What's a Sales Funnel and How Can You Set Yours Up to Make More Money Online?

Coaches… do you utilize sales funnels to considerably increase your online income? If not, then you're seriously missing the boat when it comes to your business. Read on for sales funnels 101, then take the next step to putting a sales funnel to work making you money on the web.

The Sales Funnel Explained

A sales funnel starts with content that your readers find while searching online for information. If you're a coach, then clearly you should be publishing coveted advice to help people take the first step in creating a business, improving their lives, or both.

Top of Your Sales Funnel

The "top" of your funnel is the advice that you publish for free. This is what attracts people to you and endears them to your brand. Many sales funnels begin with blog posts, YouTube videos, Facebook content, and other information readers can access at no cost. You may wonder, at first, why you'd basically hand over free advice to people you don't know. This is the nature of the web. Every good sales funnel begins with sought-after details. Researchers seek. They find YOU! BUT you've got to be out there publishing if this is going to happen.

Middle of Your Sales Funnel

The next level down on your sales funnel helps you collect subscribers who may one day become customers. It's generally a giveaway. People who visit your website will want a good reason to provide their contact details to you. One such reason could be a short report, ebook, series of tips, autoresponder tutorial, or some other thing they sign up for.

Most web-savvy folks these days are well familiar with the sight of a subscriber box. They know how a free information gift works. They know that they may be asked to sign up for a membership. They know how to download content onto their computers. So this is how you bring them to your list. Of course, not everyone will bother to read your content and not everyone will sign up. But again, this is just the nature of humans so as small biz owners, we don't sweat it. We just focus on the gains!

Bottom of Your Sales Funnel

Phase 3 of your sales funnel happens after people sign up for your list. Smart marketers and coaches who have their stuff together know that there's a good opportunity living in the whitespace of their sign-up pages. So they include offers there that will appeal to their target readers who generally ARE already seeking a deal or they wouldn't be here.

Customers who purchase your low-priced product move further down the funnel, and are presented with more, higher priced products. As they continue to buy, they move closer and closer to your top-end offers, which make up the bottom of your funnel.

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Functional Funnels: What Works?

Visualize your funnel of offers in your mind. It's easy to see that your free content—at the top—is consumed by the largest number of readers. Below that, your extreme low-cost item (available only for the cost of an email address) attracts a smaller subset of the true freebie seekers. Next, your low-priced products bring in yet a smaller group.

Finally, as you near the tip of the funnel, only the loyalest of fans and customers will purchase your highest priced offers.

Your job, as the business owner, is to ensure that your funnel leads buyers naturally from the top, free offers all the way to the bottom. The more buyers you can keep in your funnel, the more money you will make.

Most new—and even established—business owners can easily envision the top of the funnel, and they work hard to drive new business by publishing lots of free content. However, a sales funnel is much more complex than that. It's not over after the freebie, and as stated, only a small percentage of your biggest fans and followers will make it down to the high-ticket items that you offer at the bottom. So if you truly want your business to grow, you must master the entire process of understanding, building, and marketing your funnel from top to bottom.

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Sales Funnel Fundamentals Can Be Yours! Interested in setting up funnels to reach a new segment of the market without a lot of daily grind? Check out the The Digital Marketer's Quickstart Guide to Profitable Funnels from Cindy Bidar.