Website vs sales funnel: how to make profit online

When starting a business, most businesses flock to building a website first rather than a sales funnel. Websites have been around for a very long time, but sales funnels have just recently become popular. Unsure what the difference is between a website and a sales funnel and which one is going to bring you profit for your business? We will discuss the difference below and you can make a judgement on which one you need.

 

What is a Website?

A website is generally a familiar term to most people. You might already know what it means, but for the sake of accuracy, let’s define what it means specifically. A website is basically a collection of related webpages that features information provided by an entity or a person. It is merely a location connected to the internet that maintains one or more pages.

Websites can be divided into two categories, interactive or static. Static websites are basically sites that provide information without giving the visitors and site owners a medium to interact with. Interactive websites, however, are sites that allow engagement between site owners and their visitors.

Websites can function depending on what the site owner wants to do with it. It can be used to provide information, an entertainment outlet, or used for personal means. However, many websites are built with one thing in mind and that is to make money. This can be possible using business models such as;

• E-commerce: service or products are being sold directly through the website.
• Advertising products or services
• Posting content and selling contextual advertising through an advertising network or direct sales.
• Freemium subscriptions: basic content can be accessed for free, however, premium content requires payment.

To get started on building your website, you need a web hosting service to provide storage space or access to your websites. You can check out SiteGround to host your website and get you started.

 

What is the Purpose of a Website?

Bringing traffic

Generating traffic is one of the main jobs of a website. If you have interesting content to show for it, chances are people will flock to your website for that information. One of the most popular ways to drive traffic into your website is through the use of search engine optimization (SEO). SEO is used to get web pages on top of Google search results. Without SEO and good content, people won’t find the website. SEO takes a lot of work and requires a long term commitment. Many business owners think that by just building a website, they will be found, but this is not the case.

A reference point

A repeat customer may use a website as a reference point. Examples are online stores where people can shop online. A website is a place where people can find whatever they need and must be a good source of information.

 

What Are Landing Pages

In online marketing, landing pages are basically a single web page that appears in a response to clicking an online advertisement or a link from the search engine results. Usually, landing pages provides a directed sales copy from the advertisement, link, or search result. Businesses use landing pages to generate leads.

In marketing, there’s what they call, transactional landing pages. Essentially, these pages aim to persuade a visitor to take action by completing a transaction or series of transactions. Transactional landing pages work hand-in-hand with sales funnel in generating leads. For example, an email campaign can be developed based on the responses provided into transactional landing pages. The purpose of it is to acquire as much information as possible and convert visitors into customers.

 

What Is A Sales Funnel?

Sales funnels are basically a special type of pages. While websites are generally the source of information that people need, sales funnels are responsible for capturing leads and driving conversions. Think of it as a highway. While websites act like a multilane freeway, sales funnels are more like a one-way, single-lane road. Sales funnels are direct and specified. It contains a set of activities that aim to a common result. For example, sales funnels are used to deliver services or products to customers.

With that analogy, a sale funnel doesn’t have outgoing links or even share buttons for social media sites. Each page of the sales funnels features what the business has to offer. The options would be either to buy products or services or leave.

 

The Purpose of a Sales Funnel

To understand better what sales funnels are, you need to know and understand their purpose. A sales funnel has two main purses.

Increasing customer value

Sales funnels include elements like downsells, upsells, and special offers to increase sales and how much money you can generate from each customer that visits your website. For example, if you’re offering a service as your main product and it costs $50, sales funnels can help you sell additional product or service based on the customer’s input. There is more of a chance that a customer will buy an upsell if they already opened their wallet for the first product. Sales funnels can upsell and downsell many times, which increases the the overall cart value. The once $50 purchase could end up being a $5,000 sale for example after all the upsells.

Capturing email addresses

Sales funnel can help business generate leads by capturing information provided by the customer such as email addresses. You can easily build an email list systematically through sales funnel. By promoting special offers and even free content for visitors, a sales funnel can generate leads by capturing email addresses. Although it is not a guarantee that these people will be converted immediately into paying customers, you can easily market through them and offer special promos that may potentially turn them into paying customers.

 

Different Kinds of Website Traffic

To understand more about the difference between a website and a sales funnel, it is essential to know the two categories of website traffic.

 

Inbound

This type of traffic refers to the visitors who are directed to your website actively looking for information. Say, they type a set of keywords or phrases then click on the results that come up. Once these visitors click on your site, then you have generated inbound traffic. The best way to get inbound traffic is to have your website appear in the first few pages of the results. To get that, you need to apply SEO on your website or utilize search engine marketing campaigns.

 

Outbound

This particular type of traffic is generated through the use of pay-per-click advertisements (PPC) on advertising networks or social media. Visitors that go through this process are referred to as outbound traffic. The ads are specifically configured using sets of algorithms to ensure that you got your money’s worth on your ad costs and get paying customers in return.

 

Choosing What’s Best for your Business

Inbound traffic is mainly generated by the effectiveness of your website. If your website is highly optimized for search engines, you can enjoy a good deal of organic traffic that may convert visitors into paying customers. Keep in mind though that the only way a website will convert into sales is by having a way for customers to find a product or a service to purchase. Outbound traffic, on the other hand, is driven by a funnel that converts paid traffic into sales. You never just want to send paid traffic to a website. It rarely converts.

