What is a sales funnel? Why do they work better than anything else? And why would this work in just about any kind of business you might have? Yes, there are all kinds of variations, but the bottom line is that it gives you a single place to advertise maximizing your ad dollars spent, you only need a single list, a single blog to administer, a single squeeze page, it's easy to understand and build, and it scalable. It gives you a place to put all of the products you have ever tried and ones you will add. It will grow with you no matter how big you get. And it's yours. You're in control. You get all the profit. You pay affiliates if you have them if you want, but you're the boss. Now you can focus on your own business, your own future and you never have to look back. And this can be on just about any topic you can think of so you will enjoy it and understand it.
You need one place to advertise. What so many do is they have 25 different products and they try and take their entire $100 budget and try and spread that $100 around to each one. That's $4 each. Of course it doesn't work, nothing happens. So they decide they should choose one and advertise it. Maybe they get some signups, maybe they don't, so they try another, and then another. It's like trying to hit the side of a moving vehicle with a pea shooter from 1000 yards. You will not be successful. You need one place to consolidate all your advertising dollars and work on defining and refining your offer so your conversions increase. In short, you need a funnel with a single refined entry point.
http://raghurajcashcode.com/
Once they sign up to your list, even if they don't buy something right away, over time, they will find out about everything you have to offer and hopefully at least one item will interest them enough to become a client.
You only need one list of prospects. You might have two, buyers and people that haven't bought, but to get started, you only need one. I've seen folks with upwards of 100 different lists for every crazy purpose. Mostly because they don't have a funnel and they have a separate list for every product and project. Sometimes that is necessary, but not if you're concentrating on your own product, not someone else's. Having that many lists mean you have to have separate webforms for each, separate email follow-ups, it is just way too much work. Can you imagine trying to create email follow ups of at least 15 emails for 100 different lists?
And there are some out there that say you don't need a list at all. There's not one successful internet marketer out there that will tell you that. With no list, you must constantly advertise. With a list of 100,000 let's say, you already own it, it costs nothing and almost any offer you put out will make some sales with a list that large. And some people don't buy right away; maybe it takes an average of 6 emails to make a sale with a lot of people, especially with larger ticket items. If you have no list, you'll never find out. Don't be fooled into thinking building a list isn't one of the most important things you'll do.
You only need one email address. Some people have tried to have a separate email address for every website they own. That may sound like the proper business practice but who has time to login and check 45 email addresses every day. When you start getting busy, you will not have time. There has to be a better way and there is.
You need a blog. Not just any blog but a WordPress blog. They are infinitely better at attracting what we call organic traffic from the internet to your site. This is free traffic. Paid traffic is one thing, but organic or free traffic is what happens when someone is doing a search on the internet and you have optimized your site for whatever keyword phrase they just typed in and your site comes up in Google or Bing or some other search engine. SEO, or Search Engine Optimization is a confusing subject and what works and what doesn't is constantly changing. But one thing is clear; WordPress is a very unique tool to attract that organic traffic. There is nothing else like it. Your WordPress blog sits in the root of your website. The blog will be about your topic. Choose your topic carefully. Some people try and manage 10 or 15 blogs at once. Blogs require articles. It's hard enough trying to keep material added to your blog, keeping 10 or 15 current is an almost inhuman task. And the reality is in this business if you aren't moving forward, you're falling behind.
WordPress Blogs have what they call RSS (really Simple Syndication) News Feeds. What it means is that new news gets listed with priority over old news. That's bad if you don't keep at least one article a week going. It's good because if you do, you will move ahead of all of those who don't keep up quite rapidly.
WordPress Blogs have the ability to be listed in more than one search engine. Did you realize Google has 3 major search engines? The one you use every day, one that's called a Blog Search, and one that's called a News Search. WordPress Blogs come built in with the Blog Search capability and a plugin must be installed to get your pages listed in the regular search engine. That's unique; nothing else can make that claim.
