Favourite Takeaways: Traffic Secrets by Russell Brunson

Marketing is all about creating bridges from what someone wants and desires to the solution that you provide

In Traffic Secrets: The Underground Playbook for Filling Your Websites and Funnels with Your Dream Customers, co-founder of ClickFunnels and New York Times Bestselling Author of DotCom Secrets and Expert Secrets Russell Brunson describes the strategies for website traffic growth and filling your funnels with your dream customers. Traffic is the lifeblood of getting your customer to use your products and service, Brunson distills the strategies for getting found on major social networking platforms, understanding your dream customers, building a Dream 100, the hook, story offer framework, among other tools and tactics for achieving your marketing goals.

Traffic Secrets reveals the most cutting-edge way to drive eyeballs to your product or service to help people find you.

His previous books:

DotCom Secrets is based on Brunson’s foundation in direct response.

DotCom Secrets: The “science” of funnel building

Expert Secrets is based on lessons learned in his branding and storytelling journey.

Expert Secrets : The “art” behind successful funnels, helping people to move through your funnels and become your dream customers.

In each traffic secret, Brunson shared strategies for filling your funnel through the following steps:

Step #1: Understand the history and the goal of the new platform
Step #2: Find and model your Dream 100
Step #3: Identify the publishing strategy and create your publishing plan
Step #4: Work your way in
Step #5: Buy your way in
Step #6: Fill your funnel

Favourite Takeaways: Traffic Secrets by Russell Brunson

Traffic is the fuel for every successful business. It is the people who are coming into your funnels. The more people you can get in front of, the bigger impact you and your company can have, which, in turn, usually creates more money for your company.”

Traffic Secrets is less from the tactical, fly-by-night operations and more from the strategic, long-term model that will ensure a consistent flow of people into your funnels.

Moving forward, you have to understand that traffic is people, and people are extremely predictable.

Strategies for building your Traffic Funnel

Identifying your dream customers
Finding out where they are already congregating online
Learning how to “work” your way in
Understanding how to “buy” your way in
Creating your own publishing platform
Building your own distribution lists

Your Dream Customer

The people who put all their focus on creating something amazing (instead of also focusing on getting people to actually see what they created) are the people that fail. The biggest problem they have is getting their future customers to discover that they even exist.

Waiting for people to come to you is not a strategy.

But understanding exactly who your dream customer is, discovering where they’re congregating, and throwing out hooks that will grab their attention to pull them into your funnels (where you can tell them a story and make them an offer) is the strategy. That’s the big secret.

Question #1: Who is your dream customer?
Question #2: Where are they congregating?

Secret #1: Who is your dream customer?

Create a customer avata

Most entrepreneurs mistakenly think that their business is about them, but it’s not. On the contrary, your business is about your customer. If you want customers (traffic) to come into your funnels, then you have to be able to find them online. And if you want to find them online, then you have to start to understand them at a much deeper level.

The first step in this process is to become obsessed with your dream customer. Companies that become obsessed with their products will eventually fail.

Be Customer Obsessed

If you want to really understand who your dream customers are and where they are congregating online, you need to be able to enter the conversation that is already taking place inside of their mind and see the world the way that they see it. When you truly understand the core pains they are trying to move away from and the core desires and passions they are trying to move toward, it becomes very easy to identify exactly where they exist online.

The 3 Core desires/markets – Wealth, Health and Relationship

People purchase products hoping to get a certain result from one of these 3 core desires/markets. The three desires are health, wealth, and relationships. When people purchase any product from anyone, they’re hoping to get a certain result in one of these three areas of their lives.

Which of these three desires is my future dream customer trying to receive when they buy my product or service?

AWAY FROM PAIN/TOWARD PLEASURE

If you don’t truly understand your dream customers, then it will be hard to find them. But if you really understand them, then you should already know where they’re congregating to get out of pain and where they’re congregating to move toward pleasure. And when you know where they’re congregating, it’s pretty easy to put your messages or your hooks in front of them and pull them into your funnels.

Every human being on this planet is always moving in one of two directions when they make a decision: away from pain or toward pleasure.

The Hook, Story and Offer Framework

The Hook

The hook is the thing that grabs someone’s attention so you can tell them a story. You see thousands of hooks every day. Every email subject line is a hook, trying to grab your attention for just a moment so you’ll read that email. Every post, picture, and video you see in your feed on Facebook is a hook that is trying to get you to engage so they can tell you a story and then make you an offer. Every picture on Instagram, thumbnail on YouTube, and headline on a blog is a hook designed to grab your attention.

Anything that grabs someone’s attention is a hook, and the better you get at creating it and throwing it into your Dream 100’s congregations, the more attention you will get.

Story

The story will increase the value of the offer that you are about to make. By telling the right story, you can show the perceived value of what you’re selling and the story will create a desire for them to buy now.

