Secrets To Creating A High-Converting Sales Funnel

Secrets To Creating A High-Converting Sales Funnel

Money making blogs don’t just happen. They are built from the ground up, brick by brick.
For the blog to run automatically later on, some planning is necessary to ensure that the sales received from your site are maximized.
The sales funnel is the first step in making $100 a day with your blog.
You have to have a sales funnel put in place, or else you will not get as many sales, or not get any sales at all for your great products.
The funnel is the road to riches because it provides a convenient path for your website visitors to purchase your goods and services.

What is a sales funnel?
Simply put, a sales funnel is a step-by-step plan that converts visitors into buyers.
What you’re doing is leading them through a series of actions which ultimately end up in your first sale with a customer.
In order to understand the concept, imagine a physical funnel, like the kind you use to put oil in your car. It starts wide at the top and slants in to a small hole, right?
The purpose of the funnel is clear: It catches all the oil you pour into it and directs it to one desired location, right where you want all that oil to be.
The same works with a sales funnel. The purpose is to catch all your blog traffic and direct all those new readers to the place you want them to be—buying your latest product.
The funnel itself must be set up so that your visitors go from one step to the next, wanting and craving the next thing that you have to offer.
Think about your sales funnel as the foundation of your website.
You want to create a ‘rim’ that’s large enough so that every person who comes to your site will be tempted to jump into that funnel. There should be multiple touch points on your blog, each of them giving readers a chance to enter the funnel.

The three things which ALL sales funnels must do to be effective:
- Entice your readers about the product your offering.
- Show your product’s value.
- Convince your readers to buy the product NOW.
Along with information about crafting specific content and devising a killer email list, my information-packed FREE video will teach you more about the seven page sales funnel – the one which will help you convert visitors today.
Even though my seven page funnel is highly effective, it’s not the only way to make a funnel. There are many places where your site could be discovered, and your visitor have the opportunity to enter your sales funnel.

Five Possible Entry Points for Your Sales Funnel
1. Landing Pages
Landing pages are aptly named, because this is where your customers ‘land’ when they find your site from other sites. They are generally the first introduction to your goods and services and should provide very direct instructions to tell your customers what they need to be doing.
This is where you get your customers intrigued and make the huge promises that you can keep. Your landing pages are an integral part of a successful product launch.

2. Review Pages
This is a tactic that a lot of affiliate marketers use. You see, visitors have a lot of questions about the products that you’re selling. They have probably heard a lot about one product, and they want to see how your product compares to the products that they’ve heard of.
Many successful bloggers use review pages to get the attention of the search engines and drive organic search results. You would place a thorough, well thought out review on a landing page, then have the next page be the sales page for that product.
This is a variation from my seven page high-conversion sales funnel that I teach you about in this video (along with two other high-power pro blogger strategies).

3. Blog posts
In my post about the differences between professional bloggers and hobby bloggers, I talked about how professional bloggers create internal links within their posts. The biggest reason for this interconnection between the posts is that the professional bloggers want to keep you on their site for a little bit longer.
They know that if you are traveling from page to page within the site, you have a higher likelihood of purchasing something from them.

4. Widgets
If you look along the side of this blog post, you’ll notice that there are several offers and opportunities to opt-in to the sales funnel that has been set up. The more experienced professional bloggers will have multiple products and create several high-converting sales funnels at the same time.

5. Blog Headers and Footers
Quite often, you’ll see one of the opt-in offers at the very beginning of the blog within the header. This comes before the blog posts and before anything else. This touch point is actually in one of the most visible areas, just to entice visitors to step into the sales funnel.

Here’s how to create a high-converting sales funnel in five steps
Step One: Create Your Free Offer
As soon as your product is ready to sell, create another product as your free offer. Free offers are part and parcel of the experience of providing for your customer.
Why?
Because your customer will value the product that you have and increase the pay product’s perceived worth in their mind.
Every customer wants to receive value from their purchases.
The free product that you produce should be as good or better than the product that you’re trying to sell.
The reason for this is that the customer will put a perceived value on what you’re trying to sell based on the value of the free product. They will think, ‘Oh! That white paper that I got from X had great information, I bet that their paid product will give me the same type of value.’
By now, you should have learned how to pinpoint a highly profitable niche. With that knowledge of your niche, the next step is to create a free product. Free doesn’t mean cheap or valueless. You want your free offer to be so valuable and helpful to your audience that they’ll willingly follow the funnel down to your ultimate goal—your paid product.
Once you have both your product and your free offer ready to go, the second step in your funnel is to get your audience to opt-in for the freebie.

Step Two: Craft Your Opt-In
Think of your opt-in as the widest part of your funnel. This is where you want to catch as many people as possible. This is where you make your initial offer.
The whole purpose of the opt-in is to get people to get your freebie, nothing more. Give your reader as much information as you can while still being simple and to the point.
This is not the place to write page upon page of copy. You want to outline and heighten the value of what your customer will be receiving. You want to prove the fact that you are willing to work for that email address. The goal is to remove any obstacles and objections that your audience might have.
Your advertising and your efforts should be directed to a landing page on your blog, the one where you potentially receive most of your traffic.
Make sure that you have the automation in place to deliver the freebie to your audience as soon as possible. Delays might damage and discourage your viewer from wanting to take it to the next step, which is the actual sale.

Step Three: Advertise Your Product
Since your freebie was packed with value, your visitors will begin to trust that you can provide good products to them. They will gradually become curious about your other products which are available to them. What’s next in the sales funnel? Advertising.

How do you advertise your product?
• Focus on the benefits of your product. You have studied your site’s demographics and made an effort to understand them. You know what their pain points are, so you are able to advertise on the basis of those pain points.
• Demonstrate your credentials and credibility. You are just as much a part of your company as the products that you’re selling. People will purchase products based on your personality and your credentials. Make it easy to learn more about yourself so that your visitors can trust you.
• Give as many details as possible. Make sure that you are as up-front and honest about the product that you can be. Your readers will purchase from you once if you are dishonest, but they will purchase from you for a lifetime if you are honest.

Step Four: Offer Your Up-Sell
Now, you might just be getting the hang of having a freebie and a single product. That’s good that you’re taking it that far. One of the secrets of the high-end bloggers is that they have more premium products to be sold after the initial sale
This upsell puts more value on the package, giving even more things to the visitor. You’ll see this tactic on many sites.
The upsell is a more premium package. So, if you have a book that you’re selling, you can put a series of videos or CDs with it.
Since these are delivered digitally, it can be sent to you almost immediately. The masters of this art might have an array of products that they are upselling to you.
• Make sure that the purchaser knows that the upsell is optional. They’ve got the original product and that isn’t going to change.

Step Five: Express Your Thanks
Reaffirm the great decision that your customer has made by purchasing from you. The thank you page is going to be the most important page that you’ve got to establish and maintain the relationship that you have with your customer. It’s a way to strengthen the bonds that you have as well as making you look good for future promotions.
You also have a chance to advise your customer of the other products which they might receive, add some free bonuses, or otherwise make your case absolutely compelling to your reader. Your thanks can make or break future sales.
My free video that exposes three pro blogger secrets outlines a way to create a high-converting sales funnel that’s used by the pros, including myself. It also goes into more detail about how to make a killer email list and the secrets to content creation.

Your Turn
Your sales funnel is one of the biggest steps in creating a blog that makes tons of money. I’ve seen them work with two pages, I’ve seen them work with eight. What is your sales funnel strategy?