Marketers are constantly using the concept of a funnel when talking about conversions, but even though you may have heard about a sales funnel, it may not be quite clear how you can use it to grow your own business or blog.
In this article, we’re going to take a look at how you can implement the best version of a sales funnel in your blog-based business in order to increase your online sales and revenue.
We’ll discuss the three main ways of growing your business, the role that each of them plays in the sales funnel, as well as how you can build those three business growth strategies into your own blog funnel.
How The Sales Funnel Relates To Your Blog
The funnel that you’re going to set up is going to be integrated with your blog in a major way. This is something that isn’t done by the majority of marketers who own online businesses and blogs.
I see many people online who run paid traffic directly to their sales pages, but that’s not the type of business model that we’re about here.
What we’re interested in is a blog-centric business, and the funnel we’re going to set up is specifically designed to be applied to a blogging business.
Without further ado, let’s take a look at a broad overview of the blog funnel.
Before starting your online business, it’s vital to arrive at a product/market fit because without that, you’ll have a really hard time convincing people to purchase your products.
The product/market fit is simply the underlying foundation that supports all the other things you’ll be doing in your business. This entire blog funnel that we’re discussing here will only work if you have a good fit.
It doesn’t matter how well you develop your funnel if your product/market fit isn’t a good one, then your funnel simply won’t convert well at all.
When all is said and done, it comes down to being able to offer products to a hungry market who will willingly pay for them (that should go without saying, but I thought I’d mention it anyway).
OK!
So, moving on, let’s just assume that you’ve taken care of that part, and get to the actual funnel and the ways in which to use it to grow your business.
3 Effective Ways of Increasing Your Blog Profits Exponentially
- Grow the number of customers you have
- Get your current customers to make more frequent purchases
- Increase the average transaction size of each customer
These are the three basic means of growing your business: Get more customers, make them buy more frequently, and make them buy higher ticket stuff from you.
How To Build These Strategies Into Your Funnel
A funnel that is fully developed will have all three strategies in play, and you should be actively thinking about how to do each of these things better in your own business.
Most marketers make the mistake of focusing only on the first part – finding new leads and getting more customers.
They forget about the other two strategies and spend all of their time trying to convince cold leads to buy their products or services.
This presents a whole lot more work for them and isn’t nearly as effective as getting people who have already made a purchase from them to buy again and to buy things that cost more.
The only way that you’ll be able to grow your business is if you improve each of the three areas.
What you need to do is to come up with a series of offers or products that fulfill each of those strategies, and then put those in a sort of graduated series.
For instance, say you’ve got an offer for about a thousand dollars (whatever it might be).
The odds of you getting someone who’s hearing about you for the first time to part with a grand for your product are pretty low.
That’s why a graduated series of offers is necessary here.
People will likely be willing to buy a cheap product from you in the beginning, just to try you out and get a feel to see if you’re the right fit, and then if it pans out, they’ll probably go for something that’s priced toward the higher end of the spectrum.
What you need to do is to map your products according to the result or outcome that your customers seek, as well as the barriers that they will face in the process of trying to achieve their goal. When you think of it that way, it becomes easy to outline your offers and place them in a logical sequence which also helps to build and strengthen your relationship with them.
So, what you’re actually doing is putting together a clear progression with your product line that’s going to not only deliver the outcome that your customers are seeking but also effectively work to accomplish the three strategies for growing your business:
- Convert more leads into new customers
- Turn more customers into repeat customers
- Increase the average value of customer transactions
The simplest way to do this in your funnel is to have a low-end product, followed by a middle-end, and then a high-end product (If you’re noticing some repetition, it’s because repetition is the mother of all learning, and I really want you to get this…).
The Key Roles Of Each Stage Of The Sales Funnel
Time to explain exactly how this works!
Typically, you first present people with your low-end offer because these people are going to be brand new to you, and they’re not going to be willing to make a big commitment yet, money-wise.
They neither like nor trust you.
However, there are some proven ways of getting around that such as getting them to attend your webinar. If they get on to one with you and listen to you for an hour, then you’ve probably built up enough of a relationship with them to be able to convince them to buy a high-end product from you.
If they stayed on that webinar for that long it means that they believe you’re offering value, so you’ll have a much easier time getting them to commit to a higher priced product.
Webinars are great ways of kicking new leads further along into the funnel than you would have been able to do otherwise.
But, outside of such a situation where you’ve got high levels of engagement, that person is going to be a brand new lead that may have just read one of your blog posts, and that kind of person is not likely to purchase something pricey from you.
So make sure that your front-facing products are low-end offers that feel like no-brainers to your prospects and entice them to take action.
The entire goal of a front-end offer is to fulfill the first strategy for growing your business which is increasing your customers.
Presenting an offer priced between, say, $1-$10 to qualified leads will allow you to get more customers since price won’t be an issue, and it significantly lowers the entry barrier for them from free subscriber to actual paying customer.
The front end offer is not about making money – It’s only about increasing your customer base.
If you make any money on it, great!
But that shouldn’t be your main focus. You should only be thinking about changing that relationship status and moving it up to your next offer.
Get people to experience what being a customer of yours is like so that when you present them with the following offer, they’re more willing to pull out their credit cards.
Stage 2: Increasing The Number Of Transactions Per Customer
The ‘middle’ offer, more commonly known as the ‘core’ offer is the next level in the sales funnel.
Membership sites are a great example of a middle-end product, which is also great because it’s a recurring billing model. For those in the content business, this type of model lends itself to a premium- delivery level beautifully through a membership site.
Membership sites also accomplish the second strategy for growing your business, which is increasing the frequency of purchases from your customers. If the people are renewing their membership every month, it basically means that they are buying from you over and over again every single month.
Each time a membership is renewed, it’s a new transaction, and that’s why membership sites are a great way of implementing the second strategy for growing your revenue and sales.
If you don’t run a membership site, then don’t worry. It just means that you’re going to have to come up with a more expensive product than your initial offer.
This can be your own product or an affiliate offer – either one is perfectly fine. I just happen to be a fan of creating a product of your own and offering that to your audience, but affiliate products work just as well.
Stage 3: High-End Offers
Now we move on to the higher end. If you want a fully developed business, then you need to be able to offer high-end products or services to those of your customers who want them.
For example, if you have a membership site and you charge $20 per month, then you might want to make options available for anyone who is willing to pay for the next level (and there are a lot more people who’ll want that than you’d think).
Provide them with high-end products and services such as a Gold-level membership, or you could offer one-on-one coaching or something even more higher end.
But don’t sweat it if you don’t have those things in place right now.
Simply take the time to jot down a few ideas on what those things can be and do a spot of brainstorming to come up with the one that makes the most sense for your business and your customers.
Apply The 80/20 Rule
I’m sure you’ve heard all about the 80/20 rule and how 80% of all your results come from just 20% of your efforts?
Well, this is a rule that applies to a great many things. It’s most often brought up in the area of productivity, and it certainly applies to this aspect of marketing and sales as well.
No matter what you’re doing, you’ll probably find that 80% of your customers won’t buy your product, while the majority of your sales will come from just 20% of your contacts.
Now comes the fun part:
Within that 20 % who buy your product, the same rule still applies – which means that out of that group of customers, you’ll have 80% who will be regular customers and 20% who will move on to the next level.
And within that 20% who upgrade, 20% will be willing to shell out for the ultimate high-end product that you offer!
Sounds simple enough, but when you apply it to the way you design your business, can you see how it’s possible to experience exponential growth with minimal effort as long as you’re targeting the right people with the right offers?
Understanding this concept could be the difference between a 3, 4, 5, 6, or 7-figure business for the majority of marketers. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that if you don’t understand it then you’re leaving a lot of money on the table.
If you don’t have a middle-end and a higher-end product, then it’s time you gave some serious thought to offering them on your site because the numbers here speak for themselves.
Whether you believe it or not right now, there are lots of people out there who would be willing to buy a high-end product from you if only you offered them one.
The Final Word
As you can see this is a very simple but effective way of increasing the revenue from your online business.
It all starts with your lead magnet, and once you’ve got them on your email list, then you can present your front end offer to them.
The most effective way of doing this is right on the ‘Thank You Page‘ that they see soon after opting in.
Just make sure that the offer is directly related to the lead magnet otherwise it won’t make much sense to your customers.
Once they’re through the door, it’s simply a matter of pushing them down the funnel using the various techniques outlined in this post – and that’s how money is made online!
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PlanetBizOp.com
->Steven
Updated: Originally published December 13th 2018
