Hook, Story, Offer (and the Attractive Character) (TS)
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Here is another awesome episode from the Traffic Secrets book launch podcast.

Want to know how to grab (and KEEP) your customers' attention, and draw them into your world? On this episode, Russell shares:

• The 3-part method to crafting a high-converting sales funnel.
• How Natalie Hodson used this method to sell 120K copies of her book!
• How to use this SAME method to attract and convert your dream customers, no matter where they're coming from!

Listen in to learn more! Also, go get your FREE copy of Traffic Secrets here!)

Hit me up on IG! @russellbrunson Text Me! 208-231-3797 Join my newsletter at marketingsecrets.com) ClubHouseWithRussell.com)

---Transcript---

Hey everybody. This is Russell. Welcome back to wherever you're hanging out with me at. We've got Instagram. We've got Facebook going right now. And I am home during week number two of our quarantine. And I'm guessing a lot of you guys are as well. And so while we're sitting here, trying to figure out what to do, I figured this is a good time to start talking more about traffic. So hopefully, you guys are all excited and pumped for that. Anyway, excited to be here with you guys today. And it's interesting, as we were talking this morning as a team, and we started talking about all the fears. There are obviously a lot of fears, right now, happening in society and the economy and things like that. It's like, "Well, how do we protect ourselves? How do we create a life preserver around our company? What does it look like? What does that need to be?" And honestly, the biggest, most important life preserver you can create for your company is getting customers. That is your life preserver, especially in times right now, where so many companies aren't able to get customers. That's why the economy's failing, why businesses are failing is because they can't get customers.

And so I figured, from now until the next, I don't know, two or three weeks, two or three months, I'm going to be talking about this like crazy with you guys. How do we get customers? How do we get customers? Because it's the thing that we all need right now. It's the safety net we need to protect ourselves and to protect our businesses. And so that's kind of the game plan. So with that said, you guys excited if we go jump back into Traffic Secrets book some more? First off, thank you so much for all you guys. Obviously, we launched this Traffic Secrets book in the middle of chaos, and the books are selling like crazy. And so I want to thank you guys so much for doing that. That's exciting. Tom Greece said, "We are pregnant, and the next generation funnel hackers are on the way." Congratulations, Tom. We got funnel hacking babies coming. I love it. Oh, I heard the prediction is that after this whole everyone's quarantine come down, there's going to be a whole bunch of babies popping up nine months later. And the hospitals are going to be overwhelmed with that. So good thing they're preparing now, I guess.

Anyway, so I want to jump into this next section here of Traffic Secrets with you guys. So if you have been, obviously, the books don't ship until May 5th, but tons of you guys have been, told me you got the audio book, which is awesome. If you've been listening to all of the things, today we're going to be jumping into secret number three, which is by far the most, probably one of, if not the most, important secrets in the entire book, which I'm excited for you guys to get into. So things we've covered so far. Secret number one, we talked about who is your dream customer and really getting a deep understanding of them. Are they moving towards pleasure or away from pain? Are they a searcher? Are they a scroller? Getting deep into their mindsets so we understand them because if we understand who they are, then we can understand secret number two, which is where are they actually hiding. Where are they congregating online? Where is the existing streams of traffic happening? So we can go, we can find those people, and we can tap into them. So that's number two.

So now secret number three is what we call, are you guys ready for this? Hook, story, offer, and the attractive character. Now, man, if you guys have been following me at all for the last two years, not quite, a year and a half or so, about a year and half ago-ish is when I first came up with the new framework, hook, story, offer. And I started freaking out. I was like, "Ah." And I remember it was one of those things, where I was doing a training for my two comma club X members, and it just kind of came out. I was teaching something, and I was like, "if you notice, every single page in the funnel has hook, story, offer. The ad does. The emails do. The landing page, the sales page, upsells, every single page has hook, story, offer. And as we got deeper and deeper into it, I realized that if anything in the funnel isn't working, it's always because of either the hook, the story, or the offer. And then I started freaking out.

I remember the next morning I came in, it was like six in the morning. I was lifting weights with James P. Friel and Dave Woodward. And I was like, "You guys, guess what? I just figured out this thing." And they're like, "What is it?" I'm like, "It's called hook, story, offer." And they're like, "That sounds weird." And we spent the entire hour, we didn't lift a single weight that day. We just talked about hook, story, offer. And they were freaking out. I was freaking out. I'm looking at every funnel we've ever done. Like, what was the thing that made them work and not work? And it was crazy that every single time it always had to come down, and it was always either the hook, the story, or the offer.

