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About Russell Brunson

Russell Brunson is a pioneer within the entrepreneurial world. While studying at college, he developed his first online company. Within a year of graduation, he had sold over a million dollars’ worth of products. This tenacity has remained throughout his 15-year career. He now has over a million followers and has sold hundreds of thousands of books.  

Introduction

Traffic Secrets focuses on the most critical traffic of the 21st century: social media traffic. It provides guidance on how to master one social media platform before moving on to another. Traffic Secrets also explains how to encourage the right customers to gravitate towards you. The biggest problem for entrepreneurs isn’t creating a fantastic service. The biggest problem is getting their future customers to discover them. Traffic is just people. This book will help you to find your people so that you can focus on changing the world through your products. This is the underlying message of Traffic Secrets: entrepreneurs are the people who can change the world.  

Key Idea #1: Content and Traffic Are the Heartbeat

Russell describes your company’s traffic and content as the heartbeat. It doesn’t matter how slick your company looks. Without this heartbeat your company is dead. We can spend all our time optimizing funnels, producing the perfect script and thinking about our niche. That said, without these two key features, your company is destined to fail. 

Russell describes the content as what circulates the blood flow. In humans, the heart circulates energy and oxygen to your body. In your business, content circulates resources and people.

Key Idea #2: What Do I Talk About

You must produce content, coupled with traffic, to help your business grow. But, there are three things to consider before creating content.

Find Your Market

When creating content, you must consider the markets that have withstood the test of time: healthcare, relationships and wealth. Your business will fit into one of these categories. You just have to think outside of the box. For example, self-development businesses would fit into ‘relationships,’ as it is about the relationship with yourself. 

Find Your Submarket

After fitting your business into one of the three broad market categories, you want to consider your submarket. Consider your business at a more specific level. 

Find Your Niche

Finally, you want to find your niche within the market. Your niche is where you make your money as a business. You must be very specific. For example, you don’t have a niche if you started a channel on Internet Marketing and you are just talking broadly. A niche would be creating a channel where you cover specific topics like ‘How to Date as a YouTuber’ and ‘How to do taxes (for YouTubers). You are talking to a specific group of people. Break down your ideas into the lowest common denominator. This is the most robust approach to take.

Key Idea #3: Customer Avatar

A significant portion of this book covers how to get into the mind of your customer avatar. You want to know who you’re talking to and how they found your content. Doing this will allow you to personalize content to specific groups of people.

Personalizing is extremely important. Russell makes the point that if you’re for everyone, then you’re really for no one. You won’t drive any meaningful traffic if you are not identifying a niche and targeting your business’ content to that niche.

One way to develop content for specific groups is based on language. You want to use the language of people who engage with you. So, whenever you get emails, comments, tweets or DMs from people saying “I’m trying to find my calling, I don’t want to sell out,” write those down. That’s powerful. When you use their language, you will connect with them. Always think when you are producing content: “Would the customer avatar like this?”

Key Idea #4: The Dream 100

In this book, Russell Brunson talks about a concept called The Dream 100. It is the idea that you have to get out there to be successful. You have to observe successful people working in a similar realm and see what they are doing to become successful. If you utilize identical tactics, you will obtain similar results. Modeling is the fastest way to learn and adapt.

The fundamental point made by Dream 100 is that there are already people out there who have your customers. These people have your audience and are clearly doing things that are attracting your audience. One hundred of these people and their aspirations are your Dream 100. It doesn’t have to be 100 people/businesses, but you should find as many of these individuals as possible and model their approaches. It is like your market research for your personal development. As well as modeling your business on their strategies, you should start networking with them and building relationships. This networking might provide a gateway to their audience. You will learn considerably more by doing this. 

Key Idea #5: Dig Your Well Before You’re Thirsty

This idea is one that is often neglected by entrepreneurs. People have a knack of asking for things before developing a relationship. In effect, entrepreneurs have a talent of trying to find water without a well. You have to lay the groundwork before reaping the rewards of forming strong collaborations. 

You should start engaging with people before trying to sell them something, seek out a collaboration, or ask for a favor. You should also start engaging with these people’s material. Like, comment and share their posts. Over time, your name’s going to start popping up, and they’ll start to recognize you. Try to build goodwill and add value first. 

