We live in an amazing time. It used to be if you wanted to start a retail business you had to pay rent, utilities, have inventory and pay employees. Now literally anyone that can attach a picture to an email can build and operate an e-commerce store and make real money with ClickFunnels.
In this article I will give you 5 steps for you to create a sales funnel, pick a product, and make real money. I promise it’s not hard, just keep reading.
After my wife and I had our second child we decided it was best for our family if she didn’t go back to work. However, that didn’t mean we didn’t need the money. So we started researching different ways for her to generate some revenue from home. Through our research we found ClickFunnels. ClickFunnels is a website builder specifically designed to not only generate sales, but to maximize revenue from each transaction.
What is ClickFunnels?
In the next five steps I’m going to show you how you can use ClickFunnels to create a funnel, find a product to sell, and then use Facebook Ads to drive traffic to the store. My wife and I started a t-shirt and accessory business where we are using both Shopify and ClickFunnels to sell our products. We keep very little inventory because the majority of our products are manufactured on-demand and even shipped directly to our customers with our logos on it.
1. Pick A Product To Sell + Upsell/Downsell Products
The first step is to find a product to sell. This seems like a simple thing but it’s probably going to be your most time consuming step. There are a few things you need to consider. First and foremost in my experience the most effective marketing campaigns have been “Free + Shipping” offers. What that means is you find a product that’s both inexpensive to buy and cheap and easy to ship and you offer it for free. I’m sure you’re wondering why you would do that, and it’s simple… it’s not really free.
Isn’t that underhanded and dishonest? No, listen here’s the deal… I’m sure you’ve all seen infomercials that use the phrase “wait there’s more! Order now and we’ll throw in another one for FREE, just pay shipping and handling.” Shipping and Handling doesn’t just mean shipping. You can charge a reasonable amount for handling the product, right? So for example, you decide to sell a sticker. You can purchase the sticker for $1 and ship it in an envelope with a stamp for $0.50. That means it costs you approximately $1.50 (plus the cost of the envelope of course). You sell it for $4.97 so you’re actually still making a profit of $3.47. Now before you get excited, the idea of this offer is not to make any money. The point of this step of your funnel is to get people onto your site. If they buy, great, hopefully we can get them to spend more on the next step of the funnel. If they don’t buy, they’re still feeding your Facebook Pixel and we can re-target them later. I’ll get into more detail on the Facebook Pixel and Ads later on in this article.
Upsell/Downsell
Once you decide on your initial product and offer you have to figure out what your upsell will be. Please take my advice on this… first of all choose a product and niche that you like and support. You’re going to have to spend a lot of time promoting this product and interacting with people. If it’s something that doesn’t interest you, you’re not going to do it.
My suggestion for your upsell items would be to find print on-demand (POD) products that you don’t have to have in your inventory. That way you’re not going to waste a bunch of money on products that take up space. Also the POD companies will drop ship directly to your customers so you don’t have to worry about shipping anything! I use Printify for all of my POD needs. They work with a ton of printing companies and offer everything from clothing to hats to mugs and everything in between. Also, if you decide to also use Shopify, Printify links directly with your store and your orders will actually auto-fulfill making your store pretty much completely hands off.
Start A ClickFunnels Account
After you’ve chosen your products, it’s time to set up your ClickFunnels Account. This link will give you a free 14 day trial. If you work diligently you could have your Funnel live and making money before your trial is up. Seriously, it’s that good.
Build Your Funnel
Once you’re signed up, it’s time to build your funnel. The best part of using ClickFunnels is the incredible amount of information available online to help you get your funnel set up.
I’ve gone through and found all of the ClickFunnels support videos you should need to get a pretty good understanding on the technical side of building your Funnel. If you have any specific questions comment below and I can help you. There’s also a TON of information when you start your ClickFunnels account to walk you through building your first Funnel. Take your time, play with it, learn the different things you can do. The videos are at the bottom of this article so that you can continue reading about how to get traffic to your new funnel.
Once your Funnel is complete and ready for traffic.
Drive Traffic with Facebook Ads
I’ve found that the most effective way to drive traffic to your site is through Facebook Ads. I’m going to give an overview in this article of how FB Ads work, for more detail click here for my full article on using Facebook Ads and Business Manager.
Create a Business Page
Once you’ve decided on your niche, create a Facebook Page to promote it. I would recommend going into your App Store on your phone and downloading the Facebook Pages App (looks like an orange flag). It’s much better at managing multiple business pages than using the regular Facebook App.
Invite Your Friends to Like Your Page
Once you’ve created your FB Business Page the first step I would do is invite your friends to the page. As of now FB requires you to have 25 followers on your page in order to set up a shorter URL. For instance the FB page for this blog is https://www.facebook.com/ownthecorporateladder. I wasn’t able to add the end of that URL until we had 25 followers. Once that’s done go through the rest of the set up in the page and put in as much information as you can. The more info you provide the more legitimate your customers will see you and you’re going to have better traffic.
Create an Ad Account
Once you’ve completed all of the set up go to business.facebook.com and create an ad account.
This article could end up being extremely long if I went into every detail so I’m going to give you an overview of how this works.
Create Your Ad
The first layer of a Facebook ad is a Campaign. Within each campaign you’ll have Ad Sets, and then within the Ad Sets you have your Ads. You can have multiple Ad Sets inside one campaign and multiple Ads within on Ad Set. You can also have more than one Ad Set point to the same Ad. Confused yet? If you are, go to the full tutorial, I have much more detail there.
The campaign is the over all strategy of your Ad. For this type of business you always want a Conversions Campaign. That’s your goal, convert.
Your Ad Set is where you set up your audience. You need to spend some time considering who your audience actually is. What Gender? What Age? Demographic? What are their interests. In the full tutorial I go into detail on how to use Audience Insights to help figure out who your audience is.
Once you’ve established an audience you need to create an Ad. Make sure you use a great picture or video showing your product and your ad copy (the text) is important. Be clear, honest, and definitely express urgency.
Set Your Daily Budget
The idea of FB Ads is to find an ad that works, and then once you do, increase your ad budget until you bring your sales numbers to where you want them. In theory if you’re spending $10/day and getting $100/day in sales, if you increase your ad spend to $100/day your sales should increase to $1000. Now before you go dropping $10,000 a day in sales, this is obviously not a guaranteed strategy so use discretion and small increases to test your ad and your funnel.
I can tell you from my own experience, once you find an ad and product combination that works, that strategy can quickly bring in 6 figure annual revenues.
Please check out the FB Ad Tutorial Post to read more about Facebook Pixels, Lookalike Audiences, and more.
ClickFunnels How To Videos
For the free plus shipping deals, I like to use the Two Step Tripwire Funnel:
