Creating Your Marketing Funnel: The Master Key to Monetizing Any Website
Published December 11, 2009
Promoting a website and making it profitable is the one thing which most internet business owners struggle with more than anything. In fact, this is the reason why the majority of online businesses fail within the first few months in spite of the owner having spent hundreds or even thousands of dollars on web design and product creation. However, you can easily avoid being a part of this statistic as long as you have a great plan for monetizing your site and the persistence to follow through with it. The following information will show you how to build a solid and dependable marketing “funnel” which you can use to make your business prosperous and successful.
What is a Marketing Funnel
A marketing funnel is an incremental process which is designed to move interested prospects through a series of steps in order to turn them into paying customers and eventually loyal patrons of your business. In order for a marketing funnel to be successful, it must effectively build your brand and help you to establish trust with your customers. This is best accomplished through a strategic process which allows your prospects to become customers at a pace that they are comfortable with. At the same time, your marketing funnel must be designed to maximize every possible opportunity to market a product or service to your customer.
Your Marketing Funnel: A Blueprint for Success
Step One: Collect a Lead
One of the biggest mistakes that internet markers make is expecting a sale on the first visit. However, the ultra successful internet marketers such as Ali Brown, Mitch Meyerson and Frank Rumbauskas all claim that building a strong relationship with your list of customers is where the gold is. This means that the first step of your marketing funnel should always be to collect customer contact information such as their name and email. This is done by offering them something of value in return for their information such as a free ebook, a membership to your site or a free report to download.
Step Two: Viral Lead Collection
Viral marketing is another one of the secret weapons of the most successful internet marketers, and one which you need to use whenever you have the opportunity. Viral marketing is the internet equivalent of word to mouth marketing and is how sites like Myspace, Facebook, Twitter, Delicious and Stumbleupon got started. The best time to ask a customer for a referral is when they have just become a customer, whether they are a paying customer or new list member. Therefore, your second step should be to offer your customer another free gift in exchange for sending their friends a referral email to sign up for your list.
Step Three: Your Sales Offer
Most of your customers are not going to buy right away and that’s the reason why it’s important to get their contact information so that you can continue to build value until they are ready to buy. However, you will get some customers who are ready to buy on the first visit and you don’t want to miss out on the opportunity to make them an offer. So your third step in your marketing funnel is to lead them directly to your sales page where you have a strong sales letter that you are consistently testing and optimizing and a strong offer which compels them to buy right now.
Step Four: The Upsell
Marketing research continuously reveals that about one third of customers who make a purchase are going to agree to an upsell of about 30% of the original product price.Therefore, your third step should be to make a one-time upsell offer to your new customer before you take them to your checkout page. This is why it is very important to have an ecommerce application and merchant account which makes it easy for customers to make a purchase and to add to their purchase. In addition to the upsell, it is also important to have a counter offer which you can make to the customers who decide to leave your sales page without buying. This can be done in the form of a popup which comes as soon as the customer hits the back button on their browser and should offer them an “abridged” version of your product at a fraction of the original price.
Step Five: Forum Membership
Forums and social networking sites are where all of the action is on the internet and so building one for your customers can bring you a TON of exposure and customer loyalty. However, your chances of getting someone to sign up for a forum after their purchase are much slimmer than the chances of them signing up during their checkout process. Therefore, once your customer has checked out, send them immediately to a page where they can sign up for your forum and even invite their friends in exchange for a few more free items. While you might end up giving away a lot of products this way, the long term rewards will be well worth the initial sacrifice.
Step Six: Follow up and Back End Sales
Since your relationship with your customer list is where the gold is, you’ll need to make sure that you have a strategic method for building that relationship and continuing to make offers to your customers. This is why it is a good idea to have an email service like Constant Contact or A Weber which allows you split your list into segments so that you can mail your customers based on what products they have already bought from you. Otherwise you might end up with a lot of them opting out of your list because they keep getting offers which they have already said yes to and which may even be at a discounted price from what they originally paid. Of course, you should also make sure that you are periodically sending out offers for free gifts in exchange for additional customer referrals.
Conclusion
This is just a basic marketing funnel which you can use to monetize your website and which in no way exhausts the possibilities in regard to viral marketing, upselling and conversion testing. Just begin to put these steps into practice and remember to keep testing and refining your marketing process.
Additional Resources for Refining Your Marketing Strategy
A community of internet marketers who discuss methods of marketing, testing and search engine optimization.
More Information About Upselling Offers
More Information About Upselling Offers
To gain access to the most up-to-date SEO strategies, fill out the form below to sign up for our newsletter. This newsletter will help you know what Google's up to as well as how you can get your website ranking higher without raising any red flags.
