The Online Sunshine Plan

What’s interesting is that this funnel isn’t actually a one-way, one-off scenario. Your highest-level  product or service is probably a monthly subscription, where you can help them more directly. Some people even build their funnel out of a series of subscriptions, with free at the open end and higher-priced toward the tip of that funnel. The top-end product is usually a velvet-rope, exclusive area.

The funnel analogy breaks down around here, though. It actually becomes more of an hour-glass, because with a subscription, you can offer a ton of community behind that velvet rope. Forums, interaction, the latest research, a private blog, a direct email or even chat access line to you personally – there really is no limit to what you can offer.

But even this hour-glass analogy falls short. Because you now may want to start paying your clients. Offer commissions for the people they bring to your site. They become your evangelists and affiliate salespeople. That is pretty self-explanatory, but it will probably require yet another mailing list, filled with routine newsletters on others success with bringing people into your funnel, plus tips and tricks to train them up with expert lessons.

Now, worse than that, some companies enable their clients to simply start over at the beginning again, starting with the free offerings and paying for all the offers again – all the way up. These types of funnels are educational in the extreme – and exist to provide the added insight which comes from repetitive study of basics.

Of course, not all funnels are the same. If you are selling refrigerators, you will have a completely different funnel to someone selling frozen food. Or ebooks on gardening. One of the most challenging ones is selling house repairs, which are expected to last for years.

Setting up your Ecommerce back-end

You are going to want to get the appropriate ecommerce back-end that fits your business. For anyone with virtual products, such as ebooks, this is fairly straightforward, you only have to set up a delivery system which allows for either direct email or downloads. In the “good olde days” of eBay (before they outlawed digital downloads) many people simply did their delivery using their Outlook email program.

As they lowered the boom (apparently they weren’t getting enough profit, plus there were more complaints from this area than others), these producers went to sending CD’s – which could be burned at home and were under an ounce – so would mail for a first class stamp. Which is extremely low overhead. So that’s another form of ecommerce back-end.

I was reminded today that not everyone who is on the Internet has a community that is Internet-driven. Many brick-and-mortar businesses have a very effective web presence because people can search locally for suppliers and services. And their “ecommerce”, so to speak, is done in person. For instance, I freelance at times for a Basement Finishing company. The marketing guru for them told me that having mail lists and putting up articles about dry basements and water seepage didn’t particularly get them leads. However, they did smart things such as finding where they did a job and then sending  a first class letter to people in that neighborhood telling them about the job they did for that neighbor and offering a free inspection and estimate.  This guy had the cost of his leads down to the penny. There use of the Internet was strictly for lead generation – not direct sales per se.

Others have used drop-shippers, which back end consists of logging in daily and sending orders over to their warehouse with the payments. The drop-shippers include their fee and ship using that sellers’ address. The seller could be operating out of his garage or basement or spare bedroom – but rolling up thousands per week in sales if they set it up right. A step up from this is to do your own shipping, but this requires additional organizing to keep expenses low and time required to a minimum.

Affiliate sales are similar, where you simply send the potential customer over to their sales page and if the sale concludes, your affiliate account is automatically credited.

There are also crossovers. For instance, I use Lulu to print my books on demand. Because I can’t get real analytics about how my bookstore is doing or what my traffic is, what they look at, etc. – I treat them as an affiliate. Do all the pre-sell on my site and then send them over to Lulu for a printed version. I’m able to sell the download via Lulu, but also can sell that download myself – with some ecommerce script running on my own server, which gives them an immediate and secure download link. CafePress also publishes one of my books – but they can be used as a drop-shipper, printing and sending the book (as well as T-shirts, buttons, clocks, mugs, calendars) directly to who ever I specify. Other drop-ship companies along this line include Kunaki, which handles CD’s and DVD’s on a flat-rate basis. Start with a digital product and produce real-world output on demand.

If you do require some sort of ecommerce back-end, I suggest you keep this separate from your promotional blog. First, because these scripts have additional load requirements and can slow down your other site. Second, as you can get distinct analytics just for that ecommerce site and see whether people are looking around before they buy or if there are any problems you should fix. Having all this on a single site might take the whole thing down at once – or your host can have other problems, etc.

Like the old phrase, this version credited to Louis LaMour, “Plan your work, work your plan, and always carry a spare.”

Affiliates – get a volunteer sales force

One item of affiliates I am enamored with, and this is mainly for digital downloads, is the ability to invite others to sell for you. I am not keen on selling others’ stuff myself. But many people I have followed and studied make a nice living at this. And there are tomes written just on how to most effectively pull this off.

When you have a digital version of a book or other material, you can actually set this up to be sold via Clickbank quite easily. You actually only need an account and two separate pages (sales page and thank you page.) It’s that easy. Then, if you have a good product and give a good commission, you will have people starting to push your product like mad on their own lines.

The approach to this is to give the maximum commission (which right now is 75%) and then tie this into your instant download ecommerce script. Clickbank does the transaction as far as paying the affiliate and you get sales you wouldn’t have had otherwise. Most of this runs on a semi-automatic basis, so it’s worth checking into. As well, you still get that buyers email address and so can put them into your autoresponder (with their permission) and groom them into a loyal client.