Dotcom Secrets Review: Is Russell Brunson’s Book Worth It?

Hey there, welcome to my Dotcom Secrets book review.

You’ve probably noticed that the book is free but costs you $9.95 (or $19.95 Intl) for shipping, which feels like a gimmick.

You also read every comment on Amazon, Goodreads, LinkedIn, and Reddit. Some of them say it’s just a generic marketing book, ClickFunnels sales pitches, or bro marketing that makes your company look like a scam.

But many positive reviews are calling Dotcom Secrets a bible of online marketing.

So, which is it?

In this review, I’ll share with you my experience after reading the book, including:

• Is the book really free? What’s the catch behind it
• Who is Russell Brunson? Should you trust him or not?
• What result can you expect
• Pros and cons
• Break down exactly what you will learn inside the book and the key concepts.
• The best alternative if this book isn’t for you

By the end, you’ll know whether it’s worth reading or not. I spent 30 hours and $100 on coffee writing this review. YOU BETTER READ IT.

Here we go.

Is Dotcom Secrets Really Free?

Yes, Dotcom Secrets is free.  You just pay $9.95 (or $19.95 Intl) for shipping.

Many people complain that shipping costs are higher than usual. And if he says “Free,” it means they don’t have to pay anything. If he wants to help people, he could share a PDF or an audio file.

I don’t agree with this. Let me explain.

First, USPS Media Mail starts at $4.31/1lb and increases by roughly $0.71/lb. You could pay $20-$30 (not including shipping) if you buy the book on Amazon. So, it is a fair price in my opinion.

Second, digital content is disposable. Think about it.

• How many ebooks have you downloaded and never read?
• How many courses have you bought and never finished?
• How many emails with “valuable insights” have you deleted without opening?

If Russell Brunson gives a PDF version for free, there’s a higher chance you shouldn’t read it as a physical book (even a physical book with dust on the bookshelf)

Of course, he gives it away for free not because he is a good man or generous. You’re entered in his “Book Funnel” (he explains it inside Dotcom Secrets).

For now, you’ll get upsells immediately, such as:

• Dotcom Secrets Audiobook
• Dotcom Secrets Live
• Additional courses/training

Also, you will be added to his email list and receive promotional emails for his other software and programs, which is a common list-building strategy in internet marketing to stay connected with potential customers.

Don’t worry about them. You can refuse the upsells and unsubscribe from the email list at any time.

What Is Dotcom Secrets About?

Dotcom Secrets by Russell Brunson is a marketing book that teaches you how to build and grow your company online with sales funnels.

What is a sales funnel?

Russell’s whole argument boils down to one shift in thinking: stop treating your website like a digital brochure people flip through, and start treating it like a sequence of steps that walks one visitor toward one decision.

Picture this.

You want to sell your $47 products on Facebook. The average CPC is $0.47, and you land 1 sale for every $30 spent. Say you get one sale a day. Let’s do a quick math: You make $17 profit a day.

Then Facebook changes its algorithm, or the market gets more competitive. Average CPC jumps to $1. Now you need to spend $64 to land that same sale. You’re losing $17 a day instead of making it.

That’s exactly how so many online businesses quietly go under.

Now imagine you add one simple upsell ($197 product) to the process, and 1 out of every 3 buyers takes it:

• The revenue: $47 x 3 + $197 = $338
• The cost: $64 x 3 = $192
• The profit: $338 – $192= $146

Instead of losing $64/day, you make a higher profit. That’s the power of a sales funnel.

Ultimately, the business that can spend the most to acquire a customer wins.

– Dan Kennedy

Most businesses think they have a traffic or a conversion problem. They usually don’t. What’s actually broken is you can’t afford to spend enough to win the customer. Fix your sales funnel, and that problem goes away.

Dotcom Secrets is one of the few books that provides a clear, step-by-step blueprint that empowers you to skip trial and error and start applying marketing strategies FAST (even if you’ve never touched marketing before).

Stop being the founder who panics every time Facebook changes its algorithm. Dotcom Secrets is how you become the one whose funnel prints profit no matter what the ad platforms do.

What Results Can You Expect From DotCom Secrets?

