5 Frameworks for Turning Knowledge into Money Online I Learned from Russell Brunson (the Godfather of Digital Sales Funnels)

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Russell Brunson’s work changed my life forever.

When it comes to making money online, Russell is the godfather. He is the world’s foremost expert on digital sales funnels. After scaling multiple companies into the 7, 8, and 9 figure range with funnels, he distilled everything he learned into the “Secrets Trilogy,” a set of three books.

Out of all the wisdom he crammed into this series, the following 5 frameworks are all you need to transform the knowledge in your head into personal income with digital sales funnels.

Framework #1: The Secret Formula Framework

*how to turn knowledge into money online

I started my first business in exactly the wrong sequence.

I wanted to make more money on my own terms, so I looked around for a need, created a business to solve it, and launched my first business. With the Secret Formula Framework, Russell helped me see I had the process backward. Start with WHO you want to spend your life serving, then back your way into a product and/or service they need.

The first step to turning your knowledge into personal income online is clarifying who you want to help, where they are gathering, the bait you can use to attract them, and the unique result you can create for them.

Question 1: Who is your dream customer?

Question 2: Where are they congregating?

Question 3: What is the bait that you can use to attract them to you?

Question 4: What is the unique result that you can create for them?

Framework #2: The Framework for Teaching Frameworks

*how to create and sell proprietary products and services

Now you know who you want to help and how you want to help them.

What’s next? Create a framework composed of steps that lead to the unique result. Give it a name. And BOOM!

You have the foundation for products and services.

We just did it with the Secret Formula Framework.

If you want to turn your knowledge into money online, then the Secret Formula Framework is a step-by-step system that allows you to do that. Every other framework Russell developed, and every product and service he has tested and scaled, fits into the Secret Formula. Frameworks are intellectual assets.

Think about them as individual knowledge units to encapsulate the specific knowledge you want to package and sell.

“Your framework can become a post on Instagram, a video on YouTube, an episode on your podcast, a lead magnet, a chapter of your book, a course, a membership site, a coaching program, a mastermind group, or something else.

You will use your frameworks over and over again as the tool that guides your dream customers to the results they are looking for.” Expert Secrets, p. 49

But frameworks do you no good if you can’t communicate them effectively.

That’s where Russell’s “Framework for Teaching Frameworks” comes in.

It has 4 steps.

1. Share how you learned it or earned it. Don’t jump straight into teaching it. Connect people emotionally to why the framework matters first.

2. Share the strategy (the what you do). Give them an outline of the framework.

3. Teach the tactics (the how you do it). “This is where most of the content is taught. What are the principles and tools that you’ve learned and how can people use them in their lives? Walk them through the step-by-step process, just like you were teaching yourself back when you got started.” Expert Secrets, p. 54

4. Show them how it works for others. People want to know that the framework didn’t just work for you but for others as well. Social proof is a long-standing principle of persuasion.

Framework #3: The Hook, Story, Offer Framework

*how to structure and optimize sales funnels for anything

“Every step of your funnel will have a hook, a story, and an offer. The ads you place online, the emails you send, the landing pages, as well as any upsells, webinars, or phone calls you make, will all have a hook, a story, and an offer.

If something isn’t working in your funnel, it’s always either the hook, the story, or the offer.” Dotcom Secrets, p. 31–32

First, create your offer.

“The goal of an offer in its most simple form is to:

Increase the perceived value of what is being sold.
Make the thing being sold unique to you and only available within this special offer.” Dotcom Secrets, p. 33

Second, devise your story.

The story is the bridge between the offer and the hook.

“There will be stories that you tell at every step in your funnel. There will be a story in the ad that will get people to click on your ad. There will be a story on the landing page that will convince someone to take advantage of your first offer. There will be stories in the upsell pages, the webinar presentations you give, and more.” Dotcom Secrets, p. 42

Third, and finally, brainstorm lots of potential hooks.

“The hooks are the headlines, images, and videos that we put in front of our dream customers wherever they are congregating, with a goal to capture their attention just long enough that we can tell them our story.” Dotcom Secrets, p. 43

The key here is remembering that you don’t know what hooks will grab your dream customer’s attention. So, you need a lot of them, and you need a method to test them.

The right offer tee’d up by the right story that pulls people in after they are stopped by the right hook is the special sauce to make any funnel highly profitable.

Framework #4: The Funnel Hacking Framework

*how to model existing profitable sales funnels to learn how competitors are successfully selling comparable products and services

The most successful business people don’t wander around trying this strategy or that tactic all willy nilly.

Instead, they find products and services in markets and niches they want to operate in, then they make lots of notes around what is and isn’t working. This can be a very tedious and extensive process in the real world. But on the internet, where digital sales funnels reign supreme, modeling the success of others is easier than ever.

Russell calls the process of modeling other successful funnels “Funnel Hacking.”

And he’s mastered it.

Funnel hacking will save you untold amounts of time and money, if you do it right. Here’s the process:

First, pretend you are a normal customer looking for that particular product or service.

Search for it inside search portals and on social media platforms. Try to find advertisements when possible, but landing pages and/or websites will work. For products or services offered by your favorite online creator, checkout their link in bio.

That usually does the trick.

Second, take detailed notes on the Hook, Story, and Offer you find.

Third, follow the instructions.

If you are prompted to submit your email, do that. If you are asked to purchase the product or service, then do that. But do whatever you have to do to move to the next stage of the funnel.

Fourth, move through this process of taking detailed notes on the Hook, Story, and Offer for each separate component of the sales funnel you are in.

When the time comes for you to start building your product or service, model everything you found that worked. In this way, you can be sure that the majority of your funnel will function just as well as your competitor.

From here, all that’s left to do is test and optimize.

Framework #5: The Perfect Webinar Framework

*how to sell anything to a group of people

A t this point, we’ve covered most of our bases.

You know who you want to help, you know how you want to help them, you’ve researched competitors to learn best practices for products/services similar to what you want to sell, and you know the hooks, stories, and offers that will make up your funnels.

The time has come for you to actually sell your product or service.

And all you need is the Perfect Webinar Framework to do that.

This is without question the most effective single framework in Russell’s entire corpus. You can take almost any product and service and sell it at surprisingly high conversion rates to groups of people. Russell calls this “one-to-many” selling, and he is one of the best in the world at doing it.

Here’s how it works:

First, identify your dream customer’s Big Domino.

“The entire presentation is designed to get them to believe just one thing : that your new opportunity is the key to getting them the result they desire most…The whole presentation is created to knock down that one domino, and that’s it.” Expert Secrets, p. 209–210

Second, teach the what not the how of your framework.

“When you are teaching a course, you tell your story, explain the strategy, teach the tactics, and provide social proof. When you are selling, you do not teach the tactics. You teach the what (strategy) but not the how. Your audience’s desire the the how is the reason they are going to give you money at the end of your presentation.” Expert Secrets, p. 210

Third, present your offer stack and closes.

This is where you lay out your core offer and all the bonuses to show the audience how crazy they would be if they chose NOT to buy.

Conclusion

The internet is a wild and wondrous place.

You can watch the news to get pissed or Netflix to have a laugh. You can look up facts about the Roman Empire or check the score of the big game.

The message I hope you take away from this piece is that you can also use the internet to turn the specific knowledge that already lives in your head into personal income to change the financial trajectory of your life and family.

If you want to dive deeper into these frameworks, you can checkout each of Russell’s three books in the following places: