The Russell Brunson Show - Funnel Hacking Revisited

Episode Date: June 24, 2019

After a full day of funnel hacking over 300+ funnels, I want to walk you through what funnel hacking is again and make sure you're doing it right. On this episode Russell talks about the difference between stealing and pulling inspiration while building funnels. Here are some of the interesting things to look forward to in this episode: Why copying is stealing, but modeling and taking inspiration is not. How taking inspiration from several different sources and not copying anything is exactly is the proper way to funnel hack. And what Brendon Burchard said about how he avoids accidentally taking other people's ideas. So listen here to find out the difference in the right way to funnel hack, and the wrong way to funnel hack. Transcript - https://marketingsecrets.com/blog/217-funnel-hacking-revisited Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

With TD Direct Investing, new and existing clients could get 1% cash back. Great! That's 1% closer to being part of the 1%. Maybe, but definitely 100% closer to getting 1% cash back with TD Direct Investing. Conditions apply. Offer ends January 31, 2025. Visit td.com slash dioffer to learn more. What's up everybody, this is Russell Brunson. Welcome back to the Marketing Secrets Podcast. Today, once again, I am marketing in my Tesla. And it makes me laugh because all my Tesla listening followers all messaged me yesterday congratulating me on my Tesla.

So thank you. Now I know who you all are. Anyway, with that said, let's jump into the theme song and then come back. I got something fun to share with you. 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 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. All right, so yesterday was so much fun yesterday was funnel hacking day but not like a normal funnel hacking day it was like an intense expensive hacking day so i'm working on um we have an event this summer called unlock the secrets it's for all my two comic club ex-coaching members and um my inner circle members and also their families. So it's the first time I've ever done an event where parents and children can come. And so it's going to be really, really fun. And there's a lot of work going into it.

But one thing I wanted to do as I'm teaching different funnels and things like that is I wanted some examples and a swipe file. And I've been building out the swipe file in Trello with all my favorite funnels in there. I've been doing it kind of slowly for a little while. And yesterday I was like, I'm going to spend the whole day and go hardcore on this. And so I basically in Trello, you can have different columns and in column has different cards. So I made a column for every funnel type. So it's like lead funnels, cart funnels, book funnels, presentation funnels, VSL funnels, challenge funnels, like all different types of funnels. Right. And then, um, underneath there, I made a card for

every funnel I liked. And, um, and then, um, I would go and I would take, in the past, I've taken screenshots of here's page one, page two, page three. So you can see them really easily in this, uh, in this Trello board. Um, so I did yesterday is I recruited two people on my team to help make this possible. I had Melanie who became the funnel purchaser, the funnel buyer. Um, and then, uh, Leon who became the funnel screenshotter. And so what happens, I would go through, I'd find my favorite funnel. I'd post the front page link in a new Trello card, and then Melanie would go in and she would go through and buy it, buy everything, and then get the links for every single page in the funnel, post them inside of Trello, and then Leon comes behind her and takes screenshots of every

single page and posts them in there. And it's been interesting because typically I geek out on funnels, right? So I'll want to funnel hack something and I'll buy two funnels and it'll take me the entire day because I'm reading everything and looking at it and studying and nerding out. But Melanie, she's immune to funnels so far. Working on her, but as of today, she's definitely immune to funnels. And so she just buys without even thinking twice and just goes through the pages.

