I’m officially working on the secrets trilogy… Let me show you behind the scenes of how I’m doing it. On this episode Russell breaks down his process as he begins working on his Traffic Secrets book. Here are some of the informative things you will hear in today’s episode:

-- See why it takes a few days of planning before Russell will actually begin to write the new book.

-- Find out why Russell is re-writing parts of both his Dotcom Secrets,and Expert Secrets books.

-- And find out how Russell is using Trello to arrange all three of his books to make sense.

So listen here to hear Russell’s awesome way of getting his framework all together before he actually begins writing.

And it’s interesting, I used to always write the table of contents just in Microsoft word or Google docs, and it’s tough because I’ve been writing this book and I’m like page 300 and I’m like, I don’t like how this fits, I need to shift something around. And I scroll all 300 pages, look at the table of contents, scroll back down 300 pages and back to this….it’s really hard to change things.

-- ClickFunnels: Everything you need to start market, sell, and deliver your products and services online (without having to hire or rely on a tech team!)

-- DotComSecrets: Get a free copy of the "Underground Playbook For Growing Your Company Online With Sales Funnels."

​-- Expert Secrets: Get a free copy of the "Underground Playbook For Converting Your Online Visitors Into Lifelong Customers."

-- ​Traffic Secrets: Get a free copy of the "Underground Playbook For Filling Your Websites And Funnels With Your Dream Customers.

What’s up everybody? This is Russell Brunson and I want to welcome you to the Marketing Secrets podcast, I’m so excited for you to be here today.

Alright everybody, so first off, I hope everything is going amazing in your life and if you’re struggling with anything, then I hope today I’ll help cheer you up a little bit. I’m feeling really, really good right now. I just dropped my kids off at school and they had me listening to crazy songs, which always helps.

But right now, I am in lockdown other than taking my kids to school, where I am forcing myself to stay at home locked in a room to write my book. And if any of you guys have ever written a book before you know there’s a ton of pain associated with writing a book. It is by far the hardest task I have ever done. So I had to literally force myself, and lock myself in a room.

In fact, let me walk you through what’s been happening since Funnel Hacking Live. So Funnel Hacking Live happened, it was insane. For those of you guys who were there, you know, those who weren’t there, you are going to be there next year because you don’t want to miss out again. I did a whole podcast, I shared a whole bunch of podcasts kind of going through the last, everything that happened at Funnel Hacking Live, the ups the downs, the amazing-ness, it was such an amazing event.

Some of you guys have asked updates on Andy, Andy was the guy at Funnel Hacking Live, Garrett kind of brought onstage and he ended up signing up for the Two Comma Club X and everyone was freaked out and nervous about him, and it’s fascinating. In fact, he messaged me because in there I talked about, I said that he had, his dad had a multi million dollar business and stuff like that and he was probably going to help him and Andy messaged me and he’s like, ‘Dude, I listened to your podcast, that’s not true.” I’m like, ‘What do you mean?” HE’s like, “My dad is not helping me. This is me, I’m doing this myself. I put together a tshirt funnel when I got home and the tshirt funnel made more than enough to cover the first month’s payment. This month I’m working on my next project, which is going to make even more.”

And he’s doing it by himself, and it’s crazy what happens when you’re put in the state where you’ve got to be resourceful. And he’s figuring it out all by himself, which is super cool. I’m proud of him for doing that. I told him, I said, ‘for 2500 bucks in month one is not too shabby. It covered the cost of coaching, my goal is to help you make 2500 a month.” Excuse me, “2500 a month is to make 25 grand a month, then 250,000 a month and then millions a month and go from there.” and he’s like, “That’s what I’m talking about. I want to do that.”

>So it’s been fun watching him over the last 30 days since Funnel Hacking Live, watching him grow and then after Funnel Hacking live, and people ask us, “Why do you guys do Funnel Hacking Live at the very beginning of the year?” And for me it’s like, first off, there’s a ton of stress associated with it, I want to get it over with. It’s like, if I could just get this over with at the beginning of the year that’d be awesome. But number two is it’s also I feel like, setting the tone for our entire community for the year. So I love bringing people together and we get everybody moving and momentum happening at the very, very beginning of the year. So we do it very early in the year.

