Traffic Secrets

A Storm Coming

April 27, 2018. Russell Brunson is sitting in a movie theater with his kids watching Avengers: Infinity War, and Thanos has just snapped his fingers to vaporize half of all life in the universe. Brunson leaves the theater thinking about his friend Peng Joon, who had recently joked that Mark Zuckerberg could pull off the same trick at any moment. One algorithm change, one policy update, and half the entrepreneurs running businesses on top of Facebook would wake up to find their traffic gone. Peng Joon called it the Zanos snap. Brunson laughed. Then he stopped laughing, because he had already lived through it once.

In 2003, after reading a book called Google Cash by Chris Carpenter, Brunson bought his first Google ad. He was selling DVD instructions for building potato guns through a tiny funnel at HowToMakeAPotatoGun.com. Clicks cost a quarter and produced two or three dollars in revenue. It was the closest thing to free money he had ever seen. Then Google decided it preferred big brands spending a million dollars a month to small entrepreneurs spending a few hundred. Click prices jumped from twenty-five cents to over three dollars overnight. The internet still talks about the Google Slap. Most of Brunson's competitors disappeared in a single week.

He survived for two reasons. The first was that his funnels squeezed five to ten times more revenue out of each visitor than a basic landing page, so he could pay the new prices and still make money. The second was that he had been studying old-school direct response marketers years before the internet existed: Dan Kennedy, Gary Halbert, Jay Abraham, Joe Sugarman, Eugene Schwartz, Robert Collier, David Ogilvy. These were people who had to drive responses with direct mail, radio, and newspapers, and what they taught was not Facebook hacks or Google secrets. They taught how humans make decisions. That was the difference between getting wiped out and watching it happen to other people.