And I think conservatively, she spent over $10,000 in funnels yesterday. There was one offer. She's like, this is a $5,000 offer. Do you want me to buy that? I'm like, no, let's don't buy that one, but buy all the rest. So I'm going to be getting in the mail this week. Um, thousands of rando things from like nail polish to, um, kidnapping, um, board game kits to like, anyway, so many random funnels, so much fun. And so anyway, that's kind of,'s been happening. But with that said, we were able to funnel hack yesterday,

probably about 300 or so funnels. And the ones I've loaded in, they were probably close to a thousand now. So I'm done for the day. She's going to be going in there and keep on funnel hacking. And then Leon's going to be taking pictures. And we'll have this huge database of every amazing funnel that I love,

the pictures, the screenshots. And it's going to be, oh, it's going to be so much fun. So I'm pumped and excited. And I cannot wait to get all the weird crap in the mail over the next week or it's going to be so much fun. So I'm pumped and excited and I cannot wait to get all the weird crap in the mail over the next week or two to see what I actually bought. Um, uh, so that's kind of fun. So a couple of things I want to talk about. Um, number one is funnel hacking. And, um, I'm curious how many of you guys actually still funnel hack. Um, it was interesting. I went to my two comic club X members and I said, Hey, um, I want you guys to submit funnels. You look at your favorite funnel so I can go and I said, hey, I want you guys to submit funnels that you look at,

your favorite funnels, so I can go and I can funnel hack them. And I got a lot of really, really good ones back from a very few amount of people, which made me think for most of them, they haven't been funnel hacked. They don't know what funnels they like. I mean, how are you supposed to create something if you don't know what you like? Right? Like, I know exactly. When people are like, when I have my bat meetings with my team,

I'm like, hey, we're splitting the funnel. I'm like, cool. What do you want to look like? I might want to look like this one and this one, the twist of this one, a little bit of this one. I got to just create from scratch. Like that's what morons do. Come on, you guys.

If you want to like, like this is art. Um, there's a book I just bought the other day. It said like, actually I don't know the title. The title is like something like great artists steal. And I haven't read the book yet. So I don't know exactly what it, what it says, but I'm assuming it has something to do with, with that, right? Like we don't create from scratch. We look at a whole bunch of examples of amazingness and then we build something off of the back of that. Right. And so, um, it kind of blew my mind that there

was only, I don't know, maybe a dozen people that had any funnels to even post out of like a group of almost a thousand people. Right. And I'm like, this is so crazy to me that, that, that nobody's been funnel hacking. No one's got like their favorite funnels, like, like at Q, right. I have links to all my funnels. So like when I'm building something, I can get inspiration. I said, okay, I'm doing a webinar. Let me look at like 10 or 15 or 20 webinar funnels as I'm building this one out to get ideas for looks and color palettes and ideas and for hooks and headlines and ways they did things and how they did the call to actions and all those kinds of things. Right. I'm doing, um, uh, a squeeze funnel or a lead page funnel or a lead funnel or whatever you want to call it, right? To generate leads.

I look at a dozen or two or three dozen to get ideas. I think a lot of times what happens is that, and this is the borderline between funnel hacking and stealing, and this drives me crazy. Like, for example, we launched the Expert Secrets book, right? And I took inspiration from like 50 different funnels to build that one right like i spent a ton of time and energy same thing with a copy like i studied a whole bunch of free plus shipping book funnels and and um things like that to get ideas for the hooks and the angles and the copy and the stuff like that so i did all this

research and i plugged it in and we built this amazing funnel within like an hour of us doing it i see those people like i funneled drus like an hour of us doing it, I see all these people like, I funnel hacked Russell's funnel, here's a share funnel link. And they're giving away my exact funnel with the same colors and the same everything. And then I'm like, you guys, you missed it. Like funnel hacking is not,

look at something and copy it exactly, right? Like that's not how this works. Because now there's like 800 people with a funnel that looks exactly like mine. So what am I doing? I'm re-changing it. The reason why we spend time on a funnel, a funnel, I'm modeling,

like I'm looking for proven things in a funnel, right? Like layout, structure, concepts. Like I'm looking for those things that I'm funnel hacking. I'm not stealing word for word, stealing the color, stealing the headline. Like for some reason, that's what people think funnel hacking is. And it's not, that's illegal and immoral and evil and bad.

