Here is the secret to making money online…
The only way you can make money in business is to profitably sell something.
Whether it’s online or offline, you must be able to convince somebody to pull out their wallet and purchase something.
If you can’t do that, then you will not be able to make even a dime.
If you can master the skills of getting people excited to pull out their wallet and purchase from you, then you will be wealthy very soon… Of course, you have to do it ethically and legally.
You have my word on that!
The reason why you are not making any significant amount of money with your online business is because you’ve failed at getting people excited in giving you money.
What most people do is they have a few photos and descriptions of their product or service on a website, then they would use paid ads to send traffic to the site. As you could have guessed because you’ve tried that yourself, that simply isn’t enough to get people to purchase from you…
Maybe it worked years ago, back in the early days of the internet. But that is no longer the case. You will just waste your money and effort trying to get sales that way.
Do you want to know how the pros convert traffic into sales profitably? They use a sales funnel!
Table of Contents
What the heck is a sales funnel?
A sales funnel is a structured process of qualifying and converting prospects into consumers, who are willing to pay for what you are offering.
There are several steps in a funnel. Each step in the funnel is designed to bring consumers to the next one, and usually end with customers purchasing the product.
To illustrate, here is an example of a simple sales funnel to sell a home workout program for people who want to lose weight.
Awareness:
Your prospects found you through paid ads, social media posts, or blog posts.
These posts are general content about how to lose weight. And working out is one of the solutions to lose weight…
These people are clearly aware of their problem, which is they need to lose weight. And they are seeking for a solution.
The biggest mistake newbies make is that they immediately send these prospects directly to the link of the home workout program, and hope they will purchase…
Understand this, most people will NOT purchase, and you won’t make much if any money doing it this way.
Your prospects need more information before they can make an informed decision!
Interest:
To help them make an informed decision, you need to bring them to the next stage your sales funnel, which is to educate them about how working out can help them lose weight and other benefits.
Those who landed on this page is clearly interested in losing weight through working out.
Consideration:
All those who’ve learned about the benefits of working out will be prompted to learn about 10 easy exercises you can do at home.
This is like a teaser to the actual product you’re selling…
You now have a list of prospects who are clearly interested in losing weight through working out, and they prefer to do it at home.
Action:
Your last step is to offer your home workout program!
Through each of those steps, your prospects have learned about the benefits of the product, which create a desire for them have the result that the product would bring.
Now you will have a much better chance of converting your prospects into buyers after they have gone through all the steps in your sales funnel.
If you ask for their money too early, many of your leads will leave and you will lose them.
By taking your time to bring them through a sales funnel, your conversion rate will be much higher!
Three Fundamentals Of A Funnel Step
Keep in mind that the example above is just a simple funnel… Each of the steps in this funnel can easily be broken down into many smaller steps.
Each of the smaller steps in your funnel can further be broken down into these 3 things: a hook, a story, and an offer.
In brief, a hook is what get their attention.
If you don’t have your prospects’ attention, then it’s completely useless to pitch them anything. They won’t listen and won’t take any action…
Once you’ve got their attention, the story will amplify their desires, bring out emotions and establish trust.
These are the things that will get them to take action…
The last thing is an offer, which is essentially offer them a product or service that they eager to have.
If your sales funnel is not converting (people are not taking action, or aka: not making you any money), the problem is likely related to one of those three things.
Let’s go into a bit more detail about each of these areas and I’ll help you understand how to make your sales funnel bulletproof.
The Hook
We all know that hooks are used by anglers to catch fish.
Simply put, hooks are “baited” with things that attract attention so that fish will take the lure.
Without a hook, you would have a much more difficult time of catching fish as while you might be able to get in front of them, you need a way of reeling them in.
The right bait combined with the right hook though. That’s a recipe for success!
The bait pulls them in and the hook keeps them from swimming away and helps you land your prey. The hook is essential as it serves two purposes:
- It interrupts people from their regular activities – be that reading, scrolling or surfing.
- It directs their attention towards you- your ad, your sales page, or your offer.
The hook lets you pull in your target through a variety of different methods…
You can stimulate their attention through the title, a video, an image or even a question in your text.
Imagine going through your feed on Facebook or Instagram and you saw something that jumped out at you.
Perhaps a big headline that says “How I made $1 million by working from home” along with a video.
You’d probably click the link or read the post right? After all, we’re all looking for financial success aren’t we?
Or back to our previous example, a good hook to get people attention would be “How you can lose weight without embarrassing yourself at the gym.”
This is a good hook. It grabs your attention and keeps you focused and looking for more…
Hooks are everywhere, you can look online and they should be part of all of your interactions.
All of your emails, landing pages and sales pages need to have hooks, or people will just ignore you.
