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Sales funnels

Sales Funnels (Make More Money From Your Traffic)

Well researched, planned and implemented sales funnels can simultaneously boost traffic and increase conversions and revenue to make more money for blogs and businesses alike.

A sales funnel represents all the stages required for a visitor to convert - from finding content via Google search (or on social media), to reading an article, to signing up for a newsletter or purchasing a product.

Sales Funnel Secret #1

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They are often represented diagrammatically as a way to show each stage and the number of people at each stage in the process. There are more complex examples, but I like this one from AdEspresso:

Standard sales funnel

From an online perspective, a better name for the sales funnel would be the conversion funnel, since not all websites earn revenue by selling products (i.e. blogs).

For example, revenue from Google ads and affiliate links can be considered sales. Getting people to follow you on Twitter or sign up to a newsletter can also be considered a sale because these lead to revenue further down the line.

Identifying Sales Funnels

It's important to understand that different goals or objectives can have completely different sales funnels. Most sites want to do the following:

  • Get traffic from organic search
  • Get traffic from social media
  • Sign people up to a newsletter
  • Get followers and fans on social media sites
  • Get people to consume an RSS feed
  • Make money from advertising
  • Make money from affiliate links
  • Sell stuff - subscriptions, eBooks, etc

Each of these goals require a different marketing strategy in order to maximize ROI. However, the first two don't really require a funnel because the marketing strategy for getting more traffic (from organic search or social media) is to create great content.

Sales Funnel Secret #2

Research your niche market and competitors to quickly understand how to construct high converting funnels.

  • Analyze competitors' backlinks and SEO using SEMRush
  • Analyze competitors using SEMRush and learn the secrets to their success.

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You are able to use SEMRush for free by signing up. However, the free plan is limited to 10 requests per day - thereafter a paid plan is required.

Every aspect of marketing, conversions and making money is based on a foundation of great content.

But each of the remaining goals does require a specialized marketing strategy. Before we look at a specific example, let's quickly look at the general strategy behind creating a great sales funnel.

Sales Funnel Design

In order for a funnel to be effective, it has to be focused. People who come across a post (regardless of where they enter the funnel) should be skillfully directed to a specific conversion point.

In order to do that, each piece of content needs to be written with specific targets in mind.

How to Create High Converting Content

Make amazing content that attracts and funnels engaged traffic to well crafted conversion points for maximum ROI.

  • Make money blogging with sales funnel content
  • Make Money Blogging

    Learn a new approach to creating game-changing blog content that drives high value traffic and funnels it to conversions, like a machine.

    Learn to make conversions from your very first post.

    Unleash your potential to radically grow earnings with online content using our free blog post business plan. Learn to differentiate your content from millions of competitors and dominate your niche.

A post that is not really relevant, has no call to action, or doesn't engage and inspire readers is not going to be effective in pushing people to the next stage of the funnel.

In general, the strategy behind creating a sales funnel for a specific conversion on your blog goes like this:

  1. Identify a goal (sometimes called a business objective) such as making an affiliate sale
  2. Create relevant content
  3. Provide clear direction, with little distraction, to the next stage
  4. Make converting simple, easy to understand, and fast

Sales Funnel Secret #3

Secure your long-term earnings by growing an email list (funnel) that doesn't rely on Google or Facebook.

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By keeping this general strategy in mind whenever you create an article, you will find that, over time, each business objective (conversion point) on your blog builds up a body of highly focused content that directs readers expertly and efficiently to that conversion.

Sales Funnels in the Real World

Offhand, you might be wondering why a sales funnel is necessary at all. After all, anyone reading a post will most likely be able to see a newsletter signup block, a social sharing block, and so on.

That's true; and certainly, having all these conversion points on each post helps to pick up the easy conversions - the low hanging fruit. But an article crowded with links, graphics and ads is not focused and will also miss out on plenty of potentially more valuable conversions.

Not everyone is going to buy an expensive product or service because they stumbled across a blog post. But they may convert if they are directed to a more focused one that provides exactly the information they need - i.e they are pushed into a strategic sales funnel.

Why Funnels?

Consider the case of a webmaster trying to earn money from affiliate marketing.

Sales Funnel Secret #4

Use influencers & social marketing to quickly build valuable relationships that grow your sales funnel.

  • Social media marketing with SocialPilot
  • Use SocialPilot to help you understand the audience and create better engagement with them.

    If you're looking to grow into the social media space then it's vital to have insights into how your engagements are performing, as well as planning and executing campaigns from start to finish.

It's not advisable to add affiliate links to each and every post. Google doesn't like content with lots of paid links. Adding affiliate links to every article will likely result in some sort of Google algorithm penalty that will decimate organic search traffic volumes and hurt every sales funnel - not just the affiliate conversions.

The answer is to set up a strategic sales funnel for affiliate conversions.

Implementing a Sales Funnel

Instead of pasting affiliate links everywhere, risking the wrath of Google's Panda algorithm in the process, it is far better to create a few highly focused articles (I'll call them conversion posts) that contain one, maybe two, affiliate links.

Google has nothing against internal links from one post to another. This means you can write as many unique articles in, on and around the topics of those conversion posts, and link to them in order to funnel traffic towards a conversion.