And so I want to give you guys, as you guys know, when I wrote the new Traffic Seekers book, at the same time I went and I rewrote the DotCom secrets book. I rewrote the Expert Secrets book. And then I wrote this book as well. I wrote this one first, and then rewrote those other two. And because hook, story, offer, it's crazy because it's such a fundamental important concept. But because I didn't come up with that framework until after these first two books were published, these two books were missing it. And so part of the big rewrites in these include the hook, story, offer. So in DotCom Secrets book, I go deep in hook, story, offer. Expert Secrets, I go back into it as well. In DotCom Secrets, we talk a lot about funnel audibles and testing your funnel and funnels not working. And there's a whole new section in the back here about that. And what's cool about it is it's all based back on hook, story, offer.

Anyway, and so in the new book, Traffic Secrets, I talk a lot about this as well because it's such a big part. In fact, traffic, one of the most important things I've tracked is being good at throwing out hooks. A hook is like, how do you grab someone's attention? Most of our customers all day are on their phone scrolling, and they're scrolling, and they're scrolling. A hook is the thing that gets them to stop scrolling. So the hook could be the picture of you. Notice I didn't just do this on a white wall. I'm like, "Hey, I need a picture back here." And I totally forgot. I usually have something different back here, but there's the default Apple TV backdrop. I've got my books here. And then, notice I'm doing things like this. I'm trying to hook your attention. So if you're scrolling through Facebook or Instagram, all of a sudden you see this. Like, "Why is Russell so excited? Ah." And that hooks you. So hook could be the headline. It could be the image. It could be the picture. It could be a backer. It's everything you have in your tool chest to grab someone's attention. There's hook. Okay.

The second part of hook, story, offer is story, which in the Expert Secrets book is the deep dive on story, storytelling, story process, how it works, how it doesn't work. And so I talk about story a lot here, but Traffic Secrets is primarily finding the people and getting hooks to grab their attention. Expert secrets is like how you tell the story to build a perceived value of what you're going to sell. And then actually, in Dotcom secrets, we go deeper into offer. So you got hook, story, offer. They kind of weave backwards in the books, but I touch upon them deep in each book. But so, Traffic Seekers book, in section number three, or secret number three, is all about hook, story, offer. So I'm going to flip open to there really quick. So you see the picture here. If you guys can see, if you're watching, you can see there's a picture of all these little hooks. Then there's the story. And there's the offer. And this is the core framework of funnels. When you really start understanding it. All right.

Are you guys cool, if I read you part of the book? Ah. Okay, I'm going to read you a story. And this is, anyway, this is a fun one. "So it was 9:27 PM. Sorry. It's 9:27 PM. And the last of Jessica's kids had just fallen asleep. It had been a long day that started out way before the sun came up and was finally ending. While Jessica was exhausted, it was her time now. And she had a few precious moments to herself without kids pulling her in a million directions." Does that sound like any of you guys? If you've got kids, it sounds like me, especially during this quarantine. "Soon she would have to start her nighttime routine of cleaning up the house, getting herself ready for bed, taking off her makeup, and finally falling asleep for a few hours before she had to wake up and start it all over again. As she fell on the couch, she reached in to her pocket and slowly pulled out her phone. What had been happening in everyone else's lives today, she wondered. She opened Facebook and swiped through the lives of her friends and family, hoping to find some comfort, knowing that she wasn't the only one who had a busy day. Soon she started to get bored.

But when she was about to close the app, she saw an image fly past her screen. She almost missed it, but she slowly moved her finger back up the phone, bringing the picture into the middle of the screen. Yep. She thought she was right. It was a picture of a woman about her age in workout clothes with gray shorts on. The thing that caught her eye wasn't the shorts, though, it was the dark gray spot in the middle of her shorts. A little confused. She looked around above the image and read the words, 'Let me tell you about the time that I peed my pants during a workout. I was filming for dollar workout club. I'd never been so embarrassed before.' Jessica was right. It was a picture of a grown woman who had peed her pants. She laughed for a second, but then her laughter turned into uneasiness as she realized that she knew exactly how this woman had felt. She had experienced the same thing earlier that year, when her kids had wanted her to jump on the trampoline with them. She wanted to be a good mom, but after a few jumps, she had to get off because she had peed her pants. She quickly came up with a reason why she couldn't jump anymore. And after apologizing to her kids, she had run to her house to get changed.

