Gamify Your Sales Funnels with Hawk Mikado

In This Episode

• [01:31] – Hawk Mikado explains how he acquired the title “The Funnel Gamer” and briefly outlines how to gamify marketing.
• [04:41] – Hawk discusses his journey from selling lanyards and pot in sixth grade to creating his first marketing company. He talks about his passion for marketing and how he became a certified partner with ClickFunnels.
• [09:04] – Hawk talks about how to craft a message that resonates with your audience.
• [10:38] – How did Hawk succeed in a real estate funnel for his client?
• [15:44] – Hawk describes how he applies his marketing knowledge to his ventures, including a successful Airbnb business and an Airbnb management company that runs independently.
• [28:10] – Hawk explains the benefits of JVs and mentions the potential pitfalls of ineffective JV partnerships that do not align with each other’s target audience.
• [39:36] – Hawk discusses how Funnel Magazine pivoted and this year’s relaunch.

Jump to Links and Resources

Hawk, it’s so great to have you on the show. 

Thanks for having me. 

Let’s start with how did you end up getting called the funnel gamer? 

It was originally the funnel genius. One day, we were launching a product, and one of my team members said, “it’s the funnel gamer, Hawk Mikado,” and it stuck throughout my evolution. I am a massive gamer, and I wanted to incorporate gaming into my business, how we do our business, and how we operate as a business. 

While the funnel genius brand is really powerful, it felt like it was time to evolve past that. I already had many things with FG, so funnel gamer was a natural progression. 

How do you gamify a funnel? How do you gamify any marketing?

First of all, story. I play mostly MML and MML RPGs or back-in-the-day D&D. 

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I know what it is, but some of our listeners have never heard that acronym, so why don’t you explain it?

Multiplayer games are games where people play together. RPG is a role-playing game, so story-based, quest-based, where you go out on an adventure doing a specific thing and accomplish something, then you win the gold, kill the dragon, or whatever at the end. 

What was your favorite game when you were growing up? 

I played a lot of D&D with my dad. I remember staying up until four or five in the morning playing D&D on a school night, which was not so smart. 

That wasn’t great parenting. 

I thought it was wonderful parenting. 

That’s awesome. 

I was a natural entrepreneur from early on. One day I was at the store, and I got an A on a test, and my dad gave me $5. I bought a bag of dried mango, a pound of dried mango, because it was $5 a pound then. It was the first thing we checked out with. By the time we got into the car, it was gone. I polished off the entire pound. 

I was like, “Dad, this stuff is amazing. Can I get some more?” He said, “if you want to eat it like that, you must figure out how to make your own money.” I didn’t think anything of it. I’m five, by the way. 

I was like, “alright, cool.” So I go and start making origami balloons and a bunch of things. Beginning at the age of five, I’m out there on my walk home from school and making a little bit of money here and there to buy mango because that’s how my dad told me to do it. I’ve always been a little rebellious.

What was your first legit business? Was it as a teenager? 

What would you call legit? 

Figure out what you want to do. You got to get known for one thing.

It was more than just selling candy on your walk home. 

My second one was selling lanyards, and I would sell them in front of the store anytime my parents were out in the store. That was in the third and fourth grades. Six through basically the end of high school, I sold pot. That was what it was. A little later, I realized I was going nowhere and needed to do something more real. 

In sixth grade, I had an opportunity to create a marketing company. My first client was a dessert kind of thing. They asked me for business cards. I spent much time, energy, and money putting together these business cards. Then I spelled dessert as ‘desert.’ I got to have them refunded. That was my first marketing experience. Then I helped my dad with his hobby business, which stuck in the background. 

After I left high school and went to college temporarily, I was like, “Okay, I really like this marketing thing. This is where I want to be. This is what I enjoy doing.” Then a little bit down the road from there, I left college, didn’t graduate, and met one of my mentors at college and started on this personal development journey with NLP. 

That was where I went from having twenty different business ideas at once to having one, and he’s like, “you got to figure out what you want to do. Do you want to do this thing or this thing? You got to get known for one thing, and you can’t go into a networking group and be like I got 5000 things that I talk about.” I do now because I have a lot of things that are automated and businesses that run on their own now, but I had to get known for one thing.

