DotCom Secrets vs Expert Secrets: Which Russell Brunson Book First?

So Should You Read DotCom Secrets or Expert Secrets First?

It depends on which half you need first. Expert Secrets answers the question that comes first for someone shaping an offer: why would anyone listen to you, and what exactly are you offering them. DotCom Secrets answers what happens next, once someone is listening: which sequence of pages turns that attention into a sale.

Start with Expert Secrets if you are still working out what you sell and to whom, because the message is what the pages will carry. Together the two books give you the message and the mechanics, and many readers end up with both on the same shelf.

Start with DotCom Secrets if you already sell something and know who buys it. You have the message, what you are missing is structure, and that is the book built around it.

How Do DotCom Secrets and Expert Secrets Compare, Side By Side?

What Does Each Part Cover, Section By Section?

Both books happen to run four parts, and lining them up shows how closely they mirror each other, message on one side, mechanics on the other, part for part.

Read across a row and the pairing is direct: Expert Secrets Part One decides what you are saying and to whom; DotCom Secrets Part One decides what you are selling and at what price points. Part Three in each book is the payoff, the actual pitch script in Expert Secrets, the actual page scripts in DotCom Secrets. Neither book's Part Four assumes you have read the other book, and together they cover the message and the mechanics.

Why Does The Right Starting Point Depend On You?

Search this question and many results point to publication order: DotCom Secrets came out first, and the three books are described as a trilogy, so the trilogy is often read in the order it was released.

Russell Brunson's own guidance points to either book, depending on the reader. He has said Expert Secrets is the logical place to start, on the reasoning that you build the movement before you build the funnel, even though he wrote DotCom Secrets first. Elsewhere, on Facebook, he has told people starting out to go read DotCom Secrets. Both statements are his, and both make sense for the reader they were aimed at.

That is why we point you to the starting place that matches where you actually are: Expert Secrets if you are still shaping your message, DotCom Secrets if you already sell and want structure. The publication order is a fact about the author's timeline, and your situation is what picks the book.

Which Russell Brunson Book Fits Your Situation?

The lists below are not about skill level or experience. They are about which half of the equation you are missing right now, which is a narrower and more answerable question.

Start with Expert Secrets if

• You know a subject well but have never turned it into an offer.
• You have an audience that likes you and buys nothing.
• You are selling coaching, consulting or a course, where the pitch carries most of the weight.
• You sell something but cannot explain in one sentence why someone should pick it.

Start with DotCom Secrets if

• You already make sales, and want more of them from the same traffic.
• You send people to a homepage or a single page and suspect that is the problem.
• You sell a physical or ecommerce product, where the structure matters more than the story.
• You have run ads that get clicks and no conversions.

What Comes After These Two Books?

Traffic. Both books assume someone is already arriving, and they focus on what happens once those people are there. Where those people come from is the third book, Traffic Secrets, which we do not cover on this site. It makes a natural next step after the other two, so the funnel you built is ready for the traffic you send.

Both books also share the same strength: the frameworks are about offers, structure and persuasion, and those still apply. The screenshots and the specific platforms mentioned work best as examples of the frameworks at work.

Two more things sit outside the scope of both books, which keeps them focused. They concentrate on what to say rather than the craft of sentence-level copy, so they pair well with a writing habit of your own: you take the formula for the headline and the script for the page, and write them in your voice. And they leave the technical build to the platform: connecting payment processors, setting up email automation, the plumbing that turns a script into a live page. That is deliberate on Brunson's part, since ClickFunnels exists specifically to be that plumbing, and whichever platform you use, the books give you the structure to build on it.

Get Either One

Both ship free for the cost of postage, so reading both costs about twenty dollars in total. Pick the button that matches where you are today.