Have you ever watched a video that made you click "buy" without a second thought? Those captivating clips are video sales letters (VSLs), powerful tools for businesses to boost sales and build excitement. In this post, we'll break down the secrets of a successful VSL and give you the roadmap to build your own, including finding the ideal video editor to bring your vision to life.
Let's see how a pro does it.
Take Russell Brunson's VSL for his rare Napoleon Hill collection.
It's a storytelling masterpiece, drawing viewers into a thrilling world of passion, competition, and the hunt for a one-of-a-kind treasure.
We can learn a lot from Brunson's magic:
Now, let's build your own winning VSL!
The foundation is a detailed plan, a VSL brief.
This document outlines your goals, who you're talking to, and what you want them to do. It keeps everyone on the same page and heading for success. Here are the key ingredients:
Creating a great VSL takes more than just words and cameras. You need the right people on board, from copywriters who craft the message to video editing specialists who bring your vision to life with stunning visuals and seamless transitions. Here's how to build your winning team, including the perfect editor:
When searching for your video editor, keep these qualities in mind:
By following these tips and learning from Brunson's success, you can build a VSL that grabs attention, builds trust, and turns viewers into customers. Remember, a great VSL isn't just about selling; it's about storytelling, connection, and offering something valuable. And with the perfect video editor on your team, you can transform your vision into a powerful visual masterpiece that drives results.
So, are you ready to unleash the power of VSLs in your business? Get started today by building your VSL brief, assembling your dream team including the ideal video editor, and crafting a story that will leave your audience wanting more. The world of VSLs awaits, and it's full of possibilities for your business growth!
Hi. In this episode of Digital Marketing Bear, we are going to go through the step one watch Biblio Mania in Russell Brunson's secrets of success.com, and we're going to have one main objective in this video. I realized last video, I was kind of all over the place. I was thinking just homepage, which is what we're on here. So at the end of this episode, you'll see me go through and let's look at the thank you page for the subscription here, and we'll look at the community in step two. But for the purposes of this video, the objective is as a marketer, we might say, you know what? I want to test A VSL that's similar to Russell Brunson's, biblio Mania VSL.
All right. To do that, we need to go to the Biblio mania page and we need to watch the video right here. So first things first, we see that they have an enable sound. This invites a click. I like that. Click to turn on sound. So there's three options to click here, but there's not much other controls than that. It's also doing a pre-roll sort of motion, starting the video right away. So let's go ahead and watch this video and we'll pause it and sort of critique as we go along and start to build an idea and maybe take some notes for what we're looking for out of this video so that when we pass it along to our video editor or to whoever is helping us create this, we have clear expectations. And as a marketing strategist or a marketing manager, we know that the VSL will turn out the way that we want, not only by providing this example and showing the individual who will be creating this video, what this video looks like. We'll also have our notes of what we like, what we want to change, what we don't like, things like that. Alright, so let's get started.
Can one book really be worth $1.5 million?
If you can find the secret in the book, you can have anything you want. The
Greatest book on success it's ever been written
Without question. This single book has had a greater influence than any other work of its kind.
Whatever the human mind can conceive, the human mind can achieve,
It is the power to take possession of your own mind and direct it to whatever ends you may desire. I would
Visualize things coming to me that I want
Just decide. And then from that point, the universe is going to get out your way.
So you see him turn into a lot of books like The Secret Books from Tony Robbins. The origin of that material is nearly a hundred years old, which is written in 1925 by Napoleon Hill.
I knew that I had drawn that into my life and it changed the way I thought about my life forever.
You are creating that law of attraction and it will become reality
And all success begins with a clear picture in your mind of precisely what you want from life.
Okay, let's pause there. A few things that I really liked were the hook. The hook is in the headline here, can one book really be one and a half million dollars? And then at the very beginning, that's what the question was, and then it went into sort of a newsreel old school type of a look and feel. So I like that. I need to take a note of that. So we'll go to my brief template here because we're going to start building a brief right away. The best way to get anything done in marketing that I've found is to follow the super simple military-like model to plan brief execute debrief. So we're going to build our brief today to get a VSL done. Similar to Russell Brunson's Secrets of Success, biblio Mania one. All right, so let's start out by going to our brief template. We'll make a copy and we will call it our Secrets of Success, VSL, which stands for Video Sales letter brief.
We'll start planning and building this brief as a strategist or as a manager. This is how I like to help run my team and how I like to make sure that our team is all on the same page or at least as close as possible. If there is a mistake in the team or from a team member, it's often because I didn't spell things out the right way or I didn't clarify my communicated vision as well as I should have. So we will make a copy and I'll close out this template for now. And let's take the Secrets of success, VSL brief right here. We'll come back and discuss the timeline here in just a minute. The main goal of or the objective we'll be to,
All right, so in here I would be specific right about a product or service. So in this case, I might say something like about specialist pH, which is the HR company that I run for finding awesome talents in the Philippines. So I might say our goal is to develop a powerful VSL for our, we can call it our talent update list. And what that is is simply an email list where we send out awesome, amazing marketing talent. And I know this sounds promotional, but I've got to pull an example from somewhere and I like to use my own companies and things that I have done in the past so that you get the benefit of the experience that I've developed and the actual case studies that I have inside my own company. So our goal is to develop a powerful VSL for our talent update list. And we're going to use, all right, so what we're doing is we're developing a test here. I like to get ideas from anywhere, from any industry, and I like to try to apply those secrets to my own industry and what we're doing here with this specific episode in this video. So this is the goal, and the example is going to be, let's go back to here we are Biblio Mania. Let's copy this.
