Reading is a big part of my growth and I’m trying to increase my reading time each year. This last year I read 13 non-fiction books. Rather than review all 13 in one post, which would be a huge post, I’ve decided to break it up into posts with 2 – 3 book reviews.

In Part One of this series I reviewed #13 – The Millionaire Booklet by Grant Cardone and #12 – Finish by Jon Acuff. Here are the next books on my list.

#11 – The Code of the Extraordinary Mind by Vishen Lakhiani

This is an interesting book. I’ve been on a quest to study how your mindset affects everything in life. That is what attracted me to this book. 

In the book, he lists 10 unconventional laws to redefine your life & succeed on your own terms. Here are the “laws”.

1. Transcend the cultureescape. – Exploring the collective rules, beliefs, and practices about life.
2. Question the Brules. – How to identify the bulls**t rules or brules that should have expired generations ago but still infect our lives.
3. Practice conscious engineering. – Discover how your beliefs and practices shape you.
4. Rewrite your models of reality. – The beliefs ingrained in you since you were a child. Many are disempowering, or what you might call limiting beliefs. Learn how to swap them out with empowering beliefs.
5. Upgrade your systems for living. – These are the daily practices for getting on with life. How to optimize your daily life’s practices.
6. Bend reality. – Living in your optimal state, or what I would call “being in the zone”.
7. Live in blissipline. – Happiness is hackable, and blissipline is a beautiful discipline for leveling up your happiness every day.
8. Create a vision for your future. – Most of us are trained by the Brules of the world to pursue the wrong goals. Learn how to set goals that lead to happiness and create meaning.
9. Be unfuc*able. – How to be rock solid in your own self so that judgments from others and fear of loss no longer affect you.
10. Embrace your quest. – Don’t only live in the world, go beyond that by actually changing the world.

This book made me think. It had some good suggestions for upgrading life. Other suggestions were just “meh”. That’s the thing with books. You won’t agree with everything you read and you shouldn’t and that is ok. 

#10 – Dotcom Secrets by Russell Brunson

Russell Brunson is known as the funnel wizard. He has made millions online and has a company named Click Funnels. He knows what he is talking about when it comes to marketing online.

A funnel is a sales and marketing term for how you attract prospects and lead them down your path (funnel) towards a sale. In Dotcom Secrets – The Underground Playbook for Growing your Company Online he gives a wealth of information on several different techniques for building marketing funnels. 

**Warning**  I geek out about marketing so this review will be longer than most. 

Secret #1 – The Secret Formula

He starts out with basic marketing 101:

1. Who is your dream client? 
2. Where can you find them?
3. What bait will you use to attract them?
4. What result do you want to give them?

Every business has to answer these four questions if they want to be in business for long.  Once you have the answers to those questions, you know better how to approach marketing and selling to them.

Secret #2 – The Value Ladder

The first building block of funnels he discusses is the Value Ladder.

You can picture a value ladder looking like the image above. On the left-hand axis you have value and on the bottom axis is the price. You want your prospects to start out on the left and you’ll lead them up the ladder toward the right where you provide them more value and charge them more.

He gave the example of his dentist. The dentist started out with free teeth cleaning. While they were cleaning his teeth they mentioned that his teeth looked yellow and sold him on a teeth whitening procedure. Then, the dentist asked if he had ever had braces. He said he noticed that his teeth were starting to shift. Of course, the dentist had the solution, teeth retainers! So Russell walked into the dentist for a free cleaning and walked out $2,000 later with white teeth and new retainers. That’s the power of a value ladder.

Once you have your value ladder you can start thinking about the different funnels that you’ll take your prospects through.

Secret #3 – From a Ladder to a Funnel

Bridging the gap between a Value Ladder and a Sales Funnel is done by:

1. Providing 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.

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.  It’s the process you take someone through to get them to ascend through the different levels of your Value Ladder.

At each stage of the funnel, you introduce the next product or service in your Value Ladder.

 

 

Secret #4 – How to Find Your Dream Customers

Once you’ve identified who your dream customers are, how do you find them?

One of the coolest things about the internet is the power of congregations. A congregation is a group of like-minded people or people interested in the same topics. It’s easy to find these congregations on the internet. You can find them in Facebook Groups, Online Forums and specific blogs tailored to a particular topic.

