The Russell Brunson Show - Beware Of All Platforms... Except This One

Episode Date: November 7, 2017

A podcast from Russell and Todd in a private plane. On this special private plane episode Russell and Clickfunnels co-founder, Todd Dickerson, rant about troubles they've had with different platforms, most recently iTunes. Here are some of the interesting things you will hear on this episode: Find out why Russell is not longer getting subscribers for his podcast, and how all efforts to fix the problem have been fruitless. Hear Todd tell a story about a friend of his that basically lost his business when Amazon D-listed his product. Find out why YouTuber, PewdiePie pretty much lost everything after using an offensive term. And discover how we can learn from these examples to make sure we don't have all our eggs in one basket. So listen here to find out why it's important to have a back up plan when it comes to social media platforms, as well as merchant accounts. Transcript - https://marketingsecrets.com/blog/beware-of-all-platforms-except-this-one Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Calling all sellers, Salesforce is hiring account executives to join us on the cutting edge of technology. Here, innovation isn't a buzzword. It's a way of life. You'll be solving customer challenges faster with agents, winning with purpose, and showing the world what AI was meant to be. Let's create the agent-first future together. Head to salesforce.com slash careers to learn more. Hey, everyone. This is Russell Brunson. Welcome to the Marketing Secrets Podcast.

Today, we are taking this whole thing is happening on a private plane with Todd Dickerson. Yeah. Oh, it's a little bumpy right now. It's a little bumpy. So, the big question is this. How are entrepreneurs like us, who didn't cheat and take on venture capital, we're spending money from our own pockets, how do we market in a way that lets us get our products and our services and the things that we believe in out to the world

and yet still remain profitable? That is the question and this podcast will give you the answer. My name is Russell Brunson, and welcome to Marketing Secrets. Alright, so right now we're on a private plane, and I want to show you guys the moon out here, but now we're in the middle of a cloud. I don't know if you can see this. It's busting through the clouds. Busting through the clouds.

There's the flight. For those of you who are watching this, if you're listening, you can't see it, but we're on a private plane. We're like, I don't know, my feet in the air. We just left Atlanta, Georgia. We left, not Atlanta, we left, uh, Cherokee County, the airport. Which is kind of cool, so we're turning the light on again now. And, uh, we, uh,

we're supposed to be, we're really excited because this flight was supposed to be, um, a beautiful girl right there and a beautiful girl right there, and a beautiful girl right there, and then Todd right there. But our beautiful ladies, aka our wives, are not here. So Todd's daughter got sick the last two or three days. So his wife's like, I can't make it. And then my wife said, well, she's not going. I'm not going.

And so now Todd and I are on a romantic trip together without her wife. Because we've already booked a plane. So we're going either way. It's gonna be fun. It's gonna be so awesome. So, oh check this out, here's the moon. See the moon shot. Yeah, there's the moon.

For those who are watching this, there's a picture of the moon and the end, oh, it looks so cool. Anyway, for those of you guys who are listening, you have no idea what you're seeing, but you are totally missing out. Go to marketingsecrets.com

and you can watch the video version as well. Anyway, so, man this plane is really bumpy. Bumpier than I thought. So, for those of you guys who are clouds, we're good, we're past the clouds. We're above the clouds now, so we're legit. Alright, so for those of you guys who don't know Todd yet, you need to know him. He is the brains behind ClickFunnels. He's the one who built it all initially and he lives in Atlanta, Georgia. We've been trying to get him to Boise now for six years but he told me no. So finally I feel bad he comes to Boise like every quarter. Every few months. This is the first time I've come to Atlanta to hang out with him and see his house. I had a chance to spend time with him and his home and his family and it was amazing. And tell him all about how cool you are.

Oh yeah. Yeah, it was fun. So, anyway. And right now we're actually heading down to a conference. St. Peter's. St. Petersburg Airport? Yeah, Clearwater Beach. Clearwater Beach.

