DotCom Secrets

by Russel Branson

  QUESTION #2: WHERE IS YOUR TARGET MARKET CONGREGATING?

  Remember your target market is made up of real people, so you need to look at their real behavior. Where do they hang out online? Where do they spend their time? What email newsletters might they subscribe to? What blogs do they read? What Facebook groups are they a part of? Are they even on Facebook—or do they prefer Instagram? What keywords are they searching for on Google? What books are they buying on Amazon? Answering these questions can take some time and research, but it’s worth taking as much time as you need to develop a clear picture of where your ideal clients are directing their attention.

  Finding traffic on the Internet really is as easy as answering these questions. Marketers try to make it complicated with all of the technology that helps direct the traffic to certain web pages. But it’s your knowledge of the people in your market that makes the technology useful. I like to think of the Internet as a huge mountain, and your ideal customer—your traffic—is gold inside that mountain. Your job as a marketer is to find the gold and mine it out. When you start mining, you’re just digging around, poking and prodding, trying to find where the gold is. You know there’s gold in that mountain somewhere, but you’re not sure where. So you’re looking around, trying this area and that area, and all of a sudden, you might dig up a few nuggets. Typically, gold clumps together in a vein running through the mountain (like a congregation). So when you find a little bit of gold, you can dig deeper and find more. You’ll soon see that the vein runs deep into the mountain. If you keep following that vein, you can mine out all the gold. It’s worth taking the time to do a thorough job in the poking and prodding stage. Because if you can find exactly where your target market is hanging out, then pulling out the gold is simply a matter of putting a relevant message in front of them and directing them to your offer.

  Do some digging—all the while asking the crucial questions: Who is my target market? Where are these people congregating? You search for a little while, and Boom! You might find an email newsletter they subscribe to. That’s a vein of gold. You’re going to tap into that. You might buy ads in that newsletter and try to entice all those people back to your website. You might find a blog they frequent or maybe a Facebook group they like. As the entrepreneur, it’s your job to go out there and find these congregations. There are people you can hire to help, and there are systems you can set up to tap into those congregations, but first you have to get into the mindset of the target market and figure out where they congregate.

  Then you’re ready for the third question.

  QUESTION #3: HOW CAN YOU GET A CUSTOMER TO LEAVE THE CONGREGATION AND CHECK OUT YOUR PAGE?

  If I’m in the middle of a wrestling debate on TheMat.com, it’s going to take something special to get me to leave that site and go look at something else. At this point, you have to figure out what offering is special enough to entice a wrestling fan away from his favorite site. How can you divert attention away from what your prospect is currently doing? I call this process the Enquirer Interrupt.

  Fig 4.2: Your ads must be able to grab people’s attention if you want them to click over to your site.

  Did you know that The National Enquirer is one of the most read newspapers in the world? They place their publication in one of the busiest spots on earth: the checkout stand. People only have a split second to make a buying decision, so the publication offers short two-to three- word headlines that will stop almost anyone in their tracks. The magazine is an undisputed master at interrupting your brain patterns and making you notice.

  Your job online is almost the same. You are trying to engage someone who is already checking email, Facebook, and his cell phone at the exact same time. You have to interrupt potential customers long enough for them to click on your ad and visit your website.

  As you start to think about what type of ads should you be placing—what they should say, what types of images they should use—I recommend going to Google images and searching for “National Enquirer headlines.” You’ll see hundreds of examples that you can model. If you look closely, you’ll notice the magazine always uses a strange or unusual picture to grab the eye. Then it uses short, punchy headlines (usually describing something weird, unusual, or shocking) to make you curious enough to buy a copy. The images and headlines interrupt whatever you were thinking about to make you pay attention to the product, a magazine.

  In our ads, we place these Enquirer Interrupts to grab our prospects’ attention and send them to our squeeze pages, our frontend offers, and our bait. Remember that just because you’ve identified who your dream prospects are and where they are, your job isn’t done. You still need to grab their attention and get them to click over to your website. You do that through these interrupt-style ads.

  YOUR ROLE AS THE ENTREPRENEUR

  As the entrepreneur for my companies, one of my primary jobs is to identify where the veins of gold are located. This task is not for the person buying the ads, optimizing the ads, or picking the keywords, etc. That’s like expecting a building contractor to know how to pour the foundation, frame the house, put up the sheet rock, and run the electricity. A contractor does not need to know how to do all of those things to build a house. In fact, if he did do all of those things, it would take ten times longer to get the job done. Instead, he understands the pieces that need to be in place to build a house, and then he hires the electrician to do the wiring and the sheet rock guy to put up the sheet rock.

  Your job as the entrepreneur is to understand the strategy behind these DotComSecrets and then hire the Facebook guy to run Facebook ads and the Google guy to run Google ads. To this day, I’ve never once run a Google or a Facebook ad, yet I’ve made millions on both platforms. I understand the strategy, and then I set up systems and hire people who are great at the tactics. In this way, we all do what we are best at.