Dotcom Secrets is not a “get-rich-quick” scheme, trendy tactics, or a quick hack. It won’t hand your business overnight. For me, funnel building is a highly profitable skill I’ve learned in over a decade of running an online business.

Here are results you can expect after reading the Dotcom Secrets book:

• A clear, step-by-step roadmap for launching your first (or next) online business. You’re never stuck guessing what to do next or which random YouTube video to trust. 
• Create irresistible offers so you can stand out from your market, which means your dream customers STOP comparing you and your competitor on price.
• You’ll know exactly which funnel to build for your offer, so when leads or sales dry up, you’re troubleshooting a system instead of panicking and guessing.
• Build a value ladder that fits your business to increase customer lifetime value (CLV). You can spend more to win a customer than your competitors dare to (even when the first sale alone looks like a loss on paper). 
• Learn online marketing in a fun and engaging way. Cut down your learning curve, FAST.

None of this happens by osmosis. This is more Mr. Miyagi than magic wand, wax on, wax off, then one day it clicks. You still have to read it, apply it, and get your hands split-tested. But the book removes the guessing, which is where most people get stuck for years.

Dotcom Secrets hands the funnel scripts, but it doesn’t teach the why behind them. You get the framework, but not the persuasion skill underneath it.

Also, you don’t learn how to get online visitors (traffic) into your funnel here.

Those live in the other two of Russell Brunson’s books: Expert Secrets and Traffic Secrets.

Now, before we get into what you’ll actually learn, you should know the guy behind all this (skip if you already know Russell Brunson).

Who Is Russell Brunson?

Russell Brunson is a cofounder of ClickFunnels (a software company) launched in 2014. This company grew really fast from ZERO to over $100M (annual sales) in just 5 years (Source). ClickFunnels also ranked #76 on the Inc 5000 in 2018.

He has over 20 years of experience in online marketing. He has built a following of over a million entrepreneurs and is a New York Times best-selling author (sold hundreds of thousands of books).

Before ClickFunnels, Russell sold everything online from shakes and supplements to consulting, coupons, books, T-shirts, and software.

His first real success was ZipBrander, a viral marketing tool, in 2003. Two years later, the “How To Create A Potato Gun” DVD came out, where he added an upsell for the actual potato gun kit (what we now call a sales funnel). That one idea made him his first $1M within a year of graduating college.

What does it mean to you?

Unlike other fake gurus who make money by teaching you how to make money, Russell Brunson actually built a nine-figure company using the exact strategies he teaches inside the book.

Russell doesn’t hold anything back. After reading Dotcom Secrets, you’ll quickly realize that every offer he sells is structured as a funnel. Here are a few examples:

• One Funnel Away Challenge (Challenge Funnel)
• Perfect Webinar Secrets (Tripwire Funnel)
• 1357 Club (Book Funnel)
• PLR Funnels (Webinar Funnel)
• Magnetic Marketing Diamond Membership (Video Sales Letter Funnel)
• THE LIST GOES ON

And the interesting thing is that Dotcom Secrets itself is a Book Funnel. That’s why you see a series of upsells right after you buy it.

Russell Brunson popularized the sales funnel concept. Today, plenty of coaches and course creators teach the same concepts from this book. They charge hundreds or thousands of dollars for it and call it something new.

So if you want to learn sales funnels, Russell Brunson is a no-brainer.

5 Reasons I Recommend The Dotcom Secrets Book To Small Business Owners.

1. Dotcom Secrets Gives You A Simple Roadmap To Grow Your Company Online

Have you ever felt totally lost about where even to START your business online? I remember feeling exactly that. No one on my team knew marketing. I just had a product to sell, and a family to feed.

Every day, I was the seller, the customer service rep, and the “marketing guy,” all at once. So I did what most people do: Looking for answers on YouTube.

• A video suggested that we should post on social media every day.
• Another said to run ads.
• A third swore by “the one trick” that supposedly changes everything

Then a marketing forum thread called that exact strategy a scam, and I was back to square one, trusting nothing I’d just learned.

Every wasted evening cost me sleep. Every random tactic drained my budget. And when sales dropped, I couldn’t tell why.