And that's not what I'm talking about. Funnel hacking is about looking at a whole bunch of stuff and pulling inspiration. I heard somebody once say that if you copy from one person, it's plagiarism. If you copy a whole bunch of people, it's research. That's my belief on it. It's like you're looking at a whole bunch of stuff and then creating your own from that, right? I'm looking at all these different ideas as inspiration to model, but then I go and I create something new, something better. And this is one of the main reasons why that's so important is because, uh, marketing is all about pattern interrupts. Do you guys understand this? Like the reason why something works really good is because,

um, there's the pattern and I come and I interrupt that pattern, right? So you're on Facebook scrolling through the thing. And, um, it's like, for example, meme videos. I remember meme videos first came out two years ago. Nobody was doing them, right? Brandon and Caitlin were one of the first to really do it and to hit it hard. Their meme videos were killing it. Guess what happened? Everybody saw their meme videos.

They're like, oh, meme videos. Then their software came out. They're like, we create meme videos. It blew up. Now everybody on the planet has meme videos. Guess what happens? When Brandon and Caitlin came out, they interrupted the pattern right they shifted it everyone saw it like what is this and they like captured attention they clicked on it but then when everybody does it

you're not interrupting the pattern it becomes the pattern right it becomes the pattern and it doesn't work anymore same thing like hand sketch videos like um vince palco was the dude who did the very first hand sketch video online he did it for Mike Geary in the fitness space for Truth About Abs. And he did this video and I saw the stats right about six months later. I was at a mastermind retreat with Mike Geary. And he's like, Hey, yeah, Vince Palco is the dude who hand sketched my sales video. And look at the conversion was like 300% increase in conversion, something crazy. I think it's higher than that. But it was just this huge increase. And I was like, Oh my gosh. And, and that was the first one I'd seen. And and then what happened everyone the fitness industry is like oh hand over videos help on Gary's and all of a sudden next you know every single video in the fitness space with hands gets video but I

saw Gary's first so I contacted Vince I'm like hey I want to do it in my market because nobody had done it yet right so there's a pattern of everyone's doing these powerpoint vsls that and it became the patterns everyone was doing it so it stopped working it stopped becoming effective so I was like I want to do the interrupt. So I hired Vince to do handskiss video for us for the original.com secrets, local webinar. We use that and boom, it became the pattern interrupt and it works so good. And like, that was the funnel. Um, man, if you guys have heard of my one funnel way story, that was the funnel that, um, got me out of the brinks of bankruptcy and gave me the ability to pay off the IRS and a whole bunch of other craziness.

Right. Cause it was the pattern interrupt that grabbed people and like, what is this? And it worked. But then guess what happened? Oh, everyone's like, oh, look what Russell's doing. And they all got hand sketch videos. Now it became the pattern and that doesn't work nearly as effective.

So what you're looking at is with funnel hacking is you're looking at the pattern, right? And there's elements of the pattern that are essential, right? So understand this is the model. This is the structure. This is the layout. This is the flow. This is how it works. And then your job as the artist, as the marketer, right? So understand this is the model. This is the structure. This is the layout. This is the flow. This is how it works.

And then your job as the artist, as the marketer, say, okay, this is the pattern. How do I interrupt it? Right? And the interrupt can be as simple as a headline, a color tweak, a way you do your video, things like that. Like if you saw the affiliate bootcamp.com, you guys noticed the pattern interrupt there. Like it's literally almost the same concept as 30days.com. Look at both pages.

