Facebook Pixel
Join our Facebook Community

How to Build a Traffic-siphoning Marketing Funnel

Posted By Guest Blogger 14th of January 2012 Blogging for Dollars 0 Comments

This guest post is by Herman Diaz of SEO So Easy.

Would you let Google, Facebook, Amazon, Twitter, YouTube and other sites control your online business? Or would you like to control it yourself?

Would you want to be in a position to lose your online income suddenly because Google decides to drop your rankings, or because Facebook shuts down your fan page or YouTube shuts down your channel? Of course, you’d like to control your own business and not be at the mercy of other sites.

To run a sustainable business online you need to create a marketing funnel where you siphon traffic from sources like Google, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube into your funnel, and create your own traffic source.

Creating a traffic-siphoning funnel

Before you start creating your traffic-siphoning marketing funnel, you need to ask yourself one question:

What is the one important thing that’s needed to make money online?

An obvious answer would be people, right? In fact it’s not just people, traffic, or visitors that make you money online. It’s the relationship and trust you build with your visitors that will make you money online.

Relationships cannot be developed with your visitors in just one or two visits to your site. Therefore it is important you capture the names and email addresses of as many visitors as you can, so you can give yourself a chance to build a relationship with them.

To get their names and email addresses, you need to have a really good lead magnet. A lead magnet is a good piece of content like a video, PDF report, or a case study that will help your potential subscriber and will entice him to give you his or her name and email address.

Once your visitor enters their details into your site, they’ll get into you funnel—and that’s where you will begin the process of building a relationship and trust with them. And then, you can recommend products to them.

The traffic-siphoning funnel process in action

Here’s a process map that shows how the traffic-siphoning funnel works.

The funnel

Firstly, your need to have three lead hunters to convert your visitors into subscribers and put them into the funnel.

Step 1: Create a blog lead hunter

Your niche blog is a lead hunter that should focus on two things. One is providing valuable and fresh content to your visitors; the other is capturing the names and email addresses of your visitors.

With fresh and valuable content rolling in regularly, your first-time visitor will make return visits to your blog, and they might even like share or tweet your content.

Make sure your blog has your best content on it. For that, you need to prepare a three-month content creation strategy; here’s what you need to do.

  1. You need to identify ten low-competition keywords with a decent search volume.
  2. You then need to write at least one 600- to 800-word articles for each of the keywords.
  3. These will be the ten pages on your blog that you will work on getting search engine traffic to, by raking on the search engines.
  4. Each of these pages will have a resource box that will send people to your lead capture page.
  5. You will then have to write a 300-word post every other day for the next 90 days and link each of these posts to the ten pages you have created.

This tactic will create a strong internal linking structure that will help with your SEO efforts.

Step 2: Create a squeeze page lead hunter

The sole purpose of this page, which I call a lead magnet, is to capture names and email addresses of visitors.

  • Make sure you have an eye-catching header.
  • Mention all the benefits of the free offer you’re giving away.
  • Make sure to tell your visitors exactly what to do to get the free offer.
  • Have the opt-in box above the fold of the page.

Step 3: Create a Facebook fan page lead hunter

The fan page will be a replication of your squeeze page, but it will be on Facebook, allowing you to collect names and email addresses of people visiting your fan page. The main idea of the fan page is to get as many people to opt-in or like the page.

Step 4: Driving traffic to the lead hunter pages

Here’s how to drive traffic from each of your lead hunters.

Blog traffic sources

These sources will send visitors to you blog and siphon subscribers to your funnel.

  1. Search engine traffic
  2. Guest blogging
  3. Twitter
  4. YouTube

You can try other traffic sources as well, but I usually start with these.

Lead magnet traffic sources

These sources will send visitors to you squeeze page and siphon subscribers to your funnel.

  1. From your blog
  2. Warrior special offers (Note: this is a paid service.)
  3. Solo ads (Also a paid service.)
  4. Youtube
  5. Twitter.

Facebook Fan page traffic sources

These sources will siphon send visitors to your fan page, and siphon subscribers to your funnel.

