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A
Welcome to do this, not that, the podcast from marketers. We share quick tips, things you can do right now, and then we add a little bit of chaos at the end of every episode. We also keep it short like this intro. Let's check it out. We are back for do this, not that. And I. I got a. I got a big dude here. I really do. I got one of the biggest names out there. So who's here? We got Russell Brunson. Now, if you don't know who that is, I don't know who you are. But this guy, he didn't just build this software company, okay? He created an entire generation of online entrepreneurs. And I'm not just saying that he's the co founder of ClickFunnels, but everybody knows that already. And if you don't. ClickFunnels has over 150,000 customers and its users have generated over $10 billion. That's like a b. That's a big deal. This all one platform. It lets people build these sequences and guide visitors to the single action. And Russell's all about driving to outcomes. He's written all these books, he's done all these things. If you've ever heard the word funnel or offer stack or webinar launch or any of these things, it's Russell's fault. It's all his fault. We're going to get into it all. Russell, welcome to the show, man.
B
Yeah, super glad to be here, man. I appreciate you and I'm looking forward to this. It's going to be fun.
A
All right, awesome. Let's get into it. For anybody out there, when we say the word funnel, like, what does that mean? Is that the thing you pour like a drink into? What? It's a ridiculous question, as you of all people, but what exactly is a funnel?
B
A funnel cake. Yeah, funnel. So when I got started 20 years ago in this business, everyone had websites. And so I, I tried to put up a website and nothing happened. I didn't make any money. I was like, what's happening? And I started meeting these guys who, you know, I think a lot of co friends we have nowadays. But 20 years ago, they're trying to figure out this Internet thing and how do you make it work? And I don't know who stumbled upon it first. They found out that like a confused mind always says no. So if you give somebody like, bunch of options, a lot of them just do nothing. And so they're like, well, let's build. Let's build a website, but make it where it's like there's only one page and there's only one thing you can do on it. And then the next page, there's one thing you can do on it. And like, make it simple and walk them through a step by step process. And back then we didn't have a name for, we called it sales processes or whatever, but they were very simple websites that just, you know, the first page would have a headline and say, give me your email if you want more information. So you give an email, then go next page and there was a video or a sales letter or something that would talk about something else. And like, give me a little money and I'll. I'll show you the next page. And it just walk them through a step by step process. And so that's what a funnel is. It's just, it's a really simple way to take your potential customers through a very strategic process that eventually helps them to become customers and hopefully become customers for life. And that's kind of a funnel. There's a million different ways to do funnels. It's hard to say just this, there's a ton of ways, but, but basically that's the gist is it's this very simple step by step process you take somebody through that makes it simple and easy for them and helps you as the business owner to collect the most amount of money and serve them at the highest level.
A
So as a broad statement, when you're looking at somebody's business, like, you know, we're getting a lot of traffic to our site, or we think people keep talking about our stuff, we're just not making sales. Is it that their, their closing process, their actual sales process is just too complicated. There's just too much noise as they get closer to actually closing that deal.
B
Oh yeah, a lot of that. Or they're like, they'll see a video of you and they click on the thing and they go to your website and then there's like links and that and they're like, okay, I'm gonna go follow them on social. And then you go on this path and they just get lost. Versus like, okay, if I get someone's attention, I'm gonna take that. And like, I think about this like, if I met someone in the street and they're like, hey, I'm trying to start a business. I'm like, oh, I can help you. Let me tell you the first thing. And the second, I would walk them through a process, right? I would never just be like, oh yeah, we'll go to the mall and there's a bunch of stuff. Hopefully you'll figure it out. Like, that's what we tend to do online. And so this is just basically taking somebody. It's like. It's like replicating the greatest salesperson of all time and just tell them what they need to make the first decision, what they need to make the second decision. You just kind of walk them through, very simple process.
