blogging

Use a Sales Funnel to Blow Up Your Blogging and Internet Marketing Sales

By Christian

This is the second post in a series on how to power-monetize your blog, internet marketing or social networking. If you’d like to start from the beginning, you can visit the first post here.

Whether you operate an offline business and are using blogging, internet marketing and social networking as a way of expanding your reach and effectiveness, or whether your online presence is your primary activity, using a sales funnel is mandatory if you want to truly maximize your results. Yet, most people don’t even know what a sales funnel is! And what’s more…even those who have an idea of what a sales funnel is, don’t know how to use one effectively. So, here’s the rundown:

What is a Sales Funnel?

A sales funnel is a tool that guides you on how to optimize your sales. It’s something you come up with through the process of developing a good business plan for your site. This is something I’m going to be covering in depth in future posts, but for now let’s look at the funnel itself. It looks simple enough, no?

Now this graphic is just a representation of a sales funnel; you can make yours look however you prefer. The point is to have one. A sales funnel is the process you take your buyers through that leads to a sale. Simple concept wouldn’t you say? But how many of us neglect to implement on this concept? Answer a few questions to see where you stand:

Where do most of your buyers come from?
What pages do they land on most often?
Where do they go from there?
What steps are you taking to monetize each page of your site?
How are you providing maximum value to each buyer on every page of your site?
What stage in the buying process do you suppose is each of your visitors in, and what steps are you taking to guide them to a sale?

If you do not have immediate and simple answers to each of these questions, your sales funnel needs work. The good news is that by developing a well-designed sales funnel, you will be able to truly maximize sales on your site.

Obviously, you can tell by looking at my sales funnel (which I took from a real estate site I run), not everyone who visits my site signs up for what I offer. Imagine that! I expect you’re running on less than 100% conversion as well, and the trick is to really dig in and make sure you’re getting every conversion you can get.

The point of this post is not to go in depth on how to use a sales funnel. That is coming in future posts. I’m really going to dig in for this series and show you not only how to use a sales funnel but also how to maximize sales every step along the way. Make sure to bookmark this post and come back for the future posts as well!

For this post, I want to show you what a sales funnel is and illustrate how powerful it is.

The Power of a Sales Funnel

Buyers visit your site. Some of them bounce right off to another site. Some of them stick around for a minute. Some of them hang out for a while and read several things and then leave. Some of them actually sign up for what you’re offering. This is good stuff. It’s how you make money online! But the problem is that most people take a very scatterbrain approach to all this. The idea is that you put up some good content, drive traffic, offer a product or service for sale and hope for the best. I don’t really need to tell you that’s not a very good approach, do I? We need to do way better than that!

Deliberately designing a sales funnel forces you to think about the process a buyer needs to move through in order for you to make a sale. What process does YOUR buyer need to go through in order to buy from you? Have you thought about this?

Let’s use the sales funnel I pictured above as an example. As I mentioned, it’s from a real estate site I run. The goal is for me to get contact information from as many buyers on this site as possible. Perhaps your goal is to take orders for an ebook. Maybe you want to build a list of email subscribers. You have your own goals. My goal for this particular site is to build a list of buyers and their contact information.

Look at the Numbers…

Do the math and you’ll see I’m pulling a little over 17% conversion from this site. This doesn’t happen automatically! Many internet marketers shoot for 2%. They brag their faces off when they get 7-10%. This site is pulling 17%. I hope this serves as a testament to how powerful a sales funnel can be 🙂

But I don’t just have the total number of visitors and how many leads that came in, do I? There’s more. I have an intermediate step in the middle. I track how many people view the sign up form. Out of all the visitors to this particular site, I am successful at getting about 46% of them to the opt-in page, where they give me their contact information. Not all buyers fill out the form of course. In fact I lose most of them, but I do get an overall 17% conversion from this site.

It’s important to understand that 17% conversion is very rare in internet marketing, BUT it’s very achievable for you as well if you implement the same systems. Like I said, I cannot go into huge detail on the implementation of the sales funnel in this post. I will be doing that in future posts here. Please bookmark this page to return for the future articles as they go live. I will link up all the content here, so it’s very easy to find.

How to Make a Sales Funnel

Of course, this is a simple enough thing to do. Creating a sales funnel is merely a process of accessing your goal and then deciding how to best achieve it. Many people just want to “make money online”. Of course, you need more than that. You need a plan. A sales funnel is an essential part of that plan.

What is your main goal?
What things need to happen in order to turn your visitor into a buyer?
What steps can you take to ensure that every page on your site functions to convert a potential buyer from one step to the next?

Of course if your sales funnel is very simple, such as the one I’ve pictured as an example, there are really only a few steps. It doesn’t have to be complicated. It just needs to be something you’re mindful of when tweaking your site for maximum efficiency.

