  I remember paying twenty-five thousand dollars to be a part of the Bill Glazer/Dan Kennedy Titanium Mastermind program. At the time, my highest backend offer was five thousand dollars. Someone in that program asked me, “So, Russell, what do you sell next to the people who paid five thousand?” I told him that I didn’t have anything else to offer, and he responded, “Russell, that’s a five thousand dollar buyer lead— you need to sell them something else!”

  Interestingly, later that night the group (yes, the SAME group that had already paid twenty-five thousand to be in the room) was offered a chance to be in the movie Phenomenon with Dan Kennedy for an additional thirty thousand. And nine out of eighteen people in our group bought the offer! That was when I realized that there really is no end to your Value Ladder. It’s one of the reasons why we created our million-dollar program. Imagine my shock and excitement the first time someone said yes! A percentage of your audience will always want to pay you the premium to get more value.

  The only limit to your value offerings is your imagination. Keep thinking of higher and higher levels of service, and you can keep charging more and more money. There’s always something else you can offer.

  WHAT IF I DON’T HAVE A VALUE LADDER?

  Often times, it’s hard for companies to figure out how to add more offers to their Value Ladders. Typically, the process is very easy for someone selling information products because that ascension path has already been created and proven in thousands of different information-based companies. But what if you’re selling something else? What if you offer physical products, ecommerce, B2B services, or professional services where the path isn’t quite as clear? Sometimes it takes a little thought and creativity.

  If you already have a product or a service that you sell in the middle of your ladder, what type of “bait” could you create to attract your dream customer? I have a friend who owns a company that makes custom suits for people. He was stuck selling a high-end service but unable to see how to construct a solid Value Ladder (probably because the “front” at the time was two thousand dollars). After a while, my friend tried giving away free cuff links online. He put the offer up, started to advertise, and within days, he had generated hundreds of perfectly qualified leads. He then took those people through an ascension plan to get them to purchase their own custom suits.

  Often times, companies have a frontend product but nothing more to sell on the backend. For that, I love to look at what else they could bundle together. Could they offer a coaching program? How about a live event? What other results or value could they give their clients?

  I told you earlier that FitLife.tv’s core issue was not a traffic or conversion problem. The only real problem was that they had no Value Ladder. Because of that, they couldn’t build out a true sales funnel. They brought people into their funnel, but then the relationship ended. People wanted to give them money, but there was no clear path for them to follow. As soon as they added those things into their business, customers naturally started to ascend the ladder, ultimately paying Drew and his team what they were worth.

  While it’s not always obvious what you can add to the frontend or the backend of your company, I promise that the solutions are there. I also know that if you want to succeed and beat out your competition, you need to have this Value Ladder in place.

  Up Next: In the next chapter, we are going to talk about the basics of building out your sales funnel. But please take the time to fill out your own Value Ladder. Again, unless you have a complete Value Ladder, it’s impossible to build out an effective sales funnel.

  SECRET #3:

  FROM A LADDER TO A FUNNEL

  The Secret Formula was created to help you figure out who you want to serve, how to find them, what kind of bait you should use to attract them, and where you want to take them.

  The Value Ladder was created to help you figure out what products and services you need to add so that your dream clients move from your bait to your high-end services.

  Now it’s time to bridge the gap between a Value Ladder and a sales funnel. In sections 3 and 4 of this book, we will go into a lot of detail about the strategy, psychology, and tactics you need to build out your own sales funnels. But first, I need you to understand what a sales funnel is and how that relates to everything we’ve discussed so far. This section is short, but critical to your success.

  In a perfect world, I would immediately be able to talk my dream client into purchasing my best, most expensive service. But as we discussed in the last chapter, that’s almost impossible because I haven’t provided value yet. Besides, my highest-level service might not be the best fit for all people. It’s almost impossible to build a company just offering your high-end services. You need a full range of offers. So instead of trying to convince someone to buy the most expensive offering right away, we build a funnel that will help us to do two things:

  1 Provide value to each customer at the unique level of service that he or she can afford.

  2 Make money and be profitable while identifying our dream clients who can afford our highest offer.

  The best way to show you how this works is to draw a funnel:

  Fig 3.2: A funnel moves people through the sales process. They enter as prospective customers (traffic), and your job is to convert as many as possible into repeat customers by selling to them at the front, middle, and backend of your funnel.

  Above the funnel is a cloud that represents all of my potential customers. At the top of my funnel is the “bait” that will attract my dream customers. Notice that this bait is also the first rung of the Value Ladder. As I start to place ads featuring my bait, potential customers will start raising their hands, and a certain percentage of those people will purchase my frontend offer.

