DotCom Secrets

by Russel Branson

  Now, don’t be unethical here. For a while, many Internet marketers used this technique successfully with fake news sites and fake blogs that they controlled. The FTC cracked down on that practice, and you really don’t want them on your case. Use legitimate articles on legitimate websites. Encourage one of your best students to write an article about you, then use that as the landing page people will see once they click on a banner ad.

  News: Anything that’s news or is perceived as news commands more attention than other reading matter. Our brains are programmed to pay special attention to anything that might be a threat. This is why everything on the evening news is a “Special Alert” or “Disaster Update.” Each headline is phrased to get our attention and convince us a developing event is sure to destroy the world as we know it. If your pre-frame is attached somehow to a current news story, you’ll automatically receive a bump in attention for as long as that story continues to dominate the news. For example, if you manage to tie your message to an upcoming election or natural disaster, people will see the connection and pay more attention to you as a result. The downside to this strategy is that the recognition can be short lived. However, the upside can be a massive upsurge in traffic while the story is hot.

  You can also design the web page to look like a news page. It might have a special bar with a headline on the bottom or a sidebar with a relevant side story. Marketers have found that just formatting their content to look like news can increase their credibility and pre-frame their offers nicely. Again, don’t go crazy with this strategy, or you’ll have the FTC on your case. Besides, it’s just bad for business. Be ethical. Tell the truth.

  Fig 11.3: Articles on news sites lend a feeling of authority to your products and services.

  Blogs: A blog post can be used to pre-frame most any topic. For example, maybe you work in a crowded industry with many competitors who all provide basically the same solution. You could write a blog post explaining how every other company is the same, while yours is different and better. You might write the article yourself and post it on your blog. But you’ll probably get better results if you guest post it on someone else’s blog, preferably a high-traffic blog with lots of visitors in your target market. Better yet, have the blog author post the article in their name so that you are not seemingly tied to it at all. I did this once with a successful student in the “make-money-online” market. I asked him to write an article detailing his experience using my products. He added a link to our offer, and we drove Facebook traffic to his blog post. The campaign worked great. It was engineered as a pre-frame, but the content was 100% true and ethical.

  Videos: YouTube videos make great pre-frame material, especially for testimonials. The video should agitate the problem for the viewer or educate them on some process or idea. The goal is to make them desire the solution you offer. Again, have the video appear on someone else’s channel and drive traffic there. Then include calls to action that move people to your offer. The calls to action might be links in the description or comments, some pre-roll or post-roll footage, or even annotations in the video.

  Email: Pre-framing with email works well when you buy a solo ad or use JV partners to endorse you to their lists. No matter whose list you’re mailing to, you’re essentially borrowing their credibility to pre-frame you as a great person or to pre-frame your offer as a great solution. Once the pre-frame is accomplished, the call to action is a link in the email that readers can click on to get to your offer. With direct mail, this is done with a lift letter where the owner of the list writes an introduction telling his people how great you are or how well your product works. JV partners or affiliates do the same thing with email by writing an introduction for you or your offer.

  Fig 11.4: Presell pages educate the visitor before they land on your sales page.

  Presell Pages: Sometimes you have to educate people before you sell to them. A presell page tells a story. It’s a longer article used to give background information or education that prospects might need. Once they have this information, they are in the right frame of mind to understand and buy the offer. For example, maybe you sell email marketing software, but some of your prospects don’t know what email marketing is or why their businesses need it. You might send them to a presell page on your website that explains exactly how email marketing helps grow businesses. Then you add a call to action, which will take them to your product offer. This strategy works great for affiliates who want to warm up the prospect before sending them straight over to someone else’s sales page.

  QUALIFYING SUBSCRIBERS

  The next phase is to qualify your subscribers. Remember the goal here is simply to get people to opt-in to your list, subscribe to your newsletter, or request a free offer you’ve put in front of them. You’re separating out the casual visitors from the people who are willing to trade their email addresses in return for more information.

  Pop-Ups: Remember years ago when those annoying little boxes popped up on your screen almost every time you visited a website? “Congratulations! You just won . . . blah, blah, blah.” They may have been annoying, but they worked like crazy to get people to opt in to a list. Thanks to pop-up blockers and ad blockers, this method became almost obsolete for years, and marketers all but abandoned them. But recently new types of pop-ups have been created that aren’t as easily blocked, and we’re finding that these pop-ups are becoming a good tool for building a list in many situations. The bigger problem is that some advertisers (like Google and Facebook) won’t approve ads that go to pages with pop-ups. So this method doesn’t work all the time, but pop-ups can be powerful tools under the right circumstances.

  Fig 11.5: Pop-ups can still be effective if used carefully.