She knew the story she told her kids wasn't true, which added to her mom guilt even more. This also made her think about other activities she knew she would love to do but were off limits for the same reason. After a few seconds of looking at the image, Jessica decided she wanted to see why in the world this woman would post a picture of herself on Facebook telling others that she had peed her pants. She clicked on the image and was immediately taken to the page of the video with the same woman in the picture. Jessica clicked on the video and started listening to the story. The woman's name was Natalie Hodson, and she was a fitness blogger and a mom of two amazing kids, who were both 10 pound babies. Natalie told her embarrassing story, when she accidentally peed her pants during a workout she was filming for her blogs. She then talked about a doctor that she had met, who specialized in helping women with this problem. She shared how the doctors were able to help her. And after she had success, she wanted to share it with other women. Natalie mentioned she had worked with the doctor to create an online program that anyone could do from home with simple exercises to strengthen their abs, core, and pelvic floor.

Together, Natalie and the doctors, made an ebook that also came with bonuses, like diet, nutrition trips, exercises, and movements, and special training programs. They wanted to make this offer for all the moms who had struggled with accidental leaks after having babies but didn't have the ability to meet with the doctor in person. Instead, you could get the same advice without ever leaving the comfort of your home, and you can get the ebook with all these bonuses mentioned for just $47. Excited, Jessica jumped off the couch and ran across the room to find her credit card. After typing in her credit card numbers, within minutes, she had access to the ebook that would solve her problem forever. Even though Jessica story is fictional, this type of experience does happen each and every day to women who are embarrassed when they accidentally pee their pants a little bit, when they cough, sneeze, or even jump on the trampoline. Over the past three years, over 120,000 women have purchased Natalie's ebook. This made Natalie Hodson a household name, giving her the ability to change the lives of countless women around the world and made her very wealthy in the process. The framework that Natalie used to get 120,000 people to buy her book, Abs, Core, Pelvic Floor, is called hook, story, offer."

Oh, you guys see where this is going? Okay. So think about this. This is happening every single day. And I shared that story at the beginning because Natalie's business has blown up, but it's all based on the same concept. People have their phones, or they're on their computer. They're scrolling through Facebook and Instagram, through YouTube, through blogs, like whatever their method of learning is. They're doing their thing. And then something's got to capture their attention. Now for us, as business owners, as marketers, as entrepreneurs, as funnel hackers, our job has become great at getting people's attention, throwing out hooks that grab their attention. So for Natalie, as she was scrolling through their feed, they see her standing there embarrassed with the peed pants. Like she’s sobbing. What is that? Boom. You got them. You hooked them just long enough that you can now tell them a story. Now, the goal of the story is to increase the perceived value of whatever it is you're going to be selling. And then, excuse me, and then you make them an offer.. And that's it. That's the game. That's how we drive traffic. That's how we sell products with things that we're selling inside of our funnel.

And I mentioned this earlier, what's interesting is as you start looking at your funnel, at your ad campaigns, everything, if something's not working, launched the ad campaign. It's not working. Why? It's always because of one of these three things, either the hook wasn't right. It's not getting people's attention. Or if it is grabbing attention, but then they're not buying, that means the story did not increase the perceived value of what they're selling, or what you're selling. And if the hook's good, and the story's good, it means the offers is no good. So if you get all three of them working, then everything works in the funnel. And that's true every page. Like the ad, there's a hook, a story, and an offer on the ad. There's a hook, story, offer on the landing page. There's a hook, story, offer on the sales page. Hook, story, offer on the upsell page. Hook, story, offer on the down sell page. Every single page in the funnel has a hook, a story, and an offer.

This video alone, literally, I'm here with you guys. This video is a hook. There's a whole bunch of hooks around me. There's the books, the pictures. There's me reading a story. There's me being all animated. There's stuff like that. There's a headline. It's the hook, story, offer, attracted character on Facebook. It wasn't on Instagram because I can't do headline on Instagram. But that was the hook. And so far, live, I've gotten about 200 people on Instagram and about 350-ish on Facebook. So 500 people, boom, and with a second scroll because hook grabbed you guys to get your attention. Now, I have your attention. Now my job is to tell you a story. And the goal of my story is to increase the perceived value of the offer I'm going to be making. So I'm telling you a story about this book. I'm talking about it. I'm reading parts of it to you. I'm getting you excited, where you like, "Oh my gosh, I need that book." And if I've done my job right, if the story is good, it's increased the perceived value of this book.

