Making Funnels Will Lure in Leads and Signups?

Your question: making funnels will lure in leads and signups? I want leads and signups! So, will you show me how to do this?

Good. You have prepared your blog or product, or program, and your responder series ready. Now - to bring in the visitors or potential leads, (also known as customers, clients or subscribers). What you need next is: get into making funnels. (Also known as ‘lead capture pages’)

Funnel is the word for the whole process, from luring strangers to sign up for your mailing list, AND to get to see your special offer. Which might be your biggest goal, but wisdom says it is better to offer them a freebie first, and a chance to get to know you. If they are attracted to you, and get a sense that you are trustworthy, then you can lead them on to your best-paying product or program.

This is why this is compared to a funnel. A funnel is wide at the top and narrow at the bottom. To get them into your narrow-neck bottle, right?

Funnel Sections

1. Wide: place an ad on Facebook offering a tip sheet for better marketing on- say, Facebook. Those who are interested will click the link in the ad. (See? that sifts some people out).

2. Less Wide: These arrive on your funnel page where you promise them this helpful freebie, related to the niche to which you are screening them, if they give you their name and email. Now you have a way to connect with them by the autoresponder and send them more emails so they get to know, like and trust you!

3. On the freebie sheet you will include your URL where they can get more, or do more, If they like that. Maybe you want them to sign up to become a member of MLSP (for which you get a commission!). Maybe buy a product that more narrowly brings them into your niche. (This could be priced, say $19.99 to $39.99).

4. Still More Narrow: on the Thank You page - where you can provide the download link, (or promise it by email) you can also present another link - probably for a product for sale - more focused on the demographic you are trying to reach.

5. Most Narrow: if they buy your product, they end up on the most narrow part of your funnel, and you can, for instance, invite them to phone you so you can show them how they can make good money too - the way you are!

Your funnel can be as simple as just one or two layers, or they can have 4, 5, or 6 layers, (each layer taking another webpage), always tighter focused. So if someone stays with you all the way through, you KNOW you have your ideal LEAD!

Don’t hesitate to make a new funnel for each program or product. Hey, even several, coming from a different slant, or appealing to a different demographic in each funnel.

Do you see the beauty of making funnels? They automate so much of your business, so that the funnels take subscriptions, sell products, and steer them to the program you want them to sign up to become your downline. Once you have your funnel or funnels in place, you can go spend the day with the family, and just check your STATs at the end of the day!

(Wow! Congratulations! So many new subscribers, and so many sales!)

Remember though, not everyone who comes to the first level of the funnel will stay to the last narrow level. That’s why it is called a funnel. (Sieve should be in the name too, don’t you think?)

Making Funnels, Technically

Software for making Funnels is included in your membership in some systems.

TrafficWave gives you the script for your sign up form, and you can use their default (very plain) lead/funnel page where the form is embedded, or you can copy the script and insert it into a webpage you design.

MLSP has a very unique method that allows you to create very professional, smart funnels that will feed the resulting subscriptions into your Autoresponder, (if you use the ones they recommend), and enter their info into your CRM (Customer Resource Manager), you will have everything in one place.

There is just one drawback that I can see; if you ever decide to leave MLSP you lose all those records of your contacts and customers and subscribers. That worried me a bit, so I decided to only use that for marketing that I do specifically for MLSP, and to do all my other businesses through TrafficWave, but also to be making funnels on my own as much as possible. (It’s the same principle as the line of thinking that says, I’d rather buy my house than rent one).

There are other places where you can pay for the service of funnels or or also called ‘lead capture’ pages. The first two that come to mind are Clickbank and LeadPages.

Actually… I just paused to go see how many options there are out there. Whew! Oodles of them! I checked a few out and discovered that you can set up simple one-response autoresponders in gmail (you look for Canned Responses in your settings). But that does not allow you to have a form on a capture page, nor send a series, nor send broadcasts later.

I see that WordPress has a plugin for sending out newsletters. That gives you the broadcast feature but no autoresponder. I can see where that would be useful for small groups of followers to your blog. But mainly only to notify them of you last post.

For that matter, your cPanel in a regular domain-name website, allows you to set up a series of small autoresponders too, but no capture page, or broadcast features.

There are dozens of sites out there that offer you free, or one-time free trial capture or lead pages. and I watched a couple being created on Youtube. My, but they are cheap/cheesy looking! Maybe I’m a bit fussy, but I like to take time to give mine a bit of my personality and a more professional look.

My conclusion is that I still like a service like Trafficwave best, which gives me all these features, and at a decent price.

Oh, and I make a point of writing everything out on my computer in plain text files first. So that if anything should happen to my Trafficwave account, I can rebuild my autoresponder series again. Somewhere else, if I need to. Call me prudent and super-cautious, but I like to keep my business safe.

So you can try out the free stuff, or pay others to create these and host them for you, but then you should plan to stay loyal to those sites. My better wisdom suggests it is smarter to learn this skill and then later, if I have time to do this, I can offer to create the funnels for others – and naturally, charge them. (Hey, another stream of income, eh?)

At this point I’m going to stay cautious about making any promises to offer such a service, because I have a feeling the rest of this year is going to be tremendously busy for me. I’ll let you know if I can offer such services.

It’s the people on my eAction mailing list that are going to be the first to hear any hint that I’m offering a service of making funnels. Or any other business service. Just so you know.