  Squeeze Page: The squeeze page is the simplest way to qualify subscribers. It was developed as a way to increase subscribers without using pop-ups. It’s a simple opt-in page that requires people to give you their email addresses to get access to something on the next page (i.e., a free report or a free video). The only choices on the page are to subscribe or leave. The magic of a squeeze page is the complete lack of distractions. There are no ads to look at and no navigation menu tabs to click. People are forced to focus on your most important message— the one message you want to give them. And they have to make a decision: either give you their email address or leave the page.

  Fig 11.6: A squeeze page has only one goal—to get the visitor to subscribe or request information.

  Click Pop: The click pop is a way to get people to join your list via a button on your blog or other web pages. When they click on that button, up pops a squeeze-page-style pop-up. If a visitor gives you their email address, they are taken to the next page. Click pop buttons are great because you can place them in a ton of places, places where you traditionally wouldn’t be able to get opt-ins, like articles and blog posts.

  Fig 11.7: A click-pop combines a clickable button with a pop-up web form.

  Free-Plus-Shipping, Two-Step Form: This type of web form takes advantage of buyer psychology and combines the “qualify subscribers” and “qualify buyers” steps into one sequence. Step one qualifies subscribers by asking for contact information (including email addresses). Step two qualifies buyers by asking for credit card information, usually to cover shipping costs. That is how my company structures most of our free-plus-shipping offers.

  Fig 11.8: A two-step web form allows you to collect a name and email address on step one and credit card information on step two.

  Anyone who fills out step one of this form is automatically added to an email list and is qualified as a subscriber—even if he doesn’t fill out step two.

  Webinar Registration: We often use free webinars as a way to generate leads. When people register for the webinar, they naturally need to give you their email addresses because you need to send them details about the webinar. If it’s an automated webinar, they pick which day they want to watch, fill in their email, and Boom! A new subscriber is on your list. And because they signed
up for a webinar, they’ll be looking for your email.

  Fig 11.9: Webinar registrations are a natural way to collect email addresses because people expect you to send them more information about the webinar via email.

  Free Account: Signing people up for a free account works especially well with software and membership programs. Create a membership site, or a “lite” version of your software, and give it to people for free. When visitors create an account to get access to the membership or the software, they are added to your subscriber list. Often times, these types of pages are very similar to squeeze pages, but because they are actually “creating an account,” you can get a lot more information and still keep your conversions high.

  Fig 11.10: Free accounts allow you to collect more personal information about a subscriber like physical address and phone number.

  Exit Pop: An exit pop is, not surprisingly, a last-chance pop-up after people click away from your site. It asks if they’re sure they really want to leave without subscribing. You may even make a special offer to people if they decide to subscribe before they close the exit pop. Once people leave your site, there’s a good chance they’ll never come back. So, you can afford to annoy them a little bit with an exit pop. It may be your last chance to keep them engaged with you.

  Fig 11.11: You can use exit pops as a final appeal to the visitor to give you their email address.

  QUALIFYING BUYERS

  When we qualify buyers, remember that the goal is to get people to pull out their credit cards and actually pay for something. The first purchase is the hardest to get, so it’s best to offer something of value for a very low price. Then, you can guide buyers up the Value Ladder as soon as you can. Here are my favorite ways to qualify buyers:

  Free-Plus-Shipping: This is my favorite way to qualify buyers (as you’ll see in Secret #13). If you create a great product and give it away for free, it is the perfect bait and gets one of your products into the hands of a new customer. There is no better way than a free-plus-shipping offer to provide value up front and get the buyer interested in ascending. I feel like this tactic is the best way to find out which of your subscribers are also buyers.

  Trial: A very low-cost trial offer is a great way to get people to raise their hands and tell you that they’re buyers. The easiest and most popular trial is offered for one dollar. Then, you bill them a few days later for the full amount—if they want to keep the product. To receive the trial, a visitor must pull their credit card out of their wallet and prove they are a buyer. This works best for items you don’t have to ship, like digital downloads, software, or membership sites.

  Tripwire: Tripwires are smaller offers used to get buyers in the door. They are often a “splinter” of your core product. For example, you might pull out one module or one of the training sessions and offer it for a huge discount. Ryan Deiss and Perry Belcher made this technique popular. They usually use a very low-cost offer of around seven dollars per item. These can be physical products or digital downloads, depending on your market.

  Self-Liquidating Offers (SLO): These types of offers are usually a little more expensive—between thirty-seven and ninety-seven dollars. Often times, with free-plus-shipping, trials, and tripwire offers, you may actually lose money initially, although through your upsells you can often break even. With a self-liquidating offer, on the other hand, the goal is to have the frontend product liquidate your ad costs so that your upsells can become pure profit.