• Was it the price?
• The offer?
• The traffic?

I was just guessing and hoping.

That’s exactly where this book changed things.

Dotcom Secrets gives you the exact system that entrepreneurs, small business owners, and creatives use to build profit-making businesses online from scratch. It breaks the whole process into a sequence, the exact order your funnels, offers, and follow-up need to fire in. 

The best part? Every stage in the process is easy to measure.

No more guessing which page or email comes next. No more staring at your dashboard wondering which lever to pull when sales don’t come.

2. You Get Customers Even If Nobody Knows You

You probably think you need a brand before you can get customers. So you wait. You save up for a logo, a rebrand, a “brand awareness” push.

But your bills don’t wait with you.

Brand building is a rich company’s game. It’s slow, expensive, and built for someone with deep pockets and years to spare. You’ve watched big-budget brand campaigns burn through cash and vanish, over and over.

Look at Reddit. It took them 19 years, and $1.3 billion in funding, before they saw their first dollar of profit.

You can’t afford to copy their playbook on a fraction of their budget.

Every week you spend chasing brand recognition, your competitor spends getting paid by your future customers.

Dotcom Secrets skips MASS brand building entirely. The principles are based on the Direct Marketing system, so you don’t need the whole world to know your name before you land a customer.

• You sell directly to people already looking for what you offer, so you’ll know within hours, not months, whether your campaign is working.
• By using sales funnels, you create a self-funding cycle. The money you earn today fuels tomorrow’s campaigns.
• You make every dollar accountable, so you know within days exactly which page, email, or ad is pulling its weight, and which one to kill.
• It still builds your reputation, just not with “the world.” It builds it with the exact prospects and customers who are already paying attention to you.

Think about it. You don’t need everyone to recognize your logo or slogan. You need your leads and customers to see you as the go-to authority.

3. You Stop Competing On Price

Does your business look like every other option in your niche?

• Same product
• Same promises
• Same place your competitors show up
• Same message

So, your potential customers will shop on price. They compare, ask for discounts, and then buy from the cheapest.

Price wars lead to a race to the bottom, where only ONE wins. Do you?

If yes, congratulations, you’re the King.

Until you’re not.

There are two ways the Dotcom Secrets book can help you avoid this situation:

• Create an irresistible offer: You stop selling your product or service as a standalone. Instead of selling a $47 course alone, you stack it with bonuses and tell the story of why each piece exists. Same core product, but now it’s the only version of itself on the market.
• Use sales funnels: By offering optional upsells after checkout, you increase your average cart value. You can even lose money on the front-end offer and still come out ahead. Remember the math from earlier? That’s the exact mechanic at play. 

Nobody can undercut an offer that doesn’t exist anywhere else. That means you make more money from every single customer, and you finally escape the stress of watching competitors undercut you week after week.

4. The Concepts and Strategies Are Evergreen (And Yes, It Fits Alongside AI Tools)

Dan Kennedy, the Godfather of Direct-Response Marketing, is a mentor of Russell Brunson. So, everything you learn in Dotcom Secrets is built on those same principles. 

They worked yesterday, work today, and will keep working tomorrow.

Read the book, and you’ll start spotting the funnel behind almost every website you visit.

Look at the marketing influencers you follow: Alex Hormozi, Grant Cardone, Tony Robbins, Tai Lopez, Dan Lok, etc – most of them are running these same principles to generate leads and sales online.

How does that hold up in the AI era?

Direct-Response Marketing matters more now, not less. AI is everywhere now. With AI, anyone can generate content, ads, websites, and sales funnels fast. That means no matter which channel you focus on, it’s more competitive than ever.

Every new AI tool promises to make marketing easier. But if you don’t understand why a message works in the first place, AI just helps you fail faster.

A funnel built on Direct Marketing principles tells you which messages matter to your prospect, and how to build offers and stories they’ll actually care about.

The best part? The scripts that used to take me hours to learn and write can now be generated in minutes.

I used the Dotcom Secrets framework to train Claude and build my own skill for it. The image below shows the product avatar skill I’ve trained using the book’s Secret Formula.