But then after Funnel Hacking Live is over, then usually I crash for like a day, which is about all I was able to do because I was too excited about the next project. I built a whole training on Lead Funnels for my Two Comma Club Xers, and then a bunch of other cool stuff is happening.

And then for us it was like, okay now we gotta plan our direction for the rest of the year. So we flew out the entire marketing and funnel building team and brought them here to Boise, rented an airbnb house and we did a weeklong event, which was really, really cool, getting us all focused and running in the right direction. Getting everyone focused on the goals and the plans for this year.

So that happened last week, and my goal, some of you guys know, I’ve been running quite a few roles in my company. I am the CEO, I’m also, I have been the head marketer, plus the head content developer, plus I don’t know, I’m doing like 25 people’s jobs at once, and obviously I can’t keep doing that. So this was really like a literal passing of the reigns. We brought Julie Stoian in to be the VP of marketing and to run the marketing company/internal agency all that kind of stuff.

So that whole week was about me casting the vision and then handing the reigns to her and the team and now they’re running and it’s really fun to see. And then I said, “Basically after this event’s over I’m locking myself in a room for three months and I’m writing the Traffic Secrets book as well as updating the Dotcom Secrets and Expert Secrets. We’re putting together a hardbound trilogy. So I’m basically rewriting two books and writing the third book.

So yesterday was the first day. It’s funny because everyone’s like, “How much did you get written.” And I was like, “Well, no words. But I created the outline.’ And I did it a really cool way. So I’m going to give you guys this as an idea. So I built the outline out in trello, where I basically had a column for each book. So Dotcom Secrets, Expert Secrets, and Traffic Secrets book, and then I made a card for each chapter.

So the first two books, obviously have already been written, and then the third book was new. So then I wrote out, the problem, this is the problem. There’s a bunch of foundational stuff people need to know and Traffic Secrets, they don’t, I didn’t want to include in Traffic Secrets because it doesn’t make sense. There were things that I wanted to include in Dotcom Secrets and Expert Secrets.

So I went back to those outlines and put them in trello and I was like, okay I need to add a section on hook, story, offer in probably 3 chapters, hook story offer, into the Dotcom Secrets book. This is where this part needs to be. Then I need to add this part into the Expert Secrets book, and I need to be shifting these, adding some things and moving some things around. 

So I spent all day yesterday kind of rebuilding the outlines of the three books. Looking at them now, this time, instead of just three separate books, but you’ll see when we launch this later on this year, but they’re going to be a box set where they all come together.

So it’s like, now that we have them as one thing I can cross reference between the two and take somebody from here to there. And so I’m trying to, inside that context to, okay now that I know I can add hook, story, offer to Dotcom Secrets, and I can add this to Expert Secrets and I don’t have to talk about those in Traffic Secrets if I can reference them. Now I have all these three books together.

So it’s been really fascinating because I’ve been basically building the frameworks of these three books together. So yesterday I did that all day and then I recorded it and sent videos to some people in my team and some friends to get some feedback and ideas, which has been really cool as well.

But now I feel like I have the framework done. So this morning I woke up early and the preface for all three books is basically talking about how the three books fit together. So it’s been fun this morning, I’ve been making a diagram of this is what you learn in Dotcom Secrets, and boom, there’s a doodle. And this is what Expert Secrets was, and then on top of the doodle is the next phase of it, which is learning how to persuade and sell people things and build a tribe and things like that. And the third book that lays on top of that, boom, here’s how you fill these funnels, here’s how you build a value ladder and you move people up and through it.

So it was so much fun. So that’s what I’m doing this morning, doodling out those things and putting them together into an actual framework. So that’s what I’ve been working on and it’s been so much fun. So I’m excited. I just drop my kids and go back in and lock myself down for the next like 10 hours. Oh crap, I have to lift weights. I have to lift weights in 15 minutes and then lock myself down for the next 10 hours and keep working on the book.