{"http://www.seositecheckup.com/articles/52":{"data":[]}}
Read Related Articles About Online Marketing Tips
- How to Solve a High Bounce Rate Problem? Writing for Three Types of People
A high bounce rate is detrimental to any website. If you're suffering from a high bounce rate, read on to learn how to reduce the bounce rate and convert more visitors into buyers. - Build Relationships with Influencers in your Market, Build Influence in your Market
Good business is a combination of a few factors. You need to have the right mindset, determination, creativity?ability to think outside the box?and great marketing abilities to name just a few. But there?s one aspect of good business that?s rarely talked about. In fact, this aspect of business is so important, if you?re only going to get good at one skill, this should definitely be the one. - How to Put your Local Business at the Top of Page #1
When most people think of SEO, they think of online based businesses. But what happens when you do a search for a local business in your area? If you were looking for dog food in your area, you'd probably search "dog food (location)" into Google. When you do this, your search changes. - Looking for Passive Income? SEO Can Help
Passive income ? it's what virtually every aspiring online business owner dreams of. It?s the ability to go on vacation and still get a monthly paycheck. It?s the ability to come down with a disease and not have to worry about where your money?s going to come from. - Review Building 101
Thanks to how connected the internet is now, getting reviews is absolutely crucial to the success of your business. - How to Boost SEO By Making Your Site More Engaging
When the internet was first created, most websites were static pages with written content and a few graphics. However, this quickly changes as interactive features become more available, and now these features are all over the internet. Instead of having to be spectators, web users can now enjoy an interactive online experience, and that?s exactly what users are looking for. - 5 Reverse Engineering Strategies Which Can Help You Benefit from Your Competition's Successes
No matter what your niche is, there are certainly a few competitors' websites which are already producing favorable results in your niche. So as you're designing and optimizing your website, why not analyze what these competitors are doing in order to achieve their results so that you can use a similar approach to insure YOUR success in the online marketplace? You've probably heard the saying: "There's no reason to reinvent the wheel," and this saying certainly applies when it comes to developing your strategy for marketing your company website. - Three Strategies for Running a More Effective Online Business
Most online marketers try to increase their profits only by increasing their website traffic or by increasing their conversion rates. However, there are other factors which can help you to increase your profits without having to attract more traffic or increase conversions. - Five Easy Ways to Monetize Your Website Traffic
As you are reading this article, you might have a wealth of untapped opportunities to monetize your website, without even increasing the amount of traffic which you already have going to it. Many online business owners are looking for ways to bring more traffic to their site so that they can increase your earnings. - How to Harvest Visitor Feedback for Optimizing Your Website
Updates in the Google algorithm continue to confirm the importance of user behaviors in determining the value of websites. Google has reported on several occasions that they?ll be using human review processes to determine the value of websites and they?ve already been doing so for determining quality scores in PPC marketing. - What is the Most Important Factor in Making Conversions Online?
Learn the key principles to building a marketing strategy for your site and how you can use them to boost profits for your business - Building an Effective Squeeze Page for Your Site
Find out what the most successful information marketers are saying about building an effective opt in page and building a list to promote your online business - Promoting Your Site in a Web 2.0 World
Learn about how you can capitalize upon social media tools to promote your website and enhance your traffic. - Creating an Unforgettable Brand: Favicons and Other Tools
No matter what niche you’re in, there are hundreds or even thousands of other sites in cyberspace which you’re competing with. What’s going to make your site stand out? - Using Glocalization to Expand the Influence of Your Business
The term “glocalization” is a term which comes from the combination of the words "globalization" and "localization.” Glocalization is when a company adapts the marketing of a product or service which is distributed on a global basis to fit a local consumer market. For example, - Why You Need a Dedicated Landing Page
Learn why effective landing pages are important, and how you can create one that is compelling, credible, and conversion-friendly. - 5 Fatal Errors of Online Marketing
Discover the most common errors that online marketers face and how you can avoid falling prey to them.
All Categories:
- Basic SEO (19 articles)
- On Page SEO (22 articles)
- Off Page SEO (13 articles)
- Social Media Marketing (12 articles)
- Seo Product Reviews (4 articles)
- SEO News (6 articles)
- SEO Content Creation (14 articles)
- SEO Programming Topics (14 articles)
- How to Avoid SEO Pitfalls (9 articles)
- SEO Outsourcing (6 articles)
- How to Get More Traffic (10 articles)
- Advanced SEO Strategies (2 articles)
