What is a Money Funnel? – Traffic Tip #75

This is list building week here at Free Traffic Tip. And the first thing we need to do is connect the dots between generating traffic and building a list.

In my weekly research, I look at all kinds of techniques and products that promise to deliver visitors to websites, as well as to local businesses offline, and one of the most repeated myths I hear about list building is that you should focus on list building instead of building traffic.

This is usually imparted as wisdom from someone who doesn’t specialize in generating traffic, but has at least one successful method under their belt for getting visitors to their site. And you know me, I’m a capitalist. I believe in competitive markets, and in stating any truthful information you have to in order to persuade a buyer. The problem is, this isn’t true.

Yes, your list is your monthly bread and butter – the place you can fall back on to generate sales of new products, to measure interest in upcoming projects, to whet the appetite with freebies.

But instead of just paying for leads – which is essentially having someone else decide who might be interested in your goods and services- you can also use traffic to build the list for you.

How?

That’s where the money funnel comes in. The money funnel is the path from a visitor coming to your site to your sales process. It usually goes from subscription to repeated exposure to content that links to goods and services, then to an explanation of how to get those goods or services. Then it repeats the process of offering content, periodically repeating the ordering information.

Sometimes you’ll get a direct path from your content to an order page, but it’s best to make sure they are able to sign up first, because over 98% of first time visits to an average site do not end in a sale.

One of the main functions of your site should be to attract visitors who would be interested in coming again.

Every single entry point on your site should in turn have an entry point to that money funnel, whether it’s your RSS feed, an audio in your podcast, the directory your sales letter is in, or your blog. That way the process goes:

interest ==> subscription ==> actions leading to a purchase

with the only variable being how long it takes them to go from interest to purchase. (Of course you have the people who will drop out of your newsletter altogether, and that’s okay. You don’t want to keep people on your list who aren’t interested in buying, becoming affiliates of your product, helping to spread the word about you, or partnering with you.)

There’s a lot more to be learned about the money funnel and we’ll be revisiting it throughout the rest of the week. For the moment, that should be enough criteria to make sure you have a money funnel set up at your site, and if you don’t,
to know why you need one.