So the success here will mean a video that looks or feels similar to this video. It's not a copy. I do not recommend copying. I don't think copying a format entirely is a good thing because the audience is different. So in this particular case, we're kind of going off from the episode one here and we're going to a different audience. We're going to our own audience. I want to try to help every marketer that's out there. And the main purpose of this channel is to help one marketers see and experience a lot of other campaigns, because the more campaigns you experience, the more ideas you'll be able to bring back to your organization for your own campaigns, right? And two, I want to be able to showcase how to bridge the gap. You see a campaign out in the wild, how do you bring that back and apply it to your own product or service? Hopefully putting the two together here live in person in a way will help you do the same for your own company. Okay, continuing on, let's develop who it this for here soon, but I do need to drop down to the notes section here. As I'm watching the video,
I'm going to be taking just some, I'll just call them raw notes as I watched the video. Alright, and I don't know why I like to use hashtags just to showcase that, hey, this is a totally different section, completely off the cuff. It's not formal, but if you want to get into my mindset as somebody who is going to develop the video or edit the video that we put together and put this footage together, I need you to kind of know what's going on in my brain. So the headline in the landing page matched the headline in the video. I don't think that's absolutely necessary, but I did like how it starts out that way. I think that it's a good thing to test. Of course, the initial intro reel moves fast, a few seconds between each different clip with quotes from real people inside and old newsreel style.
And we don't have a timer on here. The video controls are turned off. I don't want to get into the technical on this, but we can inspect this. If you have a developer mindset, you can click on it and inspect it and discover a little bit more behind the scenes. We may reserve some of the technical speak for a different episode at some point, but for this episode, we're just going to kind of go off of the visuals and the actual video itself. So now to the introduction, we've got a brief started for our plan brief and then execute is when we hand this brief off to the people that we're going to hire. Alright, so let's go back to this and let's watch a little bit more.
My fascination with Napoleon Hill actually began at the very beginning of my marketing journey. I went to my very first marketing seminar and multiple speakers talked about mindset, that part of it, I think once or twice people ask who, here's Red Lincoln Grow Rich, and everyone's hands go up in the audience except for me, and I'm looking around, I'm like, oh, I'm the only one who hasn't read this book yet. These people are more successful in me. And I was like, I have to go read this book.
On the last page of Think and Grow, rich was read The Man who then stood and walked out into the world was a different changed man.
So that night I went on eBay and actually found,
Okay, I'm pausing here again. This might drive you nuts, but I need to insert and interject a little bit here mostly because I want other marketers to be able to understand what I'm thinking when I'm watching something like this. And this is more for my team and we're just publicly sharing these insights to you and to any other marketers out there so that hopefully you can have greater success than I've ever seen in my life. So I hope you don't mind, we're going to kind of chop this video up. The first thing I wanted to note is it's definitely a documentary style, so I need to make a note of that and I'll probably put that at the top here. So the entire video is in a documentary style format with interviews of the spokesperson. In this case it's Russell Brunson. In our case, it's probably going to be me for this particular VSL that we want to create for specialist pH and other key people. So this may be our managers, this may be our own video editors, this may be other people in the Philippines where we hire from. This may be our recruiters, this may be client success. We'll get videos from everybody in this particular VSL documentary style format. Okay, let's continue on and see and listen to Russell's story
On somebody who would create an audio CD set of them reading Containable
Risk. The reason Think and Grow Rich has withstood the test of time is because it rests on the broad clean foundation that everything begins with an idea.
So then over the next two or three weeks, as I was driving to my office and back, I had the CDs in my car and I started listening to Thinking Grow Rich. And that was the first time I ever heard it. And the first time I felt impressed by Napoleon Hill and I learned all sorts of important lessons from that definiteness of purpose. How do you pick something and move forward with purpose and what's the plan you move forward with? In my mind, I was like, this is what everyone's doing is successful, therefore it's a gospel to me. I'm going to just do what he said. And so I started implementing the things for the book Think Can Grow Rich. And fast forward 20 years later, I built a good empire, but it came off of the personal development foundations for Napoleon Hill. But a couple of years ago we were thinking about selling ClickFunnels and I remember asking Tony Robbins like, should I sell it? Should we not sell it?
You love what you do, you light up when you do. I love being around you. When you talk, you all get ClickFunnel. It's like wow. It's like Jesus has come to earth and it's coming through his body. It's a beautiful thing. So for you to sell that is really exciting right now. I don't know if it'll be exciting five years from now and last you found the next most exciting thing that you're going to go build and make happen and go do.
That's what started thinking, I don't know the next step. What is it? This is what I've been obsessed with is marketing and business and funnels, and I didn't really have a next step and it got me thinking about other things I'm passionate about.
What Russell did there is Russell already has a whole lot of trust from his community, but he brought in somebody with a totally different community and somebody that his community also knows, likes and trusts almost as an endorsing figure of what Russell is doing and what he's planning and what he's trying to build here with this documentary style VSL. And that is Tony Robbins. Tony Robbins is massive. So I'm going to ask my team, who might we bring in as an endorsement or testimonial or credibility builder like Tony Robbins did for Russell? So I'm not sure on that yet, but it's a question that I will want to answer at some point and my team might be able to come in and drop comments and highlight this and easily just add a comment and say, Hey, how about this person or that person? And that's what I love. I love the collaboration there to figure this out. So always keep raw notes. It's a good idea. Let's continue watching and see where Russell is going with this Tony Robbins angle here.
