I'm not sure exactly how to make a "funnel" out of what I have?

Your typical sales funnel involves a main offer page, with a few upsells afterwards.

And yes, you should absolutely send weekly emails to your list. Be informational, entertaining and try and sell different affiliate offers.

Here's a great overview of a traditional sales funnel that I read recently:

https://www.salesforce.com/blog/2019...es-funnel.html

And YES by all means send a weekly email to your list. Be sincere... engaging... entertaining... offer value... and on occasion recommend a product/service

Simply put...Imagine the Funnel as exactly what it describes...a wide opening at the top where you are consistently lead generating using various methods and educating your customers to make a buying decision to invest in one or all of your products and services.


Congrats on your success thus far...that is impressive.

Another way to create a funnel is to have a very inexpensive offer (usually under $10). It may be a physical product that is pitched as "Free with paid shipping". In other words, a free item with $5 for shipping.

When the buyer is filling out the shopping cart for the cheap offer, they also get an invitation (and a sales video) selling a far more comprehensive offer for much more. Maybe $50-$100. While they are in the buying mood, many will add the higher priced item into the shopping cart.

And just before they press the Buy button. There is another offer for a few hundred dollars.

This is all in the front end, the initial transaction.

If you go on Youtube, you'll find hundreds of videos by Russell Brunson that explain all of this and how it works.

He starts off with a free book, with $9.95 shipping, and averages about $75 per free book buyer, because of the upsells in the first transaction.

Then there is a series of offers with each e-mail. But the relationship starts off with them buying something.

Hope that helps.

It's called a funnel because it looks like one.

Leads

\-----/

Qualified Leads

\ /

Sales

.

Two things needed to drive revenue: Traffic and Conversion.

Seen me write about that before?

Traffic = a source of leads. People coming from somewhere to see your stuff.

That source of leads has a quality level relative to other sources. You can only find out how good the match-up is by using the source.

Driving traffic from a lead source is step 1 of a funnel.

You could buy a mailing list...you could pay for FB ads...you could post YT videos for organic clicks...any number of things. The common denominator here is some content from you has to get in front of that lead source, and the people from the traffic source will react in some way. That's feedback.

Is your lead source a list of gardeners, but you sell a tech solution? Not going to be a good fit, is it. No matter how good your copy is, it won't ever convert well. And remember, a free signup is still a sale to be made.

But if you can connect up with someone who's got a buyers' list of techie folks, well, that's going to be a better fit. Your copy doesn't even need to be that good to get positive results. Keep in mind that "copy" can be a friendly word in an email from that JV partner to their list to go check you out. Doesn't have to be anything fancy.

We would obviously love a 1:1 ratio of lead source traffic to qualified prospective customer, but that isn't very likely, is it?

So the next step is to start filtering or qualifying. We need to separate those who aren't really a fit for our offer, but somehow got over to our opt-in page out of curiosity, from those who are serious about solving the problem we fix.

Your landing page copy could do this filtering. You could do a bunch of videos and make a playlist that people either binge watch or click away from after 30 seconds of finding out it isn't a match for them. You could ask people to call in--infomercials do this and companies like Guthy Renker run the sales teams that man the phones. They have strict scripts for qualifying and selling--the job has to be done in say 14 minutes or less.

That's step 2: qualifying.

Notice how no offer is yet being presented to the prospect.

Not until you know they're qualified.

The third step is a warm-up. You'll see this called "agitating the problem", "digging for pain", "education" and other terms. Why, in their words not yours, does this prospect want their serious problem solved? Why do they want YOUR solution?

If they cannot give a clear reason answering either of those questions, it's not a fit. You're likely to have missed something.

All of this can be done very quickly, especially if the problem and solution are easily understood. Complex topics and bigger sizes of problems generally take longer--though a good buyer makes decisions quickly, doesn't have to figure out where the money to buy will come from, and several other factors that speed up the process.

When you've got a prospect who qualifies IN--admits to having the serious problem you solve, definitely wants it solved and solved today (or at least to be on the path to solving it), has the authority to make the decision, knows why they want that problem solved, knows why they want YOU to solve it--then you can move to the next step.

Step 4 is presenting the offer.

Only now should we be showing them what we've got. If we rushed and did this earlier, we'd miss the chance to get things to "stick": the buyer wouldn't know why they needed the solution, or why your solution, or have certainty that they needed to make the decision at all.

The result should be a straightforward Yes/No decision, where the prospect and you know exactly what their emotional and rational drivers are.


You could divide the funnel process up into more steps I'm sure. But this is the essence of it.

If it looks complicated to the reader ("Why don't you just skip all this crap and show your offer to the guy?") then what will result is the need to throw many times the amount of traffic at the conversion tool (sales page, discovery call etc.) to achieve the same revenue results. This is why so many IMers get so bad results.

As the seller, the more you can automate everything the better. Learning your market's common pain points and automating the first several steps of the process will free up much of your time.

The idea of creating an autoresponder sequence sharing stories and embedding links is part of steps two and three. It's certainly not the only way of accomplishing those steps.

This is what you pay a funnel consultant for expertise on and help with.


One last recommendation:

For 8 years I've seen newbies trying to mash Marketing and Sales into a single step.

This is dumb.

In fact, you should have both a Marketing funnel... followed by a Sales funnel.

This is easy to accomplish today with autoresponders and their sequence logic. It's available in free platforms. What am I talking about? Show them the stories. Show them the emotional reasons why others buy. Give them the opportunity to click to demonstrate that these reasons appeal to them, that the pain points are the same they feel. That click moves them from the Marketing (warm-up) funnel to the Sales funnel... where you give them several opportunities to buy.

People are not always in the position to buy the first time you show them the offer.

But newbies throw them at the sales page immediately... don't capture the lead... then wonder why that lead goes away.

That person might have been killing time on their phone while waiting for an oil change. They got to your sales page...but then, oops! The car is ready. Off they go.

Were they a qualified prospect? Yes. Just couldn't invest more time in making a decision right that moment.

What can you do to capture these folks, show them the offer and give them the chance to buy a few more times... and then maybe return them to the Marketing funnel if they don't buy after awhile?

The things that are possible are far more granular than the average IMer suspects. What if you knew that leads fell out of the funnel at a particular email? What decision would that allow you to make?

But people are lazy...don't track, don't care. Throw spaghetti at the wall and hope something sticks. Can't find out and never even consider whether the block to improvement is on the traffic side or the conversion side.

I know you're serious, and that's why I've taken the time to write all this.

This could be considered a sales funnel or just good list building. You should absolutely be sending out emails with value. Build a relationship with your audience and they will be more likely to buy your products.

Hi Bkelly301,

You have the fundamentals of a funnel and some really good input from fellow warriors above. The essence for me of the funnel is the breakeven point as I use a lot of paid traffic. I need to work out when that traffic breakeven.

So say for example my paid traffic costs me $1 to get a subscriber to my list. I need to work out when in a point of time I will recoup that $1 then the rest is gravy (fixed costs like hosting etc aside).

As said above, I usually use a cheap trip wire product ($1 to 7) to 1. make sure the subscriber is a buyer and has a credit card and 2. to recoup my initial ad spend as quickly as possible.

Happy to discuss further.

Stay safe

Dominic