The Online Sunshine Plan

IV. Your Sales Funnel -

The term Sales Funnel is again one of those terms created by disconnected marketers who consider this a numbers game and not in terms of helping the community expand and evolve.

The idea is that you have a funnel which is wide at the top and narrow at the bottom. Consumers are dumped in at the top and gradually pay more and more to get to your high-priced items at the narrow bottom.

But, you can see, we don’t approach it in this fashion. Higher-priced doesn’t mean better value for these guys. And I’ve dropped off more  than one sales funnel when I found out that the next higher-priced item was just more of the same, and I wasn’t all too impressed with that.

To build viewers into loyal clients (far beyond the mere “conversion” of a single sale), you are going to be doing far more than just finding or creating a string of salable products. Each of these value-packages add to the other ones you already have provided. Each will, in turn, increase the survival and life-quality of any viewer or client.

You set the price not on how much you need to make per week, or how much time it took to build it, but on how much you want that person to value it and get the most out of it. Legend has it that the most second-most expensive book in the world ever created had only a single phrase in it. And the most expensive book had only a single word. Both were lost in the sacking of the Alexandria library.

(See the ebook in the companion CD for more about pricing and value.)

Lining up your chickens

It was pointed out to me recently that although you can tell what people are looking for, that doesn’t mean they are wanting to buy. And visitors don’t always want to be converted to clients right off the bat. Just you got the horse to the trough doesn’t make it thirsty enough drink.

Visitors/Viewers are in a pre-sold condition. And the best line-up of free tutorials on how to make your sites pre-sell that customer into a condition where they are going to take a peek at your sales funnel is covered over at SiteSell.com, also known as SiteBuiltIt!. These guys have been around a very long time and provide an excellent quality service for starting your first site. (They also have an affiliate program which has a very good training program to get you started promoting others’ stuff.)

While you can get the top rankings of Google rather easily, you have to have your site laid out so that it doesn’t crush sell that person right off the bat. What do you do when you open a magazine with four or five full-page ads at the front?  Sure, just turn right past them. If the pages were stuck together so that you had to read the ad first?  Sure, drop that mag in the next trash can you come to and cancel your subscription when you get the chance.

What should be on  your site?

Same thing with your site. Don’t hit them over the head with a heavy sales pitch right off the back. You have to provide valuable content for the bulk of the page and then a small link, almost out of site, which then can take them to a briefing page which will tell them the advantages of giving you their email so you can send them a specific set of lessons, or an interesting ebooks, white paper, report, or something else useful.

The bulk of your pages simply give value on top of value. The don’t sell, the pre-sell. They allow your visitor to think about becoming a client.

Now, this isn’t how Madison Avenue does it, nor how the bulk of Internet Marketing guru’s do it. And I’ll repeat here again that 97% of what is online about how to do Internet Marketing is bunk.

You want to create a site which looks exactly the way you’d like to be treated.

• It has the information you would be looking for and presented in a fashion that you would expect to find on a professionally-designed site.

• You don’t get a bunch of ads.

• You do get a lot of links (which are to other pages on the site, but also go off-site if they are really good.

• The page loads fast.

• It’s easy to find stuff.

• It asks your opinion.

• If offers valuable stuff for free, even without giving up your email address.

• You aren’t clobbered over the head to buy something right off the bat.

• You can verify what the author says and how that author knows so much about this area.

• It has links to profiles where you can verify the authors’ background.

See – it builds trust and present real value without asking anything in return. Sure, the options are their to buy something from them (exchange your valuable dollar, or euro or whatever) for their valuable information. But this isn’t the primo reason the site exists.

And that’s the key difference between social media “marketing” and conventional wisdom in this area. When you go to a site and the first thing you see is a block of advertizing, what you you think? Yup, “Now, where’s that back button?”  Because obviously, this place is only designed to get you to click on ads. They want you do go somewhere else.

Building away from Adsense heat maps

When you see a bunch of noisy ads all over the page, competing for your attention – what you do know?  This site is there to sell advertising space, not to give me good solutions to my problem.

So if you use the tools that these guys give you for the “hottest” places to put ads – and put your best content there – then people will instantly know that you are here to deliver value, not just sell ads so Google can stay in business. Check out their page on using heat maps to determine where ads should go.