List Building From Scratch, Part 4: How to Monetize Your Funnel and Get PAID to Build Your Email List

In this post we’re concluding our four-part series on how to build your own business using a lead magnet, a squeeze page and Facebook.

First we started with creating the perfect lead magnet that targets your audience and makes them sign onto your list.

Next we covered exactly how to build a high converting squeeze page.

In our third installment, we covered how to get traffic from Facebook, and send this traffic to your squeeze page to build your targeted list big and fast.

Now that you’ve mastered all three of these skills, you can literally go into any market and create a list building machine in just days.

Better still, you can take it one step further and build a complete product funnel behind your lead magnet, offering a tripwire (low ticket) offer, followed by your main offer, followed by a big-ticket item.

And that is what we’re going to cover now in the final installment of this series, so that your lead generation will completely pay for itself.

Once this happens, you can generate as much traffic on demand as you like without having to come out of pocket financially.

Do this, and the sky is the limit.

Do you want a list of 1000 new subscribers this week?

Or 10,000 subscribers this month? It’s possible when you follow all four steps in this series.

Just a reminder: If you’ve been following along with the series, you should now have a lead magnet created, a squeeze page in place to capture your new leads and traffic already flowing to your squeeze page.

Now let’s get your funnel monetized and paying for itself as quick as possible.

Quick Review of Our Funnel System

You’ve got a lead magnet to offer people via your Facebook ads. When someone clicks the ad, they’re taken to your squeeze page, where they enter their email address.

Once they’ve entered their email address, they are NOT taken directly to the download page. Access to the lead magnet is instead emailed to them.

(As well as allowing us to monetize our traffic, this also has the advantage of weeding out bogus emails – unless the prospect uses his or her genuine email, they will not get access to the free giveaway.)

Now on the thank you page, as in “Thank you for subscribing!” Or “Thank you for grabbing our free __ Report!” you are going to tell them to check their email, AND make them a generous offer for a low amount of money.

This is often called a tripwire offer, and the goal is to:

  1. Turn a prospect into a customer, because customers are worth far more to you than prospects
  2. Put a small amount of money back in your pocket, which you can then use to buy more advertising, to get more subscribers, to sell more tripwires, to buy more advertising… You get the picture.

The tripwire offer isn’t there to make a profit – it’s there to cover your advertising expenses as much as possible, thereby making your list building efforts self-liquidating.

At this point you do have the option of stopping with the tripwire offer and not making any more offers in this funnel.

After all, you can always send your list all the offers you want.

But I recommend you take it a step or two further. For those who buy your tripwire offer, you can make them what we’ll call a core offer or ‘main offer.’ A main offer is generally a product that sells for $40 to $100.

And if they buy the main offer, you can also offer them a high-end offer. This might be coaching, a large course or anything else you might consider to be high end. The price on this is going to be anywhere between $100 and $1,000.

The Tripwire Offer

This offer and any other offers you make in this funnel need to be directly related to your lead magnet.

Obviously you’re not going to give away a lead magnet of secrets to growing roses, and then sell them a tripwire on how to get traffic to their website.

You already know what their interest is, because they took your lead magnet.

So now make them an offer they just about cannot refuse.

Here’s an example:
You offer them a lead magnet on, “The crazy 5 minute traffic generation technique that sent 204,985 visitors to my website in 24 Hours.”

Now then, you’ve got the rights to a $100 traffic generation program that sold like hotcakes last year. So you offer them this $100 course for just $7. That’s right. It’s an absolute bargain and if you position it well, you will make lots of sales.

Another example:
You offer them a lead magnet on, “7 Secret Words that Make the Sexiest Women Agree to Go on a Date with You – Even if You Look Like a Troll.”

You know your audience is guys with low self-confidence who are looking for dates, so you offer them your, “9 Step Fail-Proof Plan for Getting Women into Bed” program for just $9.

These sort of tightly targeted, highly congruent offers WILL get sales.

Tripwire numbers…

I’m going to use very round numbers here to make things easy. Your numbers will vary, but this will give you an idea of how to figure out if your funnel is paying for itself through your tripwire offer.

So, our example: You purchase 1,000 clicks at 50 cents per click. 50% of those people get your lead magnet, so you now have 500 people on your list.

All 500 people are shown your tripwire offer, and 10% of them buy it. (Remember, your numbers will vary).

50 sales of your tripwire offer at $10 per sale = $500.

Which is great, because you have now paid for your advertising and built your list for FREE.

You now have 450 new regular subscribers and 50 BUYERS.

