A marketing funnel is simply a structured, planned out method of gathering leads and introducing them to your product or service, then building a relationship with them. At some point, some of those leads will buy something from you if you have a good funnel.

The “funnel” will gather more leads than are actually ready or qualified to buy your product or service, then they will sift down through the stages of the funnel, until what comes out at the end is a customer. You start your funnel with a strategy to attract leads. You can use any marketing method to “fill your funnel.” You can network, rub elbows with people, schmooze and collect contact information whenever possible. You can advertise offline, like in newspapers, with flyers, with direct mail, etc. and have people contact you by phone, or by email, or you can send then to your website. Or, you can market online and have websites that interested people can “opt into” to get additional information.

The first thing you need to consider is, who is your target market? Who would be interested, and who would you be interested in doing business with? Where do they hang out? What do they read? What do they search for on the Internet? What catches their attention? What do they have in common with you? It’s always best to narrow down a target rather than try to appeal to everybody in the world—this is called “niche marketing.” Figure out what your niche is, or what you want it to be. Then start to make plans on how you can attract your ideal prospects.

Whatever method(s) you choose to fill your funnel, you need to give people some reason for them to give you their contact information. The best way to do this is to offer them something. It could be a free report, a sample, an e-book, a DVD—use your imagination! You always want to offer something that will either be free, or cost very little, because it’s only then that you can start to build a relationship with your prospects.

So the first part of your funnel is to fill it with the contact information of people who might be interested. That’s a key word: “might.” Not everybody who shows some interest in what you are offering will become a customer, so you need to collect many more leads than you expect will actually become customers.

Now that you have a bunch of people at the top of your funnel… what do you do with them? Well, you connect with them, of course! Your whole object with your funnel is to connect with people so that you can give them the information they need in order to make a decision about what you have to offer. You can call them directly if you have their phone numbers, or you can mail them something if you have their addresses, or you can email them if you have their email addresses. Obviously, email is much less time consuming. Probably the best strategy is to “drip” emails to them by using an autoresponder service. This is a service that will allow you to set up an entire series of messages that you can order and space as you see fit, and then have those go out automatically to the leads you have collected. The way you would be collecting those leads would be through a website where they have to put in their contact information to get to the next level of information or to get what it is that you are offering them. This website can be called a “lead-capture page,” a “splash-page,” or an “opt-in page.” You don’t want to just send somebody to a website where they poke around and then have to call you if they want more information. You want to make it irresistible for them to offer up their contact information.

This is also where a good “call to action” comes in. It’s important to tell people what they need to do, like, “Just put in your name and email address, and your free sample will be shipped to you within 24 hours.” Or, “Click on the link in this email, fill out the form on that page, and a confirmation email will be sent out to you with your free report.”

Maybe after they enter your “funnel” you give your leads a brief call to introduce yourself, and ask them a little bit about themselves and what they are looking for. You don’t even need to talk to them about your service or product– you can simply send them to a webpage for more information– another part of your sales funnel. Now you let your autoresponder take over and send them your series of messages. Your messages should be designed with compelling subject lines that elicits curiosity or appear to fill a need or a want. They should also offer some valuable content. You do not want to be “salesy.” What your goal should be is to give your prospects something that will help them begin to like, know, and trust you. You can put a link to your actual product(s) in the messages, but do it in a very relaxed and easy manner.

As your autoresponder messages go out, and you perhaps offer products that you are an affiliate for, something that your target market needs or wants, your prospects begin to know and trust you, and perhaps they purchase something. The prospects that do not really fit your target drop off your list by unsubscribing. And so the process goes. If you call your leads once in a while you can ask them questions about themselves, and what they are looking for. You might have an invitation to some training or something else to offer them.

Before you know it, you have customers coming out of the end of your funnel!

I use a system that has most of the funnel all ready built, and I can customize it for my needs without having to start from scratch.

Check out what I use: My Sales Funnel System

If you are marketing your network marketing or MLM business using traditional methods, you’re out there doing the finding. And this is a perfectly good strategy that works, if you work it. But many network marketers have found that to be difficult—they “use up” their warm market, and have trouble finding new people to connect with. That’s where the internet comes in. On the internet there is a huge opportunity to get exposure for your network marketing or MLM business. However, you need to know how to do it. There are many, many strategies to get yourself out there, but they will all cost you something.