  Then I will move to the next step in my funnel. Here I will introduce the next product or service in my Value Ladder. This will, of course, be something offering MORE value, while also costing more money. Unfortunately, not everyone who purchases my bait will also purchase this more expensive, high-value product, but a certain percentage of those people will.

  From there, I move deeper into the funnel and introduce the next product or service on my Value Ladder. Again, not everyone will buy this product, but a percentage of the clients who initially took the bait will. I will continue to do this through all the levels of my Value Ladder, and at the bottom of this funnel, a handful of people will appear who can afford—and may be willing to purchase—my high-end services. These are my dream clients, the ones I want to work with at a more intimate level.

  Now, before I “sell” you on why you need to be thinking about your company in terms of “funnels,” I want you to understand that my approach wasn’t always this detailed. When I first got started online over a decade ago, there was a lot less competition. I could have just a frontend product, and I’d spend a dollar on ads and make two dollars back in return. But as more people started businesses online and competition started to grow, ad costs went up, the consumer’s buying resistance also went up, and it got harder to sell. People I know who were making millions of dollars a year are no longer in business because they didn’t adapt and change with the times.

  When I started to feel the pinch, I was lucky enough to have some amazing mentors who taught me the importance of building a deeper funnel with more offerings. The deeper your funnel is, and the more things you can offer your clients, the more each customer will be worth to you. And the more they are worth to you, the more you can spend to acquire them. Remember this truth:

  “Ultimately, the business that can spend the most to acquire a customer wins.”

  —Dan Kennedy

  Every product I sell online has a sales funnel that I take people through. In fact, immediately after the customer buys something, they are offered an upsell or two before they even leave the page. This is one type of sales funnel. But after they have purchased something from me, I use other types of communication funnels to build a relationship and encourage them to pu
rchase other products and services that we sell. You’ll learn about these special communication funnels in Section 2. Every product we sell has its own sales funnel to provide value and convert the buyer into a higher-end customer. You’ll see all seven of these funnels in Section 4.

  The fact that you picked up this book and are reading it now is proof that this concept works. I already know that a percentage of everyone who buys this book will upgrade to one of my online web classes. I also know that from there, a percentage of those people will upgrade to my Ignite program or my Inner Circle program. And a few, the ones who are the right fit, will join my million-dollar program, and I’ll be coming out to set up this whole system in their offices.

  Let’s Review: So a sales funnel is just the online process you take someone through to get them to ascend through the different levels of your Value Ladder. It’s the actual webpages that will make the Secret Formula work. The Secret Formula will help you find your dream customer, offer them your bait, and lead them to where you want them to go—all while providing the customer value and making you money.

  Up Next: So, the next logical question, after you understand the concept behind the sales funnel, is WHERE do you find the people to put into that sales funnel? Secret #4 will present three simple questions to help you find your dream clients and bring them to your websites— with credit cards in hand.

  SECRET #4:

  HOW TO FIND YOUR DREAM CUSTOMERS

  With the Secret Formula, you discovered that you must find out who your dream clients are and then find out where they are. Usually my clients can figure out pretty quickly who they want to sell to, but they get stuck figuring out where those dream clients are and how to get them to visit their websites. The process of getting people to come to your website is called “driving traffic.” So when I talk about “traffic” throughout this book, I’m talking about the people you are convincing (through an ad) to come to your website. People always ask me how to attract more traffic to their websites, but before we can address how to get those people, you have to understand the concept of “congregations.”

  One of the coolest things about the Internet is the power of congregations. These seemingly unimportant groups of people gathering together in little corners of the Internet make it possible for people like you and me to get into business quickly and be successful without all the barriers and expensive hurdles of traditional media.

  When I say the word congregation, what’s the first thing that pops into your head? For most people, the word congregation brings to mind a church. A church is really nothing more than a group of people who gather together based on similar beliefs, values, and ideas. For example, each week, the Baptists all congregate together based on their similar beliefs and values. The Catholics also congregate together and so do the Mormons, Seventh Day Adventists, Muslims, and Jews, etc., . . . right? So, if I were selling a perfect product for Mormons, where would I go to sell it? Of course, I would go to the Mormon Church. My dream customers would be right there congregated together. All I’d have to do is put my message out in front of them.

  My point is not to teach you how to sell things to churches. I want you to understand the power of a congregation because it’s one of the main reasons the Internet is such an amazing tool for businesses. Prior to the Internet, it was hard for people around the world to congregate together. We were limited by location and ability to communicate. But now it’s possible for anyone and everyone to congregate together and discuss almost anything with groups of people who hold similar beliefs.

