A short lesson Russell learned from his time at spam school… On this episode Russell explains why he dabbled in being a spammer and how it went. He also talks about why he no longer makes decisions based on SEO stuff. Here are 3 fun things to listen for in this episode: Why Russell used to feel like he was running away from the cops all the time, and it made it hard to sleep at night. How much money Russell paid to go to Spam School, and why it was valuable even though spamming ultimately wasn’t for him. Why Russell says instead of hiring a person over a long period of time to teach you things, you should hire the person who is best at it and suck all the information from them in a really short period of time. So listen below to find out why Russell used to be a spammer, but why he isn’t any more. ---Transcript--- Hey, everyone, this is Russell Brunson, and welcome to another episode of Marketing In Your Car. Hey Everyone, so today is a cold, rainy day in Boise, Idaho. It’s Friday so I got a couple big things trying to get done, and then I’m going to go see … I’m really excited for this, Rand Fishkin, the CEO and the founder of SEOMoz is actually going to be coming to Boise and speaking which will be cool for a couple reasons. First off, last … how many years ago? Five or six years ago, maybe longer, I spoke at ClickBank Exchange and Rand was speaking as well which was cool. I felt bad because I had the big stage and then Rand had this little, tiny room. I went in there, and that dude is brilliant, so smart, it was awesome to listen to him and loved it back then. Just been a big fan of their stuff for a long time. I’m excited to go hear him speak, and I’m not sure if he’s speaking about SEO stuff or other things, but regardless, it’ll be fun to go and get some cool stuff from him. It’s interesting … He has a different philosophy on business than mine. I remember a little while ago, reading this huge article he wrote about how they raised all this crazy amounts of money, and all these things, that for me seem ludicrous, some of the worst business decisions in the world yet they’re having success. There’s different paths and different things. It’ll be fun, I’m excited to hear what he’s got to say and see what’s going down in the SEO world nowadays because it’s been a long time since I focused on it. I used to geek-out big time. For a while we had twenty, thirty people all in Peru doing SEO stuff for us and it was awesome. We were getting ranked for all these really difficult terms and it was amazing. We were very, very aggressive and so it was awesome because you could get really cool things to happen fast … But then the problem was when Google got smarter than us then we started losing everything. It was this thing where I always felt like I was chasing my own tail. We would go and we would be running, it felt like we were running away from the cops all the time. It felt like, we used to call it … I’m not going to brag about this, but a little while ago, a few years back, we dabbled a little bit in spamming and trying to learn that game. It’s the same kind of thing, it was hard to sleep at night because it felt like… we used to call it the “smash and grab”, where it felt like you were walking in, smashing a window, grabbing a TV and running down the road while the cops are chasing you. That’s what it always felt like with SEO and with spam. We got away with it for a little bit, but eventually they always catch you, you can’t always get away with it. I hated it, a little while ago, we quit the spamming thing really, really fast. More so, I wanted to understand the psychology of it so I hired this dude, I was like, “How much would you charge me to teach me how to spam?” He’s like, “Twenty-five grand,” I’m like, “Done.” I recorded all the sessions, and I remember I called it ‘Spam School’. It was like eight calls or something like that. I’m like, “Okay, I got Spam School today,” it was awesome. We got up and running, we had to b