You won’t go far in the online marketing space before someone starts trying to sell you some sort of Conversion Funnel system… or some platform for building and hosting these funnels.

You’ll see a lot of big claims and even bigger price tags for something is really a pretty simple concept…

And very easy to implement yourself.

A Conversion Funnel is Simply A Map…

That Shows You Where Your Customer Is Going

Somewhere along the way, someone noted the obvious… you get whole lot of prospects going in and a smaller number of sales coming out the other end… and they coined the word funnel…

And a whole new internet marketing sub-sector was born!

You’ll find dozens of Funnel Creation & Optimization training packages on all the affiliate networks, and it seems every week a few more Done-For-You Services launch… all promising to reveal some great mystery and make you rich.

But for all the hype, it’s all the same thing… a funnel is just a way of visualising the various pieces in your business conversion process.

All the different training packages are just showing you different combinations of those same pieces.

While the hosted solutions just pre-assemble a few of those pieces for you.

All you need to remember is, these products are geared for newbies who don’t know any better…

Because any experienced marketer will tell you: it’s not difficult or complicated…

And it’s much more effective and more profitable to do it yourself!

Sales Funnels or Lead Funnels?

Sales or Leads, it doesn’t matter… the goal of any Funnel is to advance the visitor through your Conversion Process… that will be anything your business model requires… list opt-ins, free members, info downloads etc…

So I prefer to call them Conversion Funnels.

Each one will represent a series of steps you want your customer to complete. Steps that take them from cold prospect to your final goal for them. In the big picture that will usually be paying customer, but there could be a few options for payment, plus a few non-paying steps as well.

So a good funnel will have tracking in place so you can see where you lose people and which steps you need to work on. It will also have systems in place to contact those who do fall away, and try to re-engage with them and get them back into the funnel at some other point.

The key to these steps is that each one will usually require just a little more commitment from your prospect than the step before.

That commitment can be time, effort, or money…

The steps can be made using any combination of web pages, social media, emails, text message, downloads links to other resources… as well as purchases.

So as your prospect progresses through the various steps, the become more invested in the process, and your returns increase at each step as well.

Early in the process… even before any money changes hands… you are learning more about your prospect with every choice they make.

So even if you aren’t earning cash, you are adding real value to your business when you set this up right.

So in a nutshell…

Using funnels to visualise and track these processes is good.

And it’s it’s easily done if you break it down into the  component parts.

And that’s what we’ll do in this training…

A Few Common Funnel Layouts