Again, this is made out of sheepskin cotton paper.
About that time is when I met a rare book collector, someone who specialized in one genre of books and they were LDS Mormon
Books. This is the earliest known image of Joseph Smith. This is as close as you can get to seeing Joseph Smith.
I was on eBay and I found something really, really cool that I wanted to buy. And these were old books from the early 18 hundreds books that are super rare and expensive, but they're so magical, they smell so cool. And I became obsessed with these old books and that kind of started this fascination. And I was like, well, there's other books, other things I'm excited about. There are rare books and other genres and things. I started searching around just for other things I'm passionate about marketing and business and personal development. And one day I typed Napoleon Hill and there's tons of different things I was looking through and I don't know what's good or what's not good. And I remember there's a button where you can sort and I decided to sort it from highest price to lowest. And when I did that, the number one, the Point Hill was the first edition Laws of Success and it was for sale for $1.5 million. And I was just like, that is a lot of money. There's no more expenses, there's no better, there's no more unique piece on this planet for Napoleon Hill than the first edition Laws of Success. It was published three years before the actual Laws of success books came out and there's only one on this planet. I was like, oh, I want it so bad, but like $1,000,001.5 million. It's like, is that worth it for some old books?
Do you mind if I have someone look at them? The first thing we need to see is whether or not it's a first edition. That's what you want the first book printed.
It's also about taking part of a larger legacy.
Okay, we're still bringing in a lot of voices, but we're also bringing in story elements that we're going to need in this documentary. So a few things to note on the story side. So on the story side, I see Russell as the spokesperson endorsements, whether it's intrinsic endorsements or explicit endorsements. And by that I mean Intrinsic is the Tony Robbins one, where Russell was at an event with Tony and engaging with Tony there. That is very much an endorsement, even if Russell Brunson paid to be in that mastermind or in that atmosphere at that time. And he probably got permission from Tony to use that. The endorsement is there from Tony Robbins, which brings in another audience. And then Russell not only has his audience, Tony Robbins has an audience that Russell's kind of bringing in here. And then Russell is speaking to people who love books, people who love antique books, and people who have been inside of libraries and have experienced that smell.
So he is trying to bring in a lot of sort of NLP types of things. So he is talking about the smell of books, he's talking about old antique books. So each of these opportunities speaks to a different audience, but it's also something super interesting to me about this is it feels like it's narrowing the audience more and more and more. So you have Russell's audience, and then you have the subsection of Russell's audience that really likes Tony Robbins. And then you have the sub subsection of, okay, you have Russell's audience, those who, Tony Robbins, those who like antiques and old books and old rules of success and the smell of books. And that audience just keeps getting smaller and small even though most of us have been inside of libraries. He is bringing in a lot of good elements. But I do wonder how this video is converting, and I have noticed when I visited this page, incognito or otherwise, I have noticed that there haven't been too many tests going on.
So I wonder how much traffic is being driven or if it's being tested or maybe I'm in the wrong funnel. Maybe it's something that's strictly for the homepage audience and the general audience, and they're okay with this conversion rate that's on this page. These are the questions that are going through my head. I wonder why. I always wonder why, and instinctively as a marketer, I have not seen the success that Russell has. I'll openly admit that, but I also am deeply interested in the education side. I wish I knew what was happening behind the scenes. I can only make assumptions which are often bad. So what I have to do is I have to look at it, I have to learn from it, and I have to make my own tests, maybe not for the same funnel, but I can bring story elements in. I can niche down to that audience and then target that audience.
So this may be a targeting idea too. So let's continue with the thoughts here. The Ronalds, as I watched the video on the story side, we have Russell endorsements, smell books, antique books, and third party valuation quote experts, sort of like public domain type stuff. So I don't know that Russell's team got permission from that antique show. I forget where that's on History Channel or TLC or some other channel A and E. There's a pawn shop in Las Vegas where people bring products in and then they get evaluated and offers are made or declined or accepted and so on, and they kind of pull just a little bit from there. That might just be a public opportunity because you can quote other people from time to time. It's not under copyright law as far as I know. I'm not a lawyer, but I think you can pull some of those in. So he's bringing some of that in too, bringing in pop culture references. So I'm going to write that down too. So he's bringing in just all of this value and it really is building up to be this incredible experience.
All right? So we can use this type of layering to target a very, very niche audience, but also to tell our own story, but we'll need to do it differently. Alright, so for this particular brief, I'm only going to hand this off to a few people on the team and maybe set up a cross-functional team to develop this out. But for our case, we're just going to go through the editor side and only assign and work on hiring the right video editor for this particular project. But I will showcase the team members that I think we'll need in this brief and in the plan up above. Alright, okay, let's continue. Let's see what else we're going to find out from Russell's story. What else is he going to incorporate here, which I think is awesome. And he's a world-class marketer, so we have a lot, and I mean a lot to learn from Russell Brunson here.
Blueprint for Success that was given to Napoleon Hill is literally the foundation of the whole success motivation, positive mental attitude world.