  Because I know this division of labor works, I’m not going to go into every detail on how to run the ads in this book. Instead, I want to focus on the strategy. Then, you can build a system and have your team help you to implement it. In the next chapter, I’m going to help you understand the strategy behind the three types of traffic, and we will pinpoint your ONLY goal when driving traffic online.

  SECRET #5:

  THE THREE TYPES OF TRAFFIC

  Acrucial DotComSecret you must understand to experience exponential growth is this: There are only three types of traffic:

  1 Traffic you control

  2 Traffic you don’t control

  3 Traffic you OWN

  Once you understand how each type of traffic works and how they tie together, you will have the ability to direct the right traffic to the right offers, and convert the highest number possible into buyers and repeat clients. Your one and ONLY goal is to OWN all the traffic you can. That is how you grow your list and increase your sales.

  TRAFFIC YOU OWN

  I want to begin our discussion with the third type of traffic listed above because it’s the most important. Traffic you own is the BEST kind of traffic. It’s your email list or your followers, readers, customers, etc. I call this the traffic that I “own” because I can send out an email, post a message to my followers, or make a blog post, and I will generate instant traffic. I don’t have to buy it from Google or Facebook. I don’t have to do any PR or SEO. This is my own distribution channel; I can send out messages anytime I want, with no new marketing costs. I can sell things to these people over and over again, and all of that money comes back as pure profit.

  I was lucky when I first got started online to have a mentor named Mark Joyner. Mark had built a huge company online, and when I started to study under him, his number one piece of advice to me was this: “Russell, you have to build a list.” He ingrained that principle into my mind, and it became my only focus for two to three years. As my list started to grow, so did my income.

  The first month, I was able to get about two hundred people to join my list, and I made just a little over two hundred dol
lars that month. When I had increased my list to about one thousand people, I started to average about one thousand dollars per month. When I got my list to ten thousand people, I was averaging over ten thousand dollars per month! And those numbers have stayed pretty consistent now that we have well over five hundred thousand people on the lists.

  Yes, we average about one dollar per month for each name on our email lists. In some of the markets we’re in, the profit is actually a lot higher than that. But as a rule of thumb, when you follow the communication funnels you’ll learn in Section 2 correctly, you should expect to see similar results. Once you understand that metric, suddenly list building becomes a much higher priority!

  That’s why it’s so important to convert the other two types of traffic (both traffic you control and traffic you don’t control) into subscribers and buyers (traffic that you own) as quickly as possible. The bigger your list, the more money you make.

  TRAFFIC YOU CONTROL

  The next type of traffic is traffic you control. You control traffic when you have the ability to tell it where to go. For example, if I purchase an ad on Google, I don’t own that traffic (Google does), but I can control it by buying an ad and then sending those who click on that ad anywhere I want. Any kind of paid traffic is traffic you control, including the following:

  • Email ads (solo ads, banners, links, mentions)

  • Pay-per-click ads (Facebook, Google, Yahoo, etc.)

  • Banner ads

  • Native ads

  • Affiliates and joint ventures

  Now, I personally LOVE traffic that I can control, but my big problem is that every time I want more of it, I have to spend more money. So my goal is always to send any traffic that I am going to purchase over to a type of website we call a “squeeze page.” (We’ll discuss squeeze pages a lot more during Secret #11: The Twenty-Three Building Blocks of a Funnel.)

  Fig. 5.2: Squeeze pages have one goal, and no distractions. There is only one thing for the visitor to do on this page.

  This squeeze page is a very simple page with ONE goal: to convert traffic that you control into traffic that you own. I send all of my paid traffic to a squeeze page, and when the visitors get there, they only have ONE option: give me an email address or leave. Now a certain percentage of people will leave, but the cool thing is that some of those people will give you a personal email address. After that, the traffic you control becomes traffic that you own, and you can start sending the new potential buyer through your Soap Opera Sequences (Secret #7) and your daily Seinfeld emails (Secret #8).

  TRAFFIC YOU DON’T CONTROL

  This last type of traffic just shows up, and I don’t have any control over where it came from or where it goes. For example, if someone mentions my book on Facebook, their followers may search my name in Google, and they may land on some random page in my blog. I didn’t have control over any part of that sequence of events. There are lots of types of traffic that I don’t control, including:

  • Social media (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google+, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc.)

  • Search traffic (search engine optimization or SEO)

  • Guest blog traffic

  • YouTube

  • Guest interviews

  Now, just like traffic that I control, my ONLY goal with traffic that I don’t control is also to turn it into traffic that I own. To do this, I try to push all traffic that I don’t control back to my blog. If you visit any of my blogs, you’ll notice that the top third of my blog is nothing but a glorified squeeze page. When people go there, the only real thing they can do is give me their email addresses. After they do that, they become traffic that I own, and I can put them into my communication funnels.

  Fig. 5.3: I turn my blog posts into modified squeeze pages to convert as much traffic as possible into traffic I own.