WordPress Blogs allow every single post to be search engine optimized for both search engines. If you write one article a week, optimized for a researched keyword phrase and do simple SEO for each article, which means you would have 52 optimized pages optimized for both search engines in a single year. Most websites, even the major manufacturers, only SEO their main pages. The bottom line is that having a WordPress Blog as your organic traffic attractor sitting in the root of your site is a major advantage over every other kind of site. That is really major.
What about squeeze pages? If you only have a single entry, and a single list, well then you only need one squeeze page. Now you may have several in the beginning as you're trying to refine your offer doing what we call split testing, but once that is converting like you want, you'll only have one. A squeeze page builds your list. People have to sign up to find out about your offer using a small bit of HTML code we call a webform. You'll drive any paid traffic to your squeeze page while your WordPress blog sits and gathers the organic traffic. In order to have a webform on your squeeze page and a list, you use what's called an autoresponder. The autoresponder gives you all the tools you need to build your list except the squeeze page itself. Using the autoresponder, you'll pack it with follow-up emails that go out automatically and tell all your prospects, the people on your list about everything else you have to offer.
It's scalable. By adding a few optimized pages to your WordPress blog and a few follow-up emails in your autoresponder for every product you have, have had, or will have, you can grow your product as big as you like.
And it's easy to understand and build, even from scratch without all the expense that most people end up spending. What you really need is all the resources at your fingertips in a library where you can start and stop the step by step presentations until you catch up. You need some help. You need a community of people in the same boat you can draw from and help them as well.
You must have 5 elements in your Sales Funnel
• Domain of your own
• Squeeze Page
• Autoresponder
• WordPress Blog
• Products to Sell
You need a website of your own. Not someone else's. This is going to be your product, products you choose, in niche you choose. You can pay affiliates to help you, or you can keep all the profits. You will not be dependent on anyone else.
You need a squeeze page to drive traffic to and to build your list. At first, you may have several as you develop your offer and refine until you get the kind of conversions you're looking for.
Of course, you have to have an autoresponder in order to build a squeeze page and send out automated emails.
You need that WordPress blog sitting in the root of your site and someplace to put your search engine optimized articles.
And you need products to sell.
Pretty simple, isn't it. That's the thing, it's easy to understand, but the details are where it gets a bit more complicated.
The structure of your site will look a little like this; your WordPress blog will be in the root of your website. We can put the squeeze page almost anywhere in the site, usually in a folder. All your product pages will be in your blog and in folders underneath the blog. And your autoresponder will be using one of many available services already available and inexpensive.
Here's a sample structure of what I'm talking about
jamesstone.com - blog, squeeze
jamesstone.com/product1
jamesstone.com/product2
jamesstone.com/product3
jamesstone.com/product4
And add anything else you want.
WHY A SALES FUNNEL?
For one, it's a single blog, it's not going to kill you. You have to write stuff, and I'm sorry, If you want to attract free traffic from the internet, you have to write something, whether you borrow it, curate it, make it up on your own, it doesn't matter where you get your material.
The internet is made up of words and phrases. The search engines can't see the pictures, just the words and patterns of words. Part of your business is providing the search engines what they crave. Give them what they want and they will give you what you want. They give you traffic.
You need a single squeeze page, a single place to advertise, consolidate your advertising dollars. All you need is a single list. Why complicate things. Focus on one thing. You and your own product. For that, a single list will do. It's easy to manage and understand what you're doing and what you're trying to accomplish. And it's scalable. It will grow with no matter how big you get and I want you to grow, so do you.
You know, it will be a lot of work at first to get this built. But once it's built, life gets a lot easier. You really can spend just a few hours a day tweaking your system and doing your marketing. And if it takes more time than that, it will mean you're packing and shipping and invoicing and managing your money, paying affiliates. That's all good stuff. But that's why you make it about you and things you like and are interested in. If you're like a lot of us out here making a full time living, you'll find yourself working hard and spending a lot of time at this. Why, because you'll find out doing what you love is fun. It won't feel so much like work anymore.