Like, oh, these pages look almost the same, right? Like I funnel hacked myself, right? In fact, if you look at the funnel structure, it's, it's literally the same, like the upsell flow, like everything's the same, right? But we need a different hook. Cause that's a pattern interrupt. So affiliate bootcamp versus 30 days. So different hook that I needed different. Uh, and obviously the color palettes, different ones, blue and everything. So the one's green and more army like, but then I need an interrupt for the video for the video was to say, i sat in the same spot said the same more sense anything it wouldn't work right so i gotta interrupt the pattern so what i do then is um i did the video with the cards so if you go to phillybootcamp.com look at the top you'll notice

i did these cards then and and it's a pattern interrupt it's killing it right now and i guarantee it's gonna happen all you guys do card videos now there's gonna be a million of them it won't work anymore but i interrupted the pattern with that thing right and so what's going to happen is all you guys are going to do card videos now. There's going to be a million of them and it won't work anymore. But I interrupted the pattern with that thing, right? And so what your job to do as a marketer when you're funnel hacking, you're looking at stuff, is you're looking at stuff not just in your lens of like, I'm a dentist, therefore I look at other dental funnels. It's like, look at all these funnels in different markets and see it. Okay?

Guess who I got the idea for the hand sketch videos? A couple of years ago, my wife and I were watching YouTube, flipping through stuff and we saw this kid with his hand with these cards. And I was like, that's interesting. I click play, I started watching it. And it was this kid telling a story about how he was dying. And he told his whole story through cards. He didn't say words, he told card after card. And I sat there, it was like a 25, 30 minute video. And I watched the whole thing with my wife and we bawled our eyes out. And I think the kid ended up dying. And this video was like gone crazy viral. And I was like in this emotional state where I was like, I sat

there for 30 minutes waiting to see, read his card to pull me through the story. Right. And I was like, that is powerful. And it's like that night I was just like emotionally messed up. Right. And the next morning I woke up and I said, Holy cow, look how that triggered me. I had to read the whole thing. I couldn't stop reading it. And so, um, that day, literally that day I was like, that is a pattern interrupt. And so we did our very, my very first hand card video, which also happened to be for phillybootcamp.com, but it was one from like eight years ago, whenever we did the original one. Um, and after that time, a whole bunch of people knocked me off, um, did hand that the card videos. And then I stopped and I never felt, forgot about it. And then we brought it back. Right. And so the other thing you guys about

pattern interrupts is you like something that, um, that is the interrupt, um, that becomes the pattern. Then people forget about it and then it can become an interrupt again in the future. So, um, anyway, so that's, I want you guys just understanding these concepts of funnel hacking. So often we think it's like, oh, I must find a funnel. I will copy it. Like, no, that is not what I said ever, ever, ever.

That's unethical, immoral and wrong. And it's stupid too. Cause it's not going to make, like, it's not going to make you more money. Right. It's looking at the pattern. So I find the more money, right? It's looking at the pattern. So I find the funnels that work. I'm looking at the pattern. Okay.

And I keep the structure of the pattern. Okay. So I keep the structure. So it's like, I know like this, this layout works, the logo here, the button here, the box here, the, like the structure will remain the same, but now I've got to come in and add my art, right? So I'm changing color palettes, changing things like that. I changed the copy and I'm looking for the pattern interrupts. What is it? Is it a hand

sketch video? Is it a card video? Is it no video? Is it a different headline? Is it a bold headline? Is it a picture of me flexing in my mankini? I don't know. I would never do that. But something that becomes a pattern interrupt, right? Every single ad is an interrupt, right? I saw Dean Graciosi with his book a while ago, lighting his book on fire. And I was like, oh my gosh, that's a pattern interrupt. He did it in his market, which is like personal development. I'm going to do it in the marketing nerd market. So I lit my book on fire.

And that ad did awesome for a long time, right? And it worked. And now that one didn't catch on. One of you guys didn't burn your products, which is probably good. I do know Steven Larson last weekend went and blew up his product. It was crazy. You'll see it soon in the funnel, I'm sure up, um, his product, a bunch of, it was crazy. You'll see it soon in the funnel. I'm sure.

But, um, you guys get what I'm saying though. So anyway, I love funnel hacking. It's really, really fun, but it's not stealing. It's getting ideas to pull inspiration from. So when I know next time I'm pulling a webinar, I log into my Trello board, I look at the 400 webinars I funnel hacked and start looking at the images. I'm looking for ideas. I'm looking for patterns and I don't do where like I open up the screen and then I open up ClickFunnels next to it and I'm copying it.