Oh, psychology Magazine from what You,
Okay, this is awesome. There's a whole genre that's just massive on YouTube for unboxing, and there's that A SMR side where it's like the sound effects are raw, so you kind of get quiet here. There's a music background, so let's make note of that music background intertwined with A SMR type edits. There's an unboxing. So I mean there's so many beautiful layers to this video. It's really hitting all of the possible notes. I really love it. I think a lot of it, if not all of it, has been very, very well engineered. 100%
World class here. Come on now. 1929. This is when. So I started buying things here and there, just dabbling as I would look at the obviously the one, the biggest one, the one I won the most, and try to ease the pain of the desire of the one that made no logical sense. Oh yeah, dude, 1806, morals and abstracts, morals by way of abstracts. And so I kind of started the journey. I started buying things here and there. I did find a first edition, think and Grow Rich was a couple thousand dollars. I remember buying that. I found an original copy of the Master Keys system. I bought that. Yes, the word success on three times and the word secrets, therefore write a book called Success something Secret. Dress a little by, well, Disney had a book called The Secrets of the World. I love eBay. I've been told I have an eBay addiction. People tell me that they want to delete the app from my phone, they want to ban me from the site. They want to block all ips ability in our office to get to eBay. Dude, this one's awesome. It smells so good. So Jenny, what are your thoughts about this hoard? I wouldn't suppose call myself a hoarder as much as a collector. They're different, right? And we're almost 30,000 books now before we even started ordering. For real, this is all
I bought an issue of Napoleon Hill Magazine. It was the first edition from 1919, I think I spent five or $6,000 and it was just one issue of magazine, but they're really rare. And I was like, ah, I got an issue of 1919 original Napoleon Hill magazine, which was really cool. And I'm looking at everything and then there's this card in the box that basically the card said, Hey, if you're interested, I have a whole bunch of other Napoleon Hill stuff. We should let me know if you want more things. And normally I see those things and I just kind of throw 'em away.
All right, so we're continuing all this story, but first I want to go back to the brief here just to add some more raw notes. So not only do we have the unboxing, we have references to hoarding, which is possibly pop culture, right? Collecting which appeals to collectors, antique shoppers. We see team members in here and that adds a layer of authenticity beyond Russell's own authenticity. So you can see that he loves what he's doing, he loves this project and he loves collecting. He loves these old books. And that's good to see. There is a passion there. Clearly a passion behind this video must have passion in our own video. Okay? Alright. So basically what we're saying is we don't need fake acting. We don't want fake acting. We want full, real, authentic self personalities coming through. And that's a good thing people know and trust, authentic people these days. Alright, let's continue watching.
But for some reason I felt this tug of like, okay, so I took a picture of the card and I texted that number, that picture, so he knew who he was talking to, said, hope you enjoy the heel material and that it'll receive in perfect condition. Are you a big Napoleon fan or collector? And he sent a picture of Napoleon Hillel, a whole bunch of other pictures around it and he said, here's a quick shot of some of my favorites. I was like, I've never seen these pictures before. I wrote back and said, yeah, he's one of my heroes. And also I'm a collector of old books. I said, this is one of your listings too. I think that might've been his. And so just joking there, Rebecca, I said, well, I don't want to ruin the surprise, but I'm planning on buying all that stuff from you soon, so don't sell it to anyone else. Which probably was the wrong thing to say because very short afterwards he came back and said, just heads up Kevin. Trudeau's also been reaching out about the collection as well. Wait, what? Someone else's? No one else's. I remember thinking there's no one else as insane as me that would actually spend 1.5 million on some books and they dropped Kevin Trudeau's name.
Now, Napoleon Hill at the turn of the century was hired by the richest man in the world, Andrew Carnegie and Andrew Carnegie said to Napoleon Hill, I want you to study the richest people on planet Earth for the next 20 years. So Napoleon Hill first wrote about it in a book called The Law of Success in 16 lessons, Henry Ford got crazy that Carnegie allowed these secrets to be revealed. He got the book squashed and all the real secret information edited out, and then even that book was crunched down to think and Grow Rich, and that was edited
Of all the crazy people in the world.
Okay, so this is interesting. There's a concept called the straw man concept, and inside of that straw man concept, you bring up this competitor or this feeling or this emotion or this alternate version of yourself or something that everybody can rally sort of against. And in a way, usually it's good natured. The straw man concept basically helps people decide, yes, I want my hero to win and I want that hero to be me in a way. Ultimately that's the goal. So Russell introduces a straw man, which is real. It's part of the story and authentic, and this may be loosely a straw man. I guess I do want to clarify that it's not a specific straw man in this case, but it's sort of an anti-hero, right? If you're a fan of Russell and you see that he's super passionate, you suddenly become a fan and want him to win.
So he introduces this competitor, Kevin Trudeau, who is, as you saw in the video, a number one New York Times bestselling author who also wants the Napoleon Hill Collection first edition book that Russell is going after. So now we're rooting for Russell. There's kind of this mental switch, this mental shift that happens when people watch this video if they're really, really involved and kind of are satisfying their pull for, Hey, we love Russell, we want to know what he's doing. We like Tony Robbins, we like books. What's going to happen next? We need to know, and we want to buy into this because this is an emotional roller coaster, which like I said before, I believe part of it's engineered, part of it's real life. So there's an authentic string, or I guess there's an authentic undertone and undercurrents to this, which really, really helps develop marketing campaigns tremendously if there's authentic undertones and overtones inside throughout a story. So Russell is definitely introducing that. He's bringing in this pseudo straw man type and let's see where it goes after this.
