If you are marketing a high value and presumably high profit product or service, a muli tiered direct sales funnel may have strong benefits for you and your bottom line.

A multi-tiered sales funnel is a strategic marketing model that guides customers through a series of upsells that culminate in your ultimate high value product.

First recognize that selling a several thousand dollar product online is something that happens every day, but very rarely is it done directly. I know because I do it all the time with the use of a multi-tiered direct sales model.

It’s a simple fact that making a sale to an existing customer is many times easier than making that same sale to a new prospect, especially if the new product is related to the one the customer already purchased.

What isn’t so obvious is that in the mind of the customer making another purchase, an upsell on your part, that is in the same price world, is a manageable hurdle; a price point somewhere around 2x to 10x of the previous product seems to work well.

So combining these two observations, we can migrate customers from a $50 entry level product to a $400 mid level product to a $2,000 product with relative ease, since at each step, we’ve provided exceptional value, and kept the next “step” in the same price world as the previous… this multi-tiered sales funnel is easily expanded to even higher priced products.  I’ve personally used it to sell $20,000 training programs with ease, just by adding a $9,000 step up from the $2,000 product.

So, why do it this way?

A couple of reasons. The first we’ve already hit on a little, and it’s because making repeat sales is so much easier to do than making the first sale, as long as you’ve provided real value and treated your customers well.

Secondly, and equally important, it is much easier to optimize the early stages of the sales funnel since the first step into becoming our customer is a product for less than $50.  You can start making a little bit of money while developing your customer base.  And then move on to optimizing the creatives in the next tier of the funnel and so on.  This fact alone enables a much more methodical and strategic optimization plan, that will allow you to profit while getting to the point of making the high end sale.

Of course the upsells will not be 100%, but if you do a good job of writing your sales copy, it’s straight forward to upsell at least a third of your customers over time to each next stage in the product pipeline.  And since you’re making money, improving each stage is much easier and fun to do!

A multi tiered sales funnel is a powerful marketing concept that can dramatically improve your chances of optimizing your sales and marketing creative pieces, improve your conversion rates, and return on investment and ultimately selling more high value high profit products.

So what is it exactly?

It’s a marketing model that integrates a series of upsells to move your existing customers from some entry level product that sells for a very comfortable level usually less than $50, to your ultimate high value product, that usually sells for several thousand dollars, in a methodical, scientific manner.

Say for example, you are marketing a product that retails for $10,000.

How in the world are you going to set up and optimize your sales letter and get enough visitors to your creative so you can start to see some return on investment?  Is it even possible to make sales online for products that cost several thousand dollars?  Well the answer is yes, it’s possible, and in fact it’s happening every day, just not directly.

Let me explain.

Most entrepreneurs realize it’s much easier to sell a related product to an existing customer than to sell to a stranger.  That’s why the infomercial guys are willing to “lose” money on their front end product since they know, statistically, that a certain percentage will order some of their other products.

You can do the exact same thing online.

Another observation that most successful marketers recognize is that in the mind of the customer, once they’ve purchased a product, their thermostat has been raised and any other product in the range of 2x to 10x in price is often times still in their financial comfort zone.

This is an emotional response, but it’s very real.

For example, if you paid $50 for a dvd course, or ebook, or online resource, and liked it, an expanded course for $400 feels like it’s still in your range, right?

But how about going from $50 to $2,000?

I don’t think so.  It’s too big of a step.  A much smaller percentage of people will  be willing to make that jump. The upsell conversion will be too low to gain sales momentum.

To make the $2,000 sale, I would structure so that the first product is around $50, the second related product is around $400, and then upsell to the $2,000 product. As long as you optimize the sales letters, it’s reasonable to expect at least a third of your customers for a product will upgrade to the next in the funnel.

Repeat this process as many times as it takes to get to the product you’re trying to sell.

Can you start lower?

Certainly, but I would be sure to test it.  I know a lot of marketers like to start with a product around $7, basically adding a stage before the $50.  I think it will depend on what the price point is of your high end product.  I think it’s best to keep the number of stages to five or under…

Internet marketing allows for fast testing, tracking and tweaking of your advertising. And no system demonstrates that better than Google Adwords.

It works so good it’s addictive (more on that in a another post…)

The first goal of course is to find a small set of keywords that very precisely target your ideal customer, and that get decent traffic.

Group these keywords in an adgroup.

Now it’s time to craft the perfect Ad.

The first thing to realize is that you won’t find a winner your first draft. There are some excellent copyrighting resources to get you in the game, but suffice it to say you should follow the AIDA principle to start with.

A(ttention) – I(nterest) – D(esire) – A(ction)

The goal of the headline is to grab the visitors attention, and pique their interest. It works best if you use the keyword in the headline for this, if possible.

The other two lines of the ad should serve to provide clear benefits to the visitor increase their interest and desire, and in certain circumstances to further qualify them.

