How to Create Momentum and Then Capitalize on It
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Weird Gucci shoes pic got me 120K views. What I learned and what I would do differently next time.

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---Transcript---

What's up, everybody? This is Russell Brunson. Welcome back to the Marketing Secret Podcast. Today, I want to talk about the concept of capitalizing on momentum. All right, so I had a really unique experience. Some of you guys know that by default I wear a t-shirt and jeans almost every day, but then for Funnel Hacking Live I used to try to dress up. And so I'd buy my own clothes and I didn't know how to buy clothes and so I would just... Anyway, looking back now, it's embarrassing looking at what I thought was nice. But I feel like the third or fourth Funnel Hacking Lives, one of my friends, Bart Miller, was like, "Hey, can I dress you because you're embarrassing yourself and everybody else?" And I was like, "Okay." And so he started dressing me, and it's been a fun experience. I'm not comfortable with most things he tries to put me in like suit jackets and all sorts of fancy things. But I've got my spot where I'm like, "Okay, here's Russell dressed up. I'm wearing nice jeans. I'm wearing a shirt. I'm not tucking it in though."

The shirt may have cuff links because those are cool. I'm probably even in the cool watch. That's cool. And probably some cool shoes. But that's about the extent of where I'm going to go. And so once a year we go shopping and we buy a bunch of cool stuff. I wear it at Funnel Hacking Live and then I wear it every time I'm on stage for the rest of the year. And then usually, by the time it's been a year, those clothes have been worn out and then I go buy new clothes. And so that's how I run my fashion. The Russell Brunson fashion happens that way. So, anyway, it's funny. But I had a really cool experience this time. Again, every time we're shopping, I'm way out of my comfort zone. I don't know what half these things are. I didn't know what Gucci was. I didn't know, you know what I mean? I don't know anything about brands or fashion or anything. I remember the first time we walked into a Gucci Store five years ago, I was like, "No, I'll never wear something like this ever in infinity years."

The shoes have bugs on them and fur and weird stuff, and I was like, "Yeah." But anyway, last time, two years ago I went into Gucci and they're these cool looking tennis shoes that were ClickFunnels colors. I was like, "Sweet. We'll get those. I mean, I can wear tennis shoes that look like ClickFunnels." And they were awesome. And so I've broadened my horizon to some of the weird brands that are out there. Anyway, so this year, we went back into the Gucci store and, again, they had a couple of cool not weird shoes that were in between. I'm like, "Okay, these are cool." And there are these one pair, they were sneakers. And they were weird colors like blue and yellow. And so they had me trying them on. I got one of my size, but one on each foot. I put the yellow or the blue on the right foot and the other one on the left foot.

And I'm sitting looking at them, I'm like, "I have no idea if these shoes are cool or lame or whatever." And instinctively, I grabbed my phone and I took a picture just to send it to my wife Collette who was shopping somewhere else. I was like, "Are these cool or are these lame. I don't even know." So I sent it to her, and then at the same time, I was like, "I'm going to post this on Instagram." So I posted it on Instagram, and on Instagram you can do like a voting thing. So I put it an Instagram and I was like, "Yellow or blue? Just vote whatever it is." So I post that, and then I go back, put the shoes away, and we go continue shopping. Anyway, so there's the backstory, in case you guys were thinking Russell's spending infinity dollars at Gucci every single day. That's not the reality. The reality is, it's still weird to me and I just happened to be trying these shoes on, posted a picture, and had people vote. So, that's the story.

Then, two hours later, I open Instagram and I open the thing where it shows you the score of people voting. And at the time, 70,000 had voted or had seen the thing. And I was like, "What?" I've never had 70,000 people view one of my stories. That was in two hours. And then I looked down and it had 10,000 had voted, or whatever it was. And it kept going, kept going, and by the time the 24 hour window had gone and it disappears from my Stories 120,000 people had seen it. I think 35,000 people had voted on it. And it was crazy. So, that happened, and after it happened, and again I still don't exactly how it happened, I have some ideas and things, but for some reason, the Instagram algorithm is like, "This is getting a high percentage of votes. Therefore, it's good. Therefore, we should show it to everybody that Russell knows. Plus, we should probably post it on the search feed and other places like that." Anyway, it blew up.

And then what's crazy is, I get this huge momentum surge and then stupid Russell doesn't even think and then my next couple Insta Stories are me eating food or doing stupid things and that was it. And then, again, I'm not even paying attention, and then the next day come back and I look and, again, 120,000 views, 30,000 votes. And I was like, "Man, that is crazy that happened. I still don't know how it happened." And then I looked at my next Story, and my next Story had 60,000 views on it. The next one had 40,000, then 30,000. And the ones that had 60,000, 40,000, 30,000 were me doing stupid things that didn't even matter and I missed the momentum. I should've been like, "Hey, by the way, I'm going to be wearing one of these pair of shoes at Funnel Hacking Live. Swipe up to get your ticket." Or it could have been like, "Hey, if you want to learn how to afford Gucci shoes, go buy my book," or something to capitalize on the momentum, and I didn't I missed it, And I missed the window.

