Hello and welcome to this week’s Monday Minutes. Each week in this series I am going to share simple tips and advice that you can implement quickly to help your business become more successful.
This week’s tip all about plugging those pesky (money stealing) leaks in your sales funnel.
This week we’re going to dig a little deeper into the topic of sales funnels and talk about why they leak and what you can do to fix it. For a business owner with a solid funnel in place, it’s easy to look at the number of subscribers at each level of the funnel and predict relatively accurately what the sales are going to be from day to day or week to week.
However, if you have a funnel in place and your numbers aren’t looking good, chances are your funnel has a hole. Maybe even two or three, where subscribers are falling through the cracks. The good news is that once you learn how to spot the leaks, they’re easy enough to fix.
Why Your Funnels Leak—And What to Do About It
Leaky funnels are usually caused by one (or more) of the four common problems:
- Slow or no traffic
The very heart of your sales funnel is 
traffic. Without visitors to your blog or opt-in pages, you’ll have no subscribers. Without subscribers, you’ll have low (or no) sales and without sales, you’ll have no business. Yet this is where many of us struggle. How can you get more eyes on your content and more subscribers into your funnel?
The fix for getting more traffic
Traffic generation is an entire industry of its own, but here are some tips: Use good SEO to encourage search engines to rank your content well. Be present and active in the places where your ideal consumer hangs out, whether that’s on social media, in niche forums, or at live events. Use paid ads to drive targeted traffic to highly relevant pages. Recruit JV (joint venture) partners and affiliates to promote your offers. Buy solo ads in related email newsletters.
- The follow-up
This is a leaky funnel mistake that a lot of new entrepreneurs make. They spend a lot of time and energy setting up a great squeeze page and driving traffic to it, they deliver the goods to their new subscribers, and then nothing. No follow up emails, no offers. Nothing – crickets- silence!
- The follow-up fix
Before you spend time building that opt-in page or offer, be sure you have a back-end product funnel to promote and a series of emails in place to send to those subscribers you so carefully collected. If you don’t it will end up costing you money instead of making it.
The call-to-action
This happens most typically at the top of the funnel. Your blog posts, social media content, podcasts, YouTube videos. Everything that you offer for free must have a call-to-action (CTA), or it’s dead end content and a waste of your time and energy. Your call-to-action can be as simple as “Subscribe to my newsletter for this free report” or “Follow me on Facebook for great tips,” but it must be there.
- The CTA fix
Every time you write a blog post or an email, think to yourself, “What do I want my readers to do when they’re done reading/listening/watching this?” That becomes your call to action.
- Not making offers
When you’re just starting out, this can be a problem. You know you need to build a mailing list, but with nothing to offer them, what’s the point? The truth is, there are plenty of ways to make money in your funnel even if you don’t have your own product to sell. You just have to get creative!
- The offer fix
When you don’t have your own products to sell you can promote affiliate offers. No matter what industry you’re in, there are a variety of tools and products your readers need. Find those tools, sign up for the affiliate programs, and recommend them to your readers. Not only will your readers thank you for pointing them in the right direction, but you’ll earn a tidy commission, too.
Now that you know how to spot a leaky sales funnel you can fix it with a few tweaks and some attention to your follow-up systems. Once you plug those holes you should see an increase your profits in no time!
Need a little help with your sales funnel?
Download this free Sales Funnel Checklist and use it to plan out your funnel.
If you want an easy to follow detailed plan for building out or plugging leaks in your sales funnel then I recommend this Sales Funnel Planner. You can print it out and use it yourself, use it with your clients and you can even sell it from inside your own sales funnel.
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Thank you for reading,
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lifestyle that’s full of positive energy and abundance and that makes you appear as someone who can help your clients change their lives for the better. On the other hand, if you have a fashion brand, then you need to show people that you’re put together and looking beautiful, thereby selling them the dream that your products will do the same for them.
For example, you can share a photo of yourself running in the rain, or you can take a photo of your running shoes covered in mud with your water bottle next to them for effect. In just a few words, this is telling your audience that you’ve just been on a run and it says something about your determination and your love of fitness.
Playing small may feel safer but it can severely limit the growth of your business. Try challenging yourself to take one small risk each week. As time goes by, you’ll find it gets easier to own your awesomeness.