So anyway, it’s exciting. Why’d I tell you this? Partially because I just wanted to talk about it out loud and partially because some of you guy always ask me about the process, “How do you do it Russell? How does it work?” and you know, for me, there’s the process of the year. There’s funnel hacking live, kicks off the community. And then it’s like our marketing retreat which kicks off the direction for the year, internally inside the company. And then this is me laying out the frameworks for the books and how they work together.

And it’s interesting, I used to always write the table of contents just in Microsoft word or Google docs, and it’s tough because I’ve been writing this book and I’m like page 300 and I’m like, I don’t like how this fits, I need to shift something around. And I scroll all 300 pages, look at the table of contents, scroll back down 300 pages and back to this….it’s really hard to change things.

And I realized really quick that I’m complaining about how hard it is to edit things in Google docs, which is like the easiest thing in the world. Where some people, back in the day, they wrote books on a typewriter. A typewriter. How did people do that? Gall, we are blessed today. Then pre-typewriter, people writing them by hand and then they had to go and set the print, letter by letter, and then stamp of ink and stamp into a book. Anyway, we are so blessed. I don’t know how people wrote books back in the early 1800s or 1500s or before Christ. How did people write books? I don’t know, it’s hard enough nowadays when we’ve got all this amazing technology.

Anyway, I digress. The reason why I’m sharing that is because this concept of outlining in trello is amazing because I can move chapters around, moving up, down, up, down. And then as you write a book, or you can create a course, there’s always interdependencies, that’s always been a big pain with the other books. I’d be explaining something and I’m like, “Oh crap, I haven’t explained this yet so I can’t talk about this. I have to go back two chapters earlier and talk about this thing so that they understood it over here.” and there’s this whole chicken and the egg thing that’s really, it’s a lot of work.

But what’s cool is in trello, the way I’m doing this, each card becomes a chapter in the book, so I can have them from top to bottom, so I can see the table of contents in trello, and then if I’m like, oh, I can move things around. I can just drag and drop and move things around and make sure that the logical sequencing of events makes perfect sense. And then inside each card I can outline what I’m talking about in each chapter. So outline those things and then I’m able to see before I start writing all the interdependencies. Like, “Oh I have to have this. Or I talk about this whereas this makes no sense. I talk about this where this makes no sense.” Boom, boom, boom, back and forth, back and forth.

So that’s kind of my goal process for today. So yesterday I spent the entire day writing, just outlining the chapters of the three books. And again, that may seem like a simple task, but it took the entire day. Today I’m going to be going in and outlining out what’s going to be happening in each chapter, to make sure all the interdependencies work, so that the flow works. Then I gotta, in that outline, be like, “Okay, in the card in this chapter, what are all the different stories I gotta talk about. I gotta tell this story, I gotta tell this story. I gotta make sure I explain this case study, and this case study.” It’s just kind of a big, it’s going to be fun, but that’s kind of the game plan.

Then from there, I will actually start writing. So Wednesday, tomorrow, I will actually start pen to paper, typing words. So exciting. So that’s my process, that’s how I’m doing it, and it’s working really good so far. So I hope that helps some of you guys who are creating content or courses or whatever.

With that said, I’m going to head in, I gotta get to work. I got words to write, I’ve got a mission to create, I’ve got a book to develop, I’ve got to change some of your guys’ lives. This book hopefully will be the thing for a lot of you guys who have been struggling with traffic, be like, ‘oh my gosh, now it all fits together.” Hopefully when you guys get the box set with the new Dotcom Secrets, new Expert Secrets, new Traffic Secrets, you look at these things as a whole and you’re like, “Okay, now we can have some fun.”

Alright, that’s all I got. I hope you guys are all doing amazing. If you haven’t created something yet today, go create something. It’s going to be the thing that changes somebody’s life, but you gotta go and start the process. So with that said, I’m going to go create. Appreciate you all, talk to you soon. Bye everybody.