Sometimes the cost is in money… and sometimes the cost is in time… and sometimes it’s a combination of the two. Either way, there is going to be a learning curve, but there’s a learning curve for everything we do in life when it’s new. One of the fastest ways to get found on the internet has been “PPC” or Pay-Per-Click” advertising with the search engines, like Google. It’s fast, and it can be very expensive, and it has gotten more and more competitive over the years. In addition to those challenges, Google occasionally “slaps” people by changing their rules. Advertisers who were getting visibility with their ads can suddenly find that their ads are not showing up, or are costing much more per lead actually brought in.

A great way to begin to build exposure, that will not cost you anything, or very little, is article marketing. Essentially this is putting articles out there on the internet and having them link back to your blog or to a “capture page” where somebody can opt in to get more information about you, your product, or your network marketing or MLM business. The great thing about article marketing is that you are also building a relationship. When people read your articles they can begin to know, like, and trust you—essential to attraction marketing.

If you have information to share and you like to write, article marketing is a natural choice for you. The hardest part of it will be getting your articles out to as many places on the internet as humanly possible! This can be quite time consuming, because what you have to do is submit your article to article directories. There are thousands of article directories. Sounds like a lot of work, doesn’t it? You can hire somebody to do this grunt work for you… or you can do it all yourself. You can make it a whole lot easier (and cheaper) if you use some kind of automatic article submitting software or service.

There are many good article submitters out there, some of which are on a subscrption basis and you pay a monthly fee. One that I use is great because it’s a one shot deal—you buy it once, and it costs less than $100. It’s called Automatic Article Submitter, and I think it’s fantastic. I won’t get into all the details of what it does, except to say that it cuts down the time it takes to submit articles to lots of places by a huge percentage. If you want to check out it’s features, just go here: Automatic Article Submitter software.

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Brian Fanale, one of the three co-founders of MLSP spoke about copywriting. According to Brian, “copywriters own the world!” Sounds like a strong statement, but Brian and MLSP, have the success to support it. Brian says copywriting is not hard, he’s never met a poor copywriter, and copywriters have deep fulfilling lives because they understand psychology. This is something that can serve us in all aspects of our lives! Brian says these skills helped him when he met his girlfriend!

Brian explained that people buy on emotion, how they FEEL about something—and they will justify their purchase later. So a good copywriter needs to understand emotions and engage their prospects on an emotional level. He says to engage your prospects until they are motivated to take action. If you provide a solution to your prospects’ problems and show them how they will benefit, they will convince themselves. Storytelling is also a very effective tool in the copywriters toolbox, because we all love stories and respond on an emotional level.

Brian gave a list of his copywriting mentors: John Carlton, Ryan Deis, Eban Pagan, Mike Dillard, Dan Kennedy, Yanik Silver, to name a few. Brian also said a great source of information on copywriting is David Frey, who’s got a great website, with lots of free resources. (David also has a great book called “The Small Business Marketing Bible,” which includes his “scientific” methodology for great sales copy.)

I look forward to the next Live The Dream event, and feel very fortunate to be able to work with people like Brian Fanale.

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To succeed as an entrepreneur, a business owner, or as a network marketer, or if you have a vision for yourself that goes beyond where  you now in your life or in job you need to do these two things…

First, create a picture:

The best way to get what you want is to get very clear on what you want, and then to commit to it. Create a picture in your mind of what it is that you want. Fill in all the details. Write it down. Give yourself the time to review it, reflect on it, refine it, and redefine it. Make it a daily practice. Make it a big picture, then continuously add to the picture until it is very detailed. Hold that picture in your mind and allow it to expand and evolve. Do not fret over how you can accomplish your big picture, just keep picturing the picture, and do the next step: commit to it.

Second, make a commitment:

When you are very clear on what you want, commit to it. Commit to taking action. Commit to believing you can be it, do it, and have it. Commit to moving forward. Commit to staying focused. Commit to overcoming any obstacles. Commit to persistence and perseverance. Commit to staying committed.

Here is a favorite quote:

Commitment

Until one is committed there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness.

Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one elementary truth,
the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans, that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then providence moves, too.

All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one’s favour all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamt would have come his way.

I have learned a deep respect for one of Goethe’s couplets:

“Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.”

Quotation from the Scottish Himalayan expedition, by W. H. Murray, published by J. M. Dent & Sons, Ltd., 1951

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Mike Dillard and Susan Wood at Live the Dream

Mike Dillard was one of the speakers, and here are some great tips from Mike:

• Attraction Marketing is about leadership and providing value.
• You attract people and business to yourself when you offer to help others achieve their goals.
• When you offer help, offer it generically– don’t just offer information that is specific to your company– offer generic information that others may benefit from as well, and you may attract others to you and/or to your business.
• Don’t offer generic help and then immediately pitch your business. Let people ask you about your business because they see you as a leader and want to know what you do.
• Mike suggested that if you are starting with a $500 budget you can start with offering affiliate products, and the best skill you can start to develop is copywriting.
• A couple of Mike’s favorite people to learn copywriting from: Dan Kennedy and Yanik Silver.

