Massive Action Plan – Phase 2

by | Dec 29, 2014 | Entrepreneurship, massive action plan | 0 comments

Have you worked through Phase 1 of the Massive Action Plan?

If so, have you gone ahead and posted your comment or question about Phase 1 – if not – please head back and do it now.

In this post, we are going to build on the exercises you completed in Phase 1.

By now, you should have…

  • A massively meaningful driving force – your big WHY you MUST succeed with your own online business
  • A very detailed understanding of your target market – including your customer avatar, that you will use to focus your product and business marketing going forward
  • An understanding of the 3 keys to operating a successful online business 1) Targeted traffic 2) Sales funnel that converts and 3) Various operational components including web pages, payment processing, affiliate management and autoresponders

In Phase 2 we will expand on this strong foundation by covering:

  • How your web site should be constructed
  • What is a sales funnel and what do they look like so you can create one
  • Basics of getting higher conversions (leads and sales)

Basic Construction Of Your Online Business Website

Many people become confused when they get to the point of constructing their website – do I need a blog?  What about a sales page? What is a Squeeze or Lead Landing page and how does it get used?

Let’s go through basic online business website construction right now.

Your Sales Page

You need a sales page (if you are selling your own products) or a pre-sales page (if you are generating pre-sales leads toward an affiliate product where you earn a commission on referrals).  The objective of this page is ONLY to convert the lead into buying.  Your sales page can be completely text-based, a video sales message or a combination of both.  Regardless of the format we have found the best structure for your sales page goes something like this:

  • You connect with your audience by re-stating the challenge or desire that led them to your page in the first place (reinforcing their interest) 
  • You explain to them why they have yet to find the RIGHT solution (tapping into their frustrations or desire for a better solution)
  • You give them a reason why the RIGHT answer is now available to them (giving them hope)
  • You show them that the RIGHT solution you are about to offer them has worked for others (credibility, trust and overcoming objections)
  • Well crafted offer (focusing on elevating perceived value “If you had this it would mean X, Y and Z in your life – for a terrific price)
  • Guarantee and remove obvious objections

What is most important here is that you have a very deep understanding of what your prospect wants and why they want it as well as the image they have inside of their head around how fulfilling their desire will result in major improvements in their lives

In other words, you relate to their pain (even reinforce it to make it even stronger), give them hope there is a solution and then prove to them that it will work – follow this patter and you will find sales conversions will no longer be an issue (assuming traffic is properly targeted in the first place)

Your Sales Funnel – Why You Need One And How To Get One

 At best you can expect 2-3% of “Cold” traffic to buy from your website – not all that great a number when in reality most sites convert cold traffic at lower than 1%

However you can often double or even triple sales page conversions by inserting a step in the lead generation process BEFORE you place an offer to buy in front of your prospect.

So, the idea of a sales funnel is simply to “warm” otherwise cold prospects into a more lengthy campaign where you can take multiple stages to demonstrate the value of you and your business to the lead.

A sales funnel also allows you to do two additional things that are very important to your overall profitability:

  • Spread out the timing of your sales message across several weeks so that people who may not have been 100% ready to buy on day 1 are now ready 1-week later on 5
  • Allows you to sell to your leads multiple times across multiple different offers – with ONLY a sales page you get one chance to sell to your prospect, then they are gone.  If they haven’t bought from you, chances are you will never reach them with another offer

A sales funnel involves the following components:

  1. A lead-capture component (this can be a form on the side of your blog, an inline link to a landing page containing a form, a pop-up on your site or blog, a dedicated landing page often known as a Squeeze Page) 
  2. An autoresponder that automates the subscription, list management, sending out of automated messages and broadcasts and allows people to unsubscribe with minimal operational impact on you and your business – our chosen autoresponder is this one
  3. A series of emails that walk your prospect through a carefully designed process where you connect with their pain and desire, introduce a part of your unique solution, demonstrate some proof and then “warm” your prospect to you and your offer
  4. A staged offer that may include upsells, one-time-offers (OTO’s), cross-sells and even down-sell’s)
  5. Ongoing set of post-sale contacts with your customer to ensure you are supporting them and continue to keep them as a customer for future offers

One of the most confusing aspects of the sales funnel is the Landing Page, often known as the “Squeeze Page” for it’s single-purpose objective of squeezing your best prospects into taking one step farther in your relationship by subscribing, downloading or watching something that you provide for them in exchange for their contact information