The story will build a connection with you as the Attractive Character and your brand. Even if someone doesn’t buy something today, if they connect with you, they will become your follower, and then your customer, and eventually your raving fan. Your stories will help them to build a relationship with your brand.

Offer

The hook gets your customers’ attention, the story creates desire, and the last step of every message, post, email, and video is the offer. The offer doesn’t always mean asking people to buy something amazing, although this is my favorite type of offer.

The offer could be as small as telling them if they “like this post” or “comment on my video” or “subscribe to my podcast” or “join my list,” you’ll give them a special thing in exchange. The better the offer is, the more likely someone is to do the thing that you actually want them to do.

“If people aren’t doing what you want them to do (joining your list, clicking your ads, or buying your stuff), the simplest way to fix it is often to increase the offer.”

THE 3 CLOSES: EMOTION, LOGIC, FEAR

Whenever you close someone, make sure to include in your message emotion, logic, and fear.

Story Selling

How to tell stories to break false beliefs and put people into an emotional state where they are ready to change and ready to buy. This is the most powerful way to create emotion in the minds of your visitors and get them to take action.

When your goal is to move people through a process or funnel, every type of communication you send should start with emotion, move to logic, and end with fear (urgency and scarcity).

Until you own the traffic, you’re always left to the whims of the network. So even when starting your own show, remember that the goal is still to turn that traffic that you’re earning into traffic that you own.

On Starting and Consistency

Don’t look at your stats, downloads, or numbers at first, because you’re just trying to build the foundation for something great, and it will take time.
Starting is the most important part and the biggest hurdle that most people are facing. They’re pondering and strategizing instead of making. They’re debating what’s going to happen when they haven’t even looked at what’s in front of them.

“It doesn’t matter if your end goal is a book, a webinar, a keynote presentation, a viral video, or something else, the more you publish and test your material, the clearer your message will become and the more people you will attract.”

Playing the long-game

Those who just spam their message to their followers will always think that social media doesn’t work. Even if they do get some short-term results, they won’t last. On the other hand, those who play the longer game and plant seeds with their followers will end up with a constant stream of traffic flooding into their funnels.

PRODUCER, NOT CONSUMER

Consuming social media doesn’t serve you or the audience you’ve been called to serve. Producing social media does serve them.

Effective Retargeting

Effective retargeting has at least three audiences (engaged, landed, and owned), and the end goals should be based on the type of audience the ad is targeted to.

Engaged → Sell the click: Tell the network you want to collect a custom audience of everyone who has interacted with your posts in the past five days. To this audience, you want to show an ad with a hook and story that sells the click.
Landed → Sell the opt-in or purchase: Tell the network you want to collect a custom audience of everyone who has clicked through to your landing page in the past seven days. To this audience, you want to show an ad with a hook and story that sells the opt-in or purchase.
Owned → Sell the next step: Tell the network you want to collect a custom audience of everyone who has converted into a lead and/or sale. To this audience, you want to either offer another front-end product or walk them up the next step on your value ladder.

Jenna Kutcher’s ABCDQ Test

When posting on social media as the following questions about the worthiness of the post on your profile:

Aesthetic: Does it visually show something that fits the personality of my brand?
Brand: Is it aligned with my dream client or something they will engage with?
Consistent: Is it consistent in terms of color or quality to fit within my overall feed?
Diversity: Is this something different than my last post? Does it create recognition beyond what I sell?
Quality: Is this up to the quality I want my clients/followers to expect? If this stood alone, would it fit my brand?

Inspire, Educate and Entertain

Each post you make should have one goal. Decide if the hook is meant to inspire, educate, or entertain:

Inspire: It compels others to feel inspired and capable of big things.
Educate: It teaches or educates your followers on a subject.
Entertain: It provides entertainment for your followers.

Feel, Felt, Found Framework

I understand how you feel . . .
I felt the same way . . .
This is what I found . . .

When a new platform is released, they reward people for using it by giving everyone free exposure. Over time, your free exposure lessens and you have to buy ads in order to get as much exposure as you did for free before.

The Algorithms

They don’t care who you are. They don’t care who has the best product, the best customer support, or who will treat the customers the best. All they know is that if a page meets their certain criteria, they rank it higher than a page that doesn’t meet their criteria. It’s that simple. When you understand that, then the question quickly becomes, “What exactly is the algorithm looking for, and how do I tweak what I’m doing to beat the algorithm so I can be ranked at the top?

What exactly is the algorithm looking for, and how do I tweak what I’m doing to beat the algorithm so I can be ranked at the top?

One Platform at a time

Focus on one platform until you’ve mastered it, which means that you’ll know your Dream 100, your content strategy will be systemized and happening on autopilot, and you’ll have a process in place to work your way in and the people in place to start buying your way in.

Publishing on each platform will give you limited distribution to your fans and followers, but in order to help stimulate growth of whatever show you have just published (and the more you can push eyeballs to the new episode), the more each platform will reward you for that work.