Earl, the only other person who I think is crazy enough to do this would be at Kevin Trudeau and I was like, oh crap. Now there's a timeline. Now it's not just I'm going to buy it in 10 years from now and I can afford it now. It's like if I don't buy it now, it could be gone forever. All right, I want to do this, but how much stuff is there? He said, it's conservatively over 5 million worth of books and magazines and collectibles. I was like, oh, if we're going to do this, I was like, how about this? I'll fly out to you and I'll pick it up. And he said, well, if you fly to me, it's not going to fit in a plane. You don't understand. I said, no, no, I'm going to rent a plane and then fly it to you. That way we can fill the entire plane up with everything that you've got. So we are about to take off from Boise. And so I'm really excited and also nervous. I've only seen pictures of them, I assume they're real.
And this Russell is obviously talking about making major investments and going to great lengths to achieve this collection. So going to great links to achieve the objective of getting an entire Napoleon Hill collection, meaning renting an entire jet, possibly committing to five plus million dollars of collectors items and more. All right, let's see how this going to Great links gets developed a little bit more here.
Pretty sure they're real, hoping that they're real. I ended up buying the entire state, so I don't even know all the stuff I'm getting and I don't even know this is going treasure hunting and going way better.
So he confirms. He ends up buying the entire state. Alright, let's see what that looks like.
He rented this church out and we just drove past this huge Pentecostal church. We're going to go see all this stuff.
How's it going, man?
Good meeting you for the first time, boss. What's going on? Not
Much. Great meeting you. Good to meet you. We walked into the room, we had everything set up and it was one of those feelings like this is history, this is people who have passed on, people who at one point in life were like me. They were excited, they were passionate. They had this thing they wanted to share with the world and they were writing books and publishing magazines back when that was not easy. They didn't have Google docs and things like that. They were creating these things on typewriters to get their message and their mission out. And I felt like walking in, it was like, here is the generation, the people I've modeling and studying their finest work in one spot, collected and curated by someone who was obsessed with this era and these people as much as I was,
It started out just like my own library, just for myself. It's kind of like a snowball once you get going, people come to you after a while and they're like, Hey, you want to buy this? Or I know somebody that's got this or that's how a lot of this came to me is folks just bringing it to me. This was the last book he wrote, so it could be possibly the last book he ever signed. Oh wow. The Thomas's is some of the family, but that's after his stroke. So that would be days before his death, 1970,
We able to see who were the authors, what did they create, how did they all fit together and what were the stories behind them all.
You guys want to go look at the big stuffing a little bit? Oh, the big stuff, yeah.
All right. This overall behind the scenes look is just absolutely incredible. So I'm going to just jot a no down. I love the whole deep behind the scenes view of what it took to get this collection together.
And of course I have a lot of questions that I'm developing in my mind right now behind the scenes. I'm just not quite ready to write them down yet. Once this video is over, we'll have and kind of create some discussion questions right here. So I'm going to write that down. Discussion questions. And these are really ideas for testing or how might we feel about our audience's experience and what might we change from the Russell VSL? Okay, so these questions kind of lean into that. It's not that Russell does anything wrong. I never intend to critic or to be a critic or to critique because Russell's audience is unique and he's a world-class marketer and he's well liked and loved more than anything I've ever seen or achieved more than just about every other marketer out there. So never, never intend to do that. But I do understand my audience a little bit and my audience is different. So I do want to question things and I think it's healthy to ask good, tough questions. Questions that we won't know the answer to, but when we're developing our own tests, we can create and maybe get closer to what our audience might like. Okay? So while some questions may sound critical, they're designed to spur additional thoughts and not intended to be critical, and that's key to success. Questions are designed to inspire discussion no matter how tough they are. Alright, let's continue watching. Let's see the big reveal here.
So this is the main piece. This is when I saw on eBay, that was the crazy expense. What I've been dreaming about for
This is the original work, and that's what every book on success ever written since takes from This
Is the laws of success,
This is like right now and nobody has disputed it, the only known set in the world. And for many, many years it was always stated that 1928 was the original first edition. So whenever I released that, I own this, it shocked the whole Napoleon Hill world. They're like, no way. It is been a big deal. They liked this because it's more streamlined and is exactly what Napoleon Hill wanted to do, how he wanted to say it before big publishers got a hold of it.
I remember I'd seen the pictures on eBay a hundred times to see the actual things I was scared to touch. I was scared. I'm like, I don't want to ruin them. And he opened one up and showed us, here it is. And here's when Napoleon Hill signed it and he kind told the story behind it and how he found it and that was just such a cool moment. And then he pulled out all the hand typed papers that 250 pages and pulling hand typed on the typewriter.
So these come from different years from a span, from what I can find about 1932 to about 53, 54 in there.
And he holds the stories behind those and how he found 'em, what they were and why they're important.
Pulling $200,000 worth of hand typed pages right now.
Okay, I need add just a little bit. So not only behind the scenes deep, but things never before seen on film or experienced or rarely experienced by others. So that certainly has a good emotional pull. Alright, so to summarize, what I love so far is I love just the deep behind the scenes view, never before seen on film. This is complete unique to the internet and to the world pretty much. And that's awesome. That is when you release something unique to the world, it is so, so powerful and it attracts just going into the law of attraction area. It attracts a lot of people and that's a good thing. So maybe that's the entire purpose of this is stuff that's never before unseen and it's stuff that we can't attain as ordinary marketers, ordinary people. And it's something that Russell has worked extremely and exceptionally hard for. So I really do like that part of
You can see the hand
Type. It's also got his notes and
All those kind of things. Crazy.