And it's an email marketing conference. Oh yeah, it's top secret. We're not allowed to say where it is. Oh yeah, we can't talk about it. Well, by the time this comes out, he can't yell at me anyway. So that's what we're doing. We'll bring this along to show you guys what's happening. It's kind of fun. And checking it out. Oh, it's so cool. Anyway, so I don't know exactly what we're going to talk about. There's so many things we talk about when we're on the plane,

this true podcast. I have one thing I want to rant about. And then while I'm ranting, I'm going to talk, rant about whatever he wants to do. because I want you guys to tell me better. So my rant today, right now, I'm recording my podcast. Now, some of you guys know I've been doing my podcast, Marketing Secrets, excuse me, Marketing Your Car, first, and I keep popping my ears, that's why I'm doing the weird stuff. So we launched that podcast, and ran it for almost six years, every single day in my car, podcasting, podcasting, like putting in the time, putting in the effort,

putting in the work. We built a big following. And then about a year ago, we rebranded it as Marketing Secrets. And since we've rebranded, we've had 3.5 million downloads in the top 10 business podcasts for the entire year. Our video podcast is the number one, not like in the business category,

our video podcast, number one video podcast in all of iTunes, right? So you think iTunes should like us. Yeah, you would think so. Right? But apparently, like 10 days ago, they decided they didn't like us. And so what they did is they shut down,

basically if you're subscribed to our podcast, you can continue to get our stuff, but nobody new can subscribe. And we've been appealing to them and writing to them, they're like, sorry, why are we kicked out? They're like, you're just kicked out. Like, well why? They won't tell us why, they're just like, you're out.

And it reminded me about something I wanted to talk to you guys about, because it's very, very important. And it's never, never, never trust a platform, okay? And if you're building your business on a platform, just prepare to be, to lose it all very, very soon. I've done this multiple times, and now it's happening on iTunes. I've lost, how many since we've known?

How many email undersponders? I've been kicked out of Aweber almost a dozen times. I contact at least eight or nine. Active Campaign, MailChimp multiple times. SendGrid multiple times, and again recently, just again, they did it again. Facebook, we got kicked off at least two or three thousand times, we've been really consistent recently.

Instagram kicked me off, I got back in luckily. Google kicked us off like a decade ago, we never got back really. YouTube, I watched, we had one video that the headline was the internet marketing illuminati, and they canceled our account. Like it's just crazy. And so all of us, we put all of our eggs in this basket.

Like, many chat, a Facebook Messenger, like, you ever put the eggs, like, you gotta put all your eggs in this basket. The problem is, like, if somebody doesn't like you for whatever reason, or no reason at all, they don't even have to tell you a reason. They can just turn you off. It's their business. Yeah. It is insane.

You were telling me about the Amazon one today. Oh, yeah, the Amazon guy. So there was a guy locally that was selling stuff online on Amazon. It was killing it, doing great. Ordered a huge new pile of stuff from China, had it all shipped over, got here. While it was on the way over, Amazon decided to delist his product. They didn't like the name of one of the products. They thought it was too close to another name of something else.

Delisted the product completely. His entire revenue stream disappeared overnight. Luckily, he had been talking to one of our other guys, his board agents, about funnels, so he started his funnels up, but he completely was dependent on Amazon, lost a business. He had five employees. All of his employees are looking for what they're going to be doing next. He's struggling to get things going, and it's all because he was 100% reliant on Amazon. It doesn't mean that it can't be a side channel that's also pulling in sales, but you cannot have it be a primary thing. Not Amazon, not Google, not Facebook, nothing.

It's crazy. So I just wanted to reemphasize this to all of you guys. If you're building your business, 100% on Facebook, I got bad news for you. Zuckerberg doesn't care about you. He doesn't. You may be like, but Russ, why are you paying $1,000 a day in Facebook ads?

He doesn't care. He doesn't care even a little bit. We're spending insane amounts of money, and they don't care. They don't care about you, they don't care about me, they don't care about any of us. All they care about is their customer. Make sure the platform's happy.

And gets to their shareholders the platform doesn't like. People like us. Okay, so like, that's just, you have to be aware of that. iTunes, apparently, now that I know,

they don't like people like me. I don't know why. I just kind of, you know, added a ton of publicity to their platform. Added thousands of viewers, millions of downloads and they just, one day out of the blue,

like, oh, bye. With no rivalry, it's crazy to me. Top guy won't even tell you why. Yeah, they estimated the highest guy's support. He's like, yep, we canceled your account. I'm like, why? He's like, the stick is out of my clothes. Like, you won't even tell me why?