The Story
Ok, you’ve managed to attract your prospects’ attention, but what’s next?
Well, from the hook you need to get into the story…
The story gives people the reasons to purchase whatever you’re selling, or take the action you want them to take.
Remember, we buy things emotionally, not logically… We only backup our emotional purchase with logic afterward.
A story ties to a hook by giving it context and helps bond the buyer and seller together.
You’ve probably read a book where you simply don’t care about the title character?
If you’re anything like me, you probably ended up putting that book down unfinished.
That’s because the author didn’t tell you the right story with the right details that let you feel something.
Selling is an emotional process so you need to be really good at telling stories.
You see, the sales process is all about finding people who have a problem… You would then use stories to amplify their desire to solve that problem, then offer the solution.
I can back this up with a personal example, too:
When I first started with online selling, I would give out all the information about a product without any stories or personal details.
I would literally give people the exact info that can be found on the product page…
I thought, incorrectly, that this would be enough to capture people’s attention and get them to take action.
As you would’ve guessed, no one purchased the product.
All the time and money I spent to drive the traffic to the offer was wasted for nothing.
Later, when I stumbled across the Epiphany Bridge Script that was created by Russell Brunson, I finally was able to convert traffic into sales.
By following the script in structuring a compelling story, I was able to actually profit and made my first dollar with affiliate marketing!
Not only I was able to make money, I would also get emails from people thanking me for offering them a solution to their problem.
Yes, people would purchase the product and be happy that they did all because of stories…
This is why a story is so important… You want to entice your readers with something they can connect to at an emotional level.
By bringing on these emotions they are more likely to buy or take action about something.
The reason why people failed at selling anything online is because they don’t know how to utilize storytelling to create desires.
MASTER storytelling and you will be able to influence people to DESIRE whatever that is you’re selling!
And there is a secret in structuring a compelling story…
Russell Brunson is a master at this…
He teaches how you can effectively use stories to bring out emotions and build desire to get people purchase from you in the One Funnel Away Challenge.
If you watch any of his webinars or keynotes, you will see that he uses a lot of stories.
Russell literally scaled ClickFunnels to a 100 million dollars business with stories.
When ClickFunnels was first launched a few years ago, he had trouble getting people to use it…
The startup features an online drag and drop software that allows business owners to create sales funnels in just minutes…
To be honest, the concept of sales funnel isn’t easy to explain.
It was not until he started to share his story of how sales funnels have helped him selling his potato gun DVDs that people started to see the value of ClickFunnels.
A few years later, ClickFunnels now has nearly 100,000 active users, and is worth over $100 million. All because he started selling with stories.
The Offer
If you have a good hook and story, so that the customer is in the right frame to buy, but they don’t commit, then your offer is probably an issue.
The Offer is probably the most important part of your sales funnel.
You could do terrible at the hook and story, but if you have an amazing offer that people can’t resist then you would still be able to make the sale.
It’s important to ensure that your offer really matches their needs. It has to be what the customer wants, not what you think they want.
This is why it is very important that you have something worth buying. If you wouldn’t buy it yourself, then don’t expect other people will buy it!
So if you have a bad offer then doesn’t matter what you do, you will have a HARD time selling it!
Hopefully you’ve realized that I’m talking about an “offer” here and not just a specific product.
This is because, products are commodities.
They are the same from business to business, with prices being the same or similar also. If you’re trying to compete only on price, your margins are constantly going to erode leaving you with less and less profit.
Building a Great Offer
An offer can be explained as a package of products and/or services that is tailored to your specific needs.
And because everything included in the package is perfectly for your needs, the perceived value is much higher than buying a product by itself.
For that reason, the offer is irresistible for you not to make the purchase.
By focusing on an offer though, you’re changing the argument entirely.
You’re removing the competition from the equation and focusing on the differentiating factors.
This is why lots of online sites provide freebies like ebooks or video courses as addons to their primary products.
These things don’t cost significantly aside from the initial creation. The value to the customers though is quite large. In this case, customers don’t really have to think too long and can easily make a decision.
To Sum Up The Reasons Why Your Traffic Isn’t Converting Into Sales
So, if you’ve got a sales funnel and it’s not giving you the desired result, take a look at your hook, story and offer.
It’s likely that one of these three misses the mark, but with some some tweaks you can make the changes you need to get people pull out their wallet and purchase.
If you want to master your Hook, Story, Offer and start generating sales online in the next 30 days then make sure to check out the upcoming One Funnel Away Challenge.
The challenge will walk you through the process of putting together a high converting hook, story and offer into a sales funnel in just 30 days.
>> Click here to learn more about the One Funnel Away Challenge. <<
