Category: Sales Funnels

I bet that if you’re a blogger, YouTuber, podcaster, consultant, coach, local business owner or eCommerce store owner, you’ve been made to think that working towards launching new products and services are the way to go to make big sales, especially if you are only selling that particular product or service for a limited time. Although I do agree that launching something new and selling it for a specific timeframe can help to make you a lot of money fast, let’s be real – it can be tiring, especially if you do not have the capacity to keep on producing new products and services quickly with the help of a team and driving a lot of traffic for your launch! That is why in this article, I’m going to introduce you to ‘evergreen sales funnels’ and the secrets to using them to earn big money on autopilot.

What Are Evergreen Sales Funnels?

Evergreen sales funnels are used to help guide your potential customers towards deciding to purchase either a product or service from you that is available all year round.

The reason why evergreen sales funnels are great is because you can set-up these funnels, improve their performance over time and continue to make sales for the same products and services throughout the year.

You can use evergreen sales funnels to steadily increase your income on autopilot while you can concentrate on building your business, doing what you love and growing your audience.

Why Are Evergreen Sales Funnels So Important In Business?

To continue growing your business, you need cashflow. With the existence of your evergreen sales funnels, you’ll be able to continue making money from the funnels that you created earlier. And the more evergreen funnels you create and optimize, the more income you will get – which can be channelled towards your business.

With evergreen sales funnels, you’ll also be able to reach out to your ideal customer and introduce specific products and services that will benefit him or her at a time when that person needs them the most. This increases the likelihood of that person taking the plunge to purchase from you!

Imagine if you have an ideal customer who is eager to buy from you right now but is asked to wait for another month or three months or even a year before you let that person buy from you…

Wouldn’t that person lose interest and go to your competitors who are offering a similar type of product or service to solve his or her challenge?

Wouldn’t that potential customer feel frustrated when you refuse to let him or her make that purchase and move on to buying from somebody else?

I bet that the answer would be – ‘Yes’. I’ve been in that customer’s shoes before and I know exactly what it feels like being frustrated for not being able to buy a particular thing that I desperately want!

So yes – ‘evergreen sales funnels’ are great! Unlike what many ‘gurus’ might say…I feel that they are better than launch funnels that only sells products or services for a particular timeframe – unless you’re already a very popular blogger, YouTuber, podcaster, local business owner or eCommerce owner that have lots of followers just waiting to buy from you without hesitation…Or someone who has a lot of money to spend on advertisements in a short period of time…

With evergreen sales funnels, you’ll get to continue earning more and more without:-
• Tireless working towards creating and launching new products and services;
• Waking up in the wee hours of the morning or staying up late at night to conduct live webinars for your product or service launch;
• Worrying about not driving enough traffic to buy from you during your launch period (because when your cart closes you won’t be able to make any more sales from that product or service – remember?)

How Can Evergreen Sales Funnels Earn You Big Money?

With evergreen sales funnels, you’ll be able to take advantage of the efforts you have put into growing your business from day 1.

You’ll be able to slowly take the steps towards building an audience, driving traffic and generating leads that will be interested in buying your evergreen products or services.

Every time you create content for your blog, YouTube or even podcast channel to promote a particular product or service, you will be one, two or even three steps closer to clinching more sales!

And you can continue to test out your email sequence and perfect it to be able to acquire more paying customers over time.

As long as our product or service is still available, you’ll be able to continuously drive more and more traffic to what you have to offer and sell it.

And once you have optimized an evergreen sales funnel, you can continue using it to make more and more money while you start building other evergreen sales funnels for additional income.

This compounding effect is what will help you make big money on autopilot!

Examples of Evergreen Sales Funnels

If you’re still wondering what are evergreen sales funnels, here are some easy examples:
• Let’s say you’re in the service industry. You can offer services that will benefit your customers all year round such as a consultancy, coaching or freelance services. You could be a content writer, designer, life coach, nutritionist, fitness coach, local business owner or whatever profession you like. As long as you have services that you can offer to your customers on a consistent basis, you can start building your evergreen sales funnels.
• If you’re in the information product or eCommerce business, you might have an online course, eBook, video tutorial, audio training, or physical products that you can sell throughout the year. The topics of your information products should be on subjects that will benefit your customers no matter what time of the year it is. And your physical products should be able to be used throughout the year.

Must-Have Tools To Create Evergreen Sales Funnels

You’ll be surprised that it’s not really that expensive to create evergreen sales funnels that will continue to bring you income throughout the year.

Below are the must-have tools that you’ll need to create winning evergreen sales funnels that work:

Landing page builder – The easiest way to build your landing page is to use a sales funnel building software. It will help you to build attractive landing pages that encourage your target customers to either opt-in to your email list or buy from you immediately.

Email autoresponder – When your target customers opt-in to your list, you’ll need to store their data in a secure place and send them a follow-up email sequence. The best way to do this is by using a reliable email autoresponder. I would recommend for you to use ConvertKit because they have a great segmentation system that helps you identify your contacts based on the actions that they take. To sign up for your free ConvertKit account, go here.

Payment system – To make it easy for your customers to make payment to you, you’ll need to integrate a secure payment system to your sales page. Examples of common online payment systems are PayPal, Stripe and Google Wallet.

How To Create An Effective Evergreen Sales Funnel

In a nutshell, here’s a really simple way that you can use to create your evergreen sales funnel and start making money from it:

Step 1: Understand Your Customers

You’ll need to learn about your target customers. Ask yourself:-
• What are their challenges and pain points?
• What sort of products and services they are looking for?
• What are their burning questions?
• What their ideal solutions look like – as in what do they expect to have in a particular product or service they get?
• What will motivate them to take the plunge and buy something?
• Where are they hanging out – what social media channels they love browsing, which websites they visit and which forums or Facebook groups they participate in?

>> If you want to learn more about how to find your ideal customers who really spend, check out my eBook here.

Step 2: Invite Them To Your World

You’ll need to attract your ideal customers into your ‘world’. The best way to do this is by creating free content that will be useful to them and sharing it.

You can share your free content through your:-
• Blog
• Podcast
• YouTube channel
• Social media accounts

Step 3: Create An Awesome Freebie

You’ll then need to create some sort of ‘freebie’ that these people can easily download to motivate them to give you their email addresses.

Examples of freebies you can create are:-
• Audio training
• Mini-courses
• 5-day challenges
• Video training
• Swipe Files
• Cheat Sheets
• Resource Lists

If you want to learn more about potential freebies you can create fast, go to my article – 5 Quick Freebies You Can Create For Lead Generation.

To make your sales conversion easier, you’ll need to offer freebies that are related to what you’re selling.

Step 4: Collect Their Email Addresses

Once you’ve created your freebie, you can build your opt-in landing page. The best way to do this is by using a sales funnel building software.

The reason why I recommend using a sales funnel building software is that it removes all the guesswork of having to figure out the exact landing page layout that will capture your potential customers’ attention so that they will opt-in to your email list.

If you do not with to use a sales funnel building software, you can get your web developer to build your landing pages for you.

Step 5: Present A One-Time Offer

Once your target customer opts-in to your email list, you can present that person with a one-time offer.

A one-time offer provides the opportunity for you to potentially make a sale from that person if he or she is ready to buy from you immediately.

You can either sell your product or somebody else’s product for this one-time offer promotion.

Step 6: Send Follow-Up Emails

Not everybody is ready to buy from you straight-away. A majority of your subscribers will take some time to get to know you and your business before trusting you enough to buy from you.

That is why having a reliable email autoresponder that will keep your contact emails securely and send automated follow-up emails is important.

A great email autoresponder that I’m using is ConvertKit. I love using ConvertKit because it has easy segmentation facilities so that I can tag my subscribers based on the actions they take when opting-in to my list and reacting to the emails that I send them.