Like, I don't know what to do. And so, a couple things is, same with merchant accounts. I almost went bankrupt before. I had nine merchant, or no, I had 14 merchant accounts in one bank, and all of them got shut down the same day. And so like, one is a very, very, very scary number in business and in marketing.

And so it's like, I always think about like, having multiple things, right? Like having multiple ways you are collecting money, you're able to collect money. Making sure you're getting customers from different platforms. Making sure the way you message your customers, there's multiple platforms.

In fact, can we talk about this right now, or is this top secret? It's a little top secret still. It's a little top secret. All right, yeah. No, don't talk about it. Oh, okay, I got it. Come on.

We can't talk about this part of it yet, but what he's leading towards is what we already do with Actionetics on some levels is being able to communicate on multiple channels, multiple modalities and stuff, but there's some definitely nice stuff that's going to be coming in in the near future. Yeah, because I don't want everyone, again, if you're relying 100% on email, you could be in trouble.

In fact, yeah, it's hurt me multiple times. I think, I'd say probably conservative about 20 times I've lost my email service provider. And I'm not an aggressive, well, maybe I'm not aggressive. Casually. I may be aggressive, but I'm not unethical. I follow the rules of everything, right? So it's just kind of crazy. So a lot of things we're doing, like, if you were at last year's Spiral Hacking Live,

we talked about the big benefit of using ActionX, you can plug in your other stuff to P, and, like, you have a second grid to shut you down, you can plug in a new one, but we still keep your accounts. Like, we're trying to be a platform that's not shutting our members down. So you have, like, if something bad happens, you can plug in other things. It's the new thing with the custom domains. I'm not sure, like, so now with Action Addict, you're able to have your own custom domain for everything.

So link tracking goes through your custom domain. Your unsubscribes go through your custom domain. Everything goes through your custom domain, so you don't have any relationship to any other people on the platform or to us. So if you get in trouble or someone else on the network gets in trouble, it doesn't affect anyone else, which that's not the case. It's the reason why AWeber won't let you import people into their platform. It's because if you import people and spam them,

then it hurts everyone on AWeber. That's no longer going to be the case on the whole Actionetics platform. You are super isolated, so it's only going to affect you if you cause a problem, and if another person on the network causes a problem, it's only going to affect them. Same thing with image hosting, everything. It's all going to be on your own custom domains now, which is actually already live. So if you ever set that up,

go set up a custom domain. We're giving everyone free custom domains. It's awesome. We're trying to figure out ways to make it so that, like we care about you guys as customers, we want to protect your businesses. And so we're trying to make ClickFunnels easier and easier. We can add in multiple SMTPs, multiple ways to collect money, multiple ways to message. You're not 100% relying on email. There's just a lot of cool things that are coming. I can't tell about the other ones. I always tell people stuff before they're ready and Todd yells at me, so I'm gonna be careful.

But that's where we're going. And I just wanna re-emphasize for you guys, if you're relying on one platform, if Zuckerberg is the way your entire business runs, now is the time to diversify. Don't diversify in six months from now, a year from now. My guess is that window's not gonna be that long. About a year and a half ago,

when Facebook started shutting our accounts down, I was like, we just missed, Facebook's over. And for some reason, they loosened back, they went tight grip on people, so they loosened back up. But you know it's gonna come back. You saw what Google did. I have friends who are making millions and millions of dollars a month,

who, when Google put the chokehold down, they never recovered. Like, they're doing, they're working at McDonald's, I don't know where, but they're not doing their business anymore. And so, if you want to be around in the long term, it's very important to understand that. Like, look, I have, like, Facebook's, like, I still think people should start with a platform. Like, start with Facebook, start with email, whatever that is, and go there, but then, like, be very aware. Like, as soon as that's working, then it's like, hey, now we need to add a second source.

As soon as one disappears, or I need two merchant accounts in two separate banks, I need to go click money different ways just in case one dries up and one goes away, or make sure multiple, SMTP, all these different things are very, very important. Just don't rely on a platform. The platform will screw you over.

They do not care about you or me. They only care about themselves and their customers. And they think that for every reason that because it's something we produce, it affects the experience of the customer, gone.

Or the shareholder. Yeah, or the shareholder. It's not a reason why we're not VC, but you're trying the same type thing again. Yeah, the reason why we love you guys, we're not taking VC money because we want to be able to protect you guys.

