Why Sales Funnels Are Next In Affiliate Marketing

The term “Sales funnel“It may be new to you. It is a marketing technique that has been around for decades in the offline world. It is also a technique commonly used by sellers of online products.

It is a way for a marketer to earn more money from the people who visit their site.

What’s new is that affiliate marketers are now also starting to use sales funnels to increase their own profits.

There are two general types of sales funnel:

1. The multiproduct funnel

There is the funnel that is always used by companies like JVZoo, Warrior Plus, and sometimes ClickBank.

This is where you buy a low-priced starter product and are then subject to a variety of upsells and unique offers designed to get you the most for your money.

The goal of this type of funnel is to sell you multiple products in quick succession before you actually have time to consider your options.

Deals often have timers that show how little time you have left to make a decision or tell you that limited quantities are available.

2. The single product funnel

The second type of funnel is geared towards selling you a single product.

The purpose of the funnel is to repeatedly expose you to the product and explain why it will be useful, if not essential, to you or your business.

This is often accomplished by enticing a visitor to sign up for a free product, and then sending them a series of emails outlining the benefits of the product you are trying to sell to them.

A less common tactic is to provide free training and information to prospects on whether or not they end up buying.

Sales funnels in use

If you’ve ever bought something in the Make Money Online niche, you’ve already been exposed to the multi-product sales funnel.

They can often leave a bad taste in your mouth and you end up feeling like you’ve been harassed into spending a lot more money than you intended. That can generate some resentment in you.

If you recognize that feeling, is it something you would like to highlight in your own customers?

Do not forget that those who look at your offers are real people, not credit cards with legs.

Treat your potential customers as you would like a salesperson to treat you.

This is why I prefer the second type of funnel.

This is not a hard sell. You’re giving your prospects something for free to lure them to the door.

From there, you start presenting your offer to them and why you might be a good fit for them.

You try to persuade them that what you offer will make their life easier or solve a problem for them.

If they buy, then they have made the decision to buy.

You haven’t forced them to make the decision by using some bogus shortage tactics like a countdown timer or saying there are only a limited number of copies available.

Because a potential customer has made the decision to buy on their own terms, they will feel much better about their purchase decision.

You will have earned their trust and can use it to further build your relationship with them so that you can market other offers more successfully to them in the future.

So how does this relate to affiliate marketing?

Generally, affiliate marketers have access to affiliate links and resources like display ads and emails that they can send.

They are used to drive traffic to an offer.

However, when a potential customer buys or signs up for a squeeze page, they enter the sellers email list, not the affiliate’s.

That means the affiliate has lost access to that prospect forever and it is the marketer who can market to that customer over and over again.

The best affiliate networks will also pay affiliates for products that are in a seller’s sales funnel.

So yes, you can earn commissions for multiple products.

But what you, as an affiliate, don’t know is if the seller is offering products that are not in the “public” sales funnel to the people on your list.

Therefore, you could be losing commissions as a result.

Typically, a sales funnel starts with a low-priced product, offers higher-priced products down the funnel, and culminates in one or more high-priced products at the bottom of the funnel.

This tends to be where sellers get most of their money. It is much easier to sell an expensive product than dozens of cheap products.

The seller has every right to market products for which he will not earn a commission.

After all, they own the email list that buyers are now subscribed to.

So to counter this, affiliate marketers have been creating their own sales funnels.

They select the starter product, upsells, and any high-priced products to promote.

All of these can be from different vendors. But you, the affiliate, may think that some products complement each other better than the products from the seller’s own funnel.

Yes, the potential customer will be exposed to each seller’s funnel, as well as that of the affiliate.

But the affiliate knows that a sale of any product in their own funnel will generate a commission.

That being said, I still think that the single product funnel is the best approach from a customer relationship standpoint.

If a potential customer ultimately doesn’t accept your offer, they still have it on their email list. And now is the time to promote a different offer.

You can market to these leads as often as you like as they are on your email list.

So the biggest advantages of creating your own sales funnels are:

  1. You can add prospects to your own email list

  2. Your email list is a business asset that you fully own. Its usefulness does not depend on the whims or algorithm changes of Google, Facebook or whoever.

  3. Email marketing is still the best way to make money online.

  4. You can market to your subscribers as often as you like.

  5. You can create your own unique sales funnels, combining products from a variety of sellers

As an affiliate marketer, you should never send people directly to an offer. Basically, you are giving that person exclusive access to the seller.

You should always send people to a compression page first, one that you own, and only after they sign up there, will you send them to your affiliate offer.

In this way, you have captured their email address and are now part of your 100% owned business asset: your email list.

How do you build a sales funnel?

If you use WordPress, there are plugins that will create compression (optin) pages and other types of funnel pages for you.

But creating a real sales funnel is not the easiest. These plugins are great for creating individual pages rather than a full funnel. It can be done, but it needs to be very organized and keep track of how each page relates to another.

Another approach is to use a service like Clickfunnels that is exclusively designed to create sales funnels. There is a link to a review in my bio below if you want to know more.

With a service like this, you don’t even need your own website. The tool can do everything for you.

I hope that now you see the advantages of creating your own sales funnels, whatever tool you end up using to create them.

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