Having this helps me to increase my click-through and conversion rates.

>>To get your free ConvertKit account, go here.

To use your follow-up email sequences to help you get more sales, you’ll need to introduce your products or services, provide testimonials and introduce scarcity to your subscribers.

As you won’t be working within a particular product or service launch timeframe, your scarcity or limited time offer can be based on when your subscriber starts joining your email list.

Step 7: Invite Them To Attend A Webinar

If you’re selling more expensive, high ticket sort of products or services, trying to convert your subscribers into paying customers will be difficult if you only rely on email sequences.

The best way to close high ticket sales is by inviting them to a webinar, where you can present to them your product or service and pitch it to them.

You can either have the webinar pre-recorded or live, depending on your preference.

Need Help with Your Evergreen Sales Funnel Copy?

Learning how to build evergreen sales funnels is one thing. Knowing how to create and test different copy versions for your sales funnels to optimize them might be a challenge to you.

If you’d rather have someone else create your copy, so that you can focus on your other business tasks and towards achieving the results that you’re after, I’m here for you. I’m a Conversion Copywriter for coaches, consultants and trainers. I help with non-salesy copy that converts. For more information about my copywriting services, go here.

If you want to gain an endless flow of leads for your business so that you can turn them into loyal subscribers and paying customers, then you’ve probably heard about the concept of having a sales funnel.

Knowing how to build a sales funnel to generate leads is one thing. But creating a sales funnel that will make you money as soon as possible is a whole different skill altogether!

So in this article, I’m going to reveal to you the top strategies you can use to monetize your sales funnel faster so that you can skyrocket your business revenue. Because the quicker you get cashflow into your business, the faster your business will become a success. And you’ll have the money to expand your business even further with the additional funds!

Use Buyer Intent Keywords

There are many ways that you can use to get your potential customers into your sales funnel. Normally, at the top of your sales funnel, you’ll want to attract your potential customers to opt-in to your email list by offering a freebie.

If you want to know about potential freebies that you can create fast, then go to my article – 5 Quick Freebies You Can Create For Lead Generation.

And to make sales fast, it’s best for you to run paid ads to your landing page that offers the freebies.

To make sure that you attract the right customers who are willing to buy from you now, focus on running your ads based on buyer intent keywords.

Buyer intent keywords are search queries that people are using that indicates that they are actively looking to purchase something.

In your advertisements, you’ll need to focus on buyer intent keywords that your potential customers are currently using that are related to the product or service that you want to promote to them.

By focusing on these keywords, even if the person who opts-in to your email list doesn’t buy from you immediately, the chances of that lead converting into a sale in the future is high because by using buyer intent keywords indicate that the person is in the process of searching for answers to his or her pressing problems.

One of the ways to target buyer intent keywords in your paid advertisements is by using Google Adwords.

Introduce Low-Priced Products Fast

As soon as somebody opts-in to your email list, you can immediately introduce to that person a low-priced product that is related to the freebie that they’ve just requested.

By doing this, the new subscriber is encouraged to make a purchase by just paying a small amount of money. When somebody starts to buy from you, that person will be more likely to buy from you again and again.

And by introducing the low-priced product to that person fast, this gives you the opportunity to earn a small amount of money to cover your advertising costs.

To make people want to buy your low-priced product, the product must help to solve a problem that is bigger than the problem that your freebie is solving. It also has to be a product that has a high perceived value so that people will find it irresistible.

Examples of low-priced products are such as a series of video training, an ebook, a physical book or a short audio course.

Upsell To Buyers In Heat

Some of your customers who have bought your low-priced products would be opened to buying another product from you immediately. These are buyers in heat. They are looking for quick solutions and better results for solving their pressing problems.

Take the opportunity to earn extra money from your buyers in heat by immediately introducing your upsell product or service which is priced higher than your lower-priced product just in case there are customers willing to buy more from you.

By doing this, you are catching your customers while they are in the ‘buying mode’. So they would be more open to buying at that instant.

Upsells can be done just before you take your customers to the checkout page once they buy your low-priced product.

Promote Higher Ticket Products

Once your customer buys your upsell product, you can invite them to a webinar to introduce to them a higher ticket product.

Although fewer people will want to buy your higher ticket products, you’ll make far more money by having one sale of a higher ticket product compared to making 10 sales of a lower-priced product or an upsell product.

So this step is completely worth it!

Promote Membership Programs

You can also consider promoting membership programs as one of your upsells. The great thing about membership programs is that it encourages your subscribers to continue learning from you. By doing this, they will continue to remember you. So that they will become open to making another purchase from you when you introduce it to them in the future.

You can provide a free one-month membership for your subscribers and later on charge them on a monthly basis. When you give great value to your subscribers during their free one-month trial, they’ll want to stick around and continue paying for your membership program especially if your monthly fees are very affordable!

The easiest way to get people to sign up for your membership program is to introduce it to them just before the checkout page.

Don’t Forget About Downsells!

Not everyone would want to buy your upsells. So when your subscribers say ‘no’ to your upsells, you can take the opportunity to still make some money from them by offering downsells.

Downsells are a ‘lighter’ version of your ‘upsells’ and priced at a lower price compared to your upsell products or services. They also provide solutions to your subscribers’ pressing problems but do not help to solve them to a wide extent like what your upsells do.

Follow-Up With Subscribers Based On Their Behaviour

At the end of the day, having a sales funnel is about building relationships with your subscribers. They might not buy immediately. The more you communicate with them, the more you’ll begin to learn about their needs.

I’d encourage you to follow-up with your subscribers, especially via email campaigns. I use an intelligent email autoresponder called ConvertKit that helps me to streamline my subscribers based on their actions and response towards my email campaigns.

So when a subscriber clicks on a certain link pertaining to a certain topic, I can automatically tag that subscriber based on their topic of interest. So I know what sort of subsequent emails I should send to that person to get a positive response in the future.

You can use this function to send email campaigns to promote products and services that are related to the topics that your subscribers are interested in.

That way, it’ll be very likely that your subscribers will buy more and more products and services from you because you’ll introduce them to things that they are interested in!

To experience this function and start building your email list, you can sign up for a free ConvertKit account now.

Need help with your sales funnel copy?

Now that you know how to monetize your sales funnels faster for better revenue, it’s time to start building your landing pages, build your funnels and start making money!

If you need help in creating copy for your sales funnels, I’m here for you. I’m a Conversion Copywriter for coaches, consultants and trainers. I help with non-salesy copy that converts. For more information about my sales funnel copywriting services, go here.

References:
https://www.leadquizzes.com/blog/the-4-step-process-for-building-and-monetizing-your-sales-funnel/
https://medium.com/seedx-digital-marketing-guru/how-to-make-a-sales-funnel-that-increases-revenue-256-89aa3ca2bd4a
https://seositecheckup.com/articles/creating-your-marketing-funnel-the-master-key-to-monetizing-any-website
https://www.digitalmarketer.com/blog/conversion-funnel/

If you’ve been looking into building your business online, then you’ve probably heard about online sales funnels. When I first started my business on the internet, I was rather confused as to what an online sales funnel is. But I soon found out how to master the art of building an effective online sales funnel for my business. So just in case you’re new to sales funnels and wondering how they work and help you to bring in more sales, then this article is for you. I’ll explain what an online sales funnel is and how to create a simple and effective sales funnel in as little as 3 days!

What Is A Sales Funnel?

So what is a sales funnel from an online marketing perspective? A sales funnel is a process whereby you are guiding your potential customer or existing customer towards a decision to make a purchase.

Although in the past, you might have come across articles and videos talking about just how technical and complicated building a sales funnel can be, the truth is that with the correct tools and knowledge, building an effective sales funnel for your business is very easy!