5. It Is Written for Beginners Without Talking Down

Finally, Dotcom Secrets is genuinely beginner-friendly.

The concept of a sales funnel isn’t new. Russell Brunson didn’t invent it. But his approach still feels fresh:

• He breaks each funnel apart piece by piece.
• He uses stories to explain the concepts and the science behind them, making it easy to understand.
• He shows you exactly how to apply them step by step.

Do you know what I love most? Doodles.

The book is packed with examples, case studies, details, and tons of hand-drawn illustrations for every concept.

Imagine 3 weeks after reading the book, you need to remember the “OTO” script.

You just flip the page, find the doodle, and BAM. You recall how to do it instantly.

3. Fair Criticisms of The Dotcom Secrets Book

1. It Sells You ClickFunnels And Other Programs While It Teaches You

Spend any time in online marketing, and you’ll notice he’s teaching and selling at the same time.

The examples inside the book are heavy on the ClickFunnels ecosystem.

For example, he used Funnel Scripts and Funnel Builder Secrets registration pages to demonstrate the Automated Webinar Funnel.

He also has a full chapter that walks you through building your funnel inside ClickFunnels 

This is the most repeated criticism of the book, and it’s fair. It can feel like a long ad for ClickFunnels wearing a book cover.

Honestly, I don’t mind it. The guy popularized the funnel; of course he’s going to funnel you. But if built-in selling bothers you, it’s worth knowing going in.

Do you need ClickFunnels to use Dotcom Secrets?

No. The principles work with any tool.

I’ve used ClickFunnels for years and rate it highly. I break down everything about it in my ClickFunnels review here. Prefer something else? Check my best funnel builder software for alternatives.

2. Some Images and Examples Are Outdated

The strategy in this book will outlive you. The screenshots already didn’t.

The clearest place you’ll notice it is Secret #26, the chapter that walks you through building your funnel inside ClickFunnels.

The screenshots show the old interface.

ClickFunnels launched version 2.0 in October 2022, a full rebuild, not just a redesign, so what’s on the page looks almost nothing like what you’ll see when you actually log in today.

Remember the landing pages I mentioned earlier, the ones people feel like they’re being sold to? Most of those aren’t even live anymore.

The products change, the pages change, but the book’s screenshots stay frozen in 2020.

Does that make the book outdated?

Not where it counts. The funnel types, the scripts, the psychology behind why an offer works – none of that has an expiration date. What’s outdated is the wrapping paper, not the gift inside.

You’ll still need to hop on YouTube or ClickFunnels’ own tutorials to see what the software looks like now, but the thinking that goes into building the funnel? That’s exactly as useful today as it was the day the book came out.

3. It’s Not The Whole Picture: Some Concepts Live in Another Book

Dotcom Secrets gives you a real framework for growing your company online. But it’s not the complete picture.

I mentioned earlier that persuasion and traffic live in Expert Secrets and Traffic Secrets. Here’s the practical side of that: How much you actually need them.

Story selling and the art of persuasion live in Expert Secrets. How to actually drive traffic to your funnel lives in Traffic Secrets. And it goes both ways, those two books also lean on concepts you only get from Dotcom Secrets.

Read all three back to back, and you’ll notice some repetition.

The Potato Gun story, the Value Ladder, Hook Story Offer, they show up more than once across the Secrets Trilogy. I read all three myself, and by the third pass through Hook, Story, Offer, I’ll admit it started to feel repetitive.

My advice?

Grab all three if you can. If you’re working with a tighter budget, at least get Dotcom Secrets and Expert Secrets.

Together, they cover both the framework and the persuasion skills that make it actually convert.

Who Should (And Shouldn’t) Read The Dotcom Secrets Book?

What You’ll Learn Inside Dotcom Secrets

The Dotcom Secrets book (2nd Edition) has 393 pages and is divided into four sections:

• Section One – Sales Funnel Secrets: You learn the core foundational information to understand how to use funnels inside your company. You can see the whole picture and exactly the plan to grow your business online.
• Section Two – The Funnels In The Value Ladder: You learn 10 main types of funnels you can use in your business. No matter the product or service you’re selling or the price they have, there’s a funnel for them.
• Section Three – Funnel Scripts: You learn how to create sales scripts and presentations inside each funnel type.
• Section Four – Building Your Funnels: Make your funnel in real life. You learn how to build a sales funnel step-by-step from planning and sketching to building it by using ClickFunnels. Also, you will learn funnel stacking, what you would do when your funnel breaks, and how to scale it.

