I just built my first funnel... by instinct!

I'm new to IM, but not really new to building and maintaining sites. I'm a nerd, and have been a huge advocate for standards-compliant sites for a long time.

About a year ago, I bought a vinyl cutter and started making decals. From there, I opened an eCommerce store with very lackluster sales. Looking for a way to increase them, I went to eBay. That worked fine, but I'm now sick of filling orders - so I started looking for ways to make money off my sites without actually having to ship a product.

First I found Pat Flynn's site, and then WF. Pat inspired me to start a blog about my journey to creating a semi-passive or passive income, and that's great. I bought Market Samurai, which lead me to learning about how to build niche sites and MFA. At this point, I hit "analysis paralysis".

I've been learning as much as I can about everything I can, but haven't picked a path yet. In the meantime, I've been working on an authority site with a couple of friends, which we are about to incorporate into an LLC and push big-time. That is giving me a chance to prove myself with SEO, and it's going great.

On that site, we review firearms and eventually, accessories. I've got an expert gun writer on the team, so quality content is no problem - I just proofread for keywords and the like. Monetization, to this point, has been the idea but not really implemented.

As a first step, I signed up for CJ, and got approved as an affiliate for Brownells, a firearms accessory store. I put a 300x250 banner up, and called it a day. Two weeks later, I've gotten 3 clicks and no sales, with 1,100 unique hits.

So I learned about deep linking. CJ's interface for deep links *sucks*, but I decided to work within it for now. I picked an article that highlights a problem in a certain shotgun, then used a cloaked link in the content to direct readers to Brownells for the part to fix the issue. Meanwhile, as part of my SEO campaign, I added this specific known issue to the Wikipedia page for the shotgun, and cited my site (I know, I know, COI - but again, my writer is a known authority on the subject).

Well today, I was tracking users through the site, and found something that has energized me. A user came in from Wikipedia, which means he certainly read about the issue there, and went to the citation. After reading our article for 5 minutes, he clicked the affiliate link and left the site. And then it hit me...

THAT'S A SALES FUNNEL!!!

I've provided a way for a user to become aware of an issue, established credibility and authority through Wikipedia, and presented an offer through a content link --- and the user took it!

Now, I won't know if the user bought anything immediately until tomorrow, but it is an $87 product, and if they did, I stand to make a whopping $4 or so. Still - I'm totally psyched that I successfully established a working "monetization engine" by instinct. From this point on, I know the bones of what I'm doing, and it's all about driving additional traffic and optimizing the conversion rates.

I've got a lot of work left to do - I don't think it will ever end - but now I feel like I know what I'm trying to accomplish!