You will notice very quickly that I do not focus on affiliate marketing, or pay-per-click, or any of the other faddish things that are so commonly seen online.
I focus on meeting needs through creating a product funnel.
You see, my belief is that true value is generated online when you find a group of people who you care to help meet their needs, then you create products that will do just that, and of course they exchange with you a payment in exchange for you helping them meet their needs.
In my opinion, this varies drastically from what we see so much online – people find affiliate products that they think will sell well, will make them a lot of money, and then go try to get people to buy them.
In the first place, this tends to be ineffective at really meeting needs for the end user, and is quite inefficient in terms of marketing clickfunnels price.
In the second place, I have found that most people who promote other people’s products very rarely do more than break even on their traffic costs – so the only person who really wins is the product creator – the person who runs and owns the affiliate program.
What I have found creates the highest level of long term income online is when you create a list of targeted subscribers, find out exactly what they need (notice I say here, need, not ‘think they want’ (I’ll cover that in greater detail later), and then create a complete product funnel to meet those needs.
What is a Product Funnel?
In its strictest sense, a product funnel is a series of products that progressively meet buyer’s needs at a more intense level, and have a correspondingly higher price for each increasingly deeper level.
An example of this might be:
1) a free gift (to induce subscribership)
2) a $97 ebook (to give subscribers a chance to become buyers)
3) a $497 CD series (to give an increased level of understanding to your buyers)
4) a $5000 end to end complete course or coaching program (this is where your buyers really are able to apply everything you have been teaching; this is also where the bulk of your profit occurs)
One of the things I would like to indicate here is that I am not a proponent of a strict ‘force the customer to progress through the funnel’ model. Many times various customers with varying demographic backgrounds will choose to enter your product funnel at varying points.
For example, while one buyer may need to buy your ebook, read it, test you out, see if your concepts work, then buy your CDs, listen to the sound of your voice, try out a few more things, decide if they really like you, then buy your end to end coaching program or high – end class, others may simply feel more comfortable buying your high end course first, skipping the ebook and the CDs.
If you constrain your subscribers and buyers to following your predetermined progression, you may find that many of them will not make it through the funnel, as their needs are not being met by the smaller products, although they would have been met by the high ticket product – and since you are forcing them to buy the other products first, both you and they miss out on the opportunity to do business at your highest level.