Why Do You Need A Sales Funnel?

Whether you have a local business, eCommerce store, blog, YouTube channel, coaching, consultancy or online training centre, it’s very important to have an effective online sales funnel for your business because it will help you to collect an endless flow of new leads for your business!

With new leads coming to your business every day, you’ll be able to have consistent income for your business. This will ensure that your business continues to make money so that you can expand and sustain your business.

And by having a sales funnel online, you’ll be able to automate the process of attracting and collecting new leads for your business even while you’re on holiday, enjoying the weekend or sleeping!

Top Things You’ll Need To Create an Effective Sales Funnel

There are three main tools that you’ll need to build a sales funnel.

Below are the tools you’ll need to have to create your sales funnel:

• A ‘bait’ that will attract your potential customers to opt-in to your email list

• A sales funnel building software

• An email autoresponder software

Create Your Sales Funnel In Just 3 Days!

If you’re a beginner in online marketing and sales funnels, your best bet is to keep your sales funnel as simple as possible. Remember, your main mission is to collect as many quality leads as you can into your email list so that you can follow-up to potentially turn these contacts into paying customers in the future.

Below is my 3-day plan to build a simple sales funnel that is suitable for beginners:

Day 1: Create Your ‘Bait’ To Attract Leads

As the goal of your sales funnel is to get as many quality leads as possible, you’ll want to create a ‘bait’ or incentive to attract people to opt-in to your email list.

When you provide a ‘bait’ or incentive to people, they will be motivated to give you their email addresses to get the ‘bait’ or incentive that you are offering to them.

To make sure you attract the right people to opt-in to your list, you’ll need to offer a ‘bait’ that solves a burning problem or answers a question that your ideal customers are having.

A quick ‘bait’ you can create for your sales funnel within a day is a free PDF containing a cheat sheet, checklist, swipe file, resource list or worksheet.

To learn more about the quick freebies that you can create, read my article on – 5 Quick Freebies You Can Create For Lead Generation.

Day 2: Create Your Opt-In Page

An opt-in page is a landing page that presents the freebie offer to your potential customers and prompts them to take action by completing and submitting the contact form to get the freebie.

When somebody opts-in to your form, that person will be automatically added to your email list. A safe and secure way for you to add and store your lead’s contact detail is by linking your contact form to a reliable email autoresponder software.

A reliable email autoresponder software that I’m using is ConvertKit. You can register for your free ConvertKit account here.

And after that person opts-in to your email list, you’ll want to redirect that person to a Thank You page to thank that person for opting-in. The Thank You page should provide that person instructions on how to download the freebie that he or she has requested.

An easy way to create a landing page is by using a sales funnel building software. The good thing about using a sales funnel building software is that the software will have ready-built landing page templates that are already converting well. So you won’t waste precious time designing landing pages from scratch that won’t convert!

Day 3: Create Your Welcome Email Sequence

After somebody opts-in to your email list, you’ll want to send that person a welcome email sequence.

A welcome email sequence is a series of at least 3-5 emails that is sent to a new subscriber to introduce yourself, provide valuable information as well as an introduction to an initial product or service that you are confident will be suitable for that subscriber. The first welcome email should provide a link to the freebie that you’ve offered to your subscriber.

The beauty of having an email autoresponder is that you can create your welcome email sequence and store it in your autoresponder so that when somebody opts-in to your list, you can have the email sequence sent to that person automatically according to the timing that you have set.

I enjoy using ConvertKit as my email autoresponder because I’m able to streamline my subscriber according to the actions that that person has taken. So supposing that person clicks on a certain link that indicates that he or she is interested in a particular topic, I can add a tag that will indicate his or her interest. So with this information, I can send future emails that are related to that topic.

So after sending the email sequence, I can continue to follow-up and build my relationship with my subscribers easily by offering information on topics that they are interested in and recommend more products and services to encourage more sales.

If you’re interested at learning how this works, you can register your free ConvertKit account to check it out by clicking here.

Need Help With Your Sales Funnel Copy?

Want to make your sales funnel creation even easier? Let me write your sales funnel copy for you. I help coaches, consultants and trainers with copy that converts. Find out more about my sales funnel copywriting services here.

Found this article helpful? If you did, I’d love to hear in the comments section below.

Reference:
https://laurenlambie.com/2019/01/27/how-to-set-up-your-first-basic-sales-funnel-in-just-3-days/

If you’ve been learning about making money online, then you’ve probably heard about sales funnels. But what I’m going to share with you in this article will be rather conflicting information compared to the big sales funnel hypes that you’ve seen all over the internet. I’m going to tell you the hard truths that you need to know as a beginner so that you can be well prepared to set-up your sales funnels for success.

So take a deep breath first.

Are you ready?

What Is A Sales Funnel?

A sales funnel is a process whereby you are guiding a potential or existing customer towards making a decision to purchase.

Many people on the internet talk about having a sales funnel as a money-making machine. This is true.

But to turn your sales funnel into a money-making machine, you need to understand and apply this knowledge for your success:-

Focus On Moving People To The Next Funnel Step

Although the money-earning part would be the desired outcome for every business, when building a sales funnel, you should not focus on making instant cash.

Instead, you should break your funnel down into several manageable stages and steps.

A detailed explanation about the sales funnels stages can be found in my article – How To Create A Profitable Sales Funnel That Converts (even if you’re a beginner!)

At each step of your sales funnel, you should only focus on moving your potential or existing customer to the next step of your funnel process.

The end goal is always to eventually move as many people as possible towards the bottom of your funnel to make a sale.

Learn To Define Your Niche

Although sales funnels are meant to help guide your potential customers towards making a decision to purchase, it will be extremely difficult for you to make a good amount of sales if you do not know how to define your niche.

When you know how to define your niche, you will know exactly who your target customers are and what sort of products and services you should be offering to them.

This will make life so much easier for you as you can target the right people for your content creation and advertising campaigns.

This is going to save you so much time and money.

And you will get more sales in the long run with your funnels too!

Understand Your Target Customers

If you want to sell more stuff with your sales funnels, you need to fully understand your target customers.

You need to know what are their challenges, what questions they are asking, their fears as well as their desires.

By knowing all this, it will be easy for you to create effective copywriting for your sales funnel landing pages, advertisements as well as email messages.

And by speaking in the exact tone and language that appeal to your customers, it will be more likely that they would want to connect with you and develop that trust for your business and brand – hence, this will bring your more sales in the future!

Valuable Content Will Bring More People To You

Many people are hesitant to give free content to their potential and existing customers. I notice that a lot of blog articles, YouTube videos and email messages just give you that excitement to click-through to their content but does not deliver the promised content that they have hyped about.

If you do this too much, trust me – your target customers will be so frustrated, they might even ignore you!

On the other hand, by sharing valuable content to your potential and existing customers that can bring them at least some small results, you will be able to nurture your relationship with them and build more trust with them.

So in the future, when you are introducing products and services to them, they will be more open to hearing from you and would want to support your business by buying from you.

The Number Of People At The Top Of Your Funnel Will Be Higher Than At The Bottom

Well, of course, it’s nice to have everyone who gets into your sales funnel to buy from you, right?

But the truth is that not everyone who gets into the top of your funnel ends up at the bottom of the funnel.

So the number of people buying from you will be lower than the number of people that become your leads.

But the good news is that by growing your leads, you can always follow-up on the contacts in your email list so that they will be reminded about you and your business.

So in the future, they might buy from you when the time is right!

Quality Traffic Will Get More People Into Your Funnel

Although the saying goes that the more people you get to know about your business and brand, the more sales you’ll get, this is only true if you attract the right audience.

It’s no use getting the attention of people who do not have any interest in your niche as well as the sort of products and services that you offer.