Now, this is obviously a dumb, dorky example of a fluke thing where I posted and Insta Story, got a bunch of viewers for whatever reason, I had attention for literally 24 hours, and then it was gone after that. The next day, I tried to post something and my views went back down to, normally, I get, I don't know, 10,000 to 15,000 people to view a Story. So it dropped back to normal and I was like, "Ah, I missed my window." I had momentum, I could have had this amazing opportunity, and I lost out on it. So anyway, that's the context, but the lesson I want to teach you guys is just, there's times in our life where we get momentum, and it could be in sports, it could be in a relationship, it could be in business, you do something and something goes viral or something hits or you speak on stages and the big happens or you launch a podcast and tons of downloads or something, you do something, and it gets momentum.

And I think so many times, we get so excited by the momentum that we don't try to capitalize on it. And it's actually capitalizing on the momentum is where you make money or something good happens from it. I know that there's so many times, like when ClickFunnels passed 50,000 members and we hired the Harmon Brothers to do this viral video and launched it and we did this big thing to get momentum. And we even brought in all these big influencers. We did the event and Gary V came and spoke at it. We did a bubble soccer event and got the Guinness Book of World Records thing. We did this big, huge thing, we got a whole bunch of momentum, and then we didn't capitalize on the momentum. Afterwards, we were like, "Oh, we had all these influencers there and we didn't get them to promote it. We didn't do interviews with them. We didn't do these things. We had the momentum and we didn't capitalize on it."

And, looking back, oh, we probably lost literally millions of dollars sometimes because we didn't capitalize on the momentum. And so if you look at your business, there's two things when you're trying to drive traffic and create attention. There's two things you're doing. You're going to do things to create momentum, and then you've got to capitalize on that momentum. I look at a lot of influencers who are really good at creating momentum, but then they don't capitalize. Where people are really good at capitalizing on no momentum and they're just buying ads and making money that way, but there's a sweet spot where you can do things to organically create momentum and then capitalize at the same time. And it's that yin-yang of those two things. There's a sweet spot there where you can really have some big success.

And so a couple of things I'd recommend from this. Number one is started thinking about, what are things I can do to create momentum? By me knowing that me posting a yellow and blue Gucci shoe and have people vote, I'm like, "Oh my gosh, people like these dorky little quizzes I didn't know about." And if the quiz turns out good, Instagram's going to reward it and I'm going to get 120,000 people to watch it. Now that I know that, guess what I'm doing? Knowing this is the way to get momentum, I'm going to start looking at things differently and how do I do things? Similarly, oh, I said that word right I think, last year, we did a video where I was telling my story and we had hired these actors to act it out and we did it and it got five million views.

That created a bunch of momentum and then we didn't capitalize on it. So I'm like, "Okay, how do we do that again? We create Stories." But then, the first thing creates the momentum and the second thing comes back through and it capitalizes on the momentum. How do I structure those things? And so part of is looking at things like, what are the things you've done in the past that have created momentum? Can you do them again? What are things that other people do to create momentum? Can you model those to create the momentum? And then the second half is, as I create the momentum, be prepared now to capitalize on the momentum on the other side. And that's the other side of it. So, anyway, I wanted to share that. Hopefully, it gets the wheels in your head spinning, because I think that as you consciously start paying attention to that like, how can I create the momentum and then how can I capitalize on it? That's when you have success.

You don't have success when you randomly just create momentum like I did and then you're not prepared to capitalize on it. I missed a big opportunity. But, man, if you can get those two things where you start looking at like, what are the things I can do to create momentum? What are the different levers, the things, the ideas, the things I can tweak, I can effect that, cause that? And then being prepared on the other side to capitalize on it. So hopefully, that helps you guys as you're thinking about it. Because traffic, I'm going to go buy Facebook ads. That's good. But how can I buy Facebook ads to create momentum? What are the other things I can do to create momentum? What are posts I can make that get people to share and to comment to create momentum? What are these different things? You start thinking differently and it gets really exciting. So, anyway, I hope this helps. I know that when I get excited I talk fast. This is an eight minute podcast and I probably jammed 30 minutes of stuff into it.

So if you need to go back and listen on half speed, please do that. But hopefully it gets the wheels spinning of just, what are the things you can do every single day? 120,000 views off of a picture of my shoes, that would have cost me 20 grand in Instagram ads to get that same amount of views, and I didn't capitalize on it because I missed it. And so just thinking through those things and crafting them and testing things out and having fun with it. That's the game we get to play every day, guys. It's so much fun. I hope you're enjoying the game. If not, start looking at it as a game again. This is fun, this is something that should be exciting, all these crazy things. The fact that I posted that picture and got that many views is crazy, but that's part of the game. That's the fun part of the game. So I hope this helps. I hope it gets the wheels in your head spinning. With that said, thanks so much for listening and I'll talk to you guys all again soon. Bye, everybody.

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