Together, these four sections take you from theory to a working funnel. But inside those sections are a handful of ideas that show up again and again, the ones that really make the whole system work.

Let’s break down the 7 key concepts of Dotcom Secrets.

The 7 Core Concepts of DotCom Secrets

1. The Secret Formula

This is where the whole book starts, and honestly, where your business should start too: Figuring out exactly who your dream customer is.

Russell Brunson breaks it down into four questions

• Who is your dream customer (or dream client)?
• Where are they congregating?
• What bait can you use to attract them?
• What unique result can you create for them?

I used to think this step was boring and a waste of time, but I was totally wrong. 

Skip this step, and you end up marketing to “everyone,” which in practice means marketing to no one. Your message gets generic, your offer gets watered down trying to appeal to too many people at once, and your ad spend gets wasted showing up in front of people who were never going to buy in the first place.

2. Hook Story Offer

Hook, Story, Offer framework is key to your success online. It’s available in every step of your funnel, such as:

• The ads you place online
• The email you send
• The landing pages
• Webinar presentation
• Or Phone calls

Here’s how it works.

Once you identify your dream customers and where they are online, you will grab their attention with the hook, then tell stories that increase the value of your offer, and present an offer in a way your potential customers say “Yes”.

By mastering the framework, you can identify exactly which element is underperforming in your marketing campaign.

You can fix only what’s broken instead of guessing.

That means you save time and money by making surgical improvements. No need to scrap your entire funnel and start over.

3. The Value Ladder

The Value Ladder is kind of like your business plan. It offers multiple products at increasing prices.

In simple words, the Value Ladder is the process I use to guide my visitors from a LEAD (who gets something for free) to a high-paying customer who gets life-changing value and transformation.

Why does it matter? A good Value Ladder lets you:

• Make more money from the SAME NUMBER OF CUSTOMERS already coming into your world.
• Outspend your competitors to win customers they simply can’t afford to chase. (Remember Dan Kennedy from earlier? This is how you actually do it.)

The Value Ladder is NOT just a price list.

Without one, you’re stuck at one of two dead ends, either selling the same cheap offer forever, or trying to sell a high-ticket offer that nobody buys because they don’t trust you yet. Either way, your best customers take their bigger money somewhere else.

Inside Dotcom Secrets, you’ll learn how to build it properly, so you know exactly which offer belongs on each rung and how to avoid the value maze.

4. The Attractive Character

Did you know? Your brand story doesn’t describe your audience. It selects it.

If you’re not careful, your brand story will attract the wrong people entirely.

Every detail pulls one type of person in and pushes another away, whether you planned it or not.

So the question isn’t, “What’s my story?” It’s “Who does my story summon?” 

That’s the job of the Attractive Character (or Brand Archetype). It’s the persona you consciously put in front of your market. It binds people to your Value Ladder. They come in for a result, but stay for the relationship.

Inside the Dotcom Secrets book, you build your Attractive Character from three pieces:

• Element
• Identity
• Storylines

There are four types of identities you can use to get started: The Leader, The Adventurer, The Reporter, and The Reluctant Hero.

From my experience, it’s not necessary to lock you into one. I lead with the Adventurer, out testing tools and reporting back what works. That’s what pulls people in. But once they’re asking my advice or in my community, they don’t want an adventurer anymore. They want a guide, The Leader who hands them the exact steps. 

Pro tip: Creating an Attractive Character isn’t about becoming someone you’re not. It’s about becoming more of who you already are, then showing up as that person more consistently, and more publicly, for your audience.

5. Funnel Hacking

If you want to be successful, find someone who has achieved the results you want and copy what they do, and you’ll achieve the same results. – Tony Robbins

Funnel hacking is reverse-engineering the funnels already winning in your niche. You learn their structures, processes, hooks, stories, and offers, then adapt what works to your own business.