Find out about Free Internet Marketing Training

Jerry’s favorite slogan is “Go, Go, Go!”—and it means “Go be it, go do it, go have it.”

Jerry also talked about the idea of the “Success Triangle.” He says that most people think that all they need for success is to learn how to do something—that they need “TK” (technical knowledge). But that is only one side of the triangle. The other two sides are “IC” (inner communication) and “EC” (external communication).

The IC side of the triangle has to do with mastering your internal communication. What are you thinking and what are you telling yourself and what is your vision for your life? It’s like that saying “garbage in, garbage out.” Or “stinkin’ thinking.” You need to empower yourself for success by mastering your internal communication,

The EC side of the triangle is your external communication. To really be successful you need to understand other people and learn how to communicate with them effectively. When you understand what makes people tick, what their motivations are, the hope and dreams, their frustrations, their challenges, and you learn to listen to them and communicate effectively you put yourself in a position of leadership, you set the example, and you will have influence. It’s all part of that whole “attraction marketing” thing—when people know, like and trust you, they will want to do business with you.

One more great idea from Jerry is linked to the “Law of Gestation.” Everything is a process, right? The way Jerry explains it is that it’s like a seed. You plant it in one season, but it develops and matures in a different season. You can’t expect instant results—you have to tend and care for things, you have to be persistent and consistent before you will see the results. But the results will come if you do the work, have the patience, and hold the belief. This works for everything in life—relationships, learning, marketing, and building a business.

Get invited to free webinars taught by successful marketers: Free Weekly Marketing Webinars.

Get invited to free webinars taught by successful marketers: Free Weekly Marketing Webinars.

There are many ways to market online. Some will take more money than time; others will take more time than money.  I’d like to give you a very brief overview of just two internet marketing methods: PPC and Web 2.0 marketing.

Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising is probably the most immediate presence you can get on the internet. However it is also probably the most expensive. For the uninitiated, PPC is when you pay one of the search engines (Google being the biggest and most popular one) to place small ads in their search results. So let’s say you “google” something—you get a list of results, and at the top of the page, and on the right you will see in very small letters “Sponsored links.” Those are the paid advertisements. I won’t get into a lot of detail right now—but the advertisers select the keywords (or phrases) they want to get traffic for and pays each time the ad they placed is clicked on. So if you bid to pay $1.00/click, 100 clicks will cost you $100. You can see that that can run into some expense pretty quickly, especially when you are bidding on very popular keywords, because if you bid too low your ads will hardly ever appear, so you need be bid competitively with your competition in order for your ads to show up at all. I go into a little more detail in this YouTube video: Internet Marketing, the Big Picture, Part 1

Below is the second of two videos covering Internet Marketing, the Big Picture:

Web 2.0 marketing is marketing on websites that are interactive (they accept comments or tags or some other input from users). These are websites such as blogs, forums, web applications, social-networking sites (Facebook, MySpace, etc.), video-sharing sites (like YouTube), wikis (like Wikipedia), mashups (like Digg, Flickr), and bookmarking sites (like del.icio.us and Google bookmarks). These websites are free to “advertise” on. What’s the catch? Free sounds good? The catch is that it takes much more time that the paid advertising methods.

Let me paint you a picture of Web 2.0 marketing… you have a Facebook page, you make friends and you can send your friends messages, post things that will appear on their “wall,” invite them to events, etc. (in other words, you can interact with them). You can introduce them to what you are doing to see if they have any interest, and bam—you get a customer (maybe)!

You have a YouTube channel, and you make short videos to post on your channel, people see your videos, become friends, subscribe to your channel, and bam—you get a new customer (maybe).

You create a blog, you post content on your blog, people see your posts, maybe subscribe to your blog or leave comments, and bam—you get a new customer (maybe).

You write an article, you post it on an article directory website, people see your articles and bam—you get a new customer (maybe).

You post comments on other websites—like on forums or blogs, or videos. You say something brilliant, and because you can usually also list a website (like your blog, for example), other people click on that link and come to your blog and bam—you get a new customer (maybe).

OK, you get the idea—you interact with others on the web and they interact with you and you may get customers.

It’s not quite that simple, however, because you have to understand the concepts and you need to have a strategy. Simply putting content out does not get the content found. So you need to learn how to get your content found.