But it's crazy. I have no idea. I talked about God in my last podcast. Maybe that was why. I don't know. It's crazy. YouTube, we were talking about, who was the famous dude who lost his YouTube account? Oh, well, there's PewDiePie or whatever. He was like 50 million followers. I mean, to

be fair, he did say some things that he shouldn't have said, but instantly they shut down his business. He had dozens of employees, everyone out of work, completely shut down this entire media empire, more or less, with the flip of a switch from YouTube. PewDiePie? PewDiePie. PewDiePie, so if you guys know PewDiePie, he got screwed by this as well.

And it's crazy, and you look at that, there's stuff on YouTube that's so super offensive, but he has something, I don't even know what he said, but he said something. He said something offensive. It was probably really bad. It was probably really bad, yeah, but nevertheless, they just crush you like a grape, and they don't care. But nevertheless, like, they just, like, crush you like a grape.

And they don't care. And you're like, but dude, like, you know, I put in $5 million a year on your platform. Like, we don't care about you. That's what happened to Google. I remember when Google slapped everybody. Everyone was, like, so shocked. Like, I spend, like, $100,000 a month on Google Ads. They're like, you're one of our smallest clients.

That's a blip. Like, we don't even talk to you if you're spending that. Yeah, that seems like a lot of money to the us-ins, but to them-ins, they don't even care. They're just angry that you interrupted the customer experience. And so it's just something to be very, very, very aware of. Yeah, if you're selling on Amazon, if you're building your business on any of these platforms, that's fine, but you need to also be expanding out. You need to be building that customer list.

You need to be building your email list, building your different chat lists, building your different communication channels with this, building an actual business that you're able to keep things going if Amazon just decides to shut you off tomorrow. Because it will happen, it has happened to plenty of people. So there is your warning, you have been warned. Thus sayeth the ClickFunnels.

Be careful, because they will screw you over. Okay, one last thing before this podcast. Todd's working on tons of new stuff. We can't talk about it, but what are you most excited about in the new stuff from ClickFunnels coming up? I'm most excited about this thing that I can't tell you about yet.

Sorry. It's so awesome, though. He showed me all the screenshots today. So, yeah, there's the potential to basically 2x probably the results that you're getting from different leads that are coming in

on the front door from a communication perspective. Double open rates, double click rates, that kind of thing on what you're from a communication perspective. Double open rates, double click rates, that kind of thing, on what you're currently seeing through your primary channel of communication. And that's like being super low-balling. Super generic low-balling, but it's way more than that.

Yeah, it really is probably way more than that. It really is probably way more than that. And there's also some cool things with payment processing that we're beta testing right now that should literally instill double mobile conversions for anything. That's what I'm doing. Yeah, I mean, we can talk about that.

We can be in on this one again. So Apple Pay, Android Pay, and PayPal, all of them pushed to order. So the results that we're seeing, preliminary at least, on the Apple Pay stuff is literally you go online, you click add Apple Pay to your thing, you press your thumb on it, and it's instant. Everything works with upsells, with OTOs, downsells. What, one of the upsells? One click upsells.

So imagine on your mobile, you're on your phone and someone comes to get your free plus shipping offer and they buy it. Like, does Apple even pop that on their phone? They only literally had to order once. They order on your primary order form one time, just like you would instead of typing in a credit card number, they have their thumbprint, boom, it's ordered. And then on an upsell, they can just click one button just like you would if they had to put in a credit card number we can charge them do the whole process do everything we need to do same thing for Android That's the other sexy part that just recently came out like brand new Android They're calling it like Google pay or something whatever they call it

But we'll be also supporting that as well so you'll be able to have Apple and Android which for the longest time most the other Platforms out there at least don't think if they do support it's only Apple That's crazy so like those who are selling it, it's only Apple. It's basically just for you. That's crazy. For those who are selling to mobile, it's going to make your mobile experience so insanely good. I don't know about you, I never buy things on my phone because I hate trying to type my credit card on my little thumb. So what I do is I always email myself the link and then sometimes I buy something I don't because at that point you forget about it. Whereas this is now there.

