In internet  marketing, there are many strategies to build traffic.  Getting people to your blog, giving them as many helpful hints and free gifts as possible, and truly trying to be a mentor and not a sales person are some of the important ways to relate to your potential client. As your list grows, it becomes important to maximize conversion of people opting in to something you are offering, and leading them further into your sales process so that they can build their business.

At the very beginning most mentors recommend that you get into affiliate marketing. In order to do that you should familiarize yourself with Clickbank., and the Clickbank Marketplace. There you should choose the niche that you want to start initially marketing into. Then you want to go into ClickBank products and see what products are available that fit the niche you have chosen. In choosing your first 2 or 3 affiliate products to market, you want to screen using “Gravity”. What is meant by Gravity is a number that tells you how popular and successful a particular product is amongst other marketers, and in sales.  The number seems to be arbitary, but scores above 200 would be best. Read the product description and make sure that it makes sense to you. Read any testimonals you can find, and read any product reviews you can find.

Once you’ve chosen your produc,t apply for an affiliate URL so that you that you later can get financial credit (commission) when one of your customers buys that product. The vendor of the product will have banners and possibily other promotional material that you can directly import to your own sales page to help sell the affiliate product. You want your customers to get to the product by first passing through your own Sales Funnel so that they order through your link, thereby allowing you to get credit from the merchant. This also prevents you from losing your optin new client to the merchant which could happen if they were lead directly to the merchant’s page.

So when your potential customer opts in they are led to a Thank You page, which then leads them to a FREE GIFT page, and perhaps a bonus of an additional series of gifts. If you are ready, you can offer a product of your own, or reference to future bonuses and gifts. Very often a well developed sales funnel will also use more than one sales product. It can also use special OTOs (One Time Offers), or joint ventures as additional sales material.

At the end of the funnel, after the final download, the customer should be sent an email confirming their purchase with download instructions for what they bought, especially if they did not download after making payment through a link on either Paypal, ClickBank paydotcom.com, or any purchasing software or shopping cart. Usually the link says “Return to Merchant”, but sometimes people forget to do this. So the email sent through the Auto-Responder will allow them another way to download their purchase.

This sequence of events decribes the Sales Funnel.