Chances are they’re only leading up to some sort of sales offer and in so doing are trying to get you to buy something from them, but many of those self-proclaimed Internet Marketing (IM) experts are definitely onto something with their citation of the importance of a sales funnel. A sales funnel is important if you’re going to realise any form of success with your online marketing exploits, but it’s not a simple matter of just listening to the presentations of the gurus and then going on to buy their e-book, guide, training course, etc.

I mean in all honesty, if you’re going to be presenting to me a marketing secret, strategy or technique that supposedly works and has worked wonders for you in particular, why are you trying to sell us something else then? Shouldn’t you keep implementing that marketing strategy and keep enjoying the resounding and indicatively growing success?

Anyway, they’re onto something with regards to the importance of building up a sales funnel and keeping it engaged in that that’s pretty much what Internet Marketing is all about. It is through your sales funnel that you make sales and frankly there’s no other reason to get into Internet Marketing than for the completion of sales.

The Problem Breakdown

For any form of success in IM, one needs to get to a stage where you really feel like you’ve put some work in. Recycling some generic and widely available strategy won’t bring you any results, but will rather just frustrate you, so no, the marketing strategy you uncover by clicking the first-page results of a Google search is not the way to go.

It’s all about providing value and the best point of view from which to do that is by looking into your own life and going through every last step along the way to solving a problem you had. This applies even in the case that the solution you ultimately came to was that of buying a product or service. In fact, that’s the direction in which you should be looking.

Break the problem down and in so doing create something like a 7-day free course which can be delivered digitally via an automated emailing service like Aweber.

List-Building

Next, start building your list, which entails erecting an opt-in (leads capture) page to which you will send targeted traffic. There are many sources of traffic you can use, of which the ones yielding the quickest results would be those you pay for of course, but the important thing is that the opt-ins making up your list are people who are interested in getting a solution to the problem you know how to solve and are effectively discussing through your 7-day email course.

Engaging the Funnel

The automated email which hits the inboxes of the opt-ins counts as your funnel engagement, but all of this is in vain if you don’t make a sales offer. Typically the last of the seven emails will present the solution to the problem as your sales offer.

Do this and you’ll be kicking yourself as to why you didn’t do it earlier on your life!