A
So, all right, I've been watching you forever, and there's a lot of stuff that you say that's kind of evergreen. That's like, okay, I could have watched it a year ago, two years ago, and it still makes a lot of sense. Like what you just said right now, that'll work five years from now. But I'm just curious. Everybody's, oh, everything's changing. The planet's changing, the world's different, whatever. So in the last, you know, let's say 12 to 18 months, has anything, like, changed in your world in that whole process and what it is that you talk about? Or is it basically, nope, still the same thing, no matter what's going on? No matter about AI or whatever?
B
Yeah. Well, nice thing is that human psychology doesn't change. We're still humans. Right. And so for me, it's changed dramatically. But the foundation is exactly the same. Like the structure. I look at, we did a challenge two weeks ago, highest converting thing I've done in my career to this point. But if you look at the outside, the structure was identical. Cool. Like, it's just like if you build a house, like, the. The framing of the foundation, the framing house looked identical. But I think what. What I'm seeing now is that AI has given us the ability to write better copy, to make better videos, better persuasive arguments. And so. But the foundation doesn't change. I mean, I look@mybook.com Secrets over a decade ago, and I'm going through to do an edit for, like, they want me to do, like, an AI version update. I'm going through. I'm like, this stuff's all the same. The only difference is I can use AI to speed up maybe writing the videos or, you know, knowing, you know, analyzing more people's stuff before I build my own. But for the most part, a foundation doesn't change. Human psychology is the same whether AI is there or not. And so that's what I love about this is so many of the principles are evergreen. And I'm sure that someday, instead of looking at monitors, we'll be on our phones instead of phones. Maybe we're on Goggles. But the psychology between, like where I'm taking somebody, what I'm trying to get them to do, I think that'll be here forever. So that, that part never changes, which is, which is kind of nice.
A
So wait a minute, so you just had your, your greatest launch ever, all of that. What happened? What did you do? What did you do that you didn't do before? Why, why was this success?
B
Yeah. So for me, whenever I launch a new campaign or funnel or whatever, I have a process I call funnel hacking. So my people always call themselves funnel hackers. So I'll go and I'll, I'll look at like if I'm launching a book funnel, I'm going to go and find 200 other book funnels and look at them all and see what they did. And then from that try to take the best practice and make something really good. But that takes a lot of time. Right. So I was doing a five day challenge and, and so I'm like, well I know the structure of a five day challenge looks like, but I'm like, what are people doing now that, that I didn't know about? Haven't, I haven't seen. And so I was able to go and I found, I found about a dozen challenges that done anywhere from 10 to $100 million in sales. But if I watch all of them, they're like five day challenges, like five hours every day I get so much to consume. So instead I went and I transcribed every session of every single thing. We also set it up so when we opted into it, we got every email, every text message, like just everything. And then we threw all that in AI it's like analyze this and tell us what you found out and then look at mine versus mine, like what are they doing different? And it just pulled out all these things like, oh well, your VIP sessions at the end, which means you're getting off to really move your vip. VIP sessions the first and try this. You off, you introduce your offer over here instead try it over here. And like we just move the pieces around a little bit. The framework and then emails is like you're only sending out X amount of emails. These people are sending out 90 emails. Like here's the structure that you're missing, you know. So we were able to like identify all these amazing things, these best practices. So we did our new version, took the same framework but we kind of added in these new like the things that we saw other people discovered and then ran ours and just, it was like night and day. It's like, wow, I feel like I was just a brand new beginner having, you know, because it was just like I hadn't had success like that in so long. And I was like, I just feel like I figured out a secret and just came from using AI's ability to scan through and look at a lot of data and then give me back the best, the best of the best.
A
You know what's really cool about what you just went through? It's that you don't, you, you, you grind, right? You just, you just went through a series of things where you were like, I basically worked my butt off. I gathered all this stuff. I didn't use some crazy AI tool that nobody has access to. It's like what everybody has access to. And you grind and you put it in there and you made whatever yours was better. There's. Am I, is it fair to say that anybody out there can literally do what you just did to improve their business?
