Sales Funnel Optimization Strategies

Sales Funnels Are Not Created Equal ~ Profit More With Better Engineered Funnels

If You’re Reading This Then You Already Know About Sales Funnels. The Purpose Of This Post is To Give You Another Way To Look At The Funnel Building Process and Guide You In The Direction of Making Money Online From Your Sales Funnels.

In fact, in many cases, they confuse content funnels with sales funnels. If you tried your hand at making money online using dump traffic onto a sales page, chances are you’re making some basic mistakes that I am going to describe in this booklet. The truth is, many people suffer from a serious disconnect between different stages of their funnels. These differences add up and this is the reason why most people who put up a sales funnel don’t make the money.

Let’s put it this way, if your funnel’s parts aren’t doing their jobs properly, don’t expect to convert your traffic efficiently or effectively. How come? When people come to your funnel, they may be confused about your sales page. They might not have a clue as to how your offer can help them with their problem. Your initial pages seem to just float out there on the Internet-disconnected and totally lacking context.

If people do manage to read further down your page or click to an internal page, those sections may do a lousy job of recommending a particular category of solutions. Instead, the reader is left guessing. At this point, most, if not all, the people who found themselves on your pages would have bounced out. It would be a complete and total waste of time for them to keep going.

Many marketers things that sales funnels and content funnels are so different that they run on completely different tracks. This is wrong. The big difference really turns on just how much time and space you have at your disposal in order to convert the prospect. That’s really the bottom line.

When you direct traffic to a sales funnel, you have a series of messaging platforms and tools you can use to get your message across. Social media accounts, forum posts, quora posts, reddit posts, Web 2.0 posts, and others are all different information-based ‘contact points’ between you and your intended audience member.

From these contact points, you then link them to your site or your sales page. If you link them to your site or blog, you give yourself many chances at further earning the trust and confidence of your prospect as they click deeper and deeper into your site. Every new page they view is an opportunity to build trust, credibility, and authority.
Once you get them to click through to your sales page, very few of them will be left. Maybe you are able to attract 5000 people to the top level of your sales funnel every single day. If you built and optimized a tight funnel, maybe 50 or even 10 of those people will make it all the way through to the bottom of the funnel.

You may think that this a bad thing. After all, you started out with so many people, now you only have a handful. Wrong.This is how sales funnels are supposed to work, they are supposed to filter people based on interest and interest intensity. In other words, the ones who are most likely to put dollars in your hands are the ones who will probably make it all the way through.

Content funnels are similar to sales funnels with a twist
Obviously, content funnels are not intended to convert your traffic. It’s not like your visitors will just click a link on your content page and see a credit card information entry page. Instead, content funnels are intended to filter your traffic hard.
How hard? The more tire kickers or other non-serious visitors your content drives away, the better. Don’t feel too bad. These people weren’t going to buy from you anyway. They’re not a big loss. In fact, they are not a loss at all.

Content funnels are all about answering the following questions:
“Can you trust me?”“Can you be loyal to my brand?”“What is it about my brand that makes it worthy of your time, attention, trust, and loyalty?”If you are not answering these questions, you are wasting your time building content funnels. Seriously.How come? If you can’t come up with a convincing answer to the questions above, your content funnel is GENERIC. Put simply, your visitors can find the exact same information from millions of other places on the Internet. There is nothing really special about your site, your brand, how your present information or the the kind of information you provide.
Once your site becomes generic, it is not worthy of loyalty. There’s really nothing making it stand out. Your pages’ ability to convert or convince your visitors to click on to your conversion pages would be the same or even inferior to the run of the mill content page in your niche.

Content funnels are intended to build trust so the user would want to click through to your conversion pages or join your mailing list. That’s the bottom line. But for all this work, you have to optimize to create a workable content brand!

The bottom line with optimization is that you build on your successes and you try to fix your problems. The key here is to identify what you are doing right and replicate it. For example, if you have a dog breed website and you notice that of all the dog breeds your website covers, only your content about Chihuahuas get any kind of traction. You might need to change the orientation or the focus of your website to Chihuahuas.

Take a look at the pathways people normally use and see which of these actually lead to more ad clicks, email form submissions, sales or product downloads. Regardless of how you measure your conversions, make sure that your content pages and conversion pages are set up in such a way to maximize the amount of conversions you get.