And then he pulled off probably the ultimate upsell at this point. I was just like, man, I have all this stuff. We're taking home with us, we get it all. And earlier in the tour he showed me this one book called Mental Dynamite. He said, this is part of a book series that he had written. The story told is that this book was written during World War ii, and then when Napoleon Hill got done and he wanted to print it, there was a paper in Ink shortage, so he never had a chance to print the full set.
This came from his estate and there's four out of 16. But interesting. The cool thing is I know somebody has hill's personal complete set of this. He actually did hand edit notes in it and stuff. Is he going to do
Anything with the de
Of the guy? Yeah, he wants a fortune for it though.
So in my head I'm like, oh, I have to have that for the collection. There's a spot we can put it in the light, all the thoughts, but unfortunately it wasn't here. And as we sat down on the table at the very end, he brought back up mental dynamism, remember that book? And yeah, and I said, do you think the person who would be willing to sell it to me? He's like, I'm pretty sure they would.
I got something right here to show you. So you might want to sit down for this one. You don't know about this one.
This is the one from right here.
This is Napoleon Hills personal complete scent of mental dynamite.
That was really good. I'm impressed. And inside was the entire mental dynamite course, one of if not the only one on the planet, the entire thing. And he said, I'm actually the one person who owns it. This is the one piece in the collection I hadn't told you about that wasn't planning on selling to you, but we're here and if you want it, I would be willing to sell it to you for,
I'll tell you what.
And he kind of thought through the math and his head and he said, for an extra $285,000. And at first I was just like, oh,
The end. That's everything.
But at this point, you know how funnels work. After you're in, you're in. I said, you know what, let's do it.
You sure?
Okay, notice how he says how funnels work. He is definitely speaking to his own audience. And in that case, I think this entire funnel makes a ton of sense. So let's see how funnels work. Speaking to marketers who know Trust Russell or have used or been impacted by ClickFunnels or more broadly maybe anybody who is familiar with sales funnels, which I think Russell popularized, which is what has helped him become so wealthy to be able to acquire this, right? So he's definitely speaking to that audience here.
I can't say no now. Come on now. And that became the collection. When all is said and done, after all the wires had cleared, it was $2,685,000 in books, the greatest Napoleon Hill collection of all time.
And as fast as we came, we were gone. We jumped back in and we raced to the airport before we missed our flight. And luckily we were able to fit the entire collection in the baggage storage of the airplane outside of the two that I kept with me, the laws of success and mental dynamite. I did not want to put those under the plane just in case. Those are the two most important, most expensive rarest pieces in the collection. So I kept those on the front seat with me all the way on the flight home. This is the least a no, definitely 1800, you can 1900 a different smell. This is the bump I needed.
That felt good.
We couldn't get you counsel.
Okay, so that's it. That's the video
And this is the funnel. So all right, this VSL is very powerful and it has such a huge hook At the very end we saw what that was to find out what's next to be continued. So this documentary is to be continued. You want to know what's going to happen next, and it is a pretty good hook. It's pretty compelling, especially for that audience and the audience that you narrowed the niche down into throughout the video. I think that all of those people will take the next step, which is a lot of people, no doubt about it. For our purposes, let's make a note here. First, we need to sort of ends, Russell ends the video with to be continued and the email address submission option to see what happens next right away. So you probably get immediate satisfaction, but in this case, we're going to do a video or a VSL similar to this where we want to create a hook, develop a hook, develop a video of some sort, and have a to be continued to collect email addresses, build our list, and continue marketing to people who are in our audience at Specialist pH.
Alright, so discussion questions, questions rolling around in my head, some of the very first ones that pop into my head are who can relate. And the reason this question pops in is who can truly understand spending millions of dollars on books?
Who can understand renting a private jet? I struggle with the idea that when you're trying to relate to an audience or speak to an audience, you want to be like them as the spokesperson. So somebody I can trust, maybe you can kind of overcome that, but at the same time, what's going through my head is I would never do that. That's not something I would do. I do like Napoleon Hill, I like personal development, I like success, but there's a huge almost cognitive dissonance or a gap between what I'm thinking and where I'm at right now versus where I want to be a year from now, five years from now and so on. So maybe he's selling the dream, you could be like me. And that is sort of what he's selling access to is, hey, you can be like me with access to this program, but now I have it exclusively. So another one is who might want exclusive access to this investment or rather the results of the investment.
So you notice a lot of my questions are around who, and I think that's just because I'm trying to wrap my mind around understanding the audience here. And as a marketer, that's one of the biggest things that constantly keeps me in marketing is understanding audiences. Because audiences are so different from products to product, even if it's the exact same product, if it has a different brand name on top of it, one could be sold as higher end, one could be sold as lower end, it could be made by the same manufacturer, but because each has a different and unique audience, they're able to carve out a market and make a lot of money for themselves possibly. So understanding audiences is really where my marketing brain goes all the time. I also like to understand offers and understand what's happening, what's the psychology behind certain things.