Remember, buyers are worth far more because they’ve already proven they are willing to BUY STUFF from YOU 🙂

Keep track of your numbers and remember your goal is to simply pay for your advertising. You will likely need to tweak and test to reach this point.

But once you do, the sky is the limit because now you can advertise all you want and build your list as fast as you desire without coming out of pocket.

Tripwire Ideas

Program, course, ebook – this is the most common tripwire offer, and it can work well if it’s a tremendous value for such a low price.

If you don’t already have a product of your own, you can create one. Or, if this is too big a step at this stage, you can get the rights to sell a ready made product, also known as Private Label Rights (PLR).

There are a lot of PLR products available, thousands and thousands covering just about every niche imaginable, but be warned: the majority of them are complete rubbish. You do NOT want to sell a poor quality product to your new subscribers – for those that buy, this will be the first impression you make, and you want it to be a good one.

So do your due diligence. A great way to check out a range of possible products without having to buy the rights individually is to join a PLR membership site. One of the best – especially for the IM niche – is Kevin Fahey’s Download PLR Products, and (at the time of writing) you can try it out for just $1).

Software – this always has a high perceived value, and works especially well in certain niches such as online marketing.

Unless you happen to be a programmer, creating it yourself will probablty be a non runner. But you could outsource it, or again you can find PLR software, plugins, etc., that you can rebrand as your own and offer one of these as your tripwire offer.

Physical product – sometimes a small tool, gadget, piece of jewelry or even supplement offer can work well.

You’ll need to arrange to have it drop shipped, of course, because you don’t want to physically ship these things yourself.

Frame your physical product offer as the customer pays only for shipping, and you can get higher conversion rates than with digital downloads.

Physical book – this one works well. Send out an actual book for the ‘cost of printing and shipping.’ If the book is highly targeted to your audience, you’ll make plenty of sales.

Best bet: Make it a book YOU wrote. Of course you can ‘write’ your book by compiling PLR information.

Or you could ask 20 or more people in your niche to each contribute one article, which you then compile into a book and add your own introduction.

Use your imagination!

Service – if your business is service oriented, you might want to offer a very low cost, a la carte service.

For example, if you’re a graphic artist, you could offer to design one element (logo, header, etc.) for $10.

Paid webinar – you might call this a class, a bootcamp, training or anything else you like, but it’s actually a paid webinar.

This is great because you don’t even need to make it ahead of time. And once you do the webinar, you can run a recording of it each week, or continue to do it live once each week or two – your choice.

The paid webinar is a great way to acquire very serious prospects for your higher paid services and products. And it’s also a tremendous way to build trust, because your new customers get to listen to you explain something to them, as well as being able to ask you questions and interact with you.

And yes, you can offer a product at the end of your webinar as well. Just be sure your paid webinar is chock full of great information, and that the offer at the end is very closely related to your subject.

Tripwire Tips

Make your offer almost too good to pass up. Show how much tremendous value they get for such a crazy low price.

Be clear that this is the one and ONLY time they will EVER receive this offer. If they come back later, they pay full price, no exception.

Write your tripwire copy as though you are charging a lot more than you are. When they see how mouthwatering your product is, they’re going to expect a big price. Then when they scroll down and see it’s only $7 or $10, they’re going to be relieved and eager to buy.

Test putting the price in the headline. Sometimes if you state up front how low cost your offer is, you’ll get more sales. Other times you need to build the value first, and then show them the low price. The only way to know for sure is to test.

The Second Chance Option

I know I just got done saying that you should emphasize that this is the ONLY TIME they will be able to purchase your tripwire offer at such a crazy low price.

But you do have an alternate option, if you want to pursue it, and it’s this:
For those that don’t buy your tripwire, put them into an autoresponder sequence that promotes… the tripwire offer.

Yes, I’m contradicting myself here, but with good reason: BOTH of these methods work. And you get to choose which one you want to do.

If you told them initially that this is their one and only shot to get the tripwire offer at such a low price, then you will NOT make the offer again. If you did, you would lose all credibility – don’t do it.

But if you want to forgo that sense of urgency, then you are free to follow up with emails such as this one:

Subject Line: Did you see this?
Yesterday you requested my [insert lead magnet name], and I just wanted to check back and see if you had a chance to [read/watch] it yet.
More importantly, I wanted to make sure you saw this:
[Link to tripwire sales page]
If you’re really serious about [topic] then this is the ideal first step.
Not only does it work, at only [price] it’s the tiniest investment you can make to [benefit/end result].
So get it now while you can:
[Link to tripwire sales page]
Normally it sells for $__, which is why I wanted to make sure you were able to grab this while it’s still available at this crazy low price.
signature

You might send a sequence of 3 to 5 emails reminding them of this offer, and of what they will miss if they don’t get it.

