Many people, in fact, most people who are looking to build a business online think that in order to sell anything, they need a website. A full blown, kick-assery website and all they think it entails. Honestly though, most people aren’t even sure what, and how much, they need.
Do you need a website? The answer is yes and no. Mostly, though, it is no.
You see, your website is typically not optimized to generate the fundamental drivers of an online business—building leads and making sales. A website doesn’t do that, but a funnel does.
A funnel is a nurture sequence that takes a prospect through an experience to where eventually the prospect in the funnel is moved to buy. There are several points that happen before purchasing, and that sequence of nurture is called a funnel. For instance, my favorite two funnels are the webinar funnel and a mini-course funnel. Both of which includes what are known as landing pages with the intention of getting opt-ins, aka, email subscribers.
Once these email subscribers are on your email list you take them through the funnel. There are different types of funnels, but let’s focus on three funnels we use on a regular basis—the best ones!
1. The 5 Day Challenge
5 Days of Rich Video Content Followed up by an Offer
When we ran this, we saw a huge turnout of people consuming the content and taking the challenge every day. One strategy we used here was challenging registrants to use Facebook Live to talk about their experience after they did the challenge for that day.
We had them post their FB live videos in a FB group that we created specifically for the challenge and asked them to #hashtag their videos to get found. We made a clear guideline on when and how they were to do this so that no one was spamming. This was a really effective way to get them to interact on a high, engaged level.
For context, this was a ‘5 day live video challenge’.
Every week I would post an image and blog-post-like action in my FB group where I told them where to go to watch live and what to do next. After this five day challenge, I put the entire thing into an evergreen sequence. Evergreen means a funnel that is always running.
2. Traditional 4 Video Series—Mini Course
Opt in to 4 Value-Rich Content Videos over a Period of a Week
We have sent more that 30k people through this funnel and it converts really well. Ours is a WebinarMiniCourse that ultimately teaches why one should utilize webinars, and provides a blueprint for webinar success. Then it shows off our tool for running webinars faster and easier than ever.
Video 1 Should Cover Why Your Opportunity Is Important to Them
Essentially video 1 should show the opportunity and the problem that they didn’t realize existed until now. Plus, it should teach your story. It should cover why the opportunity is important and why they should listen to you. This builds your authority. You should speak to the objections and confront their disbeliefs early on.
Answer them through your story.
Video 2 Is the Journey-The What
This video covers what will get them to the finish line & what will help them change their lives.
• Thank them and recap the opportunity. Always ask questions.
• Present a case study or do some teaching again.
• Handle objections again.
• Foreshadow the next video.
• Call-to-action, aka, CTA.
Video 3 Is the How
This video subtly—or not—covers how they will achieve success by buying your course, service or product.
•Recap excitement for completing the course.
•Quickly recap the opportunity.
•Present a short case study—your own case study or your clients.
•Answer objections again. Have 10 or so to answer through the entire series.
•Project the big picture of their future if they go through this process.
•Start to foreshadow the offer that will happen in the next video.
•bake scarcity into your launch offer.
•Call-to-action.
Video 4 Is the Case Study Reel or Sales Video
This video covers how they will achieve success by following in the footsteps of others.
•Recaps the why, what and how.
•Shares case studies.
•Talks about the scarcity.
•Shows a countdown.
Now onto my favorite funnel.
The Webinar Funnel—Both Evergreen and Live
This is a webinar registration page with dynamic scheduling for automated evergreen funnels or live webinars. It includes a Thank You page, a Webinar event that provides value and an offer page to make the sale.
Webinar funnels convert better than most funnels out there.
The Job of a Funnel
The purpose of a funnel is to shine light on the problems your audience is experiencing and to show your audience who you are and why you’re the person that should be helping them with whatever pain point they are experiancing. Talk about the problem and then tell your story as it relates to them. For instance, chances are the person coming through your funnel is in the same boat you were in a few years ago. But you figured it out, learned from your mistakes and you want to teach them to avoid those mistakes.
You must provide value through education by providing the prospect with the concepts needed to understand how to solve the problem. You must have the ultimate solution to their problem via tangible tactics that you either sell as an online course, coaching, software, service, etc.
The above four items are what makes a funnel more powerful than just sending someone to a website alone. Coming to a website gives your prospect too many things to do. There is not one singular action that a website typically asks a visitor to do.
For landing pages and essentially all the best pages of a web business, I love using Clickfunnels.com. This site offers a great visual editor tool that allows you to use high converting pages that are proven to convert interested folks. Another great tool is called leadpages.net. Click Funnels is similar to Leadpages, although ClickFunnels has a few more bells and whistles and you can often customize the funnel pages even more than Leadpages. Finally, another tool that I would recommend for those who are WordPress.org lovers is OptimizePress2.
OP2—as it is also called—is a WordPress plugin that is similar to both leadpages.net and clickfunnels.com in the sense that it allows you to create all the pages you’d want to use in your business, from landing pages, sales pages, and more. However, if I had to directly compare it to one or the other, I would have to say it is more similar to Clickfunnels due to its customization abilities.
In order of ease of use, I would rank them as follows: Leadpages, ClickFunnel and then Op2.
And finally, we use EasyWebinar for the webinar funnels we build. EasyWebinar provides only Webinar or Online Event Funnels. It is a niche product, and they do what they do quite well.
EasyWebinar has the funnels pre-built with some templates that are less customizable than others. EasyWebinar runs both live events, and automated webinar events. Some clients run paid Facebook ads or YouTube ad traffic to a webinar without having a website.
This by far is the most powerful funnel around.
Now the question remains…Do you need a website?
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