Key Idea #6: Get Traffic

The best kind of traffic is grown organically. It is possible to obtain some traffic through paid ads. That said, often the best way to produce traffic is to produce top-quality content. If you put top-quality content out, your customer avatar will eventually gravitate towards it. The most sustainable businesses build their traffic organically. They offer an excellent service and engaging content, rather than buying vast amounts of ad space. 

Taking the organic route has high sweat equity. You have to put in a lot of work. You have to be willing to accept that you cannot be successful by just buying ads. You cannot have something without work. Traffic is about quantity, but it is, more importantly, about quality. 

Key Idea #7: Don’t Be Everywhere

This idea challenges conventional advice from entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs generally suggest having accounts on all social media platforms. Instead, Russell believes that ‘being everywhere’ is arguably the most harmful advice to a new entrepreneur who doesn’t have the money to outsource their social media. If you spread yourself too thin, you will burn yourself out. You will dilute the quality of work across all areas of your business. 

Russell suggests that new entrepreneurs should spend one year mastering one platform. Once you have mastered one and have a steady income stream, you can start mastering the other platforms or outsource some of the social media work. 

Go a mile deep, not a mile wide on social media. Adopting this approach will help you start seeing good returns early on in your entrepreneurial journey. That said, certain platforms are much better than others for producing traffic. So, you will want to master one of these.

Facebook

Facebook is still extremely viable as a platform for developing traffic. There are 2.7 billion Facebook users. This statistic means there are more Facebook users in the world than Catholics. 

Building supportive communities on Facebook is one of its greatest strengths. It is easy to bring together groups of people with similar passions and goals. When you can do this you can move towards selling within this space. 

As well as developing your own groups, you can use other people’s established groups on Facebook. Use these spaces to share some of your content. If you build up enough goodwill in these groups, providing a paid service still seems organic and fair. 

You also want to make sure that your profile is optimized. If you are trying to form engaged groups and post in other people’s groups, you want your profile to be clear and informative. If somebody adds or follows you, they will see your content. This is your opportunity to leave a lasting impact on this potential customer. 

Finally, you might want to consider using messenger bots to engage with a large number of people. Although highly intelligent and personalizable, messenger bots have become less powerful. That said, with the advancement of technology, it is definitely something to look out for. 

Youtube

There are three tips for developing traffic through YouTube:

1) Your thumbnail needs to be as simple as possible. Some people try and create intricate thumbnails with text and fantastic detail. But, most people watch YouTube on their phones. So, keep it as simple as possible: a big face and some bright colors

2) Make your videos between ten and twelve minutes long. When you create longer videos, you generally get longer watch time from your viewers. YouTube’s goal is to keep people watching for as long as possible. Views are less critical than view time if you also want to make money through YouTube revenue. 

3) You should outline your video, but you should not script it. It is good to have prompts to jog your memory, but using a script can lead to bad acting. You don’t need to say everything perfectly. In fact, it makes you more relatable if you don’t. 

Instagram

When Instagram launched in 2010, it was one of the fastest-growing social media sites. It has since passed over a billion active users. 

Russell’s friend, Jenna Kutcher, provides her own tip in this book. It is called the JK5 method. Firstly, you choose five topics that represent your brand and your customer avatar. If you had to sum them up in five ways, what would they be? This is so important, as the accounts that do best on Instagram are those that are personal. People don’t follow the music band on Instagram; they follow the band members. They want to see personal and relatable content. 

So, make sure that you identify your five areas and stick to those areas. Make your posts as relatable as possible. Don’t just reuse content from other social media platforms. Instagram users are using Instagram differently than Facebook, and you need to adapt to that. 

Final Summary

Traffic Secrets challenges the common myths surrounding traffic while offering new traffic secrets. To effectively bring traffic to your website or page you must:

• Create high quality content that meets the needs of your target audience.
• Find your niche within your submarket and market.
• Use the language of the people you engage with.
• Find and mimic your dream 100 (the people who have 100 of your target audience).
• Never ask for things before developing a relationship.
• Build your traffic organically rather than quickly.
• Choose a specific social media platform and become a specialist at driving traffic. Once you have mastered one you can move onto the next platform.

Comment below and let others know what you have learned or if you have any other thoughts.

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