Here’s an example of an add that has performed well on Google:

• I Quit MLM
• Now I Make $7800/week
• Free Report Shows How

Can you pick out the components of marketing 101 (AIDA)?

In all PPC, in Adwords or Yahoo Search or even Bing, you should always be testing two ads against each other, and constantly improving your bottom line.

When a clear winner is determined (this usually takes at least 30 clicks) nuke the loser and craft another ad to take the winner.

Continue this process until you retire

Many people make poor decisions on ads because they choose the winner before it’s statistically significant.  Here’s free tool to help you to determine if a winner is found:

http://www.splittestaccelerator.com/freetool.php

Very helpful for making a sound statistical judgment; don’t settle for anything less than 95% confidence.

Creating winning ads is a fun sport, and highly profitable if you do it right. Invest the time in learning some good copyrighting, but more importantly constantly be testing, tracking and tweaking — and make statistical significant decisions.

See you on stage!

A great question was asked in one of the forums that I’m a member of:

Is there such a thing as an ideal network marketing company to join when using PPC (and social media marketing)? Are there some features that we should look for? e.g. High ticket items, etc. I am not asking about the normal things that we should look for but more the things that make it easier to market on the internet. Cheers! Calvin

Here was my response:

I’ve done a lot of PPC marketing, and what I’ve found is the key to success utilizing PPC is getting some cash flow on the front end regardless of whether your visitors join you or not.

If you don’t, you’ll run out of money.

There are several ways to accomplish this, I’ve used both a lateral approach with an attraction marketing system and a direct approach where I sell an informative DVD on the front end to qualify folks.

Both produce cash flow, and signups, although the direct approach the signups came faster for me.

Now don’t miss this critical point, you need to KNOW, or at least have a really good idea, how much a lead is going to be worth to you both in the short term and long term, so you can calculate your ROI (return on investment). The reason is you’ll be paying between $2 and $5 per lead (when you’re really good) depending on keyword, ad copy and everything we’re going to be learning here.

My experience with an attraction marketing system showed me that I was able to earn somewhere around $4 per lead on the front end for the sales funnel I had set up; my direct approach sales funnel produces a bit more.

In either case, once inside and a customer, you need to craft a unique selling proposition that stikes a chord with your customers (usually current network marketers) and can effortlessly move them along your sales funnel. If you get creative and can craft that USP, then most legitimate companies will work fine.

What are current network marketers having problems with, what are they looking for? Make sure you USP hits these hot buttons. Most current network marketers, quite honestly don’t really care about the product they promote (as long as it’s legal and ethical).

They want to work with someone who has a system that works (creates profits), and does a lot of the heavy lifting for them (YOU).

They want to work with someone that can show them how to generate leads without hassling friends and family (YOU).

HTH,

Dave

I had to change a battery yesterday for my son’s Sebring. He’s off to college, and decided not to take it with him so it sat around for a few weeks while we figured out what we want to do with it.

Tuesday I tried to start it and, as you guessed, deader than a door nail. Spent all day charging it, and it worked fine for a while, but yesterday, once again, dead.

Now when I went to take it out and bring it down to Sears for a new one, I’m struck with the stupidity of design that drives me crazy. As an engineer by trade, I might be a bit more critical than most, but this was stupid.

The way the battery is mounted in the car, there is a goofy contraption strapping it in that you need to take both bolts off… stupidity number 1.

But the real kicker was the bolts clamping on the battery posts were different sizes, and this just pisses me off. But it’s worse than that. One was an english unit nut and the other was metric.

What?

Yep, they mixed different size nuts with different units attached to the same battery.

Stupid!

This made me think of a common mistake a lot of people make while marketing on places like google and yahoo. You see that simple design hack job, causing me to first change the wrench, and also changing units on the wrench (lucky for me I had metric), disrupted my calm, and my attention.

The process was not congruent.

The same thing happens when you develop an ad on google, send them to a landing page that has a completely different tone, feel, wording than the ad, and even more common when the visitor moves past the landing page.

Your marketing should have the same look, feel, tone, and verbiage from the initial exposure (google, yahoo, where ever) through to the landing page, and on to the thank you page, and even in your email follow up messages.

One simple thing you can do to help that process is include a picture of you on your landing page, thank you page, and all the follow up messages you send. Other people include a video on the landing and thankyou pages, and a photo in emails. That simple step adds a thread in your funnel.

This is called “Congruency”, and it is extremely important in today’s market as any little bump along the sales funnel (like a different nut size on the battery) and you’ll lose the visitor to another search.

Realize it doesn’t stop with a photo, either. Do you have your Google ad text on your landing page near the top so the visitor sees the connection? Does it make sense to have it on your page? If not, then you might want to consider changing either your ad or your landing page so they are congruent.

Try it out, and see if your conversion rates don’t improve!