James 'Doc' Stone is a recognized expert and teacher of SEO and traffic generation techniques and he has the success to prove it. He's worked behind the scenes for years helping others develop some of the largest marketing sites on the internet. He does free online webinars weekly. Find out more about me at http://www.jamesstoneseo.com/about/
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=James_L_Stone
You need one place to advertise. What so many do is they have 25 different products and they try and take their entire $100 budget and try and spread that $100 around to each one. That's $4 each. Of course it doesn't work, nothing happens. So they decide they should choose one and advertise it. Maybe they get some signups, maybe they don't, so they try another, and then another. It's like trying to hit the side of a moving vehicle with a pea shooter from 1000 yards. You will not be successful. You need one place to consolidate all your advertising dollars and work on defining and refining your offer so your conversions increase. In short, you need a funnel with a single refined entry point.
http://raghurajcashcode.com/
Once they sign up to your list, even if they don't buy something right away, over time, they will find out about everything you have to offer and hopefully at least one item will interest them enough to become a client.
You only need one list of prospects. You might have two, buyers and people that haven't bought, but to get started, you only need one. I've seen folks with upwards of 100 different lists for every crazy purpose. Mostly because they don't have a funnel and they have a separate list for every product and project. Sometimes that is necessary, but not if you're concentrating on your own product, not someone else's. Having that many lists mean you have to have separate webforms for each, separate email follow-ups, it is just way too much work. Can you imagine trying to create email follow ups of at least 15 emails for 100 different lists?
And there are some out there that say you don't need a list at all. There's not one successful internet marketer out there that will tell you that. With no list, you must constantly advertise. With a list of 100,000 let's say, you already own it, it costs nothing and almost any offer you put out will make some sales with a list that large. And some people don't buy right away; maybe it takes an average of 6 emails to make a sale with a lot of people, especially with larger ticket items. If you have no list, you'll never find out. Don't be fooled into thinking building a list isn't one of the most important things you'll do.
You only need one email address. Some people have tried to have a separate email address for every website they own. That may sound like the proper business practice but who has time to login and check 45 email addresses every day. When you start getting busy, you will not have time. There has to be a better way and there is.
You need a blog. Not just any blog but a WordPress blog. They are infinitely better at attracting what we call organic traffic from the internet to your site. This is free traffic. Paid traffic is one thing, but organic or free traffic is what happens when someone is doing a search on the internet and you have optimized your site for whatever keyword phrase they just typed in and your site comes up in Google or Bing or some other search engine. SEO, or Search Engine Optimization is a confusing subject and what works and what doesn't is constantly changing. But one thing is clear; WordPress is a very unique tool to attract that organic traffic. There is nothing else like it. Your WordPress blog sits in the root of your website. The blog will be about your topic. Choose your topic carefully. Some people try and manage 10 or 15 blogs at once. Blogs require articles. It's hard enough trying to keep material added to your blog, keeping 10 or 15 current is an almost inhuman task. And the reality is in this business if you aren't moving forward, you're falling behind.
WordPress Blogs have what they call RSS (really Simple Syndication) News Feeds. What it means is that new news gets listed with priority over old news. That's bad if you don't keep at least one article a week going. It's good because if you do, you will move ahead of all of those who don't keep up quite rapidly.
WordPress Blogs have the ability to be listed in more than one search engine. Did you realize Google has 3 major search engines? The one you use every day, one that's called a Blog Search, and one that's called a News Search. WordPress Blogs come built in with the Blog Search capability and a plugin must be installed to get your pages listed in the regular search engine. That's unique; nothing else can make that claim.
WordPress Blogs allow every single post to be search engine optimized for both search engines. If you write one article a week, optimized for a researched keyword phrase and do simple SEO for each article, which means you would have 52 optimized pages optimized for both search engines in a single year. Most websites, even the major manufacturers, only SEO their main pages. The bottom line is that having a WordPress Blog as your organic traffic attractor sitting in the root of your site is a major advantage over every other kind of site. That is really major.