It’s like throwing precious time and money down the drain!

What you need is quality traffic that will work for your business.

So when creating your content and organising your advertising campaigns, do it in a way that targets only the people who would be interested in what you have to offer.

The best way to do this is by understanding your niche and target customers.

Need Help With Your Sales Funnel Copy?

I help coaches, consultants and trainers with non-salesy copy that converts. Find out more about my sales funnel copywriting services here.

I hope you found this blog article helpful and you’ll be aware of the hard truths that you need to know before getting started with building your very own sales funnels. Have you found these tips helpful? Or would you like me to talk about any other sales funnel topics in my upcoming blog articles? I’d love to hear from you in the comments section below.

References:
https://www.clickminded.com/sales-funnel-strategy/
https://cerealentrepreneur.academy/sales-funnels-for-beginners-how-do-sales-funnels-work-step-by-step-example/
https://blog.bit.ai/sales-funnel/
https://www.crazyegg.com/blog/sales-funnel/
https://www.mailmunch.com/blog/sales-funnel/
https://www.hustlr.com/how-to-build-sales-funnel/
https://pitchground.com/blog/sales-funnel/
https://www.mirandanahmias.com/about-sales-funnels/

Whether you are an entrepreneur or budding entrepreneur, you’ve probably heard about the term – ‘sales funnel’.

Having a sales funnel is vital if you want to grow your business regardless whether you have a brick-and-mortar or purely online business. No matter how good your products and services are, this will be meaningless to your business if you do not have an effective sales funnel that can transform your ideal customers into raving fans and paying customers.

In a nutshell, a sales funnel is a process whereby you are guiding your potential or existing customers towards making a decision to purchase either a product or service from you.

If you want to learn more about the strategies behind creating a sales funnel, check out my blog article, titled –

How To Create A Profitable Sales Funnel That Converts (even if you’re a beginner!)

In this article, I’m going to dive right into talking about the basic elements that you need to start building your first sales funnel as a complete beginner.

If you master the steps that I’ll be mentioning below, you’ll be able to create a powerful and high converting sales funnel within days!

Brand Awareness At The Top Of Your Funnel

The top of your funnel is the widest part of your funnel. Many people could potentially consume your products and services. These people are your ideal customers because they are going to be able to benefit from using what you are offering.

At this part of your funnel, these people would either have not heard about you or have heard about you but have not considered buying anything from you.

You need to create brand awareness for your business and brand at this stage so these people will start to get to know about you.

You can create free content or use paid advertising to get in front of your ideal customers.

When creating content to attract your potential customers, it is really important to be able to truly understand your ideal customers’ challenges, wants and needs. This is so that you won’t waste time creating content that attracts the wrong target audience.

Once you are able to reach your target customers, they may become interested in your content and want to learn more stuff from you.

Creating Your Landing Page

The next step is to encourage your ideal customers to opt-in to become your valued subscribers.

Your free or paid traffic may come from various channels. But to capture the attention of your ideal customers to opt-in to your list, you would essentially need a landing page.

A landing page would be able to minimize any distractions your target customer may have so that they can focus on deciding whether or not to opt-in to your email list in exchange of something that would be of great value to them.

The best way for you to encourage more people to opt-in to your email list especially if you are a beginner is to offer a free downloadable content that will help your ideal customer to solve a pressing challenge that they have.

The purpose of the landing page is to capture the email addresses of your ideal customers so that you can follow-up on them.

When they opt-in to your email list, they become your ‘leads’.

Introducing An Irresistible Front-End Offer

Once they have opted-in to your email list, you can introduce them to an irresistible front-end offer at a very affordable price.

Your front-end offer has to be related to the ultimate thing that you’re going to promote to them in the future.

By presenting your front-end offer, this will encourage them to purchase from you immediately.

Once a customer purchases from you, that customer will be more open to making more purchases from you in the future!

Offering Upsells

When somebody buys your front-end product, you can then offer that person an upsell product or service.

By doing this, you increase the amount of spend a customer makes with you, which in return will help you to generate more revenue. The upsell will essentially offer greater value compared to the basic front-end offer that they have just purchased.

Offering Downsells

And if that customer is unable to buy your upsell product or service, you can offer that customer a downsell.

Some customers actually want to buy the upsell product or service, but for some reason, they are unable to make that purchase at that point of time, usually because of budget constraints.

A downsell offer can provide them with an alternative payment plan so that they can get the upsell product anyway but by paying by instalment.

You can also consider having a downsell that has less features and benefits from the upsell product or service and sell it at a cheaper price.

This will still help you to increase your customer spend in addition to your initial frond-end product or service sale.

Keeping In Touch With Your Contacts

Most people who become your leads will not want to buy from you at the first instance of them becoming your email subscribers.

So it is important to continuously keep in touch with them so that they can be reminded about you and choose to buy from you in the future.

There are so many ways you can keep in touch with your email list contacts. You can follow-up on them by sending them email sequence campaigns or email broadcasts. You might also want to retarget them on social media.

And for people who have bought from you, they can also be nurtured into becoming your loyal customers and brand ambassadors. This will also encourage more repeat purchases from them in the future.

To organise your email subscribers and create automated email campaigns for the best results, you can use an email autoresponder like ConvertKit.

I love using ConvertKit because it has great segmentation and automation feature which makes it so easy for me to streamline my email campaigns.

Evaluating And Improving Your Funnels

Your sales funnel may not work as great as you want it especially if you are a beginner.

So it is important to evaluate the conversion of your funnel at every stage of the funnel.

So if you do not get the results that you want, pick yourself up and try again until you get things right.

If you want to grow continuously to make more online sales, then you should get ongoing support from online communities that are experts in this field.

Need Help With Your Sales Funnel Copy?

I help coaches, consultants and trainers with non-salesy copy that converts. If you’re interested in having me create your sales funnel copy for you, check out my sales funnel copywriting services here.

References:
https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/245730
https://www.socialmediatoday.com/marketing/6-step-guide-creating-sales-funnel-converts
https://au.oberlo.com/ebooks/sales-funnel/build-sales-funnel
https://www.crazyegg.com/blog/sales-funnel/
https://neilpatel.com/blog/how-to-build-a-conversion-funnel-that-will-triple-your-profits/
https://neilpatel.com/blog/profitable-conversion-funnel/
https://www.singlegrain.com/blog-posts/content-marketing/how-to-create-marketing-funnel/

If you’ve been in the online space for quite awhile, you’ve probably heard that you will need a sales funnel or several sales funnels to grow your business on the internet. In a nutshell, a sales funnel is a process whereby you are leading your prospects or customers towards making a decision to purchase either a product or a service. So how do you create a profitable sales funnel that converts?

To be able to create an effective sales funnel that brings you more leads and sales, you need to understand the process of setting-up a sales funnel and the strategy behind creating a funnel.

With a sales funnel, you are essentially working towards creating more awareness for your business and brand in hopes of generating more leads that will later on turn into sales.

But before you go all out to create more brand awareness, you need to choose a niche that is in-demand and has a ready audience who are willing to pay for products and services within that niche.

If you would want to learn about how to find a profitable niche, you can check out my eBook here.

There are four main stages of a funnel that you need to master to create a perfect sales funnel that converts!

A really important thing you must do before creating your sales funnel is to identify who are your ideal target customers. Because knowing this from the start will enable you to target the right people so that the chances of them making a purchase from you in the future will be high.

Four Main Stages In A Sales Funnel

Awareness

This is the widest part of your sales funnel. At this point, people would either have not heard about you or have heard about you but are not considering to purchase anything from you.

At this stage, you need to build your brand awareness by either engaging with them through social media or email campaigns or demonstrating your expertise in the niche that you are in by having authority content or recommending them to valuable content within your niche.

