DIY marketing funnel

My aim here is to help you setup a marketing funnel or list building funnel with the lowest possible budget because I understand it can be scary to throw in a big investment at initial stage without knowing your Return of Investment (ROI). This method is specially useful for beginners who are just starting out to test the water in internet marketing. I used these myself in my early days and it works just fine for me. You can of course replace it with better resources as you wished in the future, because these tools are not limited but just my personal recommendation from my own experiences. There are a combination of free tools and paid tools. These are just a few important tools you will need as a start; you will need more tools as your business expand. My advice here is to allocate some budget if you are serious about Internet Marketing. Invest in good tools especially a reliable Autoresponder at least, this is the minimum requirement. Let’s start!

Tool 1: A website to create your Squeeze Page or Landing Page
I used Weebly.com and Wix.com; both are free to use website builder. You have to upgrade to use the premium features of course but with the free version itself, I am able to build many squeeze pages of my own easily because I don’t need any of those extra features to create a squeeze page. Anyway, both are very easy to use with drag-and-drop builder. Signup a free account and you can either refer their tutorial or find some tutorials on YouTube to learn how to use it.

Tool 2: An autoresponder email service to capture email leads for long-term communication with your followers or customers
If you are serious and looking to build a long-term online business, you MUST captured your website visitors’ email or collect a list of subscribers in order to be able to email them in the future. To do this, I personally used GetResponse and Aweber. Both are the most popular picks among marketers and are paid services and offered a 30-days free trial usage. You must use any of the autoresponder services carefully in order not to get your account suspended for breaching the Spam Law. I am also using The ConversionPro; it’s an autoresponder service developed by marketers for the marketers and they are more open to online marketers who do affiliate marketing. However, if you are caught sending spam, your account will be suspended too. You can get a free 7-days trial by signing up here. In The ConversionPro, you can find ready made landing page template and with this feature available, you don’t need a website builder anymore to build your squeeze page.

Please take note, it is a standard practice to comply with the CAN-SPAM Act in any email marketing business. Regardless which Autoresponder company you signup, you must comply with the act and if you’re caught not complying you will risk your account being suspended. Therefore, you are encouraged to adapt a good email practice when communicating with your subscribers. You should go through the company members’ tutorial for best email marketing practices.

Tool 3: Tracking tool
One of the most important tool in marketing is to track your campaign performance. And the current most popular tool and widely used is ClickMagick. You can track your funnel activities with this tool but there is some learning curve involved to use this tool. You can read more from their website. As a beginner, I personally did not implement this. As you grow in your skill, you can slowly implement this tool into your marketing campaign. However, there are also a few other tracking tools out there and feel free to research about the others and there may be some free ones available that you may use.

Finally, what you need to do is to integrate the signup form from your Autoresponder into your one-page website (it’s commonly called the squeeze page or landing page). Just go through the tutorial provided from the website that you signup, the information is sufficient to learn what you need to know. And with this final step done, you now have a marketing funnel setup to collect leads that you can keep and communicate to them whenever you want.

Tool 4: Promote and send as much traffic to your squeeze page
What you do next is to constantly send visitors to your squeeze page, encouraged them to signup to your squeeze page by offering a free eBook or short course if they signup and once they signup, you have their email recorded in your autoresponder forever until they choose to unsubscribe.

I personally used paid traffic called “Solo Ads” to send visitors to my squeeze page because it is way faster to build my list with paid traffic compared to collecting the subscribers organically through blog or social media following which is going to take forever. What is Solo Ads? It is a traffic generated by online marketers or solo ad sellers with their already owned mailing list. These people already built their email list large enough and when a customer buys click from them, they will send an email to their list and when an interested subscriber click on the link in the email, they will be directed to your squeeze page. This is how you get exposure to your squeeze page. This is a powerful method and used by serious marketers because, they know these are potential traffic. Why is it potential? As they are already in someone else list, meaning they are already an interested lead in the particular niche. By getting them into your list, you know you are keeping an interested lead inside your list. Then, it is up to you to turn them into a buyer over time. Make sense?

You are advised to source solo ads from the reputable website called Udimi. Signup for a free account here and you will be credited with $5 into your account to purchase your first solo ads from Udimi. There are many other solo ads and traffic providers, many are sending poor quality visitors, you need to beware. If you are collecting leads organically, you need to spend a lot of time in adding content to your blogs, writing product reviews, submitting articles, creating videos, build social media following etc etc.  It is very much depends on your preference and marketing strategy and there is nothing wrong using either paid or free traffic.

Udimi - Buy Solo Ads

Conclusion
To conclude, let’s recap what is your estimated spending to setup this simple marketing funnel.

Option 1:
a. Weebly/ Wix (Free) + GetResponse (from $15/month) = $15 monthly for first 1000 subscribers and increase as your list grows bigger
b. Solo Ads Traffic = $0.50 – $1.00 per click, depends how much you want to buy daily
c. Drive various sources of free traffic = no monetary involved, only your time is required

Option 2:
a. The ConversionPro (fix $50 monthly) = $50 monthly (unlimited subscribers and emails sending)
b. Solo Ads Traffic = $0.50 – $1.00 per click, depends how much you want to buy daily
c. Drive various sources of free traffic = no monetary involved, only your time is required

There you go! The above demonstrates how I build my marketing funnel starting out as a beginner in the business. I hope my suggestion helps you to build a funnel up and running as soon as possible with the lowest budget possible. You have all the resources already; so it all depends on you to make things happen for yourself!

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