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A well-done sales funnel is the difference between struggling and succeeding for many creatives and online entrepreneurs. It helps you ditch the overwhelm and stop hustling so hard to make a sale. 

A marketing funnel puts your sales on autopilot. When you have everything in place, your customers will be screaming “TAKE MY MONEY!”

There are 6 pieces you need to have in place to create the perfect plan to market your sales funnel. You can always change up the specifics and tweak as your business grows and evolves. That’s what’s so great about sales funnels! They have the ability to adapt right along with you. 

#1 Create Your Irresistible Offer

Before you can create your sales funnel, you need to have a desirable offer to promote and sell. Your offer should be something that your audience needs to have and can get excited about!

Your offer can be anything no matter what you sell. It can be a digital product, service, course, or physical product. You just need to be able to deliver it to your customers after they buy. 

To have any type of offer, it needs to have the following four components:

• What you’ll be delivering (product or service)
• Journey for a lead to become a paying customer
• Know your price and how to position your offer
• Determine the sense of urgency and perceived risks

This is a general framework. You’ll need to figure out the details of your offer. Most of the details can be filled in by conducting market research about your potential offer and asking friends or colleagues what they would be willing to pay for something similar. This will help validate that your offer is ready for your target market or if you need to go back to the drawing board and tweak still. 

#2 Focus On Your Audience

Your audience is your people! You need to be serving them and providing the best resources possible so they turn into loyal fans. Just like with any relationship, you need to spend time getting to know them. You should be able to say their likes and dislikes, what inspires them, what fears they have, where they shop, spending habits, what social media platforms they prefer, and specific demographics and psychographics. 

From there you’re ready to take what you know about your ideal client avatar, as well as the market research you conducted, and write your sales page. I like to do this first because it helps to create a strategy across my social media, emails, and landing pages. Repurposing saves you time and money!

#3 Create Your Freebie

A good, loveable lead magnet is the way to your audience’s heart. It’s what’s going to draw them in and leave them wanting more. 

And then you get to swoop in to give the people what they want! It’s a win-win for everyone. 

Similarly to your offer, you need your lead magnet to solve a problem for your audience, but this time, you want your offer to be the obvious next step. It should be what they can do next to take what they’ve learned in the freebie one step further. 

It needs to be relevant, offer value, be unique, and show your personality or expertise on the subject. You don’t need to spend a lot of time creating this, but you should make sure it is on brand and easily digestible. 

#4 Write Your Email Sequence

Once a lead has signed up for your value-packed freebie, you’ll need an email sequence encouraging them to buy your product. 

What you use to write the emails will mirror the data you used for your sales page. Remember what I said about repurposing and strategy? That still applies here. 

Take what you’ve already used from your sales page, market research, and audience data to write around 7 sales emails. These should cover everything from delivering your freebie and introducing yourself to your best content and what results they can get. 

Remember to use the language that resonates with your audience and write like you’re talking directly to them. 

#5 Set Up Your Sales Funnel

A sales funnel is where everything comes together. It’s your overall marketing and sales strategy in one place that works for you. It’s how you automate your sales process. 

Sales funnels can seem tricky, but really they only have three main parts: a landing page for your freebie, a sales page for your offer, and an email sequence that bridges the gap between the two. Using an email marketing software like ConvertKit will make it easier to build your sales funnel because it’s all in the same place. 

In this video, I show you how to build a super simple sales funnel so you can get started making money!

#6 Monetize Your Audience

This is where the fun part happens! You finally get to share your freebie and offer with your audience so they can go from leads to customers. It will look different if you have an existing audience to monetize or if you are starting from scratch. 

There are two options for building and activating your audience:

• Organic Traffic
• Paid Traffic

Organic Traffic

If someone finds you through your own content like social media, blogs, or YouTube that’s considered organic traffic. Organic traffic is good to use if you don’t have a large budget for marketing and ad spend, or if you already have an engaged audience. 

To get started with organic traffic, take advantage of opportunities like guest interviews on podcasts or Facebook live, affiliate marketing, and JV partnerships. 

Paid Traffic

If you don’t have time to build an engaged audience or you want to quickly expand your reach, paid traffic is a good option. You can advertise on almost any social media platform including Facebook, Twitter, or Google, so take a look back at your research on your ideal customer to see where they are hanging out to get the most out of your ad spend. 

You can also consider collaborating with influencers to tap into their audience. If they are reputable and trusted by their audience, it gives you a leg up because some of that know, like and trust factor will carry over as they are introduced to you. Sometimes this is more desirable than reaching a completely cold audience. 

Let’s Build Your Sales Funnel Marketing Plan

How are you doing? That was a lot to cover in one post! I know it’s easy to get overwhelmed when it comes to online marketing, but I’m here to make this a whole lot less stressful for you. 

I’ve been busy putting all of this information together in one, easy-to-use place so more business owners like you can focus on what they do best AND make money on autopilot. The Online Sales Blueprint is your guide to building out your entire marketing plan for selling online. It covers everything in this post but has worksheets, action steps, templates, and bonus items so you can stop being overwhelmed and sell with confidence. You’ll never have to second guess what to do next because it’s all laid out for you!

Grab your Online Sales Blueprint to get access to step-by-step instructions on how to build out your perfect offer and money-making sales funnel that your audience will LOVE. I’ve even included a Facebook community for added support!

So what’re you waiting for? It’s time to rake in those profits!