I’ve spent the morning at the Success Summit at Earl’s Court. Up on stage and one of the most popular speakers was funnel hacker extraordinaire Russell Brunson, the man behind Dotcom Secrets and Clickfunnels.
So when I caught Russell hanging about in the lobby I grabbed the chance to as a couple of questions. The guy charges 5 figures for personal consultations so I’d be stupid not to!
Russell has fingers in a LOT of pies. Nerve pain supplements, business coaching, sofware, addiction cures, potato gun blueprints. I’m sure there are more. So I wanted to know about how he chooses his niches, how he “green-lights” projects.
The answer, super simple, but brilliant.
Russell talks a lot about not entering markets where you are the pioneer.
“Pioneers are easy to spot. They’re the ones with arrows in their backs.” Something he says often, and he talks about modeling your business and your marketing funnels on businesses that are already successful, then finding out where they get traffic.
What actually happens is a trick that I’m not sure Russell spotted the simplistic genius of. This is a rough paraphrase of what he said…
When he’s looking at the traffic that successful products get, he uses tools like similarweb.com to see where they are advertising.
Then he goes sideways.
The next step is to see what other traffic that site is sending, and is there an even bigger opportunity?
That’s where the money is. Find a stream of traffic, and get in front of it.
With a marketer’s head on this makes common sense. The advert is the closest point to the customer, not the product. Something entrepreneurs often forget in their obsessive love for the product.
So, next time you’re looking at a product, reverse engineering it to see if you can replicate its success, take a look sideways at those traffic sources and see if there’s an even bigger opportunity you may be missing.
I’m going to post a screencast of the process of using similarweb and other tools to do this research when I get back to the office, so if you’re interested, sign up to the newsletter and you’ll be first to see it.