At this point, your potential customers are aware about the problems and challenges that they are facing but have no clear idea about the solutions to what they are facing.

So at this stage, you need to make them aware that you have valuable information and solutions for their challenges.

Interest

When your potential customers are aware about you and become interested in the valuable information and solutions that you can provide to them, they will want to know more about your business and business.

At this stage, you will want to work towards turning these potential customers into ‘leads’ so that you can follow-up on them and engage further with them to build their trust.

A popular way for you to turn them into ‘leads’ is by creating free downloadable gift and offering them through your landing page.

You can either drive paid or free traffic to your landing page and deliver your free gift in return for them leaving their email addresses to you.

To make your sales funnel work, you need to know how to target your audience well so that you get leads who are interested in the types of products and services that you are going to offer to them further down the funnel.

Desire/Consideration

This is the stage whereby your potential customers will be seriously considering solutions for their pressing problems or challenges.

With the leads that you have collected, you can do a series of hard sell and soft sell marketing methods to increase their awareness about the products and services that you are offering.

You can follow-up on your leads through various methods like email marketing and social media marketing.

To transform your leads into sales, you need to consider the emotional stages of your potential customers and address them in your messages to them.

At this stage, your ideal customers will also be comparing your products and services to your competitors’ offerings. So you need to be able to display the value of what you are offering so that they will choose to buy from you instead of your competitors.

Action/Purchase

Once your potential customers are convinced that the products and services that you are offering are the best fit for them, they will take out their wallets and buy from you!

Bear in mind that not everyone who comes into your sales funnel will turn into your paying customers in the end.

So do not get discouraged and think that your sales funnel is not converting if you do not see as many people buying from you compared to the number of people who initially become your leads.

Time To Create Your Sales Funnel

Now it’s time to create your very own profitable sales funnel.

Need help with your sales funnel copy?

I help coaches, consultants and trainers with non-salesy copy that converts. If you’re interested in learning more about my copywriting services go here.

References:
https://neilpatel.com/blog/profitable-conversion-funnel/
https://mention.com/en/blog/sales-funnel/
https://www.thebalancesmb.com/how-to-build-a-profitable-sales-funnel-for-your-home-business-4584673
https://www.singlegrain.com/blog-posts/content-marketing/how-to-create-marketing-funnel/
https://medium.com/@connorgillivan/how-to-build-a-profitable-sales-funnel-with-a-freelancer-bc11f2f8a8fb

If you have an eCommerce store and wondering whether there is a need to have sales funnels to develop your business since you already have an online store, then my answer to you is “Yes”.

Not every eCommerce store owner implements sales funnels in their businesses. But because the competition is so stiff, regardless of your industry, then by having sales funnels to drive your business forward, you will be one step ahead of your competition who don’t use sales funnels.

Look at all the successful brands in your chosen industry or niche. Do they have sales funnels? They probably do. So if you want to increase your chances of success, then you’d definitely want to mirror their success story by having sales funnels implemented in your eCommerce business too.

To make things simple for you, a sales funnel is a process that helps to guide customers from their point of awareness about the need to solve a challenge right up to the time when they make a purchase.

Sales funnels help to facilitate your customers’ buying journeys to make it a pleasant experience because it helps them to make informed purchasing decisions so that they buy the right products and services.

By having sales funnels for your eCommerce store, you will be able to grow your business faster because you will be able to:-

Close More Sales Without Being Salesy

People will generally avoid purchasing something if they feel that they are forced to make the purchase. So by having sales funnels, you will give your potential customers the option to make that decision to engage with your brand and find out more about what you offer before even making the purchase.

By using non-salesy approaches to promote your business, you will have more customers wanting to get to know more about your products and services.

With more people getting to know about your stuff, your probability to close more sales will be higher.

Ensure A Smooth Purchasing Process

Many people who genuinely need your products and services might not even know that what you offer can help them solve their challenges.

By encouraging them to learn more about what you offer through non-salesy methods, they will be able to discover what types of products and services that you offer that best suit their needs.

You will also be able to recommend stuff that might complement what they have bought from you to increase their satisfaction level as a customer.

With a sales funnel, you will also be able to promote things according to their behavioural patterns.

Although, I must say that your purchasing funnel itself must be created with great care. Because when people finally decide to purchase from you and your shopping cart frustrates them, you will lose them as customers. Not many are patient enough to contact you directly to let you know when they have a problem purchasing from your online cart.

There are many reasons why people generally abandon their shopping carts. If you want to learn how to reduce your shopping cart abandonment, then you can read my blog article here.

Reduce The Need For Price War

Especially if you have an eCommerce store that is connected to eCommerce platforms like Amazon.com, and eBay, it’s a known fact that people always make their purchasing decisions in these platforms by looking at the cheapest price first.

So if you want to sell heaps of stuff by using these eCommerce platforms, you’ll probably need to offer very low prices to sell your products.

With a sales funnel, you’ll be able to reduce the need for participating in the price war strategy to sell your stuff.
This is because when you get people to opt-in to your sales funnels, you’ll be able to send them targeted email campaigns and advertisements that will help to cultivate the desire to buy from you.

By having marketing campaigns sent out to those who are in your sales funnel lists, you will be able to get more sales without having to offer your stuff at rock bottom prices because they won’t be distracted by other products.

Increase The Amount Of Money Customers Spend

People decide to buy stuff at different times within their customer journeys. When someone visits your online store or website, he or she might be just casually looking around for things to buy without any immediate intention to buy. This person might not return to your store when he or she is ready to buy.

So by having a sales funnel, you will be able to keep in touch with that person who drops by your store and continuously provide value to them right up to the time when they are ready to make a purchase.

You can start by providing valuable content that helps your potential customers solve an immediate challenge that they have. And through that content, you can encourage them to opt-in to your list for further follow-ups.

A typical eCommerce conversion funnel involves customers going through the Awareness, Interest, Decision and Action stage.

When you’re able to have them opt-in to your list, you will be able to nurture these potential customers to make informed decisions right up to the time when they are ready to make a purchase.

By capturing contact details through your sales funnels, you will also be able to encourage repeat purchases from customers who have already bought from you.

And for those who are buying from you, you will be able to get more sales out of a single purchase by offering upsells and downsells while they are making their purchases.

So overall, having sales funnels will help you to increase the amount of money customers spend on your eCommerce store.

Encourage Brand Loyalty And Referrals

By having sales and marketing funnels for your ecommerce site, you will also be able to connect with your customers and potential customers at a much more personal level. This is especially effective if you are using personal branding or personality marketing approaches to grow your eCommerce store.

When your customers feel connected to you and your business, they’ll be more likely to buy from you as opposed to another brand. This is because they feel that your brand understands them the best and it has the best products and services that suit their needs.

By interacting with your customers and potential customers through social media, you will be able to speak to them, understand their challenges more and answer any questions that they have.

By doing this, it lets your customers know that you care about them and their wellbeing. This will help to turn more of your customers into loyal customers.

And when people turn into loyal customers, they will be more likely to want to refer your products and services to other people.

So besides having repeat sales from these loyal customers, they will also be your ‘brand ambassadors’ who will spread the good word of your business and brand.

And by having them refer your stuff to others, you will see an increase in sales because you’ll be discovered by other people who are in your customers’ networks.

So my question to you is, do you feel that going through the effort of having sales funnels is worth it to grow your business? I hope your answer will be a “Yes”.

I hope that this article will be able to shed some light on the reasons as to why having sales funnels are so important in helping you to grow your eCommerce store business to greater heights. Have you implemented sales funnels to promote your online shop and found great results? I’d love to know in the comment section below.