And then I make you the offer. Like, "Hey, I want you to go to trafficsecrets.com and get a copy of his book right now." Here's my offer so the offer is this book normally sells on Amazon for 24 95. You can get it for free at trafficsecrets.com. It's pre-launch right now, but you can get it for free. You just pay 9.95 shipping and handling, and I'll ship one out to you, as soon as we start shipping on May 5th. And then on top of that, I've got five bonuses you can go through immediately. There's five different videos you get for free. And you get this video. Each video is over an hour long of some of the greatest traffic minds on the planet. One was an hour long presentation that I gave at funnel hacking live. One's an hour long presentation, or a 30 minute presentation, for Peng Joon on traffic. And then there's Prince Ea. He's got over 3 billion views on his videos. There's a presentation from him. And there's, I'm blanking on the offer, but there's all these things. And now, if you go to trafficsecrets.com, you get this right now. So good.

Hook, boom. I threw a hook out there. Got attention of 500 of you right now. And this will probably get, I don't know, between, over the next week, probably a hundred thousand plus views. So a hundred thousand people see this, if the hook was right. Okay. I tell the story. The story should be engaging. We get to know each other. And then I make you an offer. Hook, story, offer. That is the foundation of all marketing, all business. That's why it's now in the DotCom Secrets, Expert Secrets and the Traffic Secrets books. It's your job to understand that. Now, in the Traffic Secrets book, it's called hook, story, offer, and the attractive character because it's you. It's your personality. You're the one who's throwing these hooks out. You're the one grabbing people's attention. You're going to have to be engaging. You have to be exciting. You have to be figuring things out. And there's books everywhere on every platform.

Like, any of you guys who follow me on Instagram, you go to my wall. Everyone of those images is a hook. Like yesterday, I did an image of me holding a post-it note that had a scripture from the book of Esther that said, perhaps, I'm going to mess up the quote right now. "But perhaps you were born for times of right now." That was a hook to people's attention. There are all this panic, all this fear, and people are scrolling through feed. And then boom, I'm throwing the thing to say, "Look, the S is scary, but this is your time. It's time to step up and try to stand." I hooked. I was telling you a story. And the offer is just people like it. I think I had like 4,000 likes in the first, I don't know, like five or six hours. So hook, story, offer. It's happening there. It's happening there. It's happening when I'm selling, happening in my videos, happening in my emails, happening in my ads. Everywhere you're publishing, everything you're doing, hook, story, offer is there, over and over and over and over and over again.

Kim said, "Russell, is a hook just an image?" It's not just an image. It can be an image. Yes. But it can be so many other things. A hook is anything that grabs your attention. And so when you're scrolling through your feed, sometimes the thing is like, in fact, this is your assignment. Tonight, when we got off this, whenever you get off this, whatever you're listening to, go to Instagram or Facebook or YouTube, wherever you're excited about. And just start scrolling, just go through the feed and start scrolling. And notice what things grab your attention. And when someone grabs your attention, stop. And then what was it that grabbed the attention? Was it the headline? Was it the image? Was it the crazy person? Was it something? Was it the comments? There's something that grabbed attention. Whatever that was that grabbed attention is the hook. So I'm making my videos. I'm looking for, I set up this location, right here, for a couple reasons. Like, here's a potential hook that might grab some. You see some books. I could put something on the screen, back here. I'm in my funnel hacker shirt. I'm excited. I'm talking.

All these elements are things I'm doing to try to hook people. I don't know what's going hook. Something hooked all of you guys. Some of it's because you know who I am. So that's the hook. Some of it's, you're looking for traffic. That's the hook. Some of you guys just like, "There's this weird guy who's all excited. What is it? what's happening?" The hook is different… your energy is the best hook. So hook is just, it's whatever it is that grabs their attention. So it's all the tools we have in our tool chest. We're trying all of them. We're throwing everything out to get their attention just long enough that they're going to stop from their scrolling. List stop. And then you say, "Okay, cool. Now, I got your attention. Let me tell you a story." I'm telling the story. And again, the goal of the story is to build, to increase the perceived value of the thing that I'm going to sell them next, the offer I'm going to make. And then I make an offer. That's the game. That's it.

What's fun is because now it's like when people have a funnel, like, "My funnels not working, Russ. What do I do?" And it's funny. I have people, we do consulting. And it's, I don't really do it any more because it just, I ran out of time. But last time I did consulting it was a hundred grand for a day, and people coming in like, "My funnel's not working. I want to increase." Literally, what I would do, I would go to the ad and look at that and say, "Okay, this ad is doing all right. How can we make it better? Is there any better hooks we could use? Is there a better story you can tell? What's a better offer?" And we spent some time on that. Then we'd go to the landing page. "Okay, here's your landing page. Cool. It's doing all right. What's a better hook we can do? What's a better story we could tell? What's a better offer?" And then go to sales page, hook, story, offer, hook, story, and that's it. There's no magic trick. You want to see the magician, how he reveals his magic tricks. That literally is it. It's hook, story, offer. If you paid me a hundred grand today, that's all we would do.