Secret #5 – The Three Types of Traffic

There are three types of traffic when it comes to marketing and sales:

1. Traffic you control – You don’t own the traffic but you can tell it where to go by using ads such as Facebook and Google Adwords as well as emails and banner ads.
2. Traffic you don’t control – This traffic just shows up and you don’t have any control where it comes from or where it goes. This is traffic like social media, search traffic and YouTube.
3. Traffic you own – It’s your email list or your followers, readers, customers, etc.  This is the best type of traffic.

Secret #6 – The Attractive Character

An attractive character is a persona you’re sharing with your audience and how you communicate with them.

There’s a lot more to the attractive character than I can share in a blog post but the main way to think about an attractive character is that they are the person you put forth that talks to your prospects and customers instead of your company doing the talking.

Secret #7 – The Soap Opera Sequence

This funnel is the way you quickly build a bond between you and your prospect. Here’s the sequence for the Soap Opera Sequence:

1. Set the stage – Welcome them into your world and let them know what to expect.
2. Open with high drama – This is where you start selling. Give them your backstory on how you struggled with the same problems they are struggling with.
3. Epiphany – Share the moment everything turned around for you.
4. Hidden benefits – Point out the benefits they’re getting by knowing you and following your plan or using your product.
5. Urgency and Call to Action – This is where you light a fire under your prospect and get them to take action.

Secret # 8 – Daily Seinfeld Sequence

Use this email sequence to share what’s been going on in your life an business just like the Seinfeld characters used to do at the diner. These emails are about nothing other than getting the prospect to know you and like you.

Secret #9 – Reverse Engineering a Successful Funnel

In this secret, he goes over how to reverse engineer other successful funnels. Here are the steps he uses:

1. Make a list of your direct and indirect competitors.
2. Find each landing page URL.
3. Enter the URL into online research tools such as SimilarWeb.
4. Collect data, dig deep, click on links, buy products, and see what the competitor is doing.
5. Create a swipe file of ideas to model.

Secret #10 – The 7 Phases of a Funnel

There are seven phases of a successful funnel. Most marketing pros only talk about landing pages and headlines. Secret #10 covers the other things you should think about.

1. Determine the traffic temperature – Is the traffic cold, warm or hot?
2. Set up the pre-frame bridge – It’s a bridge such as an ad, a survey or an email that pre-frames people before they get to your landing page.
3. Qualify subscribers – See who is willing to give you their email or phone number as a pre-qualification.
4. Qualify buyers – After qualifying subscribers, you want to find out who among them is a buyer.
5. Identify Hyperactive Buyers – These are the people who are in some kind of pain right now and will buy now and buy more.
6. Age and ascend the relationship – Nurture the relationship.
7. Change the selling environment – Go from email to phone or in person to sell higher ticket products.

Secret #11 – The Twenty-Three Building Blocks of a Funnel

Since there are 23 building blocks he lists, I won’t go into detail on each one. Get the book if you want more info. 🙂

1. The Pre-Frame Bridge
   1. Quizzes
   2. Articles
   3. News
   4. Blog
   5. Video
   6. Email
   7. Presell Page
2. Qualify Subscribers
   1. Squeeze Pages
   2. Pop-Up
   3. Squeeze Pop
   4. Free + Shiping
   5. Webinar Registration
   6. Free Account
   7. Exit Pop
3. Qualify Buyers
   1. Free + Shipping
   2. Trial
   3. Tripwire
   4. Self Liquidating Offer
   5. Straight Sale
4. Identify Buyers in Heat
   1. Bumps
   2. One Time Offers
   3. Down Sales
   4. Affiliate Recommendations

Secret #12 – The Best Bait

In this secret, he goes over some ingenious lead-magnets or free offers that you can use to attract customers. Some of these are the order form bump. 

Conclusion

Both of these books were really good and gave me some growth. I was able to glean some real nuggets from each. 

This was a really long post and if you’re reading this you made it all the way through. I know it is a lot of information but hopefully something you read piqued your interest in one topic or another. Sometimes, when you’re reviewing a book, it is hard to condense it into bite sized morsels that are useful. I’m sure I’ll get better as we go along.

Stay tuned for the next books in the list…