References:
https://www.bigcommerce.com.au/blog/ecommerce-sales-funnel/
https://www.crazyegg.com/blog/ecommerce-conversion-funnel/
https://www.shopify.com.au/partners/blog/72569987-why-every-shopify-store-needs-a-marketing-sales-funnel
https://sleeknote.com/blog/e-commerce-sales-funnel
https://manychat.com/blog/ecommerce-funnels/
https://www.metrilo.com/blog/ecommerce-conversion-funnels-practical-guide
https://hollerwp.com/ecommerce-sales-funnel/

If you’ve been browsing for topics on the internet – you’ve probably encountered an instance whereby you were invited to opt-in to a subscribers list to get a freebie. Freebies are a form of lead magnet that many businesses use to collect the contact details (usually names and email addresses) of their ideal target customers. This can be part of a lead generation campaign or just an ongoing activity.

It’s a fact that people won’t simply give their email addresses to anyone, unless either they’re already interested to buy something from you or feel that they will get something valuable from you by exchanging their email address.

With a quality email list of your target customers, you can continuously get in touch with those who are in your list to build a connection and cultivate trust towards your business or brand.

When you get to strengthen your relationship with your potential customers, you will be likely to close more deals in the future. This will help your business to grow.

If you are looking to create freebies yourself to be offered to your target customers, you need to take into consideration the time and effort it will take on your part. You would still need to create something that is going to be valuable to your subscribers so that they would want to know more about your brand. But you won’t want to suffer from a burnt-out from creating your freebies.

Effective lead magnets should help your potential customers solve their problems, provide guidance so that they can achieve quick wins in solving their challenges, and contain information that is easy to understand and implement.
In this article, I will reveal to you 5 quick freebies that you can create to start getting quality leads for your business right now.

Cheatsheet

Cheatsheets are something like an eBook, but a much shorter form. It normally contains just a few key points and is less than 10 pages long. It elaborates about a specific topic but summarises it in a way that suits busy readers.

The reason why cheatsheets are becoming more popular is because we live in a busy world. So not everyone has the time to read an eBook to start implementing things. Although an eBook will elaborate more about a topic, a cheatsheet will work well in getting busy people to becoming your subscribers.

Another good thing about cheatsheets is that your subscribers will be more likely to go through all the contents in your cheatsheets and implement the strategies or steps that you have recommended to them.

So chances are that these people would experience quick wins. Rather than choosing a broader topic, pick on a very specific problem or challenge that your target customers have and let them know how they can overcome this in the fastest way possible.

When your subscribers begin to see quick wins, they will trust you and your brand more and even buy from you in the future!

Checklist

Checklists are one of the highest converting lead magnets available. It is most commonly used for attracting people to opt-in after reading a blog post or viewing a YouTube video.

A checklist is normally 1-3 pages long and consists of actionable steps to take in order to thrive in a particular area.

You can easily create a checklist by going through your blog posts or YouTube videos to pick out the key points stated in your content.

By downloading a checklist, your subscriber can be reminded of the vital steps that he or she should take to succeed in their area of concern.

Checklists are extremely easy to follow and attractive to potential customers because it challenges them to take the vital steps to conquer areas of concern.

It can be easily consumed by your readers, so you will find that most of them will implement your strategies successfully and begin to look at you and your brand favourably.

Swipe File

Swipe Files are another irresistible lead magnet that you can easily create for your ideal customers to download in exchange for their email addresses.

This type of lead magnet is more suitable if you are in the copywriting, marketing or advertising niche because swipe files are all about writing!

Some cool swipe files you can create for your target customers are such as swipe files for email copywriting, advertisements, headlines and social media posts.

People will love becoming your subscribers for your swipe files because they won’t need to do hours of research and finding suitable copywriting styles they can follow to bring them positive results.

All they need is to copy your swipe file examples and modify it according to their business needs to start seeing results!

Resource List

Another great way easy freebie you can create for your potential customers is a resource list.

People are generally drawn to opting-in to resource lists because they know the valuable time they can save by downloading them.

With a resource list, your job is to do thorough research on a topic that will highly benefit your target audience and reveal suitable resources to your subscribers for free in exchange for their email addresses.

You resource list can consist of a list of free tools available online or useful websites that will beneficial your target customers for achieving a specific goal.

Worksheet

You may also wish to create worksheets for your ideal customers to download. This is especially useful if you are teaching about a specific topic through your blog or YouTube video.

Your worksheets can consist of thought-provoking questions that will help your subscriber to think about the topic that you’ve covered so that he or she can work towards mastering that specific area. By answering the questions, he or she will be able to consume the information that you have taught and implement it more effectively.

That would be a quick win on their part!

When creating freebies for your target customers, bear in mind that different lead magnets will appeal to different people. For collecting more leads, you might have to experiment by using a number of different lead magnets to find the best ones that would attract your target customers to opt-in.

Need help in creating copy for your freebie? Then check out my sales funnel copywriting services here. I can create a custom package for you too. Just let me know.

I hope that with this article, you’ll be able to start creating some freebies for your target customers so that you can build a profitable email list for your business. Have you used these freebies before for your lead generation and gotten a lot of opt-ins? Or do you have other freebie examples to share? I’d love to know. Feel free to let me know in the comments section below.

Whether you have a large, medium or small-sized business, you need to have marketing strategies in place to grow your business. Because without this, it is very unlikely that your potential customers will be able to find you.

Marketing strategies are used to make your brand more recognisable and help convert your leads into paying customers. These strategies guide your customers into making purchasing decisions depending on their current buying cycles.

Although marketing strategies are important to growing small businesses, many business owners are still unaware of the amount of exposure that their businesses can get through budget-friendly marketing methods.

So what are some of the best marketing strategies that you can use for your business?

Here are some of my tips on How You Can Use Inexpensive Marketing Strategies To Promote Your Small Business:-

Employee Marketing

Whenever we think about getting new customers, we often think about going out there and getting people who have never heard about our businesses to come and buy from us. But many times, it is often word-of-mouth marketing that builds up a more loyal customer base and following. And the best place to start is by marketing your business to your employees.

You can get them to test out your products or services or let them buy your stuff at highly discounted prices. Once they have experienced your stuff first-hand and like what they have used, they will be able to recommend it to their family members, friends or other contacts.

Encourage them to share their experiences in using your products and services through their social media channels and blogs.

You can also organise special discounts for their family and friends. And you can also have special events for their network to experience your products and services.

Cause Marketing

Most people love giving back to the community. So by partnering with non-profit organizations, you get to give back to the community through your business sales. You can give a percentage of your profits to the charity of your choice.

And in return, more people will be inclined to support your business because it supports a cause that is close to their hearts.

When choosing a not-for-profit organization to tune up with, it’s best to partner with organizations that are related to your industry or niche. For instance, if you are selling children’s books, you might want to partner with a non-profit organization that helps underprivileged children to get a better education.

When marketing your products and services, be clear to your customers exactly how much of your profit will go to the not-for-profit organizations. And also let them know why you have chosen to support these organizations.

You can also encourage them to make additional donations if they like.

Co-Branding or Partnerships

You will benefit very well by doing co-branding or partnerships with other businesses, especially if you are a newly-established business.

When you do co-branding or partnerships, you are joining hands with another business or several businesses that complement what your business is offering. So it’s a win-win situation for both. For instance, if you sell baking ingredients, you can strike a partnership with a business that sells baking equipment. Or if you sell handbags, you can co-brand with a business that sells women’s clothes.

You can conduct joint-events with the other businesses that you partner with to promote yourselves. That way, you get to tap into the contacts of the other businesses and they can also get to introduce themselves to your contacts.

And because you are not selling the same things, you are not exactly competing with each other.

You can also partner with influencers in your industry so that they can recommend your products and services to their large following. And in return for them promoting your stuff, you can give them a commission for every sale that you get as a result of their recommendations.