I like marketing. I really enjoy it. Crafting messages and putting together sales pages and all those things is fun. I’m good with technology, so that solidified what I wanted to do. I got lead pages at the time because quick funnels weren’t’ a thing, and it was lead pages or WordPress. WordPress was a pain and is still a pain. 

I started building these little two-step funnels for people for $750 with a video that comes with it. After that, we just progressed forward and eventually got ClickFunnels and became a certified partner. It’s been a journey for sure.

Have you won any awards from ClickFunnels, like the funnel hacking events? The Two Comma Club awards?

I have 21 clients who have gotten the Two Comma Club awards. I could have gotten one for my former agency, but we closed shortly after making $1.2 million. By then, I already had many clients for whom I had done it. It didn’t feel right to say, “Yeah, I built this business, and it closed down.” So here’s my word: I have so many other clients and 32 certifications.

Wow, that’s a lot of certifications. What are you certified in, and from where? 

ClickFunnels is the one I talk about if somebody feels like they need credibility from me. I’m like, “here’s all this other credibility, but I’m also a certified partner.” The rest of them are from coaching programs. I got a leadership one, accountability coaching one, goal setting one, hypnosis, NLP 1, 2, and 3, and speaker training. They sit in a box in the house far, far away. 

How do NLP and hypnosis come in handy? I know the answer but I want to hear your take on it. How do you use those in your marketing for your clients’ marketing? 

That’s all marketing is. 

Give us examples. 

When you are crafting a message and crafting it in a way that doesn’t connect and resonate with your audience, then at the end of the day, they’re not going to move forward. So you have to understand psychology. You have to understand human behavior. You have to know how people will act and react.

Trying things for funnel success sometimes goes well, and sometimes it’s terrible. But, we must go forward from there.

A sales page is no different than a sales conversation, except it’s on a page. You still have to be discussing the head. As you are writing your sales page, if you are having that conversation with them as they are reading it, now they are getting the information they need when conversing with you or whoever the sales page is coming from.

I’ve used many of those components over the years in sales pages. We have a really powerful page. It’s based on psychological triggers. It goes through each of the core components. We utilize the six human needs throughout our content and rotate through them to look at it if we’re going towards or motivated. There’s just a lot of technical stuff there. It focuses on attention, notoriety, emotion, logic, and either future or fear, depending on whether they are motivated. 

I got you. What’s a funnel you’re proud of? 

A funnel is a tool at the end of the day. 

What outcome did you get for the clients or yourself from the funnel? 

A good friend of mine, Brad Hart, his book funnel; we did a million dollars with that recently. There are some things that I like that are cool. Let’s see how it works. Sometimes it goes well, and sometimes it’s just completely terrible. Then we go forward from there.  

What I love to see is when my clients can make an impact and help change their clients’ lives and that ripple effect. Almost everyone of my clients is in the B2B space, so they are coaches and coaching other businesses. 

There’s one. We have a real estate funnel that we did for a client a while back for his community. Generally speaking, for investors and agents to get a motivated seller lead, most people go straight for the jugular of hey, do you want a cash offer on the house? 

If you understand that for somebody to be looking for a cash offer on their house, they have to have gone through a whole bunch of information to get there. The likelihood that they will actually fill that form out is much smaller. They’re in the 1%–3% range. They are ready to make that next step forward.

We look for people who are either in hot or warm traffic versus those who are in ready traffic. We got another 37% or so of people in the market who could be interested but aren’t there yet. We have to educate them on the power. They are thinking of selling, but they are not considering whether I should go to the realtor or get the cash offer. What are the different components of that?

We look for people who are either in hot or warm traffic versus those who are in ready traffic.

We were tasked with building this funnel and started building it, and we started to run traffic to it. Depending on the area, getting a lead was like $200–$500 plus per lead because there’s so much competition among people trying to get those same leads. 

I started thinking, and this is a lesson I learned from one of my mentors: look outside your industry for a similar problem and its solution. I started thinking about ROE. Real estate is no different than any other business. Somebody still has to decide whether to want to sell their house. If I can hook them in based on what they might be thinking with a lead magnet, now I’ve got a much better chance of converting them into the sale before anybody else gets to them. With that, we could drop the cost per lead to $15 and $60. Saving 90-99% of what we had been paying for. 

The lead magnet’s job is to educate and, in this case, to create strain on how difficult it would be to do what they think they want to do, for example, sell your house to a realtor. It’s a great one for both realtors and investors. Get out of foreclosure. Somebody can do many things to get out of foreclosure, but the reality is the fastest thing is to sell it to a cash buyer.