Also, you don’t rely on your “prospects” to just come to you when they are ready to buy something from you—you need to first “capture” their information. You do this by offering them something (it could just be more information) which they can only get to when they enter in their name and email address). You need to have a way of collecting this information—this is called “building your list.” Now you can email your list regularly with updates, news, information, great content, offers, etc. It’s commonly understood in any kind of advertising that people do not generally buy on their exposure—it takes several exposures before they decide to buy. In order to capture this information and send regular emails to your prospects, you sign up for an autoresponder service. This service will collect the data, and you can set up emails to go out to the list automatically. The emails can go out on a schedule, or you can send them an occasional broadcast message at any time.

A large part of getting found on the internet has to do with the keywords you use. Keywords are words (or phrases) that people are looking for when they are searching. For example, somebody who is looking for information on gardening may do a search for “gardening,” but that’s probably too broad and will give too many results, or results that are too general, so a new search might be done on “gardening books,” or “gardening tools,” or “gardening in Maine,” etc. If you want traffic coming to you because you are selling books about gardening, then you want to use the keywords that people will be looking for that will get you found. You use your chosen keywords in your blog posts, in your videos, in your articles, etc. You use the keywords in the titles, the links, descriptions, etc.

When you are doing Web 2.0 marketing you want to set up a “hub.” Think of it this way. You are creating your own web—the center of it is the hub. You then direct traffic to that hub by having the links in our content pointing to whatever you’ve decided will be your hub. The reason for this is that the hub will become more of an “authority”—it will become more important in the eyes of the search engines, and it will be more easily found when people are searching for your keywords.

An example of this is using a blog as a hub, then posting articles, videos, comments on forums, comments on other people’s blogs, bookmarks, etc.—all that have links in them that will point back to your blog. Your blog now becomes more “popular” with the search engines, so like in our example your blog (chock full of information on gardening books), will appear near the top of the search engine results when somebody searches for “gardening books.” And of course, you will do something to capture their information so you can continue to send them information.

I hope this gives you at least a beginning big picture of how all of this internet marketing stuff works.

Learn more about internet marketing and get invited to free webinars taught by successful marketers: Free Weekly Internet Marketing Webinars.

What I wanted to add is that it’s also very important to believe… have faith and confidence in yourself and your abilities, and get it going. If you are learning internet marketing, or are in a network marketing or mlm company, or in your own business of any kind, learn what you need to learn, believe in yourself and take massive action, expect massive results and you will get massive results.

If you’re a Facebook user, you can see Seb’s Facebook video here.

Learn more about internet marketing and get invited to free webinars taught by successful marketers: Free Weekly Internet Marketing Webinars.

Being authentic means not pretending to be something you are not. It means presenting yourself with your strengths, and your weaknesses. It means not needing to pretend to be perfect. When you don’t have to protect yourself or your image, you are much easier to connect with. People are actually attracted to those who are willing and courageous enough to simply be themselves.

Being authentic will help you in your business and in your marketing—any kind of business, any kind of marketing. Online marketing, offline marketing—it doesn’t matter. If you are providing people with the information they need to make an informed decision, if you are genuinely interested in helping them, not in pushing your product or service on them, if you don’t lie, distort, of pump out hype, if you listen to people, and if you are open about yourself and what matters to you and what adds richness to your live—people will connect with you. People do business with those that they know, like and trust. Being authentic, in real life, in business, in marketing, will help you succeed.

I think one of the most important skills in being authentic is LISTENING. Many think that good communication has to do with being able to clearly articulate your thoughts—but what about the other side of that? Communication is a two way street. Somebody speaks, somebody listens, and we hope that they take turns! When one or neither person is listening—guess what!? No communication really takes place—don’t you agree? Marketing may start out with you putting out information, but really effective marketing will ask for and process (listen to) feedback. When you are talking to a prospect or a customer, ask questions. Ask questions about what the problem is that your prospect/client needs to solve. Ask what their goals and aspirations are. Ask what brings them real satisfaction. Then listen. I can guarantee you that when you do that, even if you barely mention your product or service, you will establish a connection with them, and when the time is right, they will be open to listening to the information you have for them—they will actually probably ask for it.

This is why social media is such a great marketing tool. It allows you to establish real, authentic communication with people who may need what you have to offer. Think about how you can be authentic in your social media interaction, in your blogs, in your articles, and when you talk to people. Always keep in mind not what you can get, but what you can offer. Consider letting go of trying to keep up an appearance of perfection or of knowing everything and having all the answers. See what happens when you allow yourself to be you, and connect with others heart to heart. (One of the best things that can happen is that that others can be themselves!) Don’t try to separate who you are from what you do. Keeping these ideas in mind when you market will make marketing much more fun, and much more fruitful.

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