Earned Media / Public Relations

You can also pitch your stories to industry-related newspapers, magazines or blogs to get free exposure.

The best way to do this is by registering yourself at Help a Reporter Out (HARO). When you register yourself, you will get requests from reporters for responses. You can choose to pitch stories on topics related to your industry and that are of interest to your target customers.

And once you’ve been chosen to contribute, your content will be featured in these media. So you will get free exposure to get your business known to your target customers!

Point-Of-Purchase Marketing

Another way you can market your products and services is by doing point-of-purchase marketing.

To do this, all you need to do is introduce products or services that complement a purchase that your customer has just made.

And when your customers buy additional products or services on top of what they’ve just bought, you will benefit by getting a higher-priced purchase.

You can do this marketing method easily by using an online sales funnel.

Social Media Marketing

Another popular way you can do marketing for your business is through social media. Most people have a social media platform that they like to frequently browse. So if you do not reach out to your customers through social media, you’ll be losing out a lot on sales.

But that being said, bear in mind that social media is a way to engage with your customers. It may not give you immediate results – as in instant sales overnight!

You can grow your social media channels organically (free) or by using paid methods. Of course, if you would to use the free method, your target customer reach will be smaller and it will take a much longer time to grow a following.

However, if you know how to tap into your competitors’ social strategies and use the right hashtags and keywords, you might be able to grow organically much faster.

The most popular social media channels you can consider are Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Instagram.

When your business is exposed to potential customers on social media, it becomes a recognisable brand. And when people are familiar with your brand, they will be more likely to buy from you in the future.

Pay-Per-Click Advertising

You can also use pay-per-click advertising methods to do marketing for your products and services. This method will enable you to reach out to potential customers much faster.

It enables you to target your customers based on their interests, keyword searches and demographics.

The good thing about paid advertising is that you will know exactly what type of people who will be seeing your advertisements.

And at most cases, the people who are clicking on paid advertisements are actively searching for solutions to their challenges.

So the probability of them purchasing from you will be high. Even if they won’t buy immediately, they will be very likely to buy from you in the future when they are ready.

The best places to do paid advertising is through either Google Ads or Bing Ads.

Referral Program

If you’ve been in business for quite a while and have been selling your products and services, it’s time to increase your marketing efforts by using referral programs.

You can reach out to your current or past customers for testimonials or mentions on social media.

To motivate more of your customers to refer your products and services, you can provide them with an added incentive whenever they share about your stuff or introduce a new customer to your business

For instance, you can give them a discount on their next purchase or you can give them a free gift.

Personal Branding

A great way to do marketing for your business especially if you are directly involved in your business is by doing personal branding.

You can do personal branding by featuring your face in your business social media channels, blog and advertisements.

You can also publish blog articles, contribute YouTube videos as well as podcast episodes.

When you use personal branding, your potential and current customers will feel as though they know you in person.

And when they feel connected to you, they will be likely to want to buy from you because you become somebody they like, know and trust.

This marketing strategy is especially powerful when you are on a bootstrap budget and want to compete with your larger competitors who have a more bigger marketing budget compared to you.

Contest Marketing

You can also create buzz around your business brand as well as your products and services by doing a contest.

Everyone loves taking part in contests, especially if they are fun and engaging. You need not spend a lot on the competition prizes. To make the prizes unique, choose to give away specially-made corporate branded gifts. That way, people will want to take part in the competition because they know that the prizes cannot be bought anywhere else!

Some examples of contest you can organize are such as photo, slogan, video and voting competitions.

To keep your contests fun, don’t make it too hard to participate. But at the same time, make them challenging enough so that people will get the thrill out of participating!

Make sure to collect the emails of the contestants so that you can use them for future marketing purposes.

Email Marketing

You might be hearing on the internet that ‘email marketing is dead’. But let me tell you that email marketing is not dead!

In fact, more and more people are using their mobile phones while commuting to their destinations. With plenty of time to kill on the internet, they love browsing their emails on the way to wherever they are going.

The only thing is you need to know how to use the right sort of words (as in copy) to capture their attention so that they will read your emails!

With the GDPR ruling, it’s not advisable anymore to get list purchases because you won’t know whether the list providers are telling the truth that their contacts have opted-in to receiving information.

So to be on the safe side – especially if you are targeting countries that are enforcing the GDPR ruling, then it’s best to start building your email list through opt-in forms.

Your email campaigns will be better received when you provide educational content, discounts, coupon codes and invitations to free webinars on topics of interest.

When your target customer regularly reads your emails and begin to resonate with what you have shared, then they will be more likely to buy from you in the future!

Content Marketing

You can also publish useful content that your target customers will be interested in to get them to learn about your brand as well as products and services.

The best way to do content marketing is by contributing content that will bring long-lasting free traffic to your business website. This can be done by doing blogging, contributing YouTube articles and publishing graphic images and infographics through Pinterest pins.

To get noticed faster, it’s best to focus on using long-tail keywords whenever you publish your content. That way, your content doesn’t need to compete for attention as much as if you would to use shorter and more general keywords.

This is a longer-term marketing strategy that will give you best results by providing you with an endless flow of organic traffic to your website. So this will save you money from using paid methods in the long run.

Brand Awareness

You can also focus on promoting your brand awareness. To do this, you must ask yourself what you want your business to represent.

What do you want your customers to think about when they see your brand?

Do you have a specific tone of voice you want to use to represent your brand?

Why did you want your business logo and tagline to be the way it is?

There must be a reason why you’ve chosen to do things in a certain way for your business.

You can communicate these reasons through your brand awareness campaigns.

A good brand awareness campaign should make the target customers think about your brand the way you want them to.

And when they think about your brand as the one that can solve their challenges or problems, then they will immediately think about buying from you the next time when they are ready to make a purchase.

Storytelling

You can use the art of storytelling to promote your brand as well as products and services.

You can tell stories about why you decided to create a specific product or service. You can also let them know why you feel passionate about a specific issue that is driving you towards serving your customers more.

Whatever story you tell, it has to relate to the purpose of your marketing campaign. And it also has to be told in a way that helps your customers to emotionally connect to your brand as well as products and services.

When your customers can relate emotionally to your business and resonate with the story that you have told, then they will be moved in a way that encourages them to support your business above your competitors.

For small businesses, this is one of the vital steps that you can take to compete with your larger competitors!

Retargeting Campaigns

When you’re spending money on paid advertisements, you would want to do it in such a way that maximises your ROI (return-on-investment).

The best way to do this is by doing retargeting campaigns.

You can retarget people who have visited your website by using a Pixel and then running ads through Facebook. You can also do the same for Google Ads and Bing Ads.

When you show your advertisements to people who have been on your website, they will be more receptive towards your ads because they have read about you and what you do.

So your chances of getting them to either opt-in or buy from you through your ads will be higher compared to sending your ads to cold traffic who never heard about you.

You can also choose to advertise to your previous or current customers. Because they have purchased from you before, chances are that they will most likely purchase from you again. So this also increases your marketing campaign success.

So now you know that you know these inexpensive marketing strategies, it’s time for you to choose and experiment to see which ones will work best for your business.

I hope that you will benefit from the inexpensive marketing strategies that I have shared in this article. These strategies are especially useful for small businesses with very little budget to spend. Do you currently implement any of these strategies in your business and have found success in generating more leads and sales? Or do you have other strategies to share? I’d love to hear from you in the comment section below.