Dave

One of my beefs with virtually every multi level marketing company out there (at least the ones I’ve been involved with) is that they all lack what is perhaps the most important skill for ANY business, and that is…

MARKETING

Most MLM company owners would rather you just learn how to talk to your friends and family about the business, and build it on word of mouth alone. The problem with this strategy is most people don’t have a big enough circle of influence to actually build a business with this very small market

What happens when they run out of people to talk to?

Well they are force to either quit, or maybe an enterprising upline will encourage them to buy some leads and start cold calling or “dialing for dollars”. In either case, the distributor is doomed for failure as they are not being taught good solid marketing fundamentals

It’s so sad, because there are literally over 1.5 Billion people on the internet right now and all you need to do is figure out how to segment that massive pool, and to market to them.

If you find yourself struggling, take some time for some honest introspection: am I being taught how to really market, or am I like a sheep being led to the slaughter?

Once you master how to market online, generating 100 unique, highly qualified prospects into your sales funnel is trivial… when was the last time you gave 100 presentations in a single day?

Until next time…

David A. Hanson

In any marketing that you do, either offline, or online, certain ratios begin to develop. These ratios allow you to plan, test and tweak your marketing message.

For example, on a good lead capture page for the MLM niche, you should expect to have to send between 5 to 10 visitors to your page to convert a visitor into a lead (10% – 20% conversion rate). Depending on traffic source, I have a landing page that converts as well as 50%, and another that converts just under 10%.

But the point is, once you have driven enough traffic to any point in your sales and marketing funnel, you should be able to predict and scale your efforts to produce what ever results you want.

Here’s the catch, though, and it has to do with statistics, but I’ll avoid the detailed technical stuff.

Let’s say the fundemental (meaning millions of visitors ratio) conversion rate on your landing page is 10%.  When you are sending your traffic to your page, you may not see a single conversion with 10 visitors, or even 20 visitors. Then again you may see 5.  The numbers are just too small to start to see what the fundemental conversion rate is.

They are good to watch, but until you have at least 3 times the number you think you need, the real ratio may not be revealing itself, so don’t panic (or get too excited).  My baseline for my landing pages is at least 10% conversion, so for me this metric means I don’t even start to get an idea of the peformance until about 30 visitors; and then as more time progresses I get a better and better feel.

This is law of averages and it takes large numbers to know what they are.

My favorite marketing method by far is Google Adwords.  I’ve used it for the past several months, and really kicked it up a notch when I jumped on the pre-launch of a training program offered by Mike Dillard’s PPC guru, Jim Yaghi.

I applied what I learned from the training and now routinely generate 25-40 leads each and every day for my business, and here’s the best part, I do it for FREE!

The program called PPC Domination is released the public today and I highly recommend it to everyone serious about generating and never end supply of free leads on the internet.

Mastering the art of generating leads on Google is a must have skill. Look at all the top internet network marketers and you’ll find them on Google. The PPC Domination training will bring up to speed fast, and avoid the costly pitfalls that many have when venturing onto G without the help of a mentor!

I see SO many people using social media wrong, it drives me crazy. You know sites like twitter, facebook, myspace and youtube to name just a few.

So if you’re just learning how to use these sites to build your business, I want to share a video from one of the most brilliant marketers alive, Perry Belcher who has MASTERED this relm.

He’ll give you the perfect approach when it comes to using social community sites to grow your business. If you’re using ANY of these sites, watch this video, and say “thanks Perry!”.

It’s 100% pure content.

Are you tired of bugging friends and family and spending a fortune on worthless leads? Are you sick of using tired worn out OLD SCHOOL marketing to build your MLM business?

If so, you’ve come to the right place.

Hey there, this is David Hanson from Eau Claire, Wisconsin. I want to thank you for investing a few minutes of your time with me today.

I truly appreciate your time and attention.

Now chances are good youve landed on my website because you are already involved in network marketing. In fact, you may even be struggling I know this because over 97% of people who start in our industry never make more money than they invest.

What a shame!

Today, what I’d like to do is to share with you some vital information that literally turned my network marketing career around instantly, and it can do the same for you as well.

But first, a little about me.

Ive been in network marketing for over eight years now, and I struggled when I started out, I was taught to go talk to friends and family invite them to home partied, drop sizzle cards all over town, put up flyers, and when those things didnt work to go buy some way over priced leads and cold call them.

What a waste of time.

What I had going for me however was a burning desire to succeed, so I went on a quest to find to use technology like the internet and websites like myspace, facebook and twitter. I invested over five thousand dollars over the past several months in training classes and online ebooks, and finally have discovered the secret recipe to succeeding in MLM online.

As soon as I applied what I learned, my business started to explode, and went from making less than what I was paying in autoship to creating a full time residual income in a few short months working less than I ever did with the old school techniques.

And it was a lot more fun too.

So if youre sick of bugging friends and family and wasting a fortune on worthless leads, then simply visit http://mlmsuccesstruth.com, and Ill share with you the instant access to the exact MLM Success Truth for you to create the same kinds of results.

Expect Success!

http://mlmsuccesstruth.com