What about squeeze pages? If you only have a single entry, and a single list, well then you only need one squeeze page. Now you may have several in the beginning as you're trying to refine your offer doing what we call split testing, but once that is converting like you want, you'll only have one. A squeeze page builds your list. People have to sign up to find out about your offer using a small bit of HTML code we call a webform. You'll drive any paid traffic to your squeeze page while your WordPress blog sits and gathers the organic traffic. In order to have a webform on your squeeze page and a list, you use what's called an autoresponder. The autoresponder gives you all the tools you need to build your list except the squeeze page itself. Using the autoresponder, you'll pack it with follow-up emails that go out automatically and tell all your prospects, the people on your list about everything else you have to offer.
It's scalable. By adding a few optimized pages to your WordPress blog and a few follow-up emails in your autoresponder for every product you have, have had, or will have, you can grow your product as big as you like.
And it's easy to understand and build, even from scratch without all the expense that most people end up spending. What you really need is all the resources at your fingertips in a library where you can start and stop the step by step presentations until you catch up. You need some help. You need a community of people in the same boat you can draw from and help them as well.
You must have 5 elements in your Sales Funnel
• Domain of your own
• Squeeze Page
• Autoresponder
• WordPress Blog
• Products to Sell
You need a website of your own. Not someone else's. This is going to be your product, products you choose, in niche you choose. You can pay affiliates to help you, or you can keep all the profits. You will not be dependent on anyone else.
You need a squeeze page to drive traffic to and to build your list. At first, you may have several as you develop your offer and refine until you get the kind of conversions you're looking for.
Of course, you have to have an autoresponder in order to build a squeeze page and send out automated emails.
You need that WordPress blog sitting in the root of your site and someplace to put your search engine optimized articles.
And you need products to sell.
Pretty simple, isn't it. That's the thing, it's easy to understand, but the details are where it gets a bit more complicated.
The structure of your site will look a little like this; your WordPress blog will be in the root of your website. We can put the squeeze page almost anywhere in the site, usually in a folder. All your product pages will be in your blog and in folders underneath the blog. And your autoresponder will be using one of many available services already available and inexpensive.
Here's a sample structure of what I'm talking about
jamesstone.com - blog, squeeze
jamesstone.com/product1
jamesstone.com/product2
jamesstone.com/product3
jamesstone.com/product4
And add anything else you want.
WHY A SALES FUNNEL?
For one, it's a single blog, it's not going to kill you. You have to write stuff, and I'm sorry, If you want to attract free traffic from the internet, you have to write something, whether you borrow it, curate it, make it up on your own, it doesn't matter where you get your material.
The internet is made up of words and phrases. The search engines can't see the pictures, just the words and patterns of words. Part of your business is providing the search engines what they crave. Give them what they want and they will give you what you want. They give you traffic.
You need a single squeeze page, a single place to advertise, consolidate your advertising dollars. All you need is a single list. Why complicate things. Focus on one thing. You and your own product. For that, a single list will do. It's easy to manage and understand what you're doing and what you're trying to accomplish. And it's scalable. It will grow with no matter how big you get and I want you to grow, so do you.
You know, it will be a lot of work at first to get this built. But once it's built, life gets a lot easier. You really can spend just a few hours a day tweaking your system and doing your marketing. And if it takes more time than that, it will mean you're packing and shipping and invoicing and managing your money, paying affiliates. That's all good stuff. But that's why you make it about you and things you like and are interested in. If you're like a lot of us out here making a full time living, you'll find yourself working hard and spending a lot of time at this. Why, because you'll find out doing what you love is fun. It won't feel so much like work anymore.
James 'Doc' Stone is a recognized expert and teacher of SEO and traffic generation techniques and he has the success to prove it. He's worked behind the scenes for years helping others develop some of the largest marketing sites on the internet. He does free online webinars weekly. Find out more about me at http://www.jamesstoneseo.com/about/
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=James_L_Stone