They click their little thumbprint and then digs their card and then upsell upsell upsell boom fulfillment i'm also i'm gonna prophesy i don't know if i should prophesy that's kind of sacrilegious i don't want to get shot down i'm going to um forecast is that a better word i'm going to forecast the future of where things are so steep in this other day you know like we always design websites for desktops they are usually wide. There's like multiple columns and stuff like that. Mark my word, the future of where website design is going is in centered, or not centered,

but single column, narrow width pages. If you look at Dollar, if you look at Dollar Shave Club's order form, this is the best example. You go to the page and the order form form is this wide going down the middle, and the fields are all centered and very, very clear, and it works really good mobily. But I think that's going to be the future of where even desktop is all designed. That's my forecast, I'm guessing.

So you can start seeing, even though ClickFunnels is one of our order pages right now, it's a lot more simple like that. I think that's where future things are going to be. Yeah, it needs to resize down properly. You can easily, the click funnels that are in here, you can easily do that. Just jump into mobile mode, build it first in mobile mode, click desktop and you'll see it in both modes.

Like, that's the great thing about it. You literally only have to design it once. You might change some font sizes or show some images on desktop that you don't show on mobile. So you need stuff like that that you customize. But in reality, like you can do it first on mobile easily. I think people read more on mobile than videos. Do you know you? Yeah, there's like, that you customize, but in reality, you can do it first on mobile easily. I think people read more on mobile than videos, do you know, you?

Yeah, there's... Like, when I'm looking, I never push play on a video on mobile, like a sales video, but I would always read, which is why I also think the blend of video plus text is gonna be more and more important. Like, look at all of our stuff now, it's like, there's the video of me pitching it, but then below, there's the copy of me pitching it,

so it's like, because if I want a video, I'll see the play button, but I'll, typically you're like in the bathroom or something. And it's off. This is my phone hand. So anyway, there's some forecasts, there's some ideas. But, that's what we got for you guys. So hope you guys enjoyed the flight.

We're probably halfway to our destination. All I remember is, first off, don't rely on one platform for anything. You're advertising, you're anything, your advertising, your messaging to your customers, your merchanting. The only one platform we should ever rely on 100% is ClickFunnels, because we love you guys. We're flexible with everything, too.

We allow you to plug in every other platform out there, so that's why we don't lay in wait for you. So we're the only ones who love you enough to just focus on us, but then, like I said, our focus, one big thing is that we're moving forward, it's like building in all the back ends so you can plug in backups for stuff. You have multiple ways to message people outside

just email in case email gets shut down. Multiple merchant accounts in case one of your merchant accounts gets shut down. Like all those kind of things. But don't forget on the ad side, on your podcast side, like all those things. My podcast downloads drop because I'm no longer listed, which drives me nuts.

And nobody can subscribe to my podcast now, so now I gotta go do work. Anyway, it's just a new annoyance that's happening. And there's always a workaround. Like, if you hear a Facebook account shut down, like, don't just walk away and be like, uh, apparently I broke their term. This is another thing that drives me crazy.

I remember, you probably missed off on the SEO days, like, people are like, who are like anti-SEO, they're like, well, we don't wanna do it because it's against Google's terms of service. And it's like, terms of service, they're coming to your website and spidering you. You can do whatever you want on your own website. Like, it's against Google's terms of service. And it's like, in terms of service, they're coming to your website and spidering you. You can do whatever you want on your own website. Like, it's this weird thing.

And so it's the same thing like, people get their Facebook account shut down. Like, oh, it's over, like, I'm done, like, this is not fair. It's like, no, don't you understand, like, this is your business, like, this is war. If they're coming out and they're shutting you down, like, you need to like fight back and get back in and like, keep coming back, keep coming back.

Like, don't just get knocked down and be like, oh, I'm dead. If that would happen to us, we would have lost our businesses decades ago. Decades ago. But we're fighters, and so we get back up and we keep going. So you'll see my podcast back very, very soon.

It's annoying that I will lose all of my pre... Ugh. Anyway, but believe it or that, it's all fun all fun games and all said and done doesn't really matter we're trying to change the world and these guys get in our way the platform will get in your way try to keep you from that so just ignore them keep moving forward they shut you down come back make some tweaks changes keep going on keep serving your people because they're there it matters it's worth it anything else say final words? See you on the ground. See you guys. Bye, everybody. Would you like to see behind the scenes of what we're actually

doing each day to grow our company? If so, then go subscribe to our free behind-the-scenes reality TV show at www.funnelhacker.tv