To be clear, funnel hacking is NOT copying.

A straight copy fails because your audience, offer, and voice are different. You’re learning WHY a funnel works, then making it yours.

Dotcom Secrets walks you through the whole process step by step, from finding the right funnels to hack, to modeling what works and adding your own twist to lift conversions. That means you skip months of guessing and thousands in wasted ad spend.

Someone already paid to find out what converts. You just model it.

Here’s how I do it. When I’m scrolling Facebook or TikTok and an ad’s design or copy stops me in my tracks, that’s my cue. I “Funnel Hack” it, then save it to a swipe file.

So I never start a new funnel from scratch. Sometimes I take the structure from one funnel and the closing copy from another.

If you want the full process, read my funnel hacking guide here.

6. Seven Phases Of A Funnel

Most people think a funnel starts at the landing page.

Wrong. By the time someone hits your page, the sale is already half decided.

That’s the point of this chapter. Russell Brunson breaks down the path from stranger to buyer into seven phases, and three of them occur before your offer ever appears on screen.

Here they are:

1. Determine traffic temperature. Hot traffic already knows you. Warm traffic knows the problem. Cold traffic knows nothing, so you talk to each one differently, or you lose them in the first line.
2. Set up the pre-frame bridge. Whatever they saw right before landing on your page (an ad, a podcast, a blog post) sets their mood. Match the bridge to the page, and your conversion rate climbs without changing a word of the offer.
3. Qualify subscribers. Ask for the email. Everyone who gives it just raised a hand, so you can stop guessing who’s interested.
4. Qualify buyers. Get a small yes. Even $7. A person who has paid you once is a completely different animal from someone who has only downloaded something for free.
5. Identify hyperactive buyers. A slice of your buyers want everything, right now. Give them somewhere to spend more on the same day, so customers who love you most don’t hit a wall at your cheapest offer.
6. Age and ascend the relationship. Most people are not ready today. Keep showing up by email until they are, then walk them up the ladder.
7. Change the selling environment. A $3,000 offer rarely closes on a checkout page. Move the conversation to a webinar, a call, or an application where you have room to sell properly.

Why this matters more than the offer itself

Look at phases one and two again.

If a cold prospect from a Facebook ad lands on a page written for someone who already knows you, that page fails. Not because the offer is bad. Because the temperature is wrong.

I’ve watched this happen with my own traffic. Same page, same product. Traffic from my email list converted fine. Traffic from a cold ad bounced. The fix wasn’t a better headline, it was a bridge page that warmed people up first.

7. Follow-up Funnels: Soap Opera Sequence and Seinfeld Emails

Have you heard “The money is in the list”? 

The moment someone buys your product or joins your list, they become traffic you own outright. This is where the real money lives. What you need is an email system that wins back lost customers, deepens relationships, and marches people up your value ladder.

In short, you squeeze more revenue out of the same number of people without spending a single dollar on ads.

In Dotcom Secrets, you’ll learn two types of email campaigns:

• Soap Opera Sequences (Follow-Up Funnels): A 5-email series sent to everyone who enters your funnel. The goal is to bond them to your Attractive Character, pull them through the first funnel, and ascend them to the next rung on your value ladder.
• Daily Seinfeld Emails (Broadcasts): Sent to people who aren’t currently in a follow-up sequence, built to re-engage them and pull them back into your value ladder.

If your first email bores them, they’ll never open the second. Game over. 

Unlike most email formulas, the Soap Opera Sequence runs on open-ended, high-drama episodes that grab readers by the collar and drag them back to their inbox day after day.

Think about how a great TV series creates an open loop that keeps you engaged from episode to episode and season to season. 

Never written an email before? Don’t worry.

The book is packed with plug-and-play examples. The image below is email #1 from Russell’s very first sequence. 

Final Verdict: Is Dotcom Secrets Worth Reading?

Yes, Dotcom Secrets is one of the best investments I’ve made. In fact, I ranked it #1 in my roundup of the best sales funnel books.