What's interesting is at funnel hacking live two years, let's see, not last year but a year before, funnel hacking live, my opening keynote presentation, I talked about hook, story, offer for first time ever. And I remember Stacy Martino was there, and she said, "I went home that night. And I was like, 'Okay, I need some help, but I don't know what to do. If I was to pay Russell, he would just tell me it's hook, story, offer. So what I'm going to do is I'm just going to think what's my hook, my story, offer'." She started looking at her business. She said, "Oh my gosh, my story is amazing. My offer's amazing. I'm not throwing out enough hooks." She says, "I'm going to throw out some more hooks." So she started doing all these things, and she messaged me, I don't know, like two weeks later. She's like, "Russell, thanks for consulting." I'm like, "hat are you talking about?" She's like, "You told me that if I was to hire you, you'd do hook, story, offer. So I just looked through my own business. I said, 'Is it the hook, the story, the offer?' I realized it was hook. I threw out a bunch more hooks. And she said, "We just had the most profitable month of our entire business because of that." I'm like, "Wow, that's amazing." Like now, you know my tricks. Now I'm useless in the equation.

That's what's important for you guys to understand. Your job as marketers is to become good at throwing out hooks that grab someone's attention. Then after you have their attention, tell them a story that builds the perceived value of the offer you're going to make them. And then make them an irresistible offer. When you become good at that, you'll be able to write your own paychecks for the rest your life. So your homework right now is to start going through your feed, newsfeed, Instagram, Facebook, Google, anywhere you're going at and start paying attention to the hooks that are grabbing your attention. And then if the hook grabs your attention, click on it. And then go listen. Listen to what's the story. What's the hook on the landing page? What's the story they're telling you? What's the offer? And you start paying attention. This is what funnel hacking is all about, noticing what's happening and watching it and paying close attention because the way you do this is not going to be magic. It's just you're looking at that, and you're figuring out how do I do the same thing? How do I throw out hooks? How do I tell stories?

Especially right now, like right now, the media is good at this. Why is media pushing so much fear? Because fear is a great hook I'm not a big believer in let's throw fear out there to try to sell products. But that's what the media is doing. They're really good at throwing out hooks. They call it clickbait. The clickbait, they're trying to get hooks out there. It's the same thing, but ethical, that you're trying to do. And so that should help.

So Mateo said, "How do you help us survive in Corona time?" This is how you survive. You need to build a life preserver around your business. The life preserver are customers. Business is all about just getting customers and serving them at the highest level possible. People still have money. There's the false belief like, "Oh no, people don't have money." It's like, no, they still have money. Money hasn't disappeared. It's going to shift a lot of businesses. People are losing jobs and stuff, but it's like, you understand people have money. They're still spending money on things that they need. Like, look at what people are buying now. There's a lot of things people are buying right now. You have to understand that, and you have to protect your company. You have to build a life preserver of customers. And how do you do that? The best way is to get traffic, people, customers to you, which is why I'm going live every single day until further notice about this Traffic Secrets book because that's what I'm talking about.

I know I have an interview. I got to jump off. It's happening in three minutes. So I'm going to bounce, but I want all you guys right now, it's time right now, during this moment of fear and frustration and quarantine and whatever the season we're in right now, this is the time for you to sharpen your saw and become better. I recommend going to trafficsecrets.com, getting copy of the free book. The book doesn't ship until May 5th. But the order form bump, the upsells is the audio book, which is seven hours of me reading the book. You can get it today. It's ready right now. So that's happening. And then, like I said, I'm going live every day during the weekday, going through chapter by chapter. So go pay attention. Go back and watch and start learning these principles. Even while you're waiting for the book, you can start understanding these principles and start becoming better at them. And test some hooks today. Post something on your Instagram wall or your Facebook wall or wherever you post stuff and test a hook out. See if you can get someone's attention. And just practice your hooks because the better you get at hooks, the more people. That's kind of game plan.

So, all right, that's it you guys. It's time. Go get your book at trafficsecrets.com. I appreciate you guys. Thanks for hanging out today. You're all amazing. And I hope you guys enjoy your time in quarantine. I know it's scary and stressful times, but we need to be focusing on the positive and focusing on building life preservers around your business, which is traffic. It's customers. It's people. And so let's focus all about how to get, not just customers. If I can get this down here, not just customers, but how to get your dream customers, the right ones, the ones you actually want to serve into your business. And so that's the game plan. All right. Thanks guys. Appreciate you all. And we'll talk to you all tomorrow. All right. Bye everybody.

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