Anthony Flatt here,
Today I wanna talk about a “simple sales funnel”. And this is a funnel that I’ve used in the past to sell things online. Mainly digital media, digital products, training programs and so forth. But this is a very simple sales funnel.
It’s being used a lot, it’s very effective, and it’s a good place to start. Especially if you’ve not sold things online, especially digital media. I just wanted to kinda go over this so you would have at least one sales funnel in your pocket. That you can utilize, that is guaranteed to work if 1: your product is high quality, 2: you’re providing an enormous amount of value, and 3: you care about the customers that you have.
Sales Funnel
So the simple sales funnel is basically, you create your training program. Let’s take one of my training programs. My offline webinar formula 2.0 product, it’s 22 videos, it’s a 94-page eBook, it’s 22 audios. So in order to sell that product, I created the training program. And I created the training program quite simply by getting frustrated one day about not creating a program.
I came to my office early one morning, sat down and just started to record my entire webinar formula. For example, what I’d use to do corporate webinars. What I’d use to get my customers on webinars for high ticket sales, and I went through the whole process.
I just basically recorded it then went back and listened to the recording. As I was listening to it, I typed out some bullet points in a PowerPoint presentation. That would go with that audio. Between the audio and the PowerPoint presentations, that was my video.
I was able to just record that into Camtasia and that became my video product. I then took that and had the audio, I was able to pull the audio back out. So I had the videos and the audio. And I was able to have it transcribed and then I edited the book into an eBook.
When you’re talking, obviously, you say things in one way. And when you’re writing, you would say things in a different way. So I obviously had to edit my audios for context to be able to make it better reading material.
Getting a hosting service
I ended up with a 94-page eBook, digital book, 22 videos, and then 22 audios. I then created a membership site, so I basically went to namecheap.com and got a domain name, and got a web hosting service from PowWeb.com.
You can get a hosting service from whoever you want, PowWeb.com has been pretty good to me, haven’t had a lot of problems. I’ve had some challenges here and there. But they’ve been very good with their online support and online chat, pretty much any time of day. You can get on there and they usually get back to you quickly. And fix any challenges or issues that you have.
I have had some self-inflicted issues and issues that they’ve caused. But overall I would say that I’ve had some experience with other web hosting and PowWeb.com has been a lot better. So I use PowWeb, got my domain name from Namecheap, used PowWeb, then I used a WordPress, I installed WordPress right from PowWeb, they have an installer. It allows you to install WordPress directly, then I went out and bought OptimizePress from optimizepress.com.
It’s a theme, it’s a customer management template and it just makes things really easy. It’s got built-in sales pages, built-in opt-in pages, built-in membership pages, and then I went and also got a plugin called wishlist.com that I use to manage the membership side of things.
Now both OptimizePress and wishlist.com have lots of training videos and capabilities available to watch. That’s what I did, I watched those and what I couldn’t learn from their training videos. I then went to Youtube or Googled their products. There are lots of other training videos out there so you can easily figure out how other companies set up their products.
And if you can’t figure it out, you can go to Upwork.com and hire somebody to set it up for you. It’s actually not that difficult although it takes some time. You can hire somebody to do it for you as well. I then went and I put my products on there. And initially I put my videos on my webserver, my PowWeb hosting service. And I was paying 20 dollars a month for web hosting, 240 dollars a year or something like that.
I supposedly had unlimited bandwidth with unlimited disc space and all that. Well, as soon as I launched my product I found out that all of the downloads that I was getting bogged down their servers. So they shut down my traffic and sent me a nasty email telling me I was using too much bandwidth.
I then got with them and said, “Look, I’ve got unlimited bandwidth, I’ve got unlimited storage and all that,” They basically explained to me that yes, it is unlimited. But I don’t have unlimited throughput and you basically can’t use them as a content network. So I had to go out to Amazon S3 or some other content network.
I went to Amazon S3, really easy, very inexpensive. You can set it up, you host all your files there. And then you just put the URL’s into your website where your files need to be and it will download them from there.
So you get your membership site and throughout the process, you can write yourselves letters, they’ve got templates for all of that. You can research on YouTube on how to write a sales letter, you can search a bunch.
I wouldn’t go out and buy a whole bunch of programs on how to write sales letters. Ultimately, if you wanna write a good sales letter, find three good sales letters, copy them, put them into a document and then print them out. Then start cutting and pasting the pieces and parts from the three that you like. When you’ve got something that looks reasonable, go back through it and read it to yourself, then change it into your own words.
So if they said something that you thought was really cool, read it back to yourself and think: “Okay, well how could I say something very similar to that?” And then keep the structure the same. Marketers have spent a lot of time and a lot of money writing their sales copy. If you’ve got a couple of people that are successful with their sales copy, model their sales copy. It’s easier that way.
You might not be as successful as they were. But I guarantee you if you’ve never written a sales copy before. Modeling their sales copy would be a thousand times better than you writing something from scratch.
I’ve done that, I wrote from scratch and the first few things I wrote, I did all the wrong things. I got no sales, I had to tweak it and then re-tweak it, then I started modeling other successful products. I really started to see some success. And I found some things that were very common about what they did each and every time. So definitely model somebody else, not copy, remodel.