Here are 4 sample squeeze pages taken from successful campaigns – (Our advice on building your sales and landing/squeeze pages is to use a WordPress Blog back end which is free to use and setup along with Optimize Press 2 WordPress Theme or Plugin package which gives you a ton of marketing-focused templates for you to quickly produce sales, landing, squeeze, blog and other standard web pages)

Squeeze Page 1 – Our Current Squeeze In The Personal Development Niche

 

Squeeze Page 2 – Recent Eben Pagan Offer

 

Squeeze Page 3 Example – More traditional design with text to the left, video and opt-in form that pops up when you click on the Subscribe or Download Button

 

 

Squeeze Page 4 Example – I included this one simply to demonstrate that the message and offer on a squeeze page matters more than being fancy – keep your message on the first page and make it obvious what they will get and how to get it…

As you can see, setting up a sales page, squeeze (or landing) page as well as the opt-in forms and email sequences that will help double or triple your sales levels is not rocket-science but IS a critical part of your success with your online business

 

How To Increase Your Conversions

You may wonder why we decided to cover information about increasing your sales conversion rate before we covered traffic generation (in the next blog post)

The reason is simple, conversions are THE most important metric with your online business as they give you insight into the predictability of how much profit per visitor and per lead you will make from your website and sales funnel.

Why is this so important?

If you know how much profit you make per visitor and per lead, then you know how much COST you can spend to get those visitors and leads in the first place.

There is a cost to every aspect of traffic generation from creating free content to placing advanced pay-per-click ads – anyone who tells you otherwise is not seriously operating an online business.

There is no such thing as FREE traffic – everything takes time, effort, energy and investment to create and to pull in your traffic

So, you MUST know your conversion rates and how much profit per lead you are making.

Here is some very basic math…

1000 visitors gets you 200 leads (20% conversion on traffic into leads) out of which you get 4 customers (2% conversion of leads to sales)

Assume you have a product to sell that nets you $40 which means your profit per lead is .80 per lead  – ideally you would like that to be over $1 in order to have more flexibility in terms of traffic generation

What this tells me is that I can only spend up to .16 cents per visitor and under .80 per lead in order to scale my business profitably.

These are VERY important metrics – and metrics that obviously you want to try and increase over time so that you can buy more targeted traffic and grow your business into the 6-figure to 7-figure range over time

So, how can you improve conversions?

  1. Targeted Traffic – first of all, you do need to make sure that the traffic generation you are using to test your early conversion is targeting traffic well – the message to market match from the content or ad that attracts your traffic to the link they follow and landing page + offer they arrive at must be very closely matched.  I have doubled conversions on my campaigns strictly by improving the alignment between the traffic I have coming to a site and the alignment of the overall campaign
  2. Compelling incentive designed to both help and sell.  All of our top converting campaigns start with an incentive (report, video, membership, or other giveaway) that is designed to both provide huge benefit itself AND to deliver part of the solution (valuable but incomplete) driving traffic back to the sales page for more thorough, more advanced or more high-touch version of the information.  If you are pre-selling an affiliate offer, the same thing holds – you want a high value incentive that then pre-sells the complete solution you are promoting
  3. Show them — the other main factor that can dramatically improve conversions is to “Show Them” that your solution works through case studies, examples, proof, testimonials and social proof.  So many people will not pull the trigger on buying from you because they have doubt around either your credibility or if the particular product or service will work for them…by showing them you remove one of the largest objections
  4. Test, Test, Test – the only way you will know about your conversion rates for given campaigns is to track and test.  Use Google Analytics as a basic way to test conversions – placing Analytics code on your various offer and then landing pages lets you track how many people have come to your front-end, signed up to your sales funnel and ultimately have purchased from you.  By having that tracking code in place you know what your conversion rates are and know how improvements, tests and tweaks are doing to improve your conversion rates

We have covered a lot in Phase 2 – heavily focused around setting up your online business presence, sales funnel and ultimately how to test, tracking and improve your conversions.

Having this basic infrastructure in place allows you to begin promoting your site, receiving traffic and testing your entire campaign – but to do that we need traffic.

Phase 3 will follow in the next post with everything you wanted to know about getting targeted traffic to really get your online business profits humming.

Have a comment or question about what we covered in Phase 1 or Phase 2 of the Massive Action Plan – post a comment.

If you are interested in digging in deeper and learning from the Online Marketer’s 6-Week Fast-Track program inside InfoMarketer’sZone – head over and check that out, it will cut months off of your online business building results.