  Straight Sale: This is just a regular sale of a high-ticket item, from ninety-seven to five thousand dollars or higher. It usually takes a little more selling to convert these offers, so we typically only introduce this option to people who are in our warm market or who have gone through our initial funnels. It usually takes a stronger bond with the Attractive Character before people will make these larger investments.

  Many people ask me what type of offer they should use to qualify their buyers. Most of the time, I like to use the free-plus-shipping offer to qualify my buyers, but it doesn’t always work. We tried this with our neuropathy supplement, and the numbers never quite worked out. So we changed it to a straight sale, and it worked great. Sometimes you try something that doesn’t work, so you change the offer. Simply shift to one of the other building blocks, and you could have a winner. You have to test each product. Different markets respond differently, so don’t give up on finding interested buyers too soon.

  IDENTIFY HYPERACTIVE BUYERS

  To figure out which customers are hyperactive buyers at the point of sale, I need to offer an upsell immediately after I qualify them with a low-cost or free offer. Here are my favorite ways to do that:

  Bumps: These are the little offers we add on to our order forms, and they have completely transformed our business. This concept is very similar to the experience you have in a grocery store checkout line. You see the candy bars, gum, and other little things that are all too easy to throw in with your order. My team does a similar thing with our order-form bumps. With two lines of text and a checkbox, we are often able to get up to 40% of our buyers to upgrade and pay an extra thirty-seven dollars or more at the point of sale.

  Fig 11.12: Bumps are a subtle way to increase sales (sometimes dramatically). Just make a simple discount offer with a checkbox on the order form.

  One-Time Offers (OTOs): After someone has purchased any of your frontend offers, you can make them a special, onetime offer. The best OTOs are products that will complement the initial purchase. Often we’ll make two to three separate offers to people after they buy, as long as the sequence of offers adds more value to the initial offer.

  Fig 11.13: One Time Offers (OTOs) appear after someone has purchased your first offer. These are special deals they can only get if they act right away.

  Downsales: If the buyer says no to the OTO, you can downsell them with either a different product or a payment plan option on the original offer. Don’t give up just because they said no to paying the full amount all at once. Often we find that up to 20% of people who say no to the special offer will say yes to a payment-plan version on a downsell.

  Affiliate Recommendations: These recommendations typically happen after buyers finish going through my upsale/downsale sequenece and have landed on the “thank you” page in my funnel. On this page, I will usually thank buyers for ordering and then link to other offers that would likely serve them.

  Let’s Review: Do you see how these blocks work to build a system that benefits your company? Simply go through each phase in the funnel and choose which block you want to try. You’ll soon discover the ones that work best in your market, and you’ll rely on them over and over. But don’t forget to test out some of the alternatives now and then. You never know when a straight sale will beat out a trial for a particular offer—unless you test it. I encourage you to split test different blocks for all your offers. I know split testing can be intimidating for some, and the software can be expensive. But I think it’s so important to the long-term growth of your business that we included simple split testing options inside ClickFunnels to make it super easy.

  Up Next: New ideas for building blocks are being developed all the time, but these listed above are the most common and most effective, I’ve found. Now that you know what the blocks are, we can start building actual funnels.

  In the next chapter, I’m going to discuss which types of funnels we use on the frontend of our Value Ladders, the ones we use in the middle, and those we use for the backend. Understanding this will help you to better understand how to use each of the funnels I will be giving you later.

  SECRET #12:

  FRONTEND VS. BACKEND FUNNELS

  Now that you know the building blocks, all you have to do to build your own funnels is put them together. You can combine them any way you like, but I have seven tested and proven funnels that I use all the time with my mastermind clients and with my own companies. We use them over and over and over again, and they work. In section 4, you’re going to learn how each of these
funnels functions. But before we go there, you need to see how we use different funnels for different steps on the Value Ladder. Funnels have a psychology behind them, and you need to use a different psychological approach for a low-priced, introductory product vs. a high-ticket package.

  Product Awareness Continuum: The basic psychology goes back to the product awareness continuum we discussed when we were talking about traffic temperature in Secret #9.

  Fig 12.2: How you speak to your prospects depends on where they are on the product awareness continuum.

  Cold traffic is probably only aware of the problem they are facing. They don’t know you or your products, so they need to start at the front of the Value Ladder with a low-level funnel, like a Free-Plus-Shipping or Self-Liquidating-Offer Funnel. These funnels are proven to work on cold traffic, people who don’t know you or the solution you’re providing.

  These potential customers will start to warm up to you after they start going through your communication funnel—building a bond with the Attractive Character. As they do, you can start introducing biggerticket products through the funnels we use in the middle of the Value Ladder. I like to sell these mid-priced offers using a Perfect Webinar Funnel, Invisible Funnel, or Product-Launch Funnel. Each of these takes the time to go into more detail about the solution you’re providing with your product, so the sales funnel is a little different.