List Building 101: Why You Need A Sales Funnel

No matter what sort of marketing you are involved in, one thing you absolutely MUST have is a list of prospects.

No prospects equals no sales.

Even if you don’t consider yourself to be a salesman (or woman), to make any money, at some point you have to sell something.

So you need someone to sell something to – in other words, prospects.

In online marketing (and increasingly in bricks and mortar business as well) this means having an email list.

If you build a list of subscribers who are interested in your niche, whatever that may be, you can regularly contact them with information that they will find interesting or useful, AND with related product offers – either your own, or products you can promote as an affiliate.

That’s how you make money – and if you do it right, you can make a lot of money. Forget all the marketing trends and fads; email marketing remains the best way to connect with people interested in your niche, to sell products to them, and to make money online.

Build your list

So you need to build a list. And the way you do this is by offering something of value in return for an email address, and then drive traffic to this offer.

Seems simple enough – and it is.

But the traffic costs money (either through ad costs if you are using paid traffic, or through the cost of your time if you are going after free traffic).

But there is a way to get these subscribers where the cost of the traffic will be immediately covered, or even more than covered – so in effect you are being paid to build your list.

And that way is by setting up an effective sales funnel

The Sales Funnel

Chances are, you never even heard of a ‘sales funnel’ until you got involved in the online marketing world.

And you might not know it, but you go through sales funnels every day in life.

The layout of your local grocery store is not random – every item there is strategically placed to encourage you to add more and more to your basket as you walk round the store. The layout, the pricing, the special offers, everything is part of a sales funnel designed to make you buy more.

Think of McDonalds. ‘Would you like fries with that?’ is an upsell, part of a sales funnel.

Amazon are masters of the sales funnel. ‘Customers who bought this item also bought’ and ‘Frequently bought together’ on the checkout page are part of their sales funnel. All the follow up emails you get after making a purchase? Part of the sales funnel.

Maybe you still aren’t clear what a sales funnel means for your business – I’ll  cover this below.

But one thing is certain – effective sales funnels are ESSENTIAL if you want to make a decent living online.

So what should your sales funnel look like?

At the ‘front-end’ is a free product to capture people’s interest.

In order to grab the free product people have to sign-up and hand over their email address – and in turn they are added to an email list/database of prospects.

After the person is added to the list, they can then be sent other related offers that they might be interested in.

But the key is this…

Immediately after signing up for the free product the prospect should be presented with a low priced offer (called an ‘upsell’ or ‘one time offer’).

This can either be your own product, or an affiliate offer.

Provided it is a good offer and is closely related to the free gift then enough new subscribers will buy the offer to cover the cost of your traffic – or more.

And then you follow up all the subscribers with a targeted email sequence with related offers (again your own or affiliate offers).

How to do this...

This is where it can start to get a bit tricky…

You need to 

  • Source or create a quality giveaway product
  • Create the squeeze page (or pay someone else to do it)
  • Find a closely related affiliate offer to add as your OTO
  • Create a redirect page and a monetized download page
  • Add all the required legal pages
  • Know all the tech stuff to link it all together and upload it to the net
  • Write a follow up email sequence that keeps subscribers engaged

This is of course all doable, even if you have never done it before. Many of us (myself included) have went through the process of learning how to do this (have hit a hundred roadblocks along the way)…  but have created complete successful list building funnels.

But there IS a lot to learn, and the technical side of things inevitably puts a lot of people off. People who know the power of it, understand how it works… but are just scared by the set up process.

A shortcut

Which is precisely why Andy Waring and I teamed up to create our ‘Funnel-in-a-Plugin’

This is a WP plugin that creates a complete funnel (exactly like the one described above) with just a few clicks. You simply install it on any WP site, fill out the fields with your affiliate links, etc, click publish – and you’re done.

It is for anyone wanting to build a list in the IM niche, and the lead magnet included is all above ‘passive income’ (and can be rebranded with your affiliate links)

Andy created a video showing just how easy it is.

This was designed specifically to be as easy as possible to use, and I think we really have succeeded in that. We spent a lot of time fine tuning it with user experience in mind, and have had some fantastic feedback  from beta testers and the first customers.

As well as the funnel creating plugin itself, we have also added some great bonuses (including white label to another course created by Andy), which make this a very sweet offer indeed.

If you want to get full details on exactly what is included, click the button below now.

But do go now – the price will jump at the end of the launch (on Sunday 24th May at midnight EST). 

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