So, you have this product. You have it on your website, now you gotta figure out how you’re going to drive customers to it. And you can do a couple of different things. You can drive the traffic through Facebook just by having it on your personal Facebook page. Or you can create a product page for your product. But then you’ve gotta drive traffic to your Facebook page. In order to be able to drive traffic to your website.
What you can do also, and what I’ve been doing a lot of lately, is you can create something called a custom audience on Facebook. If you have an email list or a phone number list, a contact list of potential buyers for your product, you could actually load that up into Facebook. Then create a custom audience and pay Facebook an advertising fee, to have them basically show one of your posts to your customers if they have a Facebook page.
So if their email address or their phone number matches a user on Facebook. You can actually send your ad to that person.
That’s pretty cool because if you’ve got some folks, say you’ve got some folks on an email list. Maybe you sold a product a while ago and then you didn’t really follow up with the people and you got several hundred names on a list.
But you haven’t talked to them in a couple of years. I haven’t sent them an email in a couple of years. Well rather than sending them a cold email. You could load them up on Facebook as a custom audience and be able to send them an ad. It’s also a little less intrusive.
They’re gonna get an ad on the right-hand side of their Facebook page. And a lot of those folks are gonna, you know, they can click. Especially if they were interested in your type of products in the past. That would be a way to do that.
And if you have a really large list, it will work even better. Because there’s only gonna be a certain percentage of the folks. That is on that list that has a Facebook page. Or have a Facebook page under that email or under that name. So that’s one way to advertise. The other way to advertise is to buy solo ads.
You go out and buy these ads from somebody who has a large list. And they send an email out to their list on your behalf. Basically, telling people to go to your sales page or squeeze page. A lot of times the solo ad guys want you to give people something for free. So you basically send them to a squeeze page where you give them a free report or a free video. Or even a free ‘plus shipping’ offer or some other type of bribe. You want them to give you their email address and get on your list. Then you can take them to the next sales page and then your overall sales funnel.
You can also do a lot of other things as far as being able to drive traffic. Go to ClickBank and get affiliates. You can go to JBZoo, you can go to the Warrior Forum and advertise it there under their WSO’s. There’s a lot of different market places where you can go out and promote your products. Really just depends on what it is you’re selling and how you want to sell it.
If you think you’re gonna create a page on the internet today and just gonna post it out there. And then people are gonna find you, it’s not gonna happen. Then if you bought a book on SEO or you downloaded a program on SEO. And you think you’re gonna become the next search engine king. And you’re gonna beat Google’s algorithm, you know that’s probably not gonna happen either.
I don’t like betting my business on a short-term trick, so I’m not a big SEO guy. I think Google knows exactly what they wanna do. They want advertisers paying a lot of money for the amount of advertising that they get. Every time an internet marketer, digital media marketer or even corporate marketer figures out the algorithm. Google’s gonna change it again to make it more difficult. They don’t want somebody paying a few thousand dollars to make a couple of million dollars in sales.
They want you paying a larger percentage, they want you paying more money. So every time they figure out that somebody’s gaining the system. They’re gonna go change the algorithm to make it more difficult.
So I’m not a big SEO fan, I would rather drive natural traffic. I’d rather buy solo ads, go to Facebook, create a YouTube channel. And create some YouTube videos to drive some traffic back to my website from the YouTube channel. Find somebody else that has an email list similar to you that you can trade or partner with. There’s a lot of different ways you can drive traffic that offers.
But the simple funnel is, you’ve got an eBook, you’ve got a video. You offer the eBook for some reasonable fee. A lot of people are doing 7 dollar eBooks, which seems to be a good number. Then when somebody buys the eBook, your up-sell is you offer them the video series. And depending on the quality of the content, that can be a 17 dollar one-time fee. That can then be a 27 dollar fee, 47 dollars. If your content’s extremely valuable and extremely detailed, it can be a 97 dollar.
I like training programs personally, that have a 7 dollar front in and then a 17 to 27 dollar up-sell. And then if they don’t want the videos. You can always offer them a down-sell, being able to buy the audio. So maybe you do 7 dollars for the eBook, 27 dollars for the video program. And maybe 17 dollars for the audios if they don’t choose to buy the video program.
You can deliver this in a lot of different ways. I prefer to deliver it on the membership site using WishList Member because I can control the content. Then I can have them log in to the membership site and with them being on the membership site. I also get the opportunity to then sell them more stuff as they’re on there already. Cause I own the membership site.
I can put whatever banners I want on there, I can add whatever pop-ups I want, I can put things on the videos, I can put offers in the download areas. There’s a lot of control I can have over the membership system, and if for some reason a member steals my product I can always turn off their access and they no longer have access to my product. Simple as that.
It doesn’t stop them from having stolen it and went out and distributed it and did whatever they’ve done with it, but it would keep them from getting anything new that you would be putting up there in the future.
So there’s a certain amount of control versus just putting your product on a free page for a download or a download page. So simple sales funnel, EBook, video up-sell, audio down-sell, do it from a membership site, simple and we’ll talk about more funnels next time.