So that's why I'm asking these questions. Now at the moment, I don't understand, I don't know that there's a relational side to this. There's intrigue, there's curiosity, and that can carry a lot of people through an entire funnel, which I think is definitely the angle here. At the same time, with curiosity and with intrigue, they're usually at least in eight figure offers, maybe even nine figure offers that I've seen in the past and possibly had a hand in a couple of them. Not anything compared to the billion dollar business that Russell's built. So this pales in comparison in some ways. So maybe he's at a whole other level of understanding here that I don't get and that's what I want to get it. But in this case, in a lot of products and understanding the authenticity behind it, usually there's some piece of it that says, oh, I'm like that and I want to be a part of that.
There's sort of a movement or a culture or a journey that one wants to develop for themselves and they can see themselves in that person. For me, even though I'm a marketer and I love marketing and I love funnels and I love understanding copywriting and psychology and success secrets and more, I'm having a hard time relating to Russell right now in this path. So for me, because I am in his audience, I do question, am I really in that audience? I know I like ClickFunnels, I know I like Russell, I like what he stands for. I like his values, I like the person, I like his energy With this. It doesn't feel like he's of the people and I don't mean that in a critical way. I mean that in a way that I need to explore it because he is likely ultra successful with this. This may have been a multimillion dollar success right out of the gates, which I wouldn't doubt because it's Russell. So the pressure is definitely on me to try to understand that. So I like writing these questions down. How might we be able to relate more to our audience specifically?
We want to make sure we have a weird, just like you part of the video and go through the, I like to overwhelm people like the 15 to 20 things we did or I did before, discovering whatever the magic pill, so to speak, of the magic, the serum or pill that changed our way of thinking.
So this will help us make sure that we relate to the audience and that's what I think might be missing out of here or I'm missing it. It likely isn't missing for those who are in this ecosystem and it likely is just a pure bias on my part. So beware of that. As marketers, we might look at something and say, that's not working, or I don't think that's working. It's likely because we think we're in that audience when we are not, which is why it wouldn't work for us. So I have to keep that in mind. But I wanted to show you that I can be biased and I have that bias here. So I want to make sure that in my video or in this video sales letter for our copywriter, we need to make sure that we understand where people are at right now and we need to make sure that we feather that in and put that into the video in depth so that the audience feels like, oh, this person gets it. They know what I'm thinking, they know what I'm feeling, they know exactly where I'm at, and I see the value of getting to where I want to go by leveraging this solution or this service or product and more. Okay, so those are my main questions then that's my main concern here. I do like the format, I like the style, I like the to be continued. I like bringing in all these things. So I've learned a ton from this masterclass in VSL and now I'm ready to write the brief.
So let's get started writing that brief. Okay, we are going to build the brief for A VSL. So we need to pull a team together. We have a lot to do just to get one VSL out. But this is typical for testing any video sales letter that you have. So this brief should help you. You'll find a template somewhere near this video. If not, you can email me. My email address or the email address here is support at specialist pH and we'll go from there. Alright, so the goal is to develop a powerful VSL for our talent update list the timeline, let's put this at a deadline of one week. And sometimes, or most of the time we'll put a date, a specific date on here. But for now until we actually start this project, I like to just use vague numbers one week, one day, two days, and so on. So one week is the timeframe. Day one will be research. Day two we'll be copywriting, and this part might take a couple of days. Day three copywriting, day four, we'll start recording. Actually we'll record all of the assets. Day four, day five. Editing and editing can take a while depending on how long
The film or the footages. I like to try to give the editors at least an hour for every minute of video, which means this part could take an entire week in itself if it's a 40 minute long VSL, which it very well could be. So we might blow this out and actually say, this actually needs to be two weeks. So this will be days five through 10, actually we'll say five through nine. Editing is post-production and day 10 will be distribution. We'll actually add tech in here and production. Okay,
Here we go. Alright, so this is the timeline and this is sort of the flow that I like to follow. The main flow that I like to follow is research, copywriting compliance, wherever compliance is needed. And that's with ad networks, with legal, with anything that needs compliance. I like to run just about everything through that. In this case, I think we're going to be pretty safe. So I didn't say that we'll submit this to legal, but I probably should. So we might actually need to add that here. So I'll just add it to day three,
Compliance. And then we go into production and then distribution and then optimization. So optimization is usually another project on its own requiring its own separate brief. Same with distribution, because both of these can be ongoing. The rest of this is something that I like to cycle through as much as possible. I like to do the research, the copywriting, the compliance and the production of VSLs, landing pages, assets. Anything else that we can test can buzz through this process as often and as quickly as possible. Alright, so let me go ahead and raise that out of this brief. Who is it for? This is not who the document or the brief is for, but rather this is the audience that we're targeting. So usually I have a copywriting brief and an audience brief written up already. In this case I do, and I could tag it right here.
So I'll just kind of insert a tag here just as a reference for now. We'll just say, tag the audience brief document what resources are available to accomplish this task. So for resources, I'm looking at financial resources, I'm looking at time and availability and talent. So we might say, actually let's skip that section for now. We'll go to what's needed and then we'll switch to what's available now to accomplish this task. And in fact, I'm going to edit this and switch that around right now live. Here we go. Okay, so what resources are needed? We are going to need a copywriter. They'll do the research we need. Let's go look at our list up here. We need legal compliance, which may just be 40 or a couple hours at most likely. Let's kind of estimate, put our estimates here for the time required copywriter. Two days.
We need producers to record the video and I don't have an exact time on that, but I guess we could say one day after the producers record the videos, we'll need of course the people in the video. So spokes people and talent for the video production when we post production. So this will be video editors, we'll say page builders, to build the page, ADD managers. And this should pretty much round us out for now, and I bet I'm forgetting something here. Oh, of course. We're going to need other assets. We'll need landing page thank you page or upsell here if possible. Of course, the VSL, which is what this project is all about. We will need images, photos, and graphics from production.
