Quick question, what would be the easiest, most reliable and automated way to generate constant revenue for your online business?

The answer: A sales funnel.

You have more than likely been entered into a sales funnel. It goes like this: you sign up for a form and enter your email address, either on a website or through an ad or flyer.

Why would you sign up? It could be to receive a coupon for an item or service you’re planning to buy, to gain more information on something of interest, a newsletter or some form of content you wish to read, or any other reason. Often you will check a box allowing the company to send you updates and promotional info.

You click to enter your email. It could be “Subscribe Now”, “Click Here”, or anything else to get you to submit your email address.

Congratulations, you are now in a sales funnel!

The Sales Funnel As The Prospect

You have now become what is known as a prospect or a lead. You’ll first receive the information you requested (the reason you signed up in the first place.) You’ll be happy and go about your business. If the information is a coupon, you might go back and buy what you were interested in.

Then, after a day or two, you’ll likely begin receiving other emails from them. Perhaps updated information on their business, some other content you were asking for, or a promotion to buy or sign up for something you may be interested in.

If you buy or sign up for the information in subsequent emails, the sender will likely receive a commission or some form of payment.

Now, does this mean that the person or people behind the company are constantly on the computer, writing emails and sending them to you? Most likely not. These emails have all been placed in a queue, to be sent to you at a pre-determined time or frequency, such as every day or every couple days.

The Sales Funnel From The Marketer’s Point of View

Let’s reverse this. You are the company or the marketer sending out these emails to customers. Once you have a prospect’s email, you can now send you information you may be interested in. What do you do with it?

Send them emails and promotions they would likely be interested in, of course!

The beauty of this is that you never slave away, sending these emails to generate income. Everything is automated. You set everything up once, queue whatever email responses you want, send them at a time of your choosing in the future, and forget about it.

Whenever a prospect reads one of your emails and click on the link to the service or product you are promoting in one of your messages, then ends up buying, you receive a commission from the sale.

Send emails to 10, 100, 1000 people a day through your sales funnel, and you are now generating a reliable, constant stream of earnings!

A basic sales funnel consists of these steps:

1. The ad with a link to the email form
2. The email form on a webpage (called a lead page)
3. The offer after they submit, or just a thank you page
4. An autoresponder on the backend, where the prospect info and your series of emails reside

With an evergreen sales funnel, you are offering something that doesn’t expire. This could be any product or service you will receive a commission on. It’s a true set and forget system where everything is automated. All you have to do is send in the traffic, either through advertising, social media or other traffic source.

I have a series of podcasts and videos where we go deep into creating an evergreen sales funnel, check them out below:

The $1,000,000 Funnel

This is a 2-part series where I interview Allison Hoyt, master sales funnel builder. In Part One we talk about what funnels are, best practices, how to monetize it, and traffic sources:

In Part 2, we take a higher level view of sales funnels, how to scale with them, split testing basics, tracking and email sequences. The end result is to grow your sales funnel into a $1,000,000/year income monster:

The Evergreen Funnel

Next, we discuss evergreen funnels, the self-sustaining, automated sales funnel that just keeps running and making money:

In Part 2, we get more grandular into the steps of crafting an email funnel, from your landing page down to your tracking:

 Have you ever built your own sales funnel? Let me know your ideas, successes, failures (which you learned from, I’m sure!), or even cool sales funnels you remember from the past!