3 Ways To Make Money Online
Disclaimer: Buildapreneur does not represent ClickFunnels™ in any way. All opinions are our own.
If you have been hearing the word “ClickFunnels™” everywhere lately and are still left wondering, “what even is ClickFunnels™?” then this article and associated video is for you.
Here is the video if that’s how you like to learn.
Let’s Keep Going
Let me preface this by saying I’ve been working with ClickFunnels™ for over two years now. I’ve built dozens of funnels (yes I know you may now even know what that means at this point), and met everyone from the CEO down to half their support team. Hopefully that gives me enough authority to understand ClickFunnels as a company and explain it.
ClickFunnels™ was started by Russell Brunson with one single concept in mind – the death of a website. When he was first starting as an entrepreneur he talks about how the big names in the industries were using funnels, not websites, for their advertising.
Honestly the best explanation can be found on their home page but if you want a third party perspective here it is.
The Purpose of a Sales Funnel
I guess we have to start with what is a funnel, also known as a sales funnel. A funnel is similar to a website, with one major difference. It focuses on massively increasing your earnings per lead. Let me use an example to make that make more sense.
Let’s say you are a small software company running ads all over the internet. The ads all lead to the home-page of your website, or even to a product page on your website. Sounds about right, right? Wrong.
Half of your customers are going to head over to your site from the ad and get distracted. Some will click your menu options and head over to look at pricing pages, home pages, blogs, social pages, or one of the other dozen places a website typically links to. Now you’ve lost over half your hard-earned (and expensive) traffic as they wander around your site and forget why they even came.
A sales funnel eliminates all the links and alternative options and gives you one option per page. You click from the ad and it sends you to an opt-in page where all you can do is put in your email address and click next (voila – now you can remarket to them, even if they leave).
The next page offers you the product that is for sale, say for $30. With a website that’s probably it. You buy, get an email, and voila, you’re done. But with a sales funnel you can now upsell them. You can send them to a page that once again only has one offer. This offer is tied into the first offer, perhaps offering additional value in some say. All they have to do is click a single button and it adds to their order.
Can you see why this might be beneficial? You can do this a few times. Now instead of making $.55 off each customer that comes to your site, you are making $1.55. That means you can do all kinds of things, spending a lot more in ads to get customers to your site.
So Back to What is ClickFunnels™
ClickFunnels™ was built by Russell Brunson to make the sales funnel process dramatically easier for entrepreneurs and small businesses. Big corporations can have programmers make sales funnels with code, but small businesses can’t afford this. So ClickFunnels™ was created to easily give entrepreneurs the capability to make sales funnels in as little as ten minutes.
It’s software-based and does everything in your browser. In the video, you can see an example of me creating a sales funnel in just ten minutes using ClickFunnels™. Because it has a drag-and-drop editor it makes the visual side of building a funnel extremely easy. Then it has additional coding built in to do all the upsells, email capturing, etc. that was discussed in the section about sales funnels. So ClickFunnels is what software Russell built to make the “death of a website” possible.
What Can ClickFunnels™ Do and Not Do
Like most softwares, ClickFunnels™ has things it specializes in and was built for, and other things that it doesn’t do so well (primarily because it wasn’t built for them).
The primary things ClickFunnels™ can do are:
Sales Funnels
This is what they are known for and this is what they do best. They make it easy to create instant sales funnels that convert. The sales funnels can take payments, capture emails, integrate with other software including Zapier, host webinars, and do pretty much anything else you would need in a sales funnel.
Email Marketing Automation
ClickFunnels™ has a built-in program called Actionetics that can automate your email sequences. So when people put in their email address on the first step of a funnel you can send them specific emails. If they purchase the first product, but not the second product, you can send them additional emails to try and market the second product. It is all built into the ClickFunnels™ platform to make it easy for a solopreneur to create and track.
Membership Area Creator
If you are in the digital space and sell memberships to training, ClickFunnels™ has a built-in platform to host your memberships and give access when people purchase in your funnel. The one weakness here is that the videos have to be hosted elsewhere, for example, Wistia or YouTube, so there is some room for your content to get stolen.
Affiliate Program Host
ClickFunnels™ has used their affiliate program to grow insanely fast, and so they have built-in software to help others do the same. You can host an affiliate program in ClickFunnels and payout your affiliates who send you traffic whenever that traffic purchases through one of your sales funnels.
Not a Blog
Many new users try to use ClickFunnels™ as a blog. This is simply not what it was made for. They don’t understand what ClickFunnels™ is. The software was not built to blog, produce content, or rank in search engines. It was made to send traffic, capture their email, and then maximize your return. Blogs are meant to bring in traffic with content and then send them through a sales funnel once you have captured the traffic!
Who is ClickFunnels™ For?
Now that we know what ClickFunnels™ is we can decide who it is for. It is for small businesses who want to increase their profits. Sounds like all small businesses right? That was the idea.
ClickFunnels™ specifically focuses on a few niches. If you go to their home page (they call it their mother funnel) then you can see on the right they take you through a survey to determine your business. Then they give you training on how exactly ClickFunnels™ applies to your business.
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