Identifying Your Sales Funnel
The first step to optimizing your sales funnel is to take stock of what you already have. The best way to do this is to just take a step back and think. Here are the questions that you need to ask yourself:
How Do People Enter the Funnel?
Detail each and every way someone can get to your site. What are the characteristics of these visitors in terms of age, gender, income, etc.? How far along in the buying cycle are they?
What Can They Do When They Come to the Site?
The first thing most visitors are going to do when they come to a site is read something. What do they do after that? Read more content? Subscribe to your newsletter? Sign up for your RSS feed? Follow you on Twitter or Facebook? Comment on a post?
What Metrics Can You Use to Track Visitors?
Unique visitors, pageviews, pageviews/visitor, time on site, subscriber counts, followers, number of sales, and sales dollar amounts are all a good start. Is there anything else you can think of?
Put it All Together
Go through the actual process of doing some of these things. How easy is it to sign up for your newsletter or follow you with social media channels? Do you have a clear call to action for what you want visitors to do?
Make Changes
Test out different changes to your site, track them, and then compare to what you were doing before. If you keep testing you should keep improving your conversion rate and make more money.