B
Oh, a hundred percent. It's so simple now because like, for us humans, we, we wade through a lot of stuff to find like the, the nuggets. In fact, I had a. I can't tell you the person's name is, but there's this guy who I was going to hire for consulting. He wanted $150,000 plus 10% of everything that this thing we were building made. And I was like, oh, that's a lot of money. So I went to his YouTube channel and he had a whole bunch of really smart videos, him talking about what he does. And so I just took the videos, I uploaded them to. I use Manus, which is one AI, and I upload it said, transcribe all these videos. It transcribed all the videos. I took the transcripts, I put into Claude. Those are the two that I only two that I really use. And I was like, I was like, read all these and tell me what it's saying. And then I was like. And then it became like a consultant. I asked like, if you were, if, if I hired you as, as a consultant based everything, you know, for all these, all these YouTube videos, what would you do in the situation? And it just tell me. I'm like, wow, that cost me $0. And I got, I believe it as good of, if not better than I would have got if I would have paid him the consulting fees. So for me, I'm doing the same thing. Like, I want to learn something. Like, okay, who's wrote the, who wrote the book about it? Usually I would go read the book and try to like get the Information from them. Maybe I'd hire them to. But I'm like, read the book, find their YouTube videos, find their podcasts, have AI analyze everything, and then let me ask it questions as if it's a consultant. It doesn't cost. I mean, it costs you, whatever, 20 bucks a month for the AI to run it. It's like the cheapest employee ever.
A
That's amazing. That's amazing. If you took every one of my podcasts you upload, you'd find out every bad TV show I watch. So I don't know. You get a lot of consulting out of it, but that's okay. I want to pivot here for a second, though, because I've now seen you say something over and over again. It sticks in my mind, which is webinars. You have this video out there that says if you do a webinar every week, right, For a year, you will be financially. Well, you'll be doing great financially. Okay, what is that? What is going on there? Because I literally could see the video. My mind, it's everywhere. Some good marketing. But what is with you and webinars and doing them a lot?
B
Yeah. So webinars is like. I did webinars a lot in my early career. That's, you know, first we would speak on stages, and then we were doing teleseminars, then became webinars. But I would just kind of do them sporadically. I have an idea for an offer. Make a webinar, sell it, and then. And maybe I'd do the webinar to one of my friends list, and it would be kind of done. And it never really, like, it wasn't. I mean, it was kind of. A lot of people experienced the webinars. Yeah, I did. I made some money. It was. It was great. But when I launched clickfunnels was. It was interesting because my business partner, Todd Dickerson, who built Clickfunnels, you know, he. He had spent so much time on it, so he was like, I need you to focus on just this for a year. If you focus on. Because I'm ADD entrepreneur, I'm doing 50 things, he's like, just focus on this for an entire year. And I was like, okay, I promise you, I'll focus on this just for a year. And so the way we launched it is I wrote a webinar. We launched it, and it worked. And it was interesting because when the webinar got done, typically I would just do the same webinar a bunch, because it did well. In fact, I remember the launch day of the webinar, we did it. And I actually had two webinars happening that day. One that happened earlier in the morning, like 10 or 11 o' clock a.m. i did the webinar and I think we had 800 people on. I'm not gonna remember the numbers perfectly, but 800 people on, and we sold like 30 or $40,000. So I'm like, yeah, that was a. That was a big win. My business partner, Todd, like, as I'm like celebrating how good I did, he goes into, I think it was Gotowebinar back then or maybe Zoom. And he exported all of the questions. And he's. He'd come back and he's like, hey, at minute 13, oh, everyone's confused here. I was like, what? Like, everyone's confused. And so I look minute 13, I find what slide? I was like, oh, well, let me just add this, the sentence in here. Let me add a slide in here to explain that. And he's like, hey, minute 24, everyone's asking the same question. So, like, I went to back my slides, I added a slide in there to address the question. Then in the offer, they're confused about this. And so we went through the webinar and we just tweaked it a bunch of times. And. And then a couple hours later, I was doing it again live. And so I jumped back on live again. This time, similar amount of people, maybe seven or 800 people did the same presentation, but I had these new little things that were added to it. And that time we did over a hundred thousand dollars in sales. I was like, what just happened? And then Todd, in his infinite wisdom, went and download the chat from that. It's like, all right, here's where it gets stuck now. And so he would tell me and we add it. And so we would do that back and forth. And I was doing the time three or four webinars a week, sometimes two or three a day. Every time we did it, we export the things, tweak the slides, and it got better and better and better to the spot where, like, every time we get on