For $9.95 (or 19.95 Int) in shipping, you get:

• 393 pages of a complete system from the guy who took ClickFunnels from zero to $100M in five years.
• A step-by-step roadmap for launching and growing your business online, so you stop guessing and waste time and money on uncertain tactics or strategies.
• Offers nobody can undercut, which means you stop bleeding customers to whoever charges less.

And it’s built on direct-response principles that have worked for decades and still work in the AI era.

The best part is how it reads. It’s beginner-friendly without talking down to you, packed with stories, examples, and hand-drawn doodles that stick in your head weeks later.

Is it also one long ClickFunnels pitch? A little bit, yeah.

Some screenshots are frozen in 2020, and you’ll want Expert Secrets for the persuasion side. But none of that touches the strategies, and the strategies are the whole reason you’re buying it.

Get the Dotcom Secrets book here.

P.S: Don’t listen to the haters who are unsuccessful. Most of them haven’t even read a chapter from the book. Read it yourself and decide. If you’re not satisfied, you can request a refund of the shipping cost without returning the book.

Dotcom Secrets Book Alternatives

There are 3 books on my shelf that come closest to Dotcom Secrets. Which one you need depends on what you’re stuck on right now.

Can’t get anyone to say yes to your offer? Need traffic and a way to close it? Or do you want the older, blunter rulebook Russell’s whole system was built on?

Remember what I said about guessing costing you years? Pick the one that fixes your bottleneck.

1. Sell Like Crazy by Sabri Suby: Best For Consultants & Agencies

While Dotcom Secrets covers 10 types of funnels, Sabri Suby focuses on a single funnel. You learn the 8-phase selling system built to turn online visitors into paying clients. He goes deeper into the pieces of funnel building, such as writing ads, building lead magnets, crafting landing pages that sell, and writing emails (headlines, body, send time, platform).

Sabri Suby built King Kong into one of Australia’s fastest-growing agencies, generating over $7.8 billion in sales for its clients. The book is free plus shipping, just like Dotcom Secrets, so trying it costs you almost nothing.

Here’s my full Sell Like Crazy review if you want the chapter-by-chapter breakdown.

Because Dotcom Secrets gives you different types of funnels for every price point and product type, Sell Like Crazy can feel narrow by comparison. Suby’s single-funnel focus is a great starting point for beginners, but Dotcom Secrets is still the better foundation for building your first online business.

Both are worth owning. My advice? Grab Sell Like Crazy alongside Dotcom Secrets, not instead of it.

2. $100M Offers by Alex Hormozi: Best for Fixing an Offer Nobody Buys

The book is short (around 160 pages), so you can read it in an afternoon.

But remember, the offer is just one piece of the puzzle. If you already understand funnels but your conversion rate is still low, or you’re stuck specifically on the offer, get $100M Offers. Alex Hormozi built Gym Launch to $28M in revenue and $17M in profit in a single year using exactly what’s in here, so the guy has receipts. I break down every chapter in my full $100M Offers review.

But if you want the full picture, grab Dotcom Secrets. Period.

3. No B.S. Direct Marketing by Dan Kennedy: Best for the Rules Underneath the Funnel

Russell Brunson shows you how to build funnels online. Kennedy shows you the rules that hold true in ANY channel, including the ones with no screen involved.

What you get:

• His non-negotiable rules of direct marketing, so you can judge any marketing idea in about 30 seconds, which means you stop handing money to agencies selling “brand awareness” with nothing to measure
• Chapters written for non-direct marketing businesses (retail shops, clinics, local services), so you can run funnel thinking through a business with a front door and a cash register.
• Real campaigns with the actual direct-mail letters and the numbers behind them, so you see what a working offer looks like before you write your own

Is it as practical as Dotcom Secrets?

No, and that’s the trade. Dan Kennedy gives you the law. Russell Brunson gives you the blueprint, the scripts, and the order to build them in. If you want to sit down tonight and construct a funnel, open Dotcom Secrets.

Get it if you run a brick-and-mortar or local service business, or if you want to understand WHY Russell’s funnels work instead of just copying them. For the price of a lunch, you get the thinking a nine-figure company was built on.

Skip it if you want screenshots, templates, and a step-by-step online build. That’s Dotcom Secrets.