A lot of people who build sales funnels, content funnels and conversion pages worry themselves to death about click through rates, page visits, and other metrics. You have to begin your analysis for optimizing your complete system with one thing; Conversions.

Conversions are all about turning traffic into something you make money from. If you are an affiliate then obviously you should be looking to convert traffic into sales so you can get a commission. If you make money through CPA programs, then you should look at trying to convert as much of your traffic into email form or zip code form submissions.

If you are looking at your statistics, you are looking at content pathways and you’re looking at all the many details that make up your website, keep your eyes on the prize, otherwise, you’re playing the game to lose. Stop listening to people who couldn’t make it. Just because they’re failing, doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to follow. Learn how to optimize each and every segment of your content funnel, sales funnel or conversion pages.

It’s very easy to blame other people or situations for our personal failures. Seriously. It feels good actually because when we do that, we no longer have to change. We can say to ourselves, “Well, I’m right” or “I’m the victim here.” This relieves us of any responsibility to change. However, the problem with blaming other people or situations that we can’t control for our failures is simply going to extend our powerlessness.

Anxious people or people with high levels of anxiety find themselves blaming other people or situations for whatever is going. The more they do this, the less in control they feel. It’s as if their world has spun out of control.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out why. When you place blame on somebody else, you’re basically saying to yourself that the solution lies with that person. After all, that person caused your problems, then it logically follows that they are the ones who could put everything back together.

This is a worthless solution because you can’t control that person. They’ve moved on. You have to take responsibility. You have to take ownership of your pain, your past, and your coping mechanism. This is too much for many people and that’s why they remain stuck. This breeds anxiety and a sense that one doesn’t really control one’s life.

Sounds sad, right? Well, this is how many sales funnels are set up. It doesn’t matter if they use a content front end. It doesn’t matter if they use a network of question-based pages to both qualify and generate traffic, when pages or page segments are just slapped together willy nilly, it shouldn’t be a surprise that these don’t make any money. How can they?

Remember this key fact: when consumers are confused, you can count on them to do one thing: refuse to do anything. As the wise old saying goes, “when it doubt, stay the hell out!” People work hard for their money and you can bet that if they are confused as to what you have to offer or how you can solve their problems, they won’t sit around waiting for an explanation. Even less probable, they won’t try to ‘read your mind’ and figure out how your product will fit their situation. They don’t have all the time in the world. They simply leave. When that happens, you don’t make any money.

The bottom line is simple, for your sales funnel to work, you have to optimize each section of the funnel.

But this assumes you’re using the right funnel in the first place.

It’s crucial for you to go through the steps below to make sure that you have built the right funnel so you can optimize it properly.

Look at existing demand and study people who express those demands in Facebook groups, Facebook messages, reddit, subreddits, etc. Once you have a clear understanding where the demand is, ask yourself “am I going to just pull traffic from these places and dump them to a sales page or am I going to create a content funnel for these places?” Maybe you need to put up a content funnel because this way, the people that end up in your conversion pages are already pre-qualified.

If it seems that they’re looking for answers to questions and not really specific product recommendations, a content funnel will probably be the better option. If on the other hand, people are specifically asking for a specific solution, then you may be able to get away with directing these people to your sales funnel.

However, your sales funnel can’t appear spammy or overly commercial. Even a one (long) conversion page must have enough information to answer the questions and needs of your visitors. There has to be enough material there to build trust.

Regardless of whether you’re using a sales funnel or a content funnel, you have to wrap your mind around optimization. This is one of the reasons why so many people who put up sales funnels of one form or another, eventually fail.

You have to understand that your sales funnel and overall conversion strategy will reflect your level of knowledge regarding how to convert online traffic into cold hard cash in your bank account.

You can’t just copy and paste something that somebody else has set up. They may have set it up in a certain way and attracted a certain traffic to produce the results that they are getting. I don’t wanna sound cynic, but there is definitely a lot of space for a healthy level of skepticism when it comes to the whole “make money online” niche.

Pay close attention to what you’ve set up and dedicate yourself to optimizing your funnel. You have to be more proactive.