Adding this sequence of emails to your autoresponder can often double the number of tripwire sales you make.

Again, test to see which works better for your offer – making it one time only, or giving them several second chances via email.

ADVANCED TIP: A clever advanced technique is to put a cookie based timer on the trip wire page, and have it redirect when the countdown ends to the same product but at a higher price. That way, you get scarcity AND you cab still mail about the higher priced offer as well 🙂

Adding a Main (or Core) Offer

This is optional, but it can be a real money maker.

If the purpose of a tripwire offer is to make enough money to cover advertising while building your list, the purpose of the main offer is to put money in your pocket.

This is the offer you make to those people who have purchased your tripwire offer. They’ve already raised their hands and said, “YES, I want to spend money with you.” So why not give them the chance to spend more money and get more value?

Your main offer might be your main product, or it could even be an affiliate product that you carefully selected to go with your lead magnet and tripwire offer.

So our funnel graphic from above would now look like this.

Don’t expect to sell a lot of these, but you will sell some. And because this is a higher priced offer, this could make a big difference to your bottom line.

Looking at the previous example, we got 1,000 people to go to our squeeze page, and half of those to join our list. Out of those, 10% or 50 took our tripwire offer.

And depending on what your main offer is, you can likely expect 1-5 of these people will take your main offer.

If it’s your own product and you charge $50, then that’s $50 to $250 more profit for you.

Do this each day, and it really adds up.

And the procedure is simple enough. In fact, you’ve seen it done many times. Once they purchase the tripwire, they are taken to your one time offer page, where they see the main offer.

They either buy it or they don’t. If they do, then you’ve made far more money. And this will also give you another opportunity to make even more with another ‘high ticket’ offer.

High Ticket Offer

Again, this is totally optional – but worth considering. After they purchase your main offer, you can then offer them something special such as coaching, or a complete ‘Done For You’ service to make sure they get the result they seek.

And for this you will charge good money. How much you charge depends on exactly what you offer, but as a general guide it should be in the range of $300 to $1000. This is your high ticket offer.

Of course not all of your buyers will take the high ticket offer. In fact most won’t. But even if you only sell one a week, you’ll still be pocketing good money on a consistent basis.

And having a high ticket offer has other (sometimes unexpected) benefits.

Firstly, you will have a product that you can continue to promote in your follow up emails. This is the most obvious benefit.

It also makes it much easier to get affiliates to promote your products. With a high ticket product in your funnel, it makes it much more attractive to affiliates, and this can be a great way to get new customers.

And it will instantly enhance your status in the eyes of your subscribers and customers, even if they don’t buy it. Human psychology is a funny thing 🙂

Overcoming YOUR Objection

Right now you might be thinking… “That is overkill. If I sell them on getting my free lead magnet, AND my tripwire, AND my main offer, AND my high ticket offer, they’re going to hate me.”

Nope.

Remember, the only people who will see the high ticket offer are those who already bought everything else.

In fact, you are doing THEM a favour. They have shown they are super serious about getting the result they seek. They WANT to buy. So if you don’t give them the chance, you are essentially robbing them of the opportunity to get everything they want.

Amazing what a little change in mindset can do, don’t you think?

Last Thoughts

You now have a complete system for generating lists of prospects and customers in a self-liquidating manner that allows you to grow your lists as fast as you like.

Undoubtedly, you have questions. “How do I link the _ to the _ so that…”

And this is where we separate the successful marketers from the “I wishers.”

The successful marketers will figure out how to do what needs to be done.

Of course we couldn’t cover ever pertinent detail of how to do everything from build a website to write your first email to your list. We did cover as much as we could in the space allowed in this sequence, but you will have to fill in the blanks.

And to do that, you have two choices.

Either Google it and find a video or article that shows you what you need to know. Self-starting marketers have been doing this for 20 years, and many of them have gone on to become millionaires.

Or you can simply outsource anything and everything you need. Guaranteed these is someone on Fiverr or Upwork who can help you TODAY with whatever you need, be it writing, website building, product sourcing or creation, funnel set up and so forth.

Really, there are no excuses for not setting up your own self-liquidating funnel THIS WEEK.

Decide now if you’re serious about your online business, and if you are, then get busy.

Guaranteed you can have your own list of prospects and buyers within days, and you can continue to build that list as fast as you please, all because you now know how to pay for your own advertising through tripwire offers.

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