References:
https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/marketing-campaigns
https://medium.com/swlh/36-types-of-marketing-strategies-tactics-to-grow-your-business-57c548cd047b
https://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2015/07/10/brand-awareness
https://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2014/06/12/marketing-ideas
https://www.campaignmonitor.com/blog/email-marketing/2019/02/5-best-types-of-advertising-campaigns-for-your-small-business/
https://www.thebalancesmb.com/small-business-marketing-ideas-2951688
https://thrivehive.com/17-free-marketing-ideas-for-small-businesses/
https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/small-business-marketing-guide
https://www.outboundengine.com/blog/marketing-ideas-for-small-business-owners/
https://fitsmallbusiness.com/small-business-marketing-ideas/
https://www.deputy.com/au/blog/20-marketing-campaign-ideas-for-your-small-business
https://www.forbes.com/sites/mikekappel/2018/02/23/inexpensive-marketing-ideas-for-small-businesses/#52b112d0353f

Starting a new business can be very exciting and daunting at the same time. You might be walking into your business journey with a very optimistic view will magically buy your products and services simply because they are really good.

But when you have finally put out your products and services to the marketplace, you will soon discover that the customers don’t start coming to you – unless you know how to break into a competitive world.

So if you’re struggling to get your first clients in the door, don’t fret!

Below are some easy ways you can get new customers – even if you do not have any prior testimonials!

Freelancing

If you still want to gain experience and confidence working in a certain area to equip yourself more before launching your higher-end products or services, then you can start earning by doing freelance work.

There are many freelancing websites available out there such as Upwork, Fiverr, Guru and Freelancer.com.

The disadvantages of these freelancing websites are that many people are willing to do the same work as you for very little money. So if you want to earn what you feel is worth your time, then you need to use excellent copywriting and branding strategies so that people will be willing to pay more for your services.

Family Members And Friends

If you’ve chosen to focus your business on a niche that your family members and friends know you’re good at doing, then chances are, when they need your expertise these people will become your first customers!

Because you’ve known these people for some time, they have seen with their own eyes how you can do a good job in the area of your business. And because you are close to them, they will be likely to trust that you will do a good job compared to a stranger.

So when launching your business, make it a point to announce to your family members and close friends about what you’re doing.

You can ask their advice for feedback on how to improve your website, web presence, products or services too.

However, I wouldn’t recommend you to suddenly email an old friend that you’ve not been in contact with for over 20 years just to tell him or her about your business. They will just think you’re being spammy and desperate!

Ask For Referrals

Even if your family members and friends do not have any need for your products and services, they can pass on your contact details to someone who does need them. When you get recommendations from other people, you will be more likely to clinch the deal compared to if you would pitch your offers to a stranger.

So it is really important to let these people know exactly what you are doing now as well as the products and services that you are offering.

The more people know about what you’re doing, the more likely you will be able to land your first clients.

Besides reaching out to family members and friends for referrals, you can also get to know more people from networking events and local associations. Always have some business cards ready whenever you are attending live events.

You’ll never know when you’ll be meeting someone who knows people who might be interested in what you do!

Sell At Affordable Prices

When you’re still unknown, it isn’t advisable to charge the same price as someone famous who is charging a very premium price for his or her products and services.

Instead, start charging at a lower price, but not at a rock-bottom price that will either make you lose money or be a complete waste of time.

You want to be saving the time to service your customers who are willing to pay you a fair amount for your expertise or hard work in either providing a particular product or service.

To ‘Wow’ your first customers, you need to offer them products and services that will seem like a real bargain in their minds. Because when they see the value they are getting out of the money they have spent, then you’ll either benefit by having them refer their friends to you or getting them to buy more from you!

Advertise Your Products And Services

Organic traffic can do only so much for your business when it comes to finding clients, especially when you do not have enough content to market your products and services.

So when you’re just starting, the best way to quickly get the word about your business across is by doing advertising.

There are so many ways you can advertise. You can use paid methods and/or non-paid methods.

More information about how to publicize your business and brand can be found in my eBook entitled ‘Power Handbook For Finding Your Ideal Customers Who Really Spend’. For more information on this eBook click here.

When you advertise your products and service, people will get to know about you and how you can help them. They can then move on to either purchasing a low-priced item from you or download a freebie. With that, you can choose to follow-up with them to see if they will be interested in your other products and services.

Optimize Your Website

In today’s digital world, if you don’t have a website, your business is seen as non-existent.

This is because the first thing people will do before deciding to purchase a product or service is to search online to see if that business has a website. I know that there are a lot of ‘theories’ out there saying that you only need an online sales funnel to succeed online, but to me, this is not true at all. In fact, you need a website and several online sales funnels to be able to grow and scale your business to greater heights!

And if you include SEO strategies, you’ll be able to optimize your website so that you can gain free traffic whenever your target customers search for specific terms online.

Getting a website is a simple process. When you do get a website, make sure to get a paid website and not a free one. My article entitled ’20 Reasons Why You Should Avoid Getting A Free Website’ explains in details why you should avoid having a free website in the first place!

Develop Personal Branding

Many people will choose to support a certain business simply because they feel more connected with the brand.

If you’re a small or medium-sized business, then the best type of branding approach you can use is personal branding.

By using personal branding, you are putting a face or several faces to your business. That way, your potential customers will be able to relate to your brand better.

Most people love doing business with real human beings rather than faceless boring corporate brands. This is especially the case if you’re doing coaching, consultancy or training. This type of branding also works well for selling eCommerce products.

With personal branding, your products and services will have your unique stamp on them. And people will be willing to buy from you even if a million other people are selling the same things as you!

Contribute To Existing Publications

You can also break through the noise by being seen in existing publications. When people see your name and articles in publications, they will see you as an authority in your field. This will make them trust you more and be curious to learn more about your business.

To do this, you can sign up for Help A Reporter Out (HARO). You will receive invitations to pitch stories to reporters in need of help. When chosen, you will be invited to become a source and work with them in preparing their articles.

And once the articles are out, your name and business will be in full view to a large pool of potential customers! Isn’t that great?

Be Active In Online Communities

You can further expand your network by being active in online communities. The best places to do this are by being active in Facebook and LinkedIn Groups as well as online forums.

Choose to be involved in communities within your niche or industry.

When you are in these online communities, you can always reach out to people by providing constructive feedback and actionable advice to others who are experiencing challenges.

Even if the person whom you reached out to doesn’t end up getting your products or services, other people in the group will get to know about you and your skills and end up buying from you.

Provide Free Content

Sometimes, for people to trust you enough to buy from you, they need to experience your expertise for themselves.

To provide ‘mini samples’ of what you can do for them, the best way is to provide free content.

The best to do this is by contributing blog articles, YouTube videos and Pinterest pins.

People love free content. There is no risk in using them. And when they get good experience in using your free content, this will increase your credibility and they will trust you more.

However, to generate the right type of free content that will attract your ideal customers, you need to contribute content that discusses their challenges and burning questions.

Getting your first clients can be a challenge. However, with the right strategies and processes in place, it shouldn’t take too long before you get your first paying customers.

If you think are just starting your business and do not have a clue on the right steps that will help you to grow your business fast, then my Marketing Coaching Program can help.

With this program, you’ll get the chance to work one-to-one with me in coming up with the best strategies to kickstart our business. To inquire more about this program, complete the contact form here and I will be in touch with you soon.

I hope that the strategies that I shared in this article will be beneficial to you in helping you to get your first clients. Even if you have not clinched your first client, don’t lose hope… Use these tips and you might get your first client sooner than you think! Tried any of these strategies and gotten positive results? Then I’d love to hear from you in the comment section below.

References:
https://hustletostartup.com/getting-clients/
https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/231375
https://www.theworkathomewoman.com/get-your-first-client/
https://www.forbes.com/sites/ashleystahl/2017/10/15/how-to-land-your-first-client-and-get-paid-what-youre-worth/#311bed9f223a
https://www.inc.com/quora/4-necessary-steps-to-land-your-first-client.html
https://www.thevahandbook.com/find-first-client/
https://briancasel.com/your-first-customers/