Online Marketing 101 – How do I get traffic to my blog or website to capture leads and make sales?

That’s the name of the game, isn’t it?

To be able to drive web traffic to your sales funnel,to peak your visitors’ curiosity so that they opt-in to your list to learn more, so that you can sell them on your product or service, and consequently make lots of money, right?

As simple as this process may seem, most people cannot get the process to work because they leave out critical steps!..

Just having a website or blog will not get you traffic, or leads, or sales

You have to draw attention to it through marketing to get the word out so that people can find your you online (and your properly setup sales funnel) and learn about all the great things you have to offer.

Just as the most spectacular brick-and-mortar business needs to get the word out to generate foot traffic into their store to make sales, so too must you market online to get web traffic to your website or blog so your prospects can see what you have to offer.

The good news is, you don’t have to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars each month in what a typical brick-and-mortar-type business would have to spend on TV or radio spots, newspaper advertisements, magazine ads, or even direct mailings.  The great thing about marketing online is that people are all within a mouse-click of your content, your blog, your sales funnel, etc.  You simply have to reach out in the right ways to capture their interest and get them to see what you have to offer.

The Key To Success in Marketing Online

There’s a million different ways to market your business online… (which I’ll get into in a bit…)

However, while its important to have good marketing processes in place, it can be a waste of your time, money and energy if what you’re selling isn’t highly valuable, highly profitable, or doesn’t convert well.

For this reason, it’s important to work backwards to ensure everything you do on the front-end (marketing) will put money in your pocket on the back-end (sales funnel process and product/service); a sustainable and scale-able business model, in other words.

Once you know your back-end process is setup correctly and in place, you can then focus solely on your marketing efforts knowing you’ll generate sales and profits on the other side.

Otherwise – like many people who fail unnecessarily online – you’ll just be throwing money away, wasting your time and energy, with nothing but poor results, frustration and burnout to show for what should have been handsome profits, massive success and rewarding fulfillment.

The Critical Components You Need To Have For a Profitable, Sustainable Online Business

First of course, you want to make sure that there’s a high-demand for the product or service you’re selling and that it’s priced in such a way to provide extreme value for money for the customer to ensure long-term success.  You don’t want to be ripping off your customers, your business won’t last long.  You need to offer or represent the highest-quality products or services at the best possible prices to see any kind of real success.

Next, you you need to look at the products or services you’re marketing and make sure the profit margin is high enough to make it worth your while to spend the time, energy and resources to market it and generate sales (ie, you wouldn’t want to go to all the trouble of setting up this awesome sales funnel only to get 30% commissions would you?  Especially when you can earn 100% commissions for the same amount of effort?)

You have to have products and services that are very well priced but at the same time provide high profit margins to ensure its win-win for both you and your customer (recipe for success).

So once you’ve got the right products and services with the right price points and profit margins you then need to make sure you have a high-converting sales video that will generate sales.  1-5% or so is average, meaning 1-5% of the people who watch the sales video will end up buying but 10-20% is much better (2-10 times more sales for same effort).  Creating sales videos that have high conversions is a difficult thing to do and takes years of practice and experience to get the 10-20% conversions.

Why sales videos you might ask?

Sure, there are other ways to get a sale: meeting someone in person, inviting them to a meeting, trying to convince them over the phone or even doing a live webinar…  Those are all methods that work, but remember our goal is to make as much money as possible with the least amount of time so we can actually make money and have a life, right?

If that’s not your objective and you prefer to work harder than necessary for less income than you could otherwise make by working smarter, have at it.  But that’s not our focus in this article.  The goal here is to help you make more money using less of your time, resources and energy so you can scale up your business and continue to make ever increasing amounts of income.  You with me?  Then let’s cover the next point: sales funnels.

So we have the right product in place with the right profit margin and the right sales video in place to ensure we get the most sales possible.  You next want to think about your whole sales process, or in other words, your sales funnel.

The Right Sales Funnel

See, a one-time sale is great (even if it’s a monthly service sale that repeats each month).  But a sales funnel with multiple high-value, high-profit (related) products and high-converting sales videos is exponentially better (especially when your sales funnel is setup to automatically upsell your customer from one product to the next – initially on the first sale and continually over time).

It can dramatically increase your income without any additional work required on your part, allowing you to scale up your business and make even bigger profits that much faster.  Having a good sales funnel in place can make the difference between a small spare-time hobby income versus earning a full-time job-replacing, life-altering income.

High-converting Capture Pages

Then we come to the capture pages, where your potential prospects enter their contact information (email address, for example) in order to gain access to more information as advertised on the capture page.  (Click here or on the picture below to see an example of a good high-converting capture page if you’re not familiar with one.)

Capture pages are the entrance to your sales funnel – this is where ultimately you will be driving traffic to in order to generate sales.  It’s where you entice people, or tease them with the solution to their problems and in exchange for them entering their contact information (so you can followup with them later and continue to market to them automatically with your auto-responder).

Once they give you their contact information, your system automatically gives them access to and redirects them to your sales video to educate and enlighten them with the benefits of your product and how it will solve their issues or problems (which is what they were searching for to begin with).

Creating capture pages that convert is again one of those skills that for most people takes years to master.  Starting off trying to create your capture pages may require you to have 100 people visit your capture page before you create even 1 lead.  But over time as you get better, some of the better marketers out there consistently get 10% or 20% traffic-to-lead conversions with their capture pages.

So having a good capture page that converts well can multiply your income 10-20 times alone so be sure you have expertly crafted, high-converting capture pages.

(If you’re new to this process but understand the benefits of having a high-converting, high-profit sales funnel with excellent high-value products but don’t want to – or can’t – spend the time or resources to develop such a system, I highly recommend you begin by plugging into this system here, where everything is already in place for you – including 100% commissions on the best products in the industry – so you can focus on money making marketing activities to create income now, not months or years down the road trying to create your own system or sales process from scratch)

So now your sales funnel and sales process is complete.  You have all the components in place to ensure the prospects that enter your sales funnel will convert into profitable sales; now you just need to market it and get the word out – the easy part!

With your system setup and in place, click here for part 2 to learn more about marketing and driving traffic through your sales funnel to create increasing profits and the freedom lifestyle to go with it…

I appreciate you!

– Hans Schoff
“Helping to Simplify a Complicated Online Marketing World”

PS> If you got anything valuable from this post, please share with your friends on facebook, twitter, google+, etc and leave me your comments below – thanks!