  When I was in high school, there were five or six kids who would get together every day at lunch and play card games. I remember one of the games was called Magic: The Gathering. Now I had never heard of it, and I thought the kids were kind of strange sitting by themselves playing cards. But they were content to congregate together and participate in an activity they enjoyed. I’m sure there were a handful of kids in high schools all over the country doing the same thing, unaware of one another. Before the Internet, that was how things worked. You were kind of limited based on geography; you might not be close to other people in your congregation. As a marketer, I would have found it difficult to reach five kids at one high school and three at another school and six or seven at yet another. It would have cost too much money to be successful. Yet now, thanks to the Internet, those five or six kids in my high school can congregate with others all over the world to play Magic: The Gathering online. They can hang out on forums and play games with people half way across the world. Now, if I have a product to sell to a congregation of people who love Magic: The Gathering, it’s easy and economical to go online, find where they are, and get my message in front of them.

  Here’s another example: I was a wrestler in college, and every night all the student athletes had to spend two hours in study hall to make sure we got our homework done. Naturally, I would sit next to my wrestling buddies, and we’d goof off online. I remember looking over one day and noticing that all my friends were looking at the exact same website I was. It was called TheMat.com—a website for wrestlers. We were all chatting about what had happened that month in the world of wrestling and who was winning. We were showing cool moves and discussing what move might work better. Every single person on my college wrestling team was in that study lab for two hours every night hanging out on TheMat.com and talking about wrestling—rather than doing our homework.

  Interestingly, this was probably happening in every single university around the country. Add in all the high school wrestlers and any older people interested in the sport who would likely find this site, and you can see that potentially every single wrestler in the world could congregate in one spot and talk about wrestling. Now, if I had a wresting product, what would I do to sell it? I would find the existing congregation of wrestling fans, and I would put my message out in front of them. Simple!

  There are congregations for everything you can dream up—from antiques buyers to zipper collectors. Once you understand the core concept of congregations, driving traffic is incredibly easy. Not sure where your congregations are? Just go to Google and type in your keywords plus the word forum or search for groups related to your keywords on Facebook. It might take a little digging, but you’ll find your target audience. Now, there are three questions you have to ask yourself to find and really tap into these congregations.

  QUESTION #1: WHO IS YOUR TARGET MARKET?

  When I ask that question, people tend to answer with straight demographics like, “My target market is women from ages thirty-six to forty-five who make fifty thousand dollars a year.” For a very long time, straight demographics like that were pretty much the only way to separate the people you wanted to target from the rest of humanity. Traditional media catered to certain demographics through its programming and sold advertising along those lines. If you wanted to reach well-off, intellectual men, you might advertise on the late night news or in The New York Times. If you wanted to reach housewives, you might advertise during a soap opera in the middle of the day. Unfortunately, straight demographics don’t give you any of the juicy information about the individual. In the old days, the best you could do was group people in general terms, according to age, gender, income, and geographical location. The Internet has changed all that. Today you can get as granular as you want to with the data available. You can segment people based on musical taste, medical background, and shoe size. If you like, you can even group according to the movies they watched last month or the websites they visited yesterday.

  Because marketers are now able to target so many different characteristics so accurately, people have lost all patience for generalized, mass media messages. Consumers expect and demand that your advertising be extremely relevant to them. Say you own a local pet food company and your advertising speaks to women in Tampa who love dogs. If I’m a man in Tampa who loves cats, you might want to create a separate message for me. It doesn’t matter that both target markets can get food for their animals at your s
tore. Consumers want and expect messaging that speaks directly to them, or they will likely ignore you. There’s just too much information bombarding us at all hours of the day and night. As modern humans, we are subconsciously forced to screen out anything that doesn’t directly apply to us. So a dog food commercial may not even register on a cat owner’s radar, even though your store also sells cat food.

  To create hyper-targeted messages, you have to know your target market inside and out. Successful businesses get inside of the customer’s mind and find out what the individual really cares about. What are their pains and passions? What do they desire? What do they think about, and what do they search for online? When you can find out those tiny details, you can search more specifically and find buyers in not-so-obvious places. For example, in the “how to make money” business that I have, I often think back to myself when I was a twelve-year-old kid buying stuff from infomercials. What were my desires? What got me excited? Where did I look for more information? What words and phrases was I searching for? What magazines did I read? I try to figure out what my mindset was at the time. If I had a wrestling product, I would think back to my own wrestling days. Who are the people in the wrestling market? What are they searching for? What problems do they want to solve? What questions do they need answered? I suggest digging into your own experience to create as detailed a picture as possible for the product you are selling. You want to go way beyond typical demographics when answering question number one: Who is your target market? Then, when you have an accurate picture, you can move on to the next question.