When you first start planning your sales funnel and creating your marketing strategy you may be confused by the terms Back-End Sales and Front-End Sales. Understanding these concepts is key to a successful sales funnel and ultimately your online profits. 

Front-End Sales.  Your Front-End Sale is the first product your prospect purchases.  In your sales funnel, this could be at any price point.  Your front-end sale could be your lowest priced item, say a book or an
introductory report for example. 

It could also be one of your higher priced items. While most customers may enter your funnel at the very beginning, that’s not always the case.  Therefore, it pays to have back end offers designed for each and
every price point in your funnel.

Back-end sales.  Back-end sales are where the money is truly made.  Your back-end products and offers are designed to enhance the product your customer just purchased or is getting ready to purchase. 

For example, if your customer just purchased a book then your back-end offer might be a corresponding workbook or online course to compliment the book.  The key to having a successful back-end sales strategy is to make sure each offer compliments or enhances the value of the product they just purchased. 

If, for example, your customer purchased a book and your back-end offer is an unrelated software product then your customer is going to be left scratching their head. Their confidence in you and their trust in
you is going to falter.  Not a good thing.

However, if your offer compliments what they just purchased or are getting ready to purchase and offers them more value, their trust and confidence in you is going to increase.  See how this works? 

The key to a successful sales funnel is to create complimentary back-end products and offers.  Understand that customers may enter your funnel at different points and be ready to up the ante, offer them more
value, and increase your profits.

Be sure and grab a FREE copy of my Quick Start Guide to Sales Funnels to learn more. Also, jump up top of the blog and sign up for my newsletter and RSS feed. Talk soon!

 There is a way to squeeze out some initial profits from your newest subscribers. Use One-Time-Offers, or OTOs.

This concept has been around for some time, but people keep using them because they work. Now, this doesn’t work a great deal of th time, but if even at a 1% conversion with a $67 commission, that would be an extra 67 bucks per hundred list subscribers.

If you’re using free methods of list building, that’s pure profit that you can use to do other things, like hire a ghostwriter for 5 strong articles or upgrade at 4 or 5 joint venture giveaway sites to build your list.

The Way to Perform an OTO Properly
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This isn’t a difficult thing to do, and there are actually a couple of ways to accomplish this.

For either of these methods, you will need to have a redirect or alternate confirmation page option for your autoresponder. Most have them do, but if yours does not, you need to check out either Get Response or Aweber since they both have this option and are the best services on the net for autoresponders. I use Get Response.

Anyway,you have to enter the URL for the OTO in your settings for "confrimation page," which is the page that your subscribers will be redirected to when thy click on the opt-in confirmation link that they click on when they first subscribe to your list.

Some have you automatically redirected to an OTO page as soon as you fill out the form, but me experience shows me that this only works if you don’t have a front-end product to sell. I have found that if you send people directly to an OTO page, most will just close the browser and never end up seeing your front-end product, and they may never even end up confirming their subscription because they have only seen an opt-in box and OTO. Therefore, they have no time or effort invested in you, may have gone on to something else and forgotten about you, then never clicked the double opt-in link.

So you have a landing page, then send your new subscribers to a front-end product related to it, then when they receive the confirmation email that is related to the initial product, they will remember and open the message and click the confirmation link. That’s when they see the one-time-offer. Most won’t buy, but some will.

Good. Now, as I said before, there are two ways to go about doing your OTOs. First is a more difficult way, but if you have old PLR products on your hard drive that may still be relevant, like software or website templates, you can put together a bundle of them, put their descriptions and retail price on an OTO webpage template, and upload it to your server. This takes a while to put together, but it’s a great way to make some money off of some products that would otherwise be collecting dust.

Yes, there is an easier way. It’s called OTOGoldmine. This is how I do my OTOs. It’s a free service that generates up to 10 campaigns with different options for you. You can choose different price ranges and packages to use as your offers. They’re pre-made, so you just look and pick one. Plug in the URL that they provide to you after you tell them where to send your visitors if they don’t want to take the offer (which should be your front-end product website). The offers are beautifully done, and if you don’t have a product up front, OTOGoldmine has an affiliate program that you can use.

Some Last Notes
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** If you run your own domain (which you should, with a blog on it), then you can use an OTO for your Error404 page.

** With Get Response or Aweber, you can use an OTO as the page your subscribers see first if they wish to unsubscribe for your list.

** If you take money through a PayPal button, you can redirect your buyers to an OTO page as soon as they make a purchase. These actually have a higher conversion rate, as the viewers have just bought form you and probably still have their credit cards out.

** If you use OTOGoldmine, you’re better served to upgrade for unlimited campaigns so that you can use every one of these techniques for all of your products/ income streams.

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 There are always opportunities to take a step back and see what’s going on with your business when you are marketing on the internet.

Most likely, you started this business hoping to make a bunch of money. Without good tools and strong skills, it can be hard to reach a high level of success and profitability.

1.)  Traffic.The sales funnel starts the minute someone opts into your list when they land on your squeeze page. This is the place that you put your opt-in form so that visitors can give you their contact information for further follow-up.

This is absolutely imperative if you want to build a list or your sales funnel. People will just look over your website and move on to someone else’s to find what they need.

People need to stay at your site long enough to leave you their name and email. The net result is their agreement to receive more communication from you through your email autoresponder.

Whether your preference is pay-per-click, e-