the webinar, I knew, depending on how many people had registered, I knew exactly almost to the dollar, how much money we would make because it was so scripted so perfectly. And I did it live, I think between 70 and 80 times, I did it live before we ever evergreened it. And in that first year, we went from zero to over $10 million in ARR. In clickfunnels, all off of just doing that webinar every single Week. And so I've been telling all my students for years now. It's like, because they'll happen, they'll do a webinar, sell their course, their coaching, and then they just try something new or whatever. I'm like, no, just focus on that. I said, if you do a webinar a week, and I set it up, I do a webinar every Thursday. And then you have Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and half a Thursday to promote it. Then Thursday you do the webinar. Friday, Saturday, Sunday, you do the replay sequence, and you close it down. And then Monday, you launch a new webinar. You start driving ads to it. And if you do that, what happens in the year is you get better and better at the pitch. More and more people come into your ecosystem, and between those things, everyone who's done it in a year, they then, with a list of 30, 40,000 people, they've generated tons of money, and their presentation is just flawless. Where they can do it by memory because they've done it so many times, and it's so, so good. So that's been my experience. It's how we built clickfunnels, and it's how so many of our students now have done it. Because that, man, the webinar week is like. It's like an apple a day. It keeps the doctor away. Webinar week keeps all the cash flow problems and business problems away.
A
So I got a real question here, because I've struggled this. I've been in the game now for 27 years, and sometimes I feel like I'm repetitive. Sometimes I get sick of talking about the things I've been talking about forever. And I also feel like everyone's got to know what I'm about to say, because I've been saying it for 400 years, and other people have been saying 400 years. Do you. I mean, do you ever feel that way? Because I feel like. Not that you are repetitive. I don't mean that. That in that way, but I am on the web. I mean, you know, by design, your business, even what you just laid out, you know, do you ever feel that way? Or you're like, no, no, no, that's not the way to think about it. You're trying to drive home a point like, where do you. What. What's your vibe on that?
B
No, great, great question. My. One of my early mentors named Dan Kennedy, he said that he's like, you'll get bored of your stories way before the marketplace ever does. But for me, I look at, like, the People have tried this, they haven't had success, is they have an existing audience and they'll do the webinar to the audience one week, and they do the webinar to the audience next week. And by the third week, it stops working. Like, it doesn't work anymore. And I'm like, this webinar week strategy is not something you're doing to your existing audience. This is the front end, where you're bringing new blood and new people into it, right? So that's happening. And then after someone goes to that webinar, they buy something. Then over here, I do other stuff. I'm telling them the cool strategies. Then I have upsells, I have other events, and, like, all the cool stuff happens over here where I can be at creative entrepreneur, share the fun things I want. But if I don't have new blood coming in every single day, then. Then this all disappears over time. And so the only way the model works is knowing that, like, hey, I can do it once. In fact, the way we structure it internally for us is like, I do my webinar once a quarter to my entire audience. Cause that point, they've all. Three months, they've all forgotten, and it works again. So once, once, a quarter to my own audience, and then every single week to bring new people in and new blood in. What happens is, is for them, the first time they show up, it's brand new. And yes, I get so tired of telling my stories about potato guns and tired of my. Of the supplement, like, all the things. Like, I, you know. But it. But again, you get tired of it way before the market does. I got asked last year to speak in London, and I was coming out and I was trying to think of a new thing, and the promoter's like, I want you to the your funnel hacks webinar. I'm like, no, everyone's seen it. It's been a decade. Like, everyone's seen it. He's like, no, my people haven't seen. Like. And so I went out there and I was just, like, kind of embarrassed, almost like, this is my old stuff I wrote a decade ago, right? But I did the presentation, and it was crazy because people were like, just like, at day one, when I was doing, they're running the bathroom, they're buying. They're like, in tears. Like, like, you shifted every. Like, it finally makes sense to me. And I was just like, I forget that, like, this market's always replenishing new things. People. New people are coming all the time. And it's like, these stories are brand new for them. And so that's why, like, on the front end is having that message that we know we've curated, we've perfected it, new people come in there and, and they, it helps to like, turn them into your dream customer. And then after that, then you can be creative with everything else you do with those audience. But that, that webinar week on the front end just, it's what makes the businesses consistent and grow.