  1. Facebook PPC (A paid service)
  2. From your blog
  3. YouTube
  4. Twitter

Step 5: What happens in the funnel?

Now, as you get a steady flow of subscribers from your lead hunters, you need to set your autoresponder with some killer content. This content can be articles, videos, PDF reports—or you can even send subscribers back to your blog pages where you have already published good content.

Get your subscribers involved. Ask them to tweet, share, or Like the page you sent them. Also ask them to comment and ask questions, as this will help you build a good relationship with your list. They will feel like they know you not only because you send them quality emails, but because they interact with you on your blog and other places as well.

You also have to make sure you are honest with your subscribers from the beginning. Tell them that, apart from the great content, you are also going to recommend good products to them that will help them. Also be clear that you will make a commission when they purchase the recommended product using your link.

To summarize, in the first part of the funnel you need to focus on providing great content with incredible value to your subscribers. Be honest from the first email about what your intentions are. This combination of honesty and great content will build a strong relationship of trust with your subscribers.

Step 6: Promoting the right product

Relationships, trust, and honesty will go a long way in making your subscribers loyal to you. To keep up this loyalty, make sure you recommend good products to your list.

Research the product you are going to promote well—including, of course, trying it for yourself—so you can answer any question that are asked. Try getting a discount for the product you are promoting too, as this will increase conversions with your list. Also try giving subscribers a bonus, depending on the price of the product.

Make sure you treat your subscribers like friends, and recommend only products or services you think will genuinely help them. Remember, it will take you some time to develop a relationship and build trust with your list, yet it can all be lost with one bad recommendation. Be choosy with what you recommend.

If you are promoting your own product, make sure you over-deliver with that product. Go all-out to see that your product will really help them—this will only build credibility and your buyers will love you for it.

People who buy your products should get on your buyers’ list—and you have to take very good care of them! The people who have not yet bought from you can still enjoy the free content you provide.

Step 7: Back in the funnel

After you have finished promoting an affiliate offer or you own product, make sure you start the process of sending free content and start building up to the next promotion.

Conclusion

You have to have a business to make money! But you also have to remember that your business has to be built on a foundation of honesty, trust, and good relationships with your subscribers. That’s what will make you money consistently for years: a source of customers who trust you.

Herman Dias likes writing about SEO Tips, blogging, list building, traffic strategies and other Internet Marketing Topics, He also recently completed a Free Live Case Study on How to Rank on Page One of The Search Engines in 15 days for 55 keywords.

About Guest Blogger
This post was written by a guest contributor. Please see their details in the post above.
Comments
  1. I just printed your funnel graphic Herman, love it so much it made it to my pinboard of “inspiration”. Thanks for sharing and take the time to make that graphic.

  2. I think you have outlined some essential tips for being able to help develop your own traffic stream. It takes a lot of time and patience to use social media and search engines to be able get that funnel started. For some, that may work quite well and for others, it may not work as well as we like. I think it is essential to focus on content that we have already in place and then try to go out and market (and therefore develop that funnel).

  3. This is great help thanks! I love writing, but it is getting the traffic that is becoming hard for me. I am going to try and use some of these tips.

  4. I am a late bloomer to this, but am now discovering that [guest blogging and YouTube videos] with links in the video description tend to drive search engine and social networking traffic for years to come. I’m now more compelled to “upload more YouTube videos” , as well as more guest blogging, as I’m now seeing more search engine traffic and lower search engine rankings on Alexa and United States from my heart invested hard work :-)

  5. Great post, Herman. I have just recently setup a facebook page for my blog and I’m working on getting people to that page. I have a “like” box on my site but because it is so new (2 weeks) I don’t have a ton of traffic. Twitter has been good at helping with this but I should probably add a squeeze page. Thanks for the info. Keep it up.

    • Dwayne try participating on other facebook pages in your niche that have many fans, I get some good traffic doing this.

