Business Start-up Advice: Use The Funnel Concept

The funnel concept is a great way to visualize your business when you sell your knowledge over the internet. Understanding how it works is some of the best business start up advice anyone ever gave me.

What I want you to do is to get in your mind a picture of a huge funnel. This funnel should have a wide opening at the top and a small opening at the bottom. Entering the top of the funnel is easy because of its large width. However, emerging from the bottom of the funnel is more difficult. This is because of how narrow and thin the bottom end of the funnel is.

This funnel is exactly how the process of building a business works. It is easy to sell your knowledge if you are offering it for free in a report. It becomes a little more difficult when you charge $10 for information. It becomes even more difficult if you are charging $37 or $67 for additional information. This is why you need to have multiple products in your ebook business.

Why do you want to set your business up to sell your knowledge like this? You do so because at the top of your funnel is where you are going to have the most amount of people. As you continue to move through the funnel you are going to have fewer and fewer people. Generally speaking, more people will buy your $10 eBook than your $500 home study course. This is because when you charge more, it requires a higher level of commitment.

As you offer these products, you have to do more to make your customers feel comfortable. The marketing process that you use to give away a free report is not necessarily going to be as effective if you are marketing a $200 coaching program. People need to feel confident that your product can help them and that it will be worth the investment. Otherwise, they will hesitate and you will not make the sale. However, if you do a good job at this, not only will they buy, but they will promote for you also.

This is the power behind the funnel philosophy. When you first get started in selling information, you typically only care about having one product to sell. You just want to make that first sale. However, those who understand the whole view know they need many products with many price points. They also understand that they want more complicated products that serve their customers as they grow.

By focusing your efforts on providing value, you will build up the level of trust that your customers are willing to invest in you. Your product portfolio funnel should illustrate this goal by including escalating values of products with escalating price points. Now you should not expect to have this trust coming out of the gate. However, you do want to have a goal to shoot for and build towards because it is absolutely essential if you want to build a big business and sell your knowledge.

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Copyright Stephen  Beck, 2010

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Stephen Beck can teach you online business set up steps and how to make your first $1000 on the internet.  Pick up a FREE link to his webinar replay where Stephen shows you everything you should do: http://www.YourOnlineBasics.com/go.html.