A
I think it's so valuable for everybody here out there because you think you're being repetitive. You think that people already heard it, they haven't keep pushing, keep sharing. So, all right, listen, we're going to put everything in the show notes. We're going to tell you how to follow Russell on, on Instagram and go to clickfunnels.com and all things. But Russell, how do people get involved with your world that don't know you? Where should they go? How do they consume?
B
Yeah, there's a lot of, I've been doing this a long time. There's a lot of stuff. So it kind of depends. You know, we have things for different audiences and stuff. But honestly, like, you know, I think the, the best way to get started with me is like, just go read one of my books. Like, my books are kind of, you know, like the, the foundational framework. So I got three books. One's called Dot Com Secrets. If you're in funnels, that's like the bible on funnels. The second one's called Expert Secrets and that's the book that's like, like, how do you do the messaging inside the funnels, the stories you tell, how you persuade people and things like that. And third's called Traffic Secrets with how you get people to show up. So in your business, wherever you're at, if you're like, I don't even know what a funnel is. Like start.com secret. I got a funnel that's not working. Go read Expert Secrets. Like, I got a funnel, but no traffic and traffic secrets. And it's kind of plug in wherever that makes sense and then just come join, you know, jump in. We're having a lot of fun all the time. Like, I've, you know, we have such a cool community of entrepreneurs and we're all just talking about these nerdy things all day long. It's so much fun.
A
It is true. ClickFunnels is more than just a platform. It is a community. I'm not just saying that it's free for real. The whole thing is, is a business vibe, and Russell Brunson is a legend. I appreciate you being here, my man. Thanks for doing it.
B
Yeah, thanks for having me. It was a lot of fun.
A
Wait. The party is not over. Go to Jay schweddleson.com because I want to do stuff with you. I want to partner with you. When you click on the button, partner with Jay, you let me know what you got going on. Work with my agency. Work with me directly. Get access to all all of my free resources@jschwetelson.com and I got a book coming out this April. It's called Stupider People have Done It. And all of the net proceeds are going to the V Foundation for Cancer Research. Go on Amazon. Buy Stupider People have Done It. That way, you can help kick cancer's butt with me. And if this podcast wasn't the worst podcast you've ever listened to, it might have been listening. Leave it a review. Follow the show. You are awesome. Go out there and crush it.
Podcast Summary: "Do This, NOT That: Marketing Tips with Jay Schwedelson"
Guest: Russell Brunson (Co-Founder, ClickFunnels)
Episode: RUSSELL BRUNSON!🔥The $10M Webinar Blueprint 💸 GUEST!! ClickFunnels' Russell Brunson | Ep. 469
Date: March 5, 2026
This episode features marketing legend Russell Brunson, co-founder of ClickFunnels, as he joins Jay Schwedelson to unpack his “$10M Webinar Blueprint.” Russell breaks down the core strategies behind highly successful sales funnels and webinars, discusses leveraging AI to level up your campaigns, and shares practical frameworks that any marketer or entrepreneur can use to dramatically improve sales. The episode is packed with actionable insights, timeless marketing wisdom, and behind-the-scenes tactics from one of the industry's greatest minds.
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The conversation is lively, encouraging, and rich with stories and actionable advice. Russell exudes humility and clarity, making advanced strategies feel accessible. Jay’s questions keep things grounded in what listeners can apply right away.
This episode is a masterclass in modern direct response marketing and funnel strategy—featuring both timeless psychological frameworks and the edge that today’s AI tools provide. New and seasoned marketers alike will leave with actionable ideas to immediately improve their funnels, messaging, and business outcomes.