SFR 63: The ONLY Time To Partner

Approaching someone with nothing but an idea doesn't put you in a position to start partnering with someone. Here what you need to have before going to others...

What's going on everyone? This is Steve Larsen, and in this episode I want to share with you guys when it's actually really cool to partner with somebody, but also I want to share with you when it's completely inappropriate.

Welcome to Sales Funnel Radio, where you'll learn marketing strategies to grow your online business using today's best internet sales funnels. And now, here's your host, Steve Larsen.

All right. Now when I first got started in this business, I started getting a little bit of traction, I was studying a lot of traffic strategies, and I didn't know it at the time but I literally was taking this piece of paper in the middle of my internet marketing class, and I was drawing out a funnel, a sales funnel. And I was drawing from a squeeze page, to a thank you page, over to an affiliate offer, and there was an email sequence.

And I was learning how to put all this stuff together. I had no idea that I was drawing what is now commonly known as a sales funnel. And it was super cool, and there was all these really cool things that I was drawing, this really detailed little map of how this was going to be all working out. And I walked up to my internet marketing professor, this was about two and a half, eh, this was way longer than that. This was probably three and a half years ago now, four years ago.

And I walked up to him and I said, "Hey, you know what? Hey, great class. I never want to come back." And he's like, "What?" And I said, "Look, it's like day two and you just asked me what SEO stands for. Like, I've been studying this stuff way longer than you probably have been." I didn't say that part. But I was like, "Look, I don't want to come back."

And he's like, "All right, fine." And I held up this piece of paper, that funnel, and I said, "I'm gonna go build this instead," and he, I thought he was going to say no. But he said something that probably changed my life. He said, "Okay. You can leave, don't come back the rest of the entire semester. And what you're going to go do is you're going to hold a class on your own. And at the end of the semester, I expect some kind of deliverable."

And so what I did is I looked around in class, and I looked for the other kid that looked like he was just bored out of his mind because he just knew this stuff already, and I was like, "Hey, let's go." And we left class for the rest of the semester. And we, every single day, held class for three hours. We called it class, but literally all we were doing is we were trying to make as much money online as we possibly could. And that's what our class was. And it's super unique, it was really, really cool, I can't believe he actually said yes to that. And so that's all we did.

We sat down and we just started executing the plan. I said, "Hey, okay, here's the plan." And I, his name's Ben Wilson, he's one of the first interviews on my podcast, by the way. He's about to launch his own. Anyway. And he ... I was like, hey, here's what this is. I didn't know it was a funnel that I was drawing. But I was like, first we're going to send it to this and then we'll go do this, and then we'll go do this.

You know, it was all this cool automation and I was kind of patch working together these different systems that weren't really supposed to work together but I somehow in weird ways got them to.

And we went and we got a Clickbank offer and the coolest thing happened. We went and we grabbed this Clickbank offer and we put basically together an affiliate funnel. Using some free software for some crappy landing page thing. And we thought through all the lines of copy and we thought through the headlines.

All that we could, we were just focusing as hard as we could on when to say this line, and when this line. And we took this video from here. It was just really, really fun.

And I was like hey, I have no money. We're gonna put fifty bucks in, let's say, on ads, and I learned some really awesome traffic driving strategies. This is literally before I even learned who Russell Brunson was by like a month before I learned who he was. And it was really, really cool. I went and we put fifty bucks in and I was like, okay, let's see if it works.

And we went to bed. And that night, I woke, the next morning I woke up and I was really, really excited. I had a hard time sleeping because I was so excited to see what would happen.

I was like, we're gonna be rich! We're gonna be rich! This is gonna be amazing!

And not from fifty bucks, but just to prove the concept and knew we could scale afterwards.

And so we put fifty bucks in, and I open up my account, and there was fifty dollars in there. It was like fifty-something. Anyway, we basically, we broke even. And I was like, God! No way! Oh my gosh, we broke even, we broke even! Dude! And I called him up and I was like, "We freaking made it!" And he's like, "Are you kidding me man?" And I was like, "Yeah, meet me there."

So we go and I get on my bike, because we only have one car, and I wanted to like, to have the car for the kids. And I'm riding my bike as fast I can, rah! Go as fast as I can. I get to campus, get to the room that we always stole from the other people so that we could try to make money every day.

And I pull my computer up and he comes running in and I show it to him and we were like, "Oh my gosh, it worked!"

Well the news of that spread. And part of me was like, yeah, whoa! And the other part of me was like, eh, we broke even. We had 17 people opt in and one person bought and then bought the upsell which made fifty bucks. And I was like, huh. Well, it looks like we failed on that, I guess what else should we try?

And it's so funny because until I just kicked myself. We made a break even funnel our very first try, which, just so you know, in the sales funnel world, is not a small feat. It was huge. And it was mass ... Anyway. What was funny was this onslaught of people with these deals that just started coming out of the woodwork for us. And news of that spread. And we were just excited. We weren't thinking. We were just like, "yeah, check this out! We did this, this, and this!" It was like, aw, so crazy cool!

Well, pretty soon everybody was a deal maker. And I was in the middle of my marketing classes and I'd go from class to class and these people would come out and be like, "hey, you want to do this?" "Hey, dude, I've got this great thing. Hey, you want to drive traffic for me and do x, y and z?" And I was like, "Yeah! Totally!" And I was just saying yes to everything. And we were saying yes to all this stuff, thinking, oh my gosh, this is huge, we've learned this cool little skill, we've just proved it, we have a case study now, let's go do, it's an actual business. And let's see if it works, you know? And I can't even remember what we did next.

Oh! We started doing all these little small businesses. And trying to drive, you know, driving traffic for them, and it was really, really fun. It was cool. And then one day ... I mean, we were just saying yes to everything. And then one day, this compan...