So You’ve Put Together a Sales Funnel. Now What?

Having a sales funnel is the first step. A defined and laid out step-by-step process you lead every buyer through that results in a sale. As you can see by the example I provided, it doesn’t need to be complicated. In fact, it can be very simple! But it’s essential to write it up as part of your plan and most people skip this.

Having a process in place, you now have the real work cut out for you: how to maximize results at each stop along the way to the sale!

In future posts, I will take you through each step of the sales funnel and how to maximize results each step of the way. Suffice to say for now, your sales funnel is the process you lead your buyers through in order to make a sale. It’s essential to understand where each of your buyers is within your sales funnel. If you know where they are, you can take them and guide them to a sale. Or you can use the scattershot approach, put up good content and hope for the best. I hope you’ll keep reading and learn to use your sales funnel for maximum success in your blogging and internet marketing 🙂

BTW…let me know if you have any questions!

Make sure to visit the next post in this series also…

Make Money Online by Selling More to Fewer People

Your “Internet” Business is Just as Much Offline as it is Online

By Christian

Be careful calling your business an “internet” business. I mean, the phrase “internet business” is by it’s very nature misleading. No business is actually done online. Think about it. You can easily argue that money changes hands. Products are obviously sold online, etc…so what the heck am I talking about? My point is simple: PEOPLE buy stuff, and people are in the real world. Your business is either a real world business, or it’s not a business at all. Most small online businesses concentrate primarily on nebulous concepts like “traffic”, “SEO”, “clickthroughs”, etc. This is a mistake.

Your blog, sales page…your social networking profiles, all the contacts you make…it all has a real world context. These are real people you’re interacting with, not avatars, not screen names. I honestly think we forget this. Look, you’re either in business, or you’re not. There is no “internet” business without real world business!

More than just Semantics

Of course, this could very easily get blown off as some type of semantics rant. But it’s an important point for one reason. It’s essential to think about the real people you’re doing business with. I see so much content out there about how to “convert traffic”, how to “increase CTR” and all this other BS. Yes, clicks make money. Ads generate revenue. But this blog is about one thing: running a real, substantive business from your blog, internet marketing and social networking. If you want to do this, you need to take it to the next level.

Yes, SEO is very important. Writing a good headline is important. The placement of your opt-in box is important. But the reason I’m writing Next Level Blogger is that I don’t see nearly enough attention given to the human element of this business. And this also is one of the huge reasons I feel competent and authoritative enough to be able to provide you with real value in this area…I come from direct sales. I understand that when you make a sale, it’s not just a “conversion”. It’s not just a stat. It’s a real person that you’ve affected.

Your Internet Business Deserves the Extra Attention

I understand many people in internet business may not want to bother themselves with this distinction. It’s cool. If you’re in that camp, I’m not writing for you. I named this blog “Next Level Blogger” for a very specific reason…this site is about taking things to the next level. If you’re cool pursuing the revenue you can generate from running a regular blog, scraping a few cents together here and there, you have every right to, and I make no qualms about it. We’re all in this business for our own reasons. That’s the way it’s supposed to be. I also understand that mentality. I mean, one of the immediate appeals of internet business is that you can interact with people without having to *actually* interact with them. It’s very convenient. The only downside is that it’s a very limiting way of doing business, and if you want to truly maximize your blogging, you need to maximize your interaction with the real people who read it.

This is what I mean when I say your business is as much offline as it is online. We can learn so much from offline business, yet we usually skip over all the lessons we could learn, because we think everything works differently online.

It’s true, there are things to learn, but at the end of the day you need to know how to sell things if you want to make real money online. And if you’re selling things, you’re selling them to real people…offline business has HUGE lessons to teach us.

Rookie Mistakes from Offline Business Owners

So many business owners in my network are in home based business. Many are Realtors. Many are consultants of various kinds. All of you guys are shrewd and talented. You can all, also, benefit massively from blogging and social networking. You all operate great businesses, but when you guys go online, you get uber-distracted by all the jargon and all of a sudden abandon everything you know about how to do good business. All of a sudden I’m talking with you about link building, image alt tags and all this kind of thing.

Don’t get me wrong, learning basic SEO stuff is a great idea. Crucial even. But don’t let it over run your business. There is a difference between running a successful blogging or social networking plan and being an SEO expert. If you want to get into the SEO business, do it. But if you want to run a successful business using blogging or social networking, you just need to learn enough to make things run smoothly. The rest of your focus needs to be on the human element. Don’t get distracted!

This is the Key to Lasting Success Online

If you want to take your efforts and really drive a home run, you’re going to have to get smart about what you do. If you want a real business, you’re going to have to run a real business, not just an “internet” business.

The point of this post is to make a simple point: your customers are real people, and thinking of them as such causes two things to happen.

