Get Your Website Found By Clients Through Sales Funnels
"If you build it they will come" might be the biggest lie ever told. It applies to ghost baseball players, it does not apply to your website. How do you get your website found by customers?
Is that what sales funnels do? You invested in building this home on the web but there's no foot traffic. Whatโs the equivilent to foot traffic in the online world?
[Prefer to watch? This content is also in this video on my YT channel]
First letโs talk about sales funnels (my favorite topic!).
Is the sales funnel what gets your website found?
It depends on how you look at it.
Here is a graphic I found in Canva that is really great for showing the sales funnel (and I added a few notes to it). Some people would consider the strangers part of the funnel. I tend to think of the first step of the funnel being when they hit your website/landing page.
Either way is fine, you still need a strategy for getting those strangers to become leads. This is what weโre talking about today.
There are three main types of traffic and Iโll show you examples for each one. Iโm saving my persoanl favorite method for last!
Website Traffic Type One: Paid
If you had a physical store location you might put ads out to entice people to come in and I think that's why many people think of ads as a crucial part of a funnel. But it is not the only option.
You can set up social media ads (FB ads in particular are popular) to bring traffic automatically to the top of funnel so the entire thing runs by itself. Which is the dream!
In reality it can be challenging to get the ads working well for you. You need to have a budget to test and optimize your funnel. Russell Brunson, the king of sales funnels, does this. [Side note: you know that saying that people's names often corellate to what they do? How amazing is it that he has "Sell" in his name?!] Anyway, he spends a lot of money upfront and then when everything is working smoothly he can put money into an ad and get more money back in ROI from the funnel.
Iโll be honest, Iโve never made it work for myself. Iโm not a risk taker and putting money into testing is so stressful that I canโt focus on getting the right results.
What I have done in terms of paid traffic are 1. Pinterest ads and 2. Boosted posts.
Pinterest is a more affordable place to spend ad money so if your audience is there it can be a great payoff.
Common wisdom on the Internet is to only use boosted posts for awareness campaigns but I don't see why. I've been boosting IG posts to a free weekly class and just $20-30 gets new registrants.
Website Traffic Type Two: Partnership
Networking expands your reach and visibility like nothing else! I highly recommend going to online networking events to meet people who serve the same ideal client as you but have complementary products and services.
For example, I'm very narrowed in on my niche. I build book sales funnels in one day. That's it. So I love to partner with book coaches, ghostwriters, publishers, and other people in the book world. I can promote them to my audience so my people always have support for every part of the process and they can do the same with their audience.
I have an affiliate program for my work so my partners can sign up to get commission when one of their referrals signs up for a book funnel in a day intensive.
If they have affiliate programs for their work I sign up and promote them through my emails and by interviewing them on my podcast, The Financially Free Author Show.
Podcast guesting is another great way to benefit from partnership relationships. This is called borrowing someone else's audience. I've also done presentations within other people's masterminds, Facebook groups, and more.
Here is a post more about podcast guesting and it also has a list of my favorite networking groups to participate in!
Website Traffic Type Three: Organic
And now my personal favorite!
A good traffic strategy will have all three of these traffic types included but for most of us there's one in particular that just clicks. My business coach is all about the affiliate relationships (in fact he's now teaching affiliate marketing!) but for me, inbound organic is my comfort zone.
What is meant by inbound marketing?
Inbound marketing is attraction marketing. It's posting your own content and letting it draw people to you. Your audience reaches out when you have shown them something they want to buy or learn more about or sign up for. This is like if you have a restaurant and you put someone outside on the sidewalk handing out free samples.
Outbound marketing is outreach like pitching and cold messages. I haven't done much of this as of yet. But I did find this lovely series of videos about how to cold pitch that actually made it sound...not spammy!
Inbound organic includes social media marketing as well as SEO (search engine optimization). Both are huge topics. I have more information about using social media marketing in this video and more about SEO in this blog post.
Join Website Traffic school to build out your own traffic strategy layering in each pillar one step at a time. You can jump in any time, start with the current month's focus, and build out your traffic strategy over time.
๐ Weekly instruction, challenges, accountability threads, and engagement pods
๐ A private community to connect and support each other
๐ Monthly guest expert trainings
๐ Templates, scripts, Canva graphics to support each element of traffic
๐ Learn to track what's working
Sign up for just $50/mo
