You pick up the latest #1 business best-seller at your local bookstore, open the front cover, flip to the second or third page and WHAM...it’s there.
You’re being urged to singup for a "Special Offer", access to a "Private Site" or get a "Special Rate" on an upcoming seminar or event.
Guess what…you’ve just become part of a highly effective sales funnel.
You’ve no doubt heard of the sales funnel, where you generate leads in your niche market by offering low or no-cost products pulling them through higher and higher priced products.
With information products it may mean…
- Generate leads with a free e-course or report
- Sell them a $47 eBook
- Move them to a $197 multimedia or paid membership site
- Offer group coaching for $97/month
- Throw in 1:1 coaching for $150/hour or more…
- Add a $2997 seminar into the mix
IT’S ALL ABOUT THE UP-SELL
For writers and information product publishers, you will recognize this system well as most of the leading health, business, personal development, and even travel books contain up-sell offers within the book.
In fact, where you or I may believe that getting a book published is an end unto itself, savvy information publishers understand that the book itself is simply a lead-generator – the second step in a powerful sales funnel.
The latest Donald Trump book "Think Big and Kick Ass in Business And Life" is a lead generator for the current touring set of Learning Annex Seminars happening all over North America. The Learning Annex Seminar itself is another phase in the sales funnel (as are most seminars) which lead to still higher-priced products and services.
Some questions that often come up are:
1. Should the first stage of your sales funnel always be no-cost, or can it be a low-end $7-$17 report?
2. Do you always use a funnel, or are their times when you can jump right to the higher-end product?
3. Should you have one freebie feeding your funnel, or should you have multiple lead-ins.
Ah, don’t you love digging into the grimy details?
First point, nothing says that you only design one sales funnel system – in fact you can have a few different ones.
Let me explain…
For ongoing marketing, giving something away to build a list which then allows you to market multiple products and services is still a very good approach, and here is why:
1. Many people who visit your website are not ready to buy anything yet – their in "curiosity" mode, but several will be ready weeks or months from now. If you force them to buy now, you’ve likely handed future sales to your competitors – so better to get them on a list where you can be ready to offer them the product when they are ready. I often tell people, over half my sales come from list subscribers who purchase weeks and months after initially finding my site.
This is why the first steps in the 6-week Information Product Profits Course cover – in detail – the steps to get your online presence setup and begin building a list which will serve as your ‘platform’ of buyers.
2. You get to build a relationship. In many cases a buying decision is made based on what they think of you and your accomplishments. We all look for role models, someone that we respect and admire who we will follow – the sales funnel system allows us to cultivate that mindset.
3. If not you…then! Your product will not be a 100% fit for everyone you bring into your list, so offering them a sprinkling of other quality, related products and services means that you can augment your income by 30%-50% – just because you have a sales funnel in place.
So, when does it make sense to jump the cue and NOT drive people directly into your sales funnel but hit them with your high-end product right away?
Where you can leverage the sales funnel of someone else through a joint venture or affiliate relationship.
Think of your niche market as a forest of sales funnels. You have one or more sales funnel, others within your market each have their sales funnels. By leveraging the forest of sales funnels, you can drive people immediately to your higher-profit products as a secondary sales model.
The most successful marketers online use both models.
Just to throw another method that works well, what if you had multiple sales funnels?
Multi-million dollar information publisher Yanik Silver outlined a system of having multiple front-ends feeding your back-end and having multiple sales funnels working for you as a method of really dominating your market and exploding your business results.
What do I do first?
First think you need to do is setup your own sales funnel. Ensure you have an attractive, no-cost entry into your sales funnel, a mid-priced bread-and-butter product and work on a back-end product which may be a multi-media product, personal coaching, a membership site or a joint venture with another marketer for a high-end product.
Next, you can move to setting up JV’s for your mid and higher-end products followed by mapping out multiple back-ends with multiple sales funnels.
Remember – you can have your own information publishing business online and earning dollars within just 6-weeks using the new 6-week Information Product Profits Video Series as part of the InfoMarketer’sZone InfoPublishers Mentor Site.
Jeff