  6. when you get a chance, please take a moment to read the post at the link below, and feel free to comment on it any time :-)

    http://www.drewrynewsnetwork.com/f37/increase-traffic-now-youtube-videos-way-image-sharing-facebook-2530.html

  7. Great tips! It is pretty hard to really wrest control of your blog from Google especially but it can be done. Building a list is SO important and I can’t believe how many would-be internet marketers are not even doing that (actually, I can believe; took me 3 years to start building mine :o ). These tips are very clear and easy to follow. Thanks for sharing.

  8. Hi Herman,
    This is so true and I use it to get traffic to my site as well. Giving a way a free eBook had helped me tremendously to get newsletter subscribers.

    • Justin,

      I am happy to hear about the success of your free e-book giveaway. When you develop and distribute your e-book effectively, what sites did you use to distribute your E-book, that is, if you used files haring also :-)

      • Drewry,

        if I am not wrong justin ment he gave the ebook to people in return for their name and email address. I dont think he submitted his ebook to sites.

  9. Some great advice, thanks dude:D. Also, can making live feeds from your site through a feed box help?

  10. Being a new blogger, I am in dire need of traffic and these tips could not have come at the right time. Thanks a lot for the share

  11. Hey Herman,
    That’s a nice strategy…I have been using video marketing (Youtube) for some time and it’s working out good in both the scenerio…Treaffic + revenue..
    Also for a tutorial + aff blog, video marketing is the way to go..

  12. What a great visual! Thanks for sharing the funnel with us.

  13. This is fantastic information! I appreciate that you weren’t afraid to get specific and give some distinct directions. Bloggers, copywriters, marketers and beyond have to start getting comfortable with the fact that in order to “get”, you’re going to need to give. Great content is heavily rewarded when executed properly. Thanks for sharing.

  14. Wow, excellent content.. I’m impressed.

  15. Hi Herman,

    Your breakdown is excellent.

    I struggle with setting up a consistent lead funnel at times. I know how easy it is to stray from “what’s working”.

    Sticking with successful strategies always works, though. Provide value, become valuable. Of most importance is targeting your visitors. Be clear on what you do. From the URL, to the blog name, to your tag line, to your About Me page, to the posts. Everything. Gotta be 100% clear and consistent with all you do on your blog, or Twitter or Youtube, because each piece of content created sends a message.

    Dilute this message at your own risk. You lose traffic and confuse your fans. I learned this over and over before I finally stuck to 1 core message.

    The amount of value you share to the right group will come back to you multiplied. So as you build the content to form your lead magnet, make sure to convey a similar message to your list subscribers.

    2 things:

    1 – Offer REALLY good stuff. Solve problems, and people will see you as a problem solver.

    2 – Include a call to action with each email. Many advise sparing the “Join my opportunity” call to action, but I advise against this. Why? When I moved away from this consistent call, less people joined my team. When I stuck to this call with each email, more people joined my team. I tested, and the results spoke for themselves.

    Provide tons of value then you better be ready to ask people to join, and you must be clear on this.

    If they feels too “sale-sy” to you, you have a lot of clearing to do in the self-belief/self-promotion department.

    Thanks for sharing your super helpful insight Herman. Keep up the great work.

    Ryan

  16. Top class advice. Thank for sharing. Currently working on creating an eBook as a freebies. Hopefully would attract more traffic.

  17. These tips are going to help me for next summer. I also own a landscape company and have been looking high and low for a site with this exact information. Great article Herman! Thank you very much!

  18. Darren Rowse the father of blogging.. I can see why.. Very interesting, helpful information. Thanks for the tricks.

    peace,

    Angelo
    affordable websites

  19. Nice advice, thank you. Google SE is getting confusing now. It seems the more I try to build backlink the more difficult for me to get traffic. I think it’s the time for me to move to other ways to get traffic. Thank you for your advice, it will be an alternative for me to drive traffic to my blog.

  20. These tips are going to help me for next summer. I also own a landscape company and have been looking high and low for a site with this exact information. Great article Herman! Thank you very much!

A Practical Podcast… to Help You Build a Better Blog

The ProBlogger Podcast

A Practical Podcast…

Close
Open