It causes you to think about your business completely differently.
It enables you to truly unlock many of the profit centers that are not open to you when you only think of your business as an “internet” business.

In future posts, I’m going to outline ways you can use your “real world business” mentality to generate new systems of revenue that most small internet businesses completely ignore 🙂

For now, the simple point I want to get across is that while SEO, traffic, impressions, etc…all the ethereal concepts we tend to concentrate on DO have value, it is up to us to look past it all and focus on what really matters…the real world customers we’re interacting with and how we can best help them.

Harness the Ultimate Niche and Destroy Your Competition

By Christian

This post is about value. Creating value is powerful. It is the ultimate niche. It always works. Value defeats your competition every time.

The way you create wealth is by creating significant value for many other people. Whether that’s through creating jobs for others, providing hugely valuable content for others to learn from, selling valuable products that enhance the lives of many people…the net result is the same. Value leads the way to wealth.

As Zig Ziglar has said so many times, “You can have everything you want in life, if you can just help enough other people get what they want.” I’m an advocate of pursuing wealth over profit. It’s important to know the difference. This means pursuing value first and foremost in your business. When you do this, your niche will reveal itself automatically.

But there are roadblocks, aren’t there? When we actually go about the work of setting up a home based business, we run into on all-to-common situation. We see other people…those jerks…who are already doing what we want to do. This is what we refer to as “competition”. I know, it’s a highly technical word 🙂

Competition is a Reason to Pursue a Niche, Not a Reason to Avoid It

Know this: competition is a good thing. It is the foundation of value. It fortifies value and encourages us to create more and more of it for others. And wealth for ourselves and others in the process. If there were no competition, value would be very low. Without competition, there is no motivation to improve. So why do we look at competition so negatively?

So many would-be successful business owners will look at high competition as a reason to not enter a specific niche. To this I have a few questions:

What is your motivation for starting this business to begin with?
Are you focused on creating value for others or simply making sales?
Do you really believe there is an ideal niche out there, one that perfectly aligns all your talents, is fun and exciting, highly profitable and has no competition?

Let me respond to the last question first. The is no magical niche! Look, if you’re looking to start a home based business or want to take your existing business to the next level, you’re signing up for some hard work. To the others, let me say this: long term success in your business will come from creating value for others, and this may mean taking the long view from time to time.

Get Far Away from the “Make Money Fast” mentality…

So much home based business literature out there is focused on “making money fast”. Get over it! We all know get rich quick schemes are a bunch of crap. You can make great money, and you can achieve some fantastic goals, and the social media concepts I cover in this blog are awesome ways of making this a reality for you. But if you are requiring your business niche to be some instant miracle cure to all your cash flow woes, it’s time for a reality check.

You Can Prosper in ANY Niche…Go Make it Your Own

Look at my niche for example. Next Level Blogger is a blog about blogging. Do you know how many powerful blogs I’m up against in this niche? We’re talking Darren Rowse, John Chow, Michael Martine, David Risley, just to name a few. Now that’s competition! But why am I writing this blog? Why am I not running away with my tail between my legs? Because I know what I have to offer is distinctly different that these other writers. My focus is on sales training and business principles…and how to translate those skills directly to social media. I know there is significant demand for this content, because the success of these other blogs is obvious, and it’s equally obvious the content I’m going to be covering here is not covered in depth anywhere else. Now this does not speak to a fault of anyone’s existing blog. It just speak to how opportunity works, and it illustrates how niches work. This is important.

I know you all know how great, talented, good-looking and important I am, and of course I’m going to use every strength I can muster up to make this blog as successful as I can make it, but my point is that YOU have exceptional strengths, a unique story and huge value you can add to a niche somewhere as well. You need to develop that and tap into it.

Be Passionate…Success Comes from YOU, not Your Niche

I want to encourage you to pursue the niche you’re passionate about, and don’t spend so much time researching keywords and trying to find the perfect niche. The magic is never going to come from the niche. The magic is going to come from you. At the end of the day if you want to be successful, you’re going to have to be great at what you do, and you’re going to have to create a lot of value for others. If you want to chase the get rich quick gurus for a bit more, I won’t hold it against you. But one of two things is going to happen. You’ll either become disillusioned and decide you don’t have what it takes to be in business for yourself, or you’ll decide that if you want to do it, you’ve gotta do it for real. There are no shortcuts.

The Real Deal…this is How Niches Really Work

The more a niche develops, the more it opens up to new opportunities. First there were sites on how to make money online. That led to sites on how to make money blogging. Now there are sits on how to make money blogging in real estate…see where I’m going with this? What can you add? Maybe you can write a blog about investment real estate, or maybe you can focus on something even more tight…multifamily investment property in Orlando, FL. What’s up? That’s a blog that could dominate the Orlando Florida real market right there. Then someone else could come in and niche that out even further. They could focus on providing a particular kind of financing for that type of real estate, or they could come in and focus on a particular neighborhood…the opportunities are endless. See how it works? There is no end to it. The more niches there are, the more opportunity for NEW niches there will be.