I don't do it that way because that's plagiarism. In fact, I was talking to Brendan Bruchard. It was interesting. He said that when he has an event coming up, he's like, I can't listen to any Tony Robbins thing for at least six months before my event happens because I get heavily influenced and I'll hear Tony's say stuff and I like it

and I'll be on stage talking and all of a sudden this thing will come out and it's like, ah, that was Tony's thing. That was not my thing. He's like, I know that how our brains work is that we model and we, we see things we like, we pull inspiration. He's like, if I listen to Tony too close to me, he's stepping on stage. He's like, then I started saying Tony things. That's not what I want. Like I want this to be my stuff. So I have to stop listening to it. And it's the same thing with funnel hacking. Like I don't open up, you know, let's say Jim

Edwards' webinar funnel. And I copy like thing for thing for thing, because then I'm copying, and then it's not going to work, and it's just like a not cool thing to do. Instead, what I do is I go back, and I say, okay, let me look at five, 10, 15. I look at all these things, and I get ideas, I get inspiration,

then I close the board, and then I start building something, right? So now I'm not copying anything, but I'm pulling inspiration. I did a bunch of research ahead of times, and now I'm like, oh, I remember this part. I like that, and I like this, and I like this times and now I'm like, Oh, I remember this part. I like that. I like this and I like this and I create something new, genuinely new. And that is how you grow in your market. Okay. And that's how fun hiking can and should be used.

Um, so I hope that helps. Um, all right. Well, I've been in my Tesla driving around in a circle for the last like 14 minutes as I've been talking with you guys. So I'm going to go drive to the office now and get started because Funnel Hacking Day is done. And today I got to be working on the Traffic Seekers book. I have to get chapter four done today. It's halfway done. I have to get done today or else I will be beaten by my publisher who gave me a deadline. They also, it's crazy.

This is the first time I've used like a traditional publisher and they, and it was so funny because like we did the whole book deal and I didn't read the contracts. I'm not a contract guy, but I had Dave read through it. And then Dave came over. He's like, do you know they're giving you advance? I'm like, what's an advance?

He's like, that's where they pay you before you write the book. I was like, really? That's like the coolest thing ever. And so anyway, so I asked him, this is cool. He's like, yeah, well, most people, they take the advance. That's that way they can take a year off and write a book. He's like, you're kind of insane because you're running a business and a million other things. And, um, but we, oh, my kids turn on the whoopee cushion, fart on the Tesla. That's not me farting. That's the whoopee cushion.

That's a turn signal. Oh, my Tesla drivers know what I'm talking about. That is embarrassing. Anyway, my kids are dead to me now. Um, what was I talking about? Oh, anyway, uh, they gave me gave me this advance, right? So that was pretty cool. And then they send me like this money. And I'm like, this is awesome. And then with that, it's like the chains. It's like, okay, here we gave you money.

Here's your deadlines. I'm like, wait, what? And anyway, kind of funny. So I got to write my book because I contractually have to now. But I'm also excited. And it's turning out really good. I spent a lot of time in the RV on the way to Lake Powell last week on the way home writing. My wife is amazing. She drove while I was typing it up and it's coming along really good.

The end of chapter four will be done with the first section, which is, ah, I'm excited for. So, all right, that's all I got. I hope you guys are amazing and I will talk to you all again soon. Bye everybody. Want more marketing secrets? If so, then go get your copies of my two best-selling books.

Book number one is called Expert Secrets and you can get a free copy at expertsecrets.com. And book number two is called Dot Com Secrets and you can get your free copy at dotcomsecrets.com. Inside these two books, you'll find my top 35 secrets that we've used to become the fastest-growing, non-VC-backed SaaS startup company in the world.