  MOVING INTO YOUR COMMUNICATION FUNNEL

  Up Next: Now that you understand where you can find congregations composed of dream clients and you understand that your goal is to convert those people into traffic that you own, the next question is, What do you do with the potential customers after they join your email list?

  Section 2 of this book will show you how we communicate with our audience. It will detail what emails we send out and in what sequence we send them. It will show you how to use your email list as a tool to get people to ascend your Value Ladder. But before we get into the actual sequences that you’ll be sending out (Secret #7 and #8), you first have to understand the Attractive Character.

  SECTION TWO:

  YOUR COMMUNICATION FUNNEL

  SECRET #6:

  THE ATTRACTIVE CHARACTER

  Hey Russell, I’m building a list, but nobody’s opening my emails. Nobody’s clicking on my links. Nobody’s buying what I’m trying to sell. What am I doing wrong?!”

  People who started my DotComSecrets course used to express this same thought all the time. Business owners often get behind the idea that they should be averaging a dollar per month for every person on their list. So, they focus on growing their lists, yet feel stuck and frustrated when they don’t see results. Can you relate to that at all?

  In my experience, the missing link is this concept of the Attractive Character (AC). It’s about the persona you’re sharing with your audience and how you communicate with your list. Most people either don’t bother to create this character, or they don’t do it correctly. So, I want to explain the process to you now. It’s one of the most important steps you can take when it comes to making sales. Once you intentionally create your AC, your business will change forever.

  An Attractive Character is not someone who is extraordinarily good looking, although they might be. What I’m talking about here is a persona that attracts clients or customers and helps you build your following to eventually make sales. An Attractive Character allows you to build a platform anywhere you want, whether on email, Facebook, or YouTube. It doesn’t matter where you show up; your AC will draw people to you.

  The first time I learned about personas and characters, I was at a marketing seminar and heard John Alanis speak. If you look up his name, you’ll find he teaches men how to get women to approach them. In other words, he teaches guys how to pick up chicks. I remember he explained how the concept of attracting women was very similar to attracting customers and making sales. If a guy wants a woman to be attracted to him, there are certain things he needs to do. And they are the same things you need to do if you want clients and customers to be attracted to you in your business. He said entrepreneurs need to create an Attractive Character. This was the first time I had ever heard anyone talk about this idea. I listened to him talk for an hour, and it made a huge impact on me and my company.

  Think about any business—online or offline. Most successful ones have an Attractive Character front and center. Take Subway, for example. Subway used to be just another fast food restaurant like McDonald’s, Burger King, and all the rest. Then somewhere along the line, the company found this guy named Jared. He was a big guy who weighed over four hundred pounds. However, he started eating nothing but Subway twice a day, and over the course of a couple of years, he lost a ton of weight. Subway shared Jared’s story with the world. They put him in commercials, on billboards, everywhere. By making Jared their Attractive Character, Subway transformed its business from an average fast food restaurant to a weight-loss plan. This new tactic completely set the company apart from the competition. One of the reasons that Subway does so well is because it focuses marketing tactics around an Attractive Character. People trying to lose weight can relate to Jared. They understand his backstory, and they want to be like him. If this guy could lose all that weight just by eating Subway twice a day, then they can too. This same guy has been bringing in business for Subway for over fifteen years!

  Now think about your favorite movies. What was the last movie you saw? Did you see it because you thought the storyline was intriguing? Or did you go because one of your favorite actors or actresses was in
it? Movies use Attractive Characters because those ACs bring in the customers. A great example of that concept is the movie Ocean’s Eleven. When I saw the lineup for that movie, I had no doubt it would be successful. Producers brought in eleven Attractive Characters, actors who viewers already loved, put them together in a movie, and Boom! Instant hit. Maybe you’re not a big Brad Pitt fan, but you love everything Julia Roberts does. So, you go see the movie because she is the Attractive Character you relate to.

  This is why sequels and franchises work so well, generation after generation. If you loved Harrison Ford as Han Solo in 1977, you probably paid to see all the Star Wars sequels and Raiders of the Lost Ark, too. And guess what? Nearly forty years later, guess who’s showing up again to bring you a little more Han Solo? It’s amazing to think that one mediocre movie created over a generation ago can still pack the theaters and sell tickets by the millions. That’s the power of Attractive Characters. We love them. We want to be like them. We relate to their stories. And we buy what they’re selling!

  This is one of the big secrets behind the most successful online businesses in the most competitive markets, like weight-loss, dating, financial investing, supplements, and ecommerce. All these types of businesses can use an Attractive Character.

  I started noticing how this works in my own business when I started speaking at seminars and selling products from the stage. The first few times I spoke, I was still in school at Boise State University. I was a student athlete in the wrestling program, and that information would come out when I told my story from the stage. I talked about wrestling and coaches and lessons I’d learned from the sport. When it was time to sell at the end of the presentation, I noticed that the people who came to the back to buy my product were mostly male athletes. They would say, “Hey, man, I played football in college.” Or, “Hey, I’m a lacrosse player.” I didn’t realize it at the time, but my story was promoting an Attractive Character that other male athletes could relate to. Interesting.