If you are looking at starting your own online business, a key element is learning how to create a sales funnel. More about that in a minute. First let’s have a look at what is a sales funnel.
A sales funnel refers to an online marketing tactic to turn visitors into buyers. It starts with your visitor landing on your website or blog and entering their email into a landing page or email capture on the side of your website. (See the one on the right). Once they do this they are sent a confirmation link to accept that they have requested your information.
They will then receive more information by email which in turn can lead them to any number of pages or websites according to how you have set up your sales funnel. Typically you offer a legitimate ‘bribe’ to entice your visitors into the funnel. Once in you offer them valuable information and some kind of product or service which may benefit your visitor.
What’s the point of a sales funnel?Â
The best thing about an online sales funnel is that it works completely automatically, delivering emails and products as your visitors enter their email into your website. Providing you have enough visitors (and provide good value), you can work on building your traffic flow to your website once it is all set up. Another great point of a sales funnel is that it is scalable. Being a scalable business model means you can increase the number of people going through the funnel and it continues to work in the same way. There is no limit to the amount of people you can serve through your automated system.
How to create sales funnel
To create your own sales funnel you will first of all need a website or a blog and an email capture program. I use this one. Aweber is a great tool to deliver emails and capture email addresses on your site. Once you have access to this site you can create email capture pages and place them on your website. You need to offer something of value to give your visitors. Otherwise there will be no incentive for them to enter their email address.
Once you have done this you will need to create a series of emails to follow up your subscribers with. This can be some more information, useful guides or product offers. You do this through your email responder program. The offers you send to your list should be coded with your affiliate link so that you will receive commissions when you sell anything through your list. You can find affiliate products to promote to your list in pretty much any field. Just do a Google search for “‘your niche’ affiliate program” to find one. Clickbank is a good resource for this too and affiliate programs can pay up to 40% of their cost to affiliates per sale.
Selling larger products through your sales funnel
You will need a large amount of traffic through your sales funnel to make reasonable sales selling smaller products. To make your sales funnel more lucrative the key is to sell high ticket products. To learn more about building a sales funnel or to have one built for you which has already got a sales team, high ticket products and comes with a full training program, sign up for this video series which will explain more.Â