Is it too late to start a blog or get into a niche market and make your mark? Are you kidding me? It’s the perfect time.

Don’t compare your business to anyone else’s. Do what you’re passionate about, and focus on creating value. It is the only constant. If you see competition, that’s a good thing. It means there’s a lot of demand. Your business will ultimately be as unique and valuable as you are. Get in touch with your market, and ask them what they want. Believe me, if you have a market…they will tell you! If your focus is value, not sales, not making money, your niche will take care of itself, and it will evolve along with you, with value leading the way.

One side note. My recommendation to do what you’re passionate about cannot be divorced from the rest of what I’m saying. Don’t take this all to mean that you can do whatever you want and expect to be successful. What I’m saying is that any niche that you want to tap into, can be tapped. You can develop it and own your own portion of it. You can take it to the next level. It’s probably going to be a lot of hard work, and you’re going to have to get good and produce awesome content. But you’ll love doing it, and you will be successful if you go all the way.

Blogging is a Business and Most Businesses Fail

By Christian

Failure is a part of life, and it’s surely a part of business. This really isn’t news, and it shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone. So what can we do about it?

The assumption I’m making here is that you want to succeed. And with that, I’m assuming that you want your blog or web pages to get adequate traffic to meet your goals. You want a sufficient number of people to convert into subscribers and paying customers. You want to travel the world with a margarita in your hand, hardly working a day in your life and living like a jet-setting lifestyle without a care in the world. With me so far? So how do you do it?

How to Succeed

The way you succeed in blogging, internet marketing and social networking is the same way you succeed in any other business. This is why I created Next Level Blogger to begin with. I want to get this point across to everyone in my network. Here’s the problem: there is a general mentality that comes with internet business that needs to be dismantled. Bloggers and internet marketers work at home in most cases. It’s not like you really need a corporate office or even any employees starting out. All you need is a functioning laptop and high speed internet. This is where the trouble starts. Given the low point of entry, internet business gives us some false impressions, and it’s essential we dispel these falsehoods once and for all. Here are a couple:

Internet business/home based business means “small”: this couldn’t be further from the truth. There are entire real estate firms operating entirely online, with no corporate offices. There are huge newspapers (the Christian Science Monitor was the first I believe, and there will be more and more) that are moving their entire publications online…and DISCONTINUING most of their hard copy newspapers. Internet business is HUGE business, not small business.
Working from home is easy: taken at face value, I bet most of us would be inclined to believe we don’t believe this. But look at the facts. The work-at-home industry is inundated with get rich quick schemes and frauds of one sort or another. At the end of the day, most people are looking for a quick fix. People want to make money fast. Want to know how I know this? I study keywords. I look to see what people are actually looking for, and “how to make money fast” is one of the top keyword strings in Google, consistently month after month.

Next Level Blogger is a business blog. I am creating products and services to sell, and I will certainly make sure you all know about them as they come out. That said, this is NOT the place to come for the quick fix. I come from direct sales. Door to door sales. Real estate. I learned how to sell in the real world. Face to face. I know what works, for real. I understand that web traffic doesn’t buy squat…PEOPLE buy stuff. Page views cannot be monetized in any meaningful way. If you want to make money consistently, hand over fist, online, at home, you need to run your business like a business. You need to know how to sell stuff. That’s what this blog is about.

How do you make money online? You have to adopt the habits and systems of others who are successful. This means hard work, consistency and creativity. If you happen to have the attitude that online business is easy, means quick money, can be fully automated or any such nonsense, you are setting yourself up for failure. My goal for Next Level Blogger is to fully destroy any myths surrounding how to make money online by showing in detail how to run your business like an actual business. It means more work, but it also means success. Predictable, money-in-the-bank success. Are we on the same page?

Why Most Fail

Most businesses fail. We know this. Most business blogs fail also, and failure to monetize is the reason. If you’re serious about taking your blog or other online marketing to the next level and ensuring success, it’s time to take your sales plan and make sure it’s up to snuff. This, interestingly enough, applies to Next Level Blogger as well. I’m up against the exact same standard. If I fail to provide meaningful value to you as a reader, and if I fail to monetize properly, this blog will fail. The principles are the same across the board. If you learn the basic sales and business principles I talk about here, I honestly believe it’s impossible for you to not see a dramatic improvement to your sales.

In upcoming articles I will be covering why to write a plan for your blog, how to identify your most profitable niche market and a lot more. If you have any specific topics you want covered, I always welcome input and will make every effort to make sure all questions are answered.

Thanks for reading my very first post on Next Level Blogger. I look forward to a lot of awesome conversation with you 🙂