This conversation, (and headline, incidentally – thanks Cam!) came up yesterday at our morning meeting. Cam and I were discussing the sales pipeline, as we are now starting to see the first ones we have built generate leads, apps and sales.
Now, this is going to be a short post today, and the point of it is to emphasize the importance the sales pipeline plays in your online business.
It is amazing (and scary) how easy it is to make an extremely simple business model difficult and complicated. And I have to give myself a big red cross for doing this very thing for so long.
You see, when we first got started, we just did what the other top earners did; established our own “brand” via an iweb website, customized our autoresponder series, and then ran a very expensive and aggressive Google Adwords campaign. We didn’t question ‘why’ it worked, it just did. And don’t get me wrong, it got us outstanding results.
And so, like a zealot, this is the strategy I advised people to use in their own businesses. Several members of our team did this in part, but they did not put the whole package together. A few of them started out with the exact same Google campaigns that we did (we gave them our best stuff). But their results were not like ours in any way. We had put most of the emphasis on the Adwords campaign, and did not hammer home the importance of the pipeline before they started pulling leads into their system (and to be fair to us, you would be stunned at how many people won’t even try to customize properly – terrible photos, or none at all, “My Story” that is all pitch etc etc)
Why?
Because they had not created a sales pipeline that was highly customized to them, for their prospects to go through.
Then, in July we had our account slapped by Google and as this was the only marketing strategy we had in place, our business was effectively shut down.
In the process of figuring out how we would respond to this challenge, and developing a new sales pipeline (Word Press website), it became so clear to us that the pipeline was everything. I mean it, everything.
I happened to be listening to the original recording of Mike Dillard’s MLM Traffic Formula a couple of weeks ago, and if you have not ever heard this material, I’ll clue you up.
It is about the sales pipeline. It is about the fact that if you don’t have a “traffic formula” (in the form of a well built sales pipeline to send your traffic to), you basically don’t have an online business.
The sales pipeline hosts your landing pages, it contains information about you personally, it should contain well written articles which are relevant to the field you work in, it should contain an FAQ section which gives your prospect the opportunity to make a decision about opting in to your business, it should contain your contact details (we are legitimate business people, and should not be ‘hiding’ behind a website), and any other content that has been useful to you, and that you would like to share with those contemplating a home based business.
Your pipeline should contain links to your favorite, relevant (note the frequency of ‘relevance’ here?) affiliate products, as this will monetize your lead generation activities. Mike Dillard refers to this as a “funded proposal”.
After your prospect has become a lead in your system, you should be communicating with them via your own personalized autoresponder messages. These will build rapport with them over time, and make offers to them (usually of affiliate products).
In the process of integrating these features into your pipeline, you have created a content rich, unique, stand alone website, that will provide you with a great deal of protection should you wish to use Adwords to generate leads for your business.
When you add your own content regularly over time (and this can be videos from a video marketing campaign or articles and blog posts), it improves your organic ranking. We know that the search engines love video, and so do searchers.
When you have a watertight pipeline in place, you can use any form of marketing (online or off) that you like to send traffic to your landing pages. The options are many and varied.
And while I used to preach from the Adwords soapbox exclusively, now I would advise you to mix it up; don’t put all your eggs in one basket. Aim to use a selection of marketing methods such as banner ads, classified ads (online or in offline print media), articles, videos, and social media.
A mix of free and paid is a good idea, and the amount you spend on marketing should be a function of how much time you have to work on the free methods versus where you are positioned in the compensation plan to receive a satisfactory ROI (return on investment).
A little word of caution here though – don’t spread yourself too thin. Perhaps aim for one paid method (e.g. Adwords or classified ads) and one or two complimentary free methods (e.g. articles and videos). If you try and do all of them, you will not master any of them, and cannot expect to see the results you would want for your efforts.
So as you work on your business, pay particular attention to your pipeline, it is your business.
If you would like to see an example of a very tight sales and marketing pipeline, take a look at ours
www.MLMHomeTruths.com.au
This is an example of the type of system we are building for those on our team who want to outsource this task to us.
I will be flying to Houston, Texas today for the WMI 5th birthday event, and will return on the 3rd of February. I will keep you updated while I am away, and look forward to sharing with you the details of the re-launch.
Make today a great one.
Cheers,
Tan
