Marketing Sales Funnel
It seems like most new Internet marketers focus very heavily on traffic. They want to get as many visitors to their site as they can. In their minds, the more eyes on their signup box or that see their product offer, the more money they are going to make. The Internet marketers who only worry about traffic are only taking care of the first step of their sales funnel. What is a sales funnel you ask?
The sales funnel is the process that begins when you capture the attention of prospects. This would be the visitor to your site. As you move down the funnel the visitor interacts with your site in some way, whether it's filling out a form, following you on Twitter, liking your Facebook page, whatever. As you continue to interact with the potential customer you need to demonstrate to them that you can solve some kind of problem or need for them. As you continue to move down the funnel, customers fall off who are not all that interested in what you have to say, so the ones that are left are very targeted. This targeted list is a gold mine as you can offer highly tailored products and services to them at higher prices. This is where the profits are made.
You need to optimize your funnel each step of the way. Are you using PPC ads? Then make sure you are targeting the right traffic. Are some keywords performing better for you than others? These are the ones to focus your SEO efforts on. How well does your hover ad convert visitors to leads? Have you tested it against different wording, a different special bonus, or just a different design? Continue testing until you have achieved the highest conversion rate of visitor signups. Once the visitor has signed up, how well are they reacting to your offers? Do you need to tweak your autoresponder system to get better results? How about your email blasts? Are you trying to upsell former customers? The different ways to optimize your funnel goes on and on.
Now you can see why the marketers who focus on the sales funnel and optimizing it to perfection make the most money. Even if they do not get as much traffic as someone else, they refine their funnel so that they get more money out of each one of those leads. In the end that is all that matters. Traffic stats are nice, but how much money you make is really the only thing you should care about.
Related Posts:
Making Money with Review Posts
Another great way to make money online is to write reviews of sites, products, or services. You can make money with review posts either by advertisers paying you directly or by earning a commission when reviewing products that you are affiliated with. Sponsored posts can either be a solid money maker or can turn out to be a real dud. The trick is to give your readers a comprehensive, honest review of the product that you are reviewing. Don't just throw something out there that you haven't used yourself and can't give an honest opinion on. It goes back to building up relationships with your subscribers. You can't do anything that will jeopardize their trust in you or this method of making money will blow up in your face.
The amount of money that you will be paid to write paid reviews depends on a few different things. If you have a higher Google PageRank, the outgoing links will be worth more. If you have a high Alexa rank and can show how many visitors and page views your site gets, you will get paid more per post. Some advertisers want to make sure they are getting click throughs to their site, so the visitor information will be more important to them. Others are trying to build up their presence in the search engines, so they are trying to acquire pagerank to help their rankings. It won't matter to them how many visitors you send them, they just want the bump in rankings for their keywords.
What should your review cover? Basically you should answer the questions your readers would have about the product like, what does it do, how is it different from the competition, what are the advantages and disadvantages, who is it tailored to, and where can you go if you are interested in buying. By answering all of a reader's question about a product, you are encouraging them to take action. If you include pictures, video, and examples those will help alleviate any doubts the reader has with the product.
Whatever you do, make sure that you include both the good and the bad with your review. No product is perfect for every person. There are going to be things that you either don't like about the product or it's going to do something that isn't for everyone, just be honest.
While you are getting paid by the sponsor to write the review, you have to remember that your real customer is the reader. Keep them in mind while writing your review and explain the product in their terms. Do not get overly technical and definitely do not recommend a product to them that you can't see giving them value that makes it worth the price.
If you want to start writing paid reviews on your blog, then make sure to add that fact to your advertising page. It also wouldn't hurt to put that information on your contact page if you want to increase the number of leads you receive. If you want help finding products to review, then take a look at Sponsored Reviews. It's easy to signup and to add your blog. You can then look for opportunities to bid on and once accepted, get paid 50% of the price for writing the review. Payments come bi-weekly and you can earn $5 to $1,000 per post, with no minimum payout.