What other assets might we need? Copywriting, copy for the VSL, copywriting for the landing page, copy for ads, copy for email follow response sequences. I believe that covers it as far as minimal resources required. Now luckily we have a lot of this already on staff. So we can reassign this and say, let's go ahead and move this down to what resources are available to accomplish this task. We have a copywriter, we have legal, we have producers, we have spokespeople, we have post-production people, we have page builders, ad managers. What we don't have and what we need are the landing page, thank you page VSL images and all of the ad copies. I'm actually going to move this back up to the resources needed.
Now what I might do is I might hand this off to a project manager. If not, if I don't, then I am the project manager. So I will need this so that I know what's to check off and the things that I need to build inside of a project management system to pass on to other people. In this case, like I said, we're going to focus on the VSL. So we're going to hand this off to the person that will be the producer that will be developing this VSL and managing the editing and more. So I want them to have a clear picture and a clear view of what I'm looking for, and we're going to pretend that we have the copy and that we have everything ready for them to produce. So the roadblocks to completing this task or project, we will say there aren't any typically just time the steps to accomplish this task. So this is one of the most important pieces as a manager is outlining the steps you think it will take to accomplish this, or better yet, assign it to the people who will accomplish this task. So in this case, I'll say video producer, I might have their name here, will fill this out and I will audit before launching.
So what I would like to do is review it and make sure that there's something or that there isn't anything that I think is missing from this from the video producer's perspective. Now they will be extremely detailed, which I really, really like. And typically it is a simple brief XU debrief in that they say, okay, here's what I've done. Here's the list that I have. Am I okay to execute? And all it takes is a manager or me as a CEO here to say, yes, let's go. Let's do it. And I usually don't need to add anything, but I like to just review it just to ask questions and make sure that everything is covered. In this case, I'll go ahead and detail some of the things that are required for this entire project. The video producer will fill their section out for the VSL. So I'll actually add that VSL here, and we will have each person from above fill out their remaining parts. But just in case, I will say we'll follow the process.
Research copywriting compliance and our team usually know this, but just in case we have new people on the team, I like to repeat things and have it documented just so we have a center and that our entire team is on the exact same page and that there are no assumptions made because new people are coming onto the team all the time. And when they're new and they haven't seen the process before, it puts them at risk and it puts your company or your process or your campaign at risk if they don't know the process. So including the process or including the documents in the notes for the process will help tremendously. So we'll go from compliance into production, which includes tech, and then we'll go to distribution. And finally optimization.
All right, any additional notes? If I have any other documents that I want to attach here, any job descriptions. If I am missing any people, let's say I am missing the video producer and the video editor, then I will typically go and start with hr. And I have a template here that we'll share somewhere around this video that will showcase what I'm looking for with a recruiting specialist. In this case, I will change out the documentation, I'll say produce the best possible candidates as outlined in the project brief, and this will be the secrets of success VSL one, and we'll hire and recruit for several roles here, video editor, we'll recruit for maybe a ClickFunnel specialist. We'll recruit for copywriting specialists and more fill those roles to help us out to get this project done. I really like to start with HR because I think starting with HR frees up your time to continue competitive research, to continue building a brief out, and you have a much better chance of getting the right people on the team because somebody who's hired to handle hr, they're not going to hire the first person they interview.
They're going to find the best person that can do that job, that displays and has a portfolio that they can do that job. I think that's crucial because a lot of times marketing managers are not HR people, but they adopt that as part of their role to recruit and to hire and train and interview people when that should be hr. So a good rule of thumb for any digital business person or manager to follow is to simply start with hr. Any project that they do, if they have to do it themselves, okay, they probably don't need hr. But if you're going to hire somebody, if you're going to vet a freelancer or even another company, start with hr. Have an HR person do that and have them bring the top five based on your criteria. Have them send out the decline notices to say, Hey, we're sorry this isn't the exact fit for now, but we'll keep you in mind for future projects.
And it's just so much easier on a manager to have somebody else doing that. The best part is if you're just going to hire HR and start hiring HR first, it takes just a couple hundred dollars per role at most in a marketplace setting. Now that's if you're a small company, typically you'll want HR to come in-House, and then sometimes you'll want an HR partner. And that's where Specialist pH really fits in is the HR partnership side. So companies that are generating usually several million plus is right where we fit in just because we're supplemental HR and we help find talent overseas, which typically is a specialty that most HR managers domestically don't have that expertise and they need the help because it's a totally different marketplace versus what they're used to possibly. Okay, well, here's the sequence of success VSL brief, and it's fairly straightforward.
In this case, I think we have our raw notes. We know that we're going to get a video produced. We will have to review as a manager, we'll have to review the copywriting for the VSL before it goes to the producers, just to make sure that we're on the same page. And then we have things feathered in there that will help us create and develop this offer for the, let's see, for the talent update list. And again, that list is simply a free list where our recruiters sometimes recruit more people than we need, and they're not a good culture fit for one particular agency or client or marketing team, and they're fit for another. So we already know what the offer is, we just have to build this campaign around it and get going on it. So I hope that helps, that this is sort of the skeleton to making this happen. And if you have any questions, always happy to help drop a comment or a note to us and we'll get back to you as quickly as we can. Thanks. Bye.
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