Sales Funnel Secret #5

Widen the sales funnel by growing a large, profitable audience using inbound marketing.

  • Inbound marketing with HubSpot
  • Inbound marketing doesn't push advertising onto customers. Instead, it draws in customers by providing engaging content.

    HubSpot offers a full suite of free & paid tools and services that integrate to make inbound marketing faster, cheaper and more effective. 64,500 customers in over 100 countries grow their businesses with HubSpot.

Since the purpose of this content is to attract traffic before passing it off to a conversion post, we can call this type of post a landing page.

People find a landing page, get directed to a conversion post where they are far more likely to click on an affiliate link (because this is a highly focused post that they have explicitly requested to read).

The net result is that:

  1. You avoid Google algorithm penalties
  2. You create many on-topic landing posts to drive traffic
  3. Landing page readers are funneled to conversion posts
  4. Conversion posts enjoy a high CTR (Click Thru Rate) because the traffic they receive is highly relevant

You now have a strategic sales funnel for those specific affiliate links.

Sales Funnel Demo

We use sales funnels all the time. Sometimes the funnel is long and requires people on the fringe of a purchase to go through a number of steps before they are ready to convert. Others are ready to convert when they arrive at a specific page (assuming Google has matched the search with the correct content - something you can't take for granted).

A good example comes from one of our forum answers that was incorporated into our beginner guide on How to Make a Website.

Sales Funnel Secret #6

Use SocialPilot to extend your sales funnel into massive social media markets.

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This is a common question that many new webmasters are looking for information on before they buy. SEO is just one consideration and there are many others, but it's a waste not to treat this peripheral question as part of a sales funnel (since people reaching this page are likely thinking about using a website builder).

We added a few visible calls to action to the answer (which includes quite a bit of in-depth research and information about built-in SEO features of each of the major website builders) that directs people to a free, step-by-step setup guide that helps them get over the initial learning curve a bit quicker:

Visible calls to action as part of the sales funnel

Here's a screenshot of the visitor flow through that page:

Mapping visitor flow through a webpage

As you can see, the vast majority of people clicking through go to one of our four website setup guides. These guides are all conversion points for us because if users do end up starting a website with one of the platforms we provided guidance on there is a small affiliate commission captured.

Over time this sales funnel generates thousands of dollars in what becomes, essentially, passive income.

Have you set up strategic sales funnels to improve conversions on your blog? Has knowing about, and implementing funnels, helped you to make more money? What advice would you share about how best to drive traffic to convert?

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Proof that business blogging works. Pic by nicoleec

The vast majority (in the region of 95%) of all sites and blogs ever created fail to make any money at all - let alone a profit.

Convincing bloggers to promote your company

Blogger outreach and PR is difficult - I've read a lot of How to articles and guides that say stuff like "Get bloggers to review your site or product", or, "Get as many backlinks from other bloggers as possible".

So everyone knows what to do, but no-one's talking about how to do it. In fact, gathering backlinks is often time consuming, ineffective and infuriating.

Hands up anyone who has spent several hours emailing other bloggers asking them to take a second to look over your new [blog/site/product/service/article/video] and gotten almost no response. It happens all the time.

Learn how to make money from each and every blog post

Learn how to research, plan and create awesome blog content designed to amaze readers and turn them into avid fans, allowing you to make money online.

Genuine bloggers and businesses use high quality articles to build high page rankings in Google and generate plenty of valuable organic search traffic.

The problem is that the better the content, the more likely it is that others will duplicate, copy, or spin those articles and publish them on their own sites (without permission or attribution).

Most of the time this is not an issue because low quality, article spinning sites generally tend not to rank well in Google search results.

Blogging traffic tips. Pic by duncan c

A lot of popular blogging techniques have died out as Google's search algorithms (and the rise of social media) have changed the content landscape of the Internet.

For startups and small businesses utilizing blogging as part of their content marketing strategy, keeping tabs on industry best practices can be a bit like trying to herd cats.

As a result, unfortunately, many people find themselves swimming upstream as their content fails to capture high rankings in search results, generates little to no buzz, and generally offers little to no return on investment (ROI).

Start blogging

Blogging works! It doesn't matter if you are a college student thinking about making extra pocket money, or a entrepreneur looking to promote your brand.

It also doesn't matter what topic you decide to write about, provided it is a relevant to your niche and something you are passionate about and interested in.

Starting a blog is exciting, but it is also a medium to long term commitment (if you want to derive any real benefit from it), but if you have the drive to succeed there's no better time to start.

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Google recently ruined our startup launch with a 'false positive' phishing warning that coincided perfectly with our launch announcement to 4500 existing customers.

The article I wrote about that hugely damaging mistake attracted the attention of John Mueller, who responded sympathetically and said he would 'let the team know' about the problem.

Good to his word, I noted a few hits from Mountain view, California on the affected site and at the article, and a few hours later the erroneous phishing message was removed.

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No blog traffic. Pic by stefanos papachristou

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If you're blogging regularly, using SEO, sharing content socially, sending out newsletters, marketing, and doing everything right without success, then I've

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Learn how to start a blog using WordPress by following this super easy step-by-step guide that covers both hosted and self-hosted blogs.

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