 

Building Your Sales Funnel

Creating your sales funnel may take some time and it also involves a lot of hard work, just like a website.

 

You Need Strategy

In building a sales funnel, you need to strategize on how you can direct people to your website. There are many ways to do it, but if you don’t know where to start, here are some basic steps to get you going.

1. Know your audience. You must figure what your target audience may be where to find them.
2. Creating your offer. You must have great offer that your audience has need for.
3. Creating a campaign. This is the most important step to lure people to your sales funnel. Creating a launch campaign is what will help market to your audience. If the campaign and offer is great enough, you will have customers.

 

Creating the Best Content for Your Sales Funnel

After creating your sales funnel strategy, you need to effectively communicate your message to your targeted audience. The best way to do that is by providing great content. Copywriting is of great importance in marketing for this reason.

Having great content doesn’t only generate organic traffic, but also gets your page rank higher on Google search results. A lot of companies understand the importance of having great content. That is why a lot of them would hire copywriters that can be either freelance or in-house. However, if you don’t have the budget to hire people to do your content, you can always do it yourself.

 

Finding the Right Sales Funnel Builder

One of the most common tools for building websites is WordPress. Sure, the tool is great in developing websites, but can be difficult to use when implementing sales funnel especially to beginners. If you’re a total newbie and you don’t have any single clue about building your sales funnel, the best place to start would be going for ClickFunnels and the One Funnel Away Challenge.

 

What is ClickFunnels?

Even if you don’t have any technical background in programming or building funnels, ClickFunnels is a must-try. ClickFunnels makes building a sales funnel like a child’s play. You can get your sales funnel up in running in just a few minutes. If you need more information about ClickFunnels, you can check out my blog post about ClickFunnels.

 

Advantage of Using ClickFunnels

Landing Pages that Convert

Websites are primarily focused on making people visit than on getting sales. Landing pages, however, are made to convert visitors into paying customers. Even for those website owners with technical knowledge, creating landing pages that sell can be a huge challenge.

ClickFunnels however, are designed to maximize the potential of landing pages to convert traffic into sales. The landing pages are extremely streamlined to attract attention to customers and to collect more information while getting them to the final stage of the sales process.

 

Streamlined Online Marketing Funnels

If you’re starting from scratch, creating a sales funnel would take you days (if not weeks). ClickFunnels eliminate the tedious and sophisticated sales funnel creation process with just a few clicks. Additionally, there are plenty of templates and features that are already available for you to use. You can set up and customize your sales funnel in any way you see fit.

 

A/B Split Testing and Full Funnel Conversion View

Can’t figure out the best campaign to go with your sales funnel? ClickFunnel has an A/B split testing tool that allows you to run two slightly different versions of a page and run them concurrently to see which performs better in converting leads. ClickFunnel analytics feature gives you detailed information about which page gets better performance.

Additionally, ClickFunnels have a full-funnel conversion view before you go live. This helps improve the sales funnel sequence and devise a standardized experience for your audience.

 

Customizable Funnel Order

Some scenarios would prompt you to make last-minute decisions on your sales funnel order. Manually doing it on your website could take up a lot of your time. ClickFunnels however, makes the process easy and fast. It allows you to rearrange the funnels quickly in just a few clicks. The drag-and-drop feature allows you to update the interface without having to touch the codes or work on a new page entirely.

 

Quick Funnel Duplication or Sharing

Replicating a page and funnel can be both difficult and time-consuming. Not with ClickFunnels. There’s no need to create a new page or funnel and work your way around. All you have to do is to click a few buttons and the software will do the rest.

 

How do Websites and Sales Funnel Work Together

Websites and sales funnel make up a perfect couple in modern digital business. While websites make sure that your audience finds the right place to find information, sales funnel points them to the right aisle and ensure that you make a profit out of your products and services. A lot of successful businesses is geared towards having a good website with multiple funnels attached to it. The best approach to have a profitable website is just a matter of devising a good strategy that could elevate your brand or business.

 

Website vs Sales Funnel: How to Make Profit Online

To make a profitable website, you need to have a search engine optimized site with a good sales funnel to match. Here’s a good read on how to start a WordPress blog to make money.

If you’re starting your website using WordPress, you need to find a great web hosting platform that makes it easy for you to manage your site. SiteGround offers the best tools for a seamless website building. Additionally, it has an awesome client interface that allow you to build and manage your WordPress site with ease.

While a website is good for building organic traffic, you need a sales funnel in place to convert the reader into a customer. If you have money for paid traffic, a sales funnel is all you need. A website however allows you to build a brand and help make sales to your sales funnel. A website requires a lot of work and time to help build that organic traffic, but if a sales funnel is attached to it, it could create sales for many years to come organically without modifying anything.

The One Funnel Away Challenge is a great 30 day live course that will teach you how to create your own sales funnel for your offer, how to launch it, how to drive traffic to it, and many other aspects to launching an offer.