Another one primarily for somebody who is an agent and a property manager is should I sell or rent my property? Should I sell, or should I rent and become a landlord? So there’s that, and we’ve been developing many new ones.

Having those lead magnets on the front then breaks down the process and, in the end, says get a cash offer. Get a comp on your house, or get a rental analysis on your property, what it would rent for. So it was cool being able to do that. 

With that, we were getting booked. You got leads, and then you got booked actual meetings and done deals. We had a couple of clients doing deals for $500 approximately. From $5000 down to $500. It’s just a powerful funnel.

Have you taken this knowledge and applied it to your ventures so that you can start up businesses that maybe you’re the sole owner of, or perhaps you’re a partner with someone else, and you’re in the real estate business, or you’re in some other vertical that a client was in? 

I have done some of my wholesaling as an investor. We have an Airbnb business, and I’ve taken all of my processes and everything from marketing. I have a seven-page sales letter on Airbnb that explains why somebody would want to stay at our house. We do corporate rentals on our short term due to the laws in the places where our Airbnbs are. 

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We do these corporate rental styles, so we’re attracting corporate clients that want to come in for 30, 60, and in some cases, we have a couple of people who stayed over four years through Airbnb as partners of the corporate rental, which is kind of not really what people think about when they think about Airbnb.

We are making more money than a vacation rental, we are making far more money than a standard rental, and it creates flexibility for the person staying there because there is a 30-day limit through Airbnb. So we took all the marketing principles and applied them there.

We then launched an Airbnb management company and hired a house manager in the area who manages all our houses and our client’s house. That business runs on its own. I got a few leads now, and if we are interested, we will have a conversation with them again. If not, we can go from there. 

I don’t do much marketing there, but it is this little money-generating business on the side. A side hustle takes an hour, maybe four hours a month, if everybody is checking in and checking out. So you must make sure things are flowing right. 

Then now with our 3D house printing company, which we originally got into because we wanted to build a series of hotels and then build a second location in each of the cities that we go to to help take the homeless off the street and use the profits from the first location to be able to provide services to the homeless. Get them off the road, get them trained, get them placed in jobs, and help end homelessness in each city we go to. That’s just starting.

As we are talking about this and going through this, we got a bunch of people that are like can you build my house through 3D printing? So I said, “of course, we can because I am an entrepreneur, and I’ll figure it out.” So I started talking with Shawn, my partner on the printing side, and we went to a mastermind last week and started saying, “Hey, I am a 3D printer. I print 3D-printed houses.”

We got a contract for 172 complexes. So it’s somewhere between 155 and 181. The plan they showed me had 172, so let’s see how many will be. That will be about a $100 million project, give or take $10 million.

We’re going to build a dragon house. This is really cool. This is one of the fun ones. We’re going to make a house in Idaho, and it will be a giant dragon on a farm, and each wing will be a house, like its own house. The body is going to be a house. It will be a triplex dragon as long as the city permits us. It’s just going to be a great attraction to the city. We will sell it to them as, “hey, you’re going to have this dragon in your town. Bring some tourism to the town.”

Alright, good luck with that. For the Airbnb stuff, that must require specialized knowledge of how the Airbnb algorithm works and how to get visibility within the Airbnb platform so you get more bookings for your properties. 

I took a very simple split test. I can’t think of a word for what it is. We figure out how to split test headlines and images to attract people to Airbnb, which anybody can do. It’s just that nobody does. I’ve seen maybe two or three people ever, and I’ve been to over 100 Airbnbs myself. 

While searching, I can see some people who know how to market. I can tell you’re a marketer. They’ve got different listings for the same room or place. It’s a great way to figure out what works best or what you want to provide.

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Then the other is because we have such an in-depth listing, people can make an easy decision. We only want specific guests. We don’t want somebody who wants to come in and party or somebody’s going to be loud. It’s meant to be a corporate rental where our audience is contractors coming to the area for a job, traveling nurses, and grad students, not college students, but grad students. 

In between that, we usually get people moving to or from the area. We have one guy who’s waiting for his house to be ready. I don’t know the exact situation, but he has a place he’s moving into, and he keeps extending because it’s unprepared. I don’t know if they’re building it or what’s happening there. It’s cool just to have people come and go. We got fourteen units right now that all produce for themselves. 

I got an amazing house manager. I could not do this without her. She’s incredible, and she takes care of the properties. She goes in and cleans them. She turns them. She does maintenance as needed. It helps bring it together. Having the right people on the team is essential to entrepreneurial growth.

How’d you find her?  

I just started posting listings, and rather than apply through the listings. She sent me a DM on Facebook. I was impressed. I could tell she wanted it more than the rest of the people. So we just started talking, and she came and did a cleaning, and then it was like, alright, here’s more and more.

We just started her off with cleaning and then realized how essential she would be in cleaning and how skilled she was. So, in this case, we wanted Jane of all trades or Leslie of all trades because her name’s Leslie.

Be specific in what you ask for.

She can take on a lot and fix things that need fixing. She is there to care about the houses and is grateful to have found her. I always know that the universe provides what you ask for, so be clear about what you ask for, and you’ll get it. If you ask for ice cream and it comes and falls on your head, you got ice cream. You got to be specific. I want a bowl of ice cream in front of me for free, and it’s got to be chocolate and vanilla. 

What’s an example of getting the universe to provide you what you asked for, and then you’re like, I should have gotten more specific?

I was looking for my future wife or partner a long time ago, probably a decade and a half or two decades ago, and I wasn’t very clear. I was like a general, and I found somebody I thought was good but wasn’t. So that’s a very simple situation. 

An opportunity like I wanted to do this thing, and then I didn’t get the chance because I wasn’t very specific. I got to attend but not do anything or go to a mastermind. It wasn’t like I was involved on the front end, things like that.

On the flip side of getting clear, it’s like I want to have this person on my stage, or I want to have this person on Funnel Magazine. Probably for the last almost five or six years, probably seven years, I go anytime I have a spot on my marketing roster where I can bring on a new client. Here’s what I’m looking for in my mind. Usually, within a week, I’ve landed a new client. It’s just clockwork now. 

It’s easy, and I don’t do anything. I say it out loud, and within the week, I have ten people go, “hey, Hawk, are you available to work with people now? Because I only do a limited number of clients at a time.” I’ll start getting leads from these places where my businesses are out there and profiles out there, and they don’t generate any leads while I’m not looking for clients. It’s very interesting. 

As soon as I start looking for clients, I swear, the next day, I’ll get three or four people who apply through those. So the universe conspires for us, and we have to know what we want it to conspire with. 

The universe conspires for us; we must know what we want it to conspire with.

This is very true. Awesome. I met you many years ago, and I don’t think you remember me, but I think it was a Speaking Empire in San Diego. Were you in a Speaking Empire event way back in the day, maybe a decade ago?

Yeah, we were in San Diego and had Ira making videos. I don’t know if we were at a round table together or if you were managing the Speaking Empire there.  

I was speaking there. I don’t remember if my wife Orion was there with me. She’s done Speaking Empire events or had in the past. I’ve gotten some awards and things from them, too, from some of the training. I remember meeting you. You had a memorable name. That was awesome. 

What sort of masterminds are you involved in these days? I started hanging back out with Rudy Mawer. A while back, we worked together in his agency, and then I saw he launched a mastermind, and I was like, “I’ll join the mastermind.” There are a lot of reasons why.

This last week we made a deal to create a co-offer. One of my offers and one of his offers ultimately get people into the mastermind. It helps more people because he has some stuff I don’t teach, and my team does something his team doesn’t want to do. So it was a perfect mashup of synergies. 

We have that whole new offer. We’re just crafting it out, finalizing that, and that’ll get more people into the mastermind to hang out with me. Win, win. They’ll get a funnel out of it, get training and be able to scale through it as well—just a cool way to work together again.

That’s awesome. Do you do joint venture partnerships with other folks? 

Always. I’m always looking for the best way to help. 

Are you familiar with Joint Venture Mastermind, JVMM?

Yeah, I’m in JVMM. 

Oh, you are? Okay. I didn’t realize that you were in there. There are so many people in it. It’s really grown. That’s a great group. I’ve been in it for like five years. 

I’m in the JVMM Directory, technically in JVIC, formerly in JVology, which has now been closed down. JV Jams, although my team goes to that, it’s on their calendar. JVs are one of the most powerful ways to grow and scale a business. It’s like referrals on steroids because it’s great to get a referral from a client, a friend, or a colleague when they come in because those will be strong referrals.

When you have a partner, you can then either create a co-offer together, build something that each of you provides, or you can cross-promote each other, then either way, both people can help each other’s lists and each other’s communities and be able to sell more as well. So it grows the business, helps more people, creates cross-pollination, both people grow, and everybody wins.

What would be an example of a JV that wouldn’t be effective? I’m sure you’ve had less effective JVs and really great ones like the one you mentioned with Rudy. What do you think are the difference makers? 

This happens a lot in the newer JV communities. I’m not saying that the community is newer, but the people there are newer, and everybody’s like, “let’s join JV because I just got all hyped up on this thing. I was learning this whole thing.” They say, “I want to promote you, and I’ll promote you too. You only target women, and you only target men. “

Somehow, you will be cross-promoting each other’s products and offers. The people who target women are like business coaching, and those who target men are like some completely different, maybe spiritual coaching. So there’s this excitement that I see happen, and then nothing happens except for unsubscribing. They get many unsubscribes and ask, “why am I receiving information about this different thing that is irrelevant to me? I see it happen all the time.”

I’ve done them, too, over the years where. I don’t remember exactly what it was a couple of years ago, but I’ve never gotten so many unsubscribes from an email. Usually, it’s 0.12% or something like that. It was a 3% unsubscribe from that email. It was like, I’ll never promote this thing again. 

What was another one? I had another one recently that I promoted that was a good fit. We have a software called Funneltopia, and it does it all. It’s an all-in-one. I had a “competing” software that we were promoting. I got many questions, like why are you sending me a competing offer? It wasn’t actually competing; in the buyer’s mind, it was competing, so it wasn’t differentiated enough. 

When you have a partner, you can create a co-offer, build something each of you provides, or cross-promote each other.

Ours is for warm traffic. Theirs was for cold email, which is powerful. Our system doesn’t do cold email, or we don’t allow it. So it was like, “if you want to do a cold email, here’s how you do it, and it just didn’t go well.” We ended up stopping the promotion short as a result of that just. Our list wasn’t clicking, and I was getting questions from clients being confused. “Doesn’t your system do this?” I go on the warm side, “yes.” On the cold side, “no.” It was just confusing.

That came down more to the messaging that was being sent out. We were in a rush. We just sent out the swipe files they sent us with some very basic edits. We know never to do that, but we did it anyway because we had a thousand other things, and it was like, “oh, that’s today. Okay, send it.” It happens every once in a while. Crafting the message to your audience is key, which is what I learned there or relearned. 

When you get a swipe file with a sample email copy to send to your list, how long does it take for you or your team to rewrite an email campaign? Let’s say it’s like a three-email promotion for a JV partner to your list, and you won’t use any of their swipe copy. Are these hours of work, or is this like 20 minutes? What’s involved here? 

We may spend three to four hours writing new emails to our list for that JV, which is specific to their offer. Our copywriters look at their sales page to see if we can get into the program’s content, then we get into the program’s content. Kate, my wife and head copywriter, probably spends ten or fifteen hours going through and creating and then crafting the right message to the list.

Swipe files are swipe files. I noticed that most of them are being written by ChatGPT. I’ve gotten at least five of them in the last month. So magically, we can now write swipe files.

How do you tell that it’s ChatGPT? 

I see patterns everywhere. I have this uncanny ability, I suppose, to be able to see and go, “oh, this structure is how ChatGPT writes,” and we’ve written a ton of stuff in ChatGPT. It’s a great tool to start with a new copy.

If you’re struggling to get something out, I’ll never ask you to write anything from scratch because it will be terrible and not terrible. It’s just generic and 100% plagiarized, which most people don’t realize because it’s just grabbing information from the internet and putting it into the thing. This sentence could have been used on your competitor’s website, which could be copyrighted, and if you publish that as is, you could end up in some hot water.

What we do, first of all, is always start with a human-written sales page. Take that content, literally copy and paste the entire sales page content into ChatGPT, and then have it write something from there. Let’s have it write some pretty cool emails, ads, or whatever gives us something to go off of. Of course, it doesn’t always work. 

Crafting the right message for your audience is key to better traffic.

I was over at a friend’s house two weeks ago, and we discussed it. We ended up writing two emails out, and we rewrote them over and over and over again. It wasn’t just like the first time, oh perfect. We rewrote it ten times with different tones, angles, and everything.

Then we took the content it wrote, grabbed blocks from each component, put it together into one email, and did that again for a second email. I copied and pasted what I created into a second email and then created a reminder based on this new content, which helped it learn what to put in the second one. The second one had much less to do on it, but we made like $6000 in two days off of two emails. That was fun. 

He’s a great copywriter, but he doesn’t have the time. So he used that to create some starting copy for a webinar that he was doing with somebody else, a joint webinar that he was doing with somebody else, and they did like $30,000 from that webinar, too, and he made ten of that. So it was a good week for everybody.

It’s a tool but doesn’t rely on it like this magical thing because it’s only as good as you are at promoting it, and you got to massage it from there, too, because it will replace the junior copywriter. In the next couple of years, it will never return the direct response, high ticket, high figure copywriter. In a decade or two, all of our jobs will be gone. They’re just going to be done by AI, and I don’t know what will happen there because if AI does everything, we have nobody to pay for things. It’ll be iRobot all over again. 

I, for one, welcome our robot overlords.

Yes, me too, especially since this is being recorded. 

As training data for ChatGPT. 

Probably, yeah. You can always take this transcript and upload it into ChatGPT and then create a bunch of fun little snippets, social posts, blog articles, and all the other stuff. 

Have you used ChatGPT for your Airbnb business to rewrite those long article-type explanations for each property?

No, and that’s an interesting idea. We have almost 100% occupancy anyways. As I said, it just runs on its own with the help of our house manager. If she weren’t there, we’d have much more work to do. It runs itself, and we have all the systems in place, and we have all the marketing and everything in place. So I can check in when somebody’s either checking in or checking out to ensure, “hey, how are things going?”

If something breaks, it gets sent to me, and then I send it to the house manager. We had a problem with the refrigerator at one of our properties last month, and it happened to be nothing. Something happened with the sensor, and it just stopped sensing the temperature. It was like it’s 55, and one of the guests like, “The refrigerator’s 55. It’s supposed to be in the 30s.” So she went over there and turned it off, turned it back on, and it was the temperature it was supposed to be. 

I would’ve never known how to do it. I’m not physically technical. You can hand me a computer. You can hand me the code. I can figure it out. You hand me a hammer, which will surely land on my foot.

I’m not that particularly handy, either. One thing you mentioned a while ago in this interview was Funnel Magazine. Is that something that you’re currently running? A magazine? Is it online? Is it in print or both? 

It was actually one of those pivot moments in life where we needed to either pivot, or we would just completely perish off the face of the business world. So we had this whole thing. This whole debacle happened basically on LinkedIn at the time. Before they got bought by Microsoft, they had this process that now works again, but they shut down everybody. We had contracts we had to fulfill that we’d already been paid for, so we had to figure out how to do this. 

At the same time, we also lost our entire revenue source. It was our only revenue source. So we cannot make more money because the one thing we were doing for lead generation is no longer available, so what are we pivoting to?

At the time, I was probably paying about $1200 per booked client to get a client in. I was paying about $1200 to get a client in. I was like that’s not going to work at this time. We built a ton of free push shipping funnels for our clients. We’ve got quite a few out there that made seven-plus figures from their free plus shipping funnels, and the upsells that come from them. Why don’t we build ourselves a free plus shipping funnel? We’re also really good at affiliate marketing. So we started just brainstorming all these different ideas, all these different possibilities.

We just returned from a Darren Hardy event, and he’s the former publisher of Success Magazine. We’re just throwing ideas on the wall, and I was like, “what about Funnel Magazine,” just totally joking. Then Kate and I looked at each other, and I can still remember the sound of the air conditioner because it was that silent in there, and we just started nodding to each other. So yeah, that’s the one.

Ironically, it was meant to be one edition. We would have one edition with ten articles promoting ten different affiliate offers. That was what Funnel Magazine was supposed to be originally, and then I just posted it online. I’m like, “we’re launching Funnel Magazine,” and everybody’s like, “oh my God, who’s going to be on the cover? How many editions are there going to be? What’s the price?” I can’t believe I didn’t think about this. A few people jokingly cussed at me about how brilliant and how they should have come up with the idea. I thought it was funny.

The lead magnet educates and highlights the difficulty of achieving goals to propel action toward a solution. Share on X

We were like, “We should build a real magazine. We’re getting all the questions. We got the community’s interest, so I pursued Russell Brunson for the next months, and that’s for a whole other story because we have a hard stop here in a few minutes today. Eventually, they said yes. So he’s on the cover.

We launched his edition at Traffic and Conversion. I had physical prints of his edition and Traffic and Conversion. The first year was all print and digital. In the second year, we made a lot fewer additions to print. In the third year, we did not print, but we gave the print files to the people on the cover so they could print them for their community if they wanted to. A couple of them printed it out for their community. 

It grew, and when our agency shut down, it kind of shut down. So we relaunched it a couple of months back, basically at the beginning of 2023. We’ll do it twice a year, in the middle of the year and then at the end. We may do a quarter, three times a year. Our current promise is we’re going to do two this year. We got John Assaraf on the cover of the first one of 2023. 

That’s great. 

We got somebody else. We’ll see where that comes.  

Congratulations, that’s a great idea. I know we’re out of time, so if our listener, our viewer, wants to work with you, I know you have limited spots for consulting and funnel building, but if they catch you at the right time, how do they get in touch? Also, if they want to learn from you or perhaps be a JV partner, what’s the best way for them to contact you?

Number one, if you want to work with me at any point, the fastest way to know I will be available is to be on my list. It’s just simple, easy peasy. Get a free copy of Funnel Magazine. Get your copy of Funnel Magazine, and if you want to get lifetime access, at least during this recording, we’re doing lifetime access for all the past and future editions since we’re only doing a few right now. 

You can access that and other bonuses, including free coaching. You get access to our software for a bit. You get access to a whole bunch of other cool things, $20,000 plus in training, all for some crazy price that we’re insane for doing, but it’s a low-ticket offer. 

Get that, and if you want to do any JVs with us or you’re ready to skip the line forward, find me on Facebook. There’s a profile, and there’s a page. Please send it to my profile, not to my page. You can send it to either, but if you want to have an actual conversation with me, send it to my profile. If you want to talk to a salesperson that is not me, send it to the page. 

Get your copy of Funnel Magazine. If you want to JV or talk to me personally, send me a message on Facebook Messenger and say something more than hi. For example, “I heard you on Marketing Speak and want to talk to you about something,” and I will respond. Even if it’s a no or if it’s a yes, either way, I will respond. If you say “hi,” you’ll be in the archive folder with the other 5000 people who just said hi.

You can ChatGPT for the initial outreach.

Sure. Go ahead. Feel free. At least it’s not just hi. 

Thank you, Hawk, and thank you, listener. I hope you got inspired to do more than just market but build businesses because Hawk’s doing some amazing things. We’ll catch you in the next episode. Have a great week. This is your host, Stephan Spencer, signing off.

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Your Checklist of Actions to Take

Determine my target audience’s psychology and pain points. Anticipating and addressing potential client needs is crucial before I craft a persuasive sales page.

Build trust and personal relationships with clients in my sales funnel rather than make a hard sell. Develop empathetic strategies to help increase credibility.

Craft a compelling lead magnet. A strong call-to-action leads to higher engagement and conversion rates.

Join mastermind groups aligned with my values and interests. Masterminds are a great way to network, learn, and grow my career.

Collaborate with businesses or individuals. Create joint offers or services. Combine unique skills and offers to enable comprehensive solutions, greater client value, and wider reach.

Use human input to tailor content for my target audience. Utilize AI language models to help me save time. However, human input is still necessary for high-quality output.

Drive traffic back to my funnel with targeted advertising. Explore and develop other relationship-building strategies for leads.  

Continuously optimize the funnel. Conduct tests to improve its effectiveness for better long-term results.

Reach the target audience with multiple touchpoints at different funnel stages. For example, explore various forms of communication, such as email, social media, and ads.

Join Hawk Mikado’s email list to gain access to free resources, and or send him a Facebook message to connect.

About Hawk Mikado

The Funnel Gamer, Hawk Mikado, is the leading expert in Funnels, Lead Generations and Live Launches. He has helped 11,973+ entrepreneurs learn how to add 6+ figures to their business and has built Eighteen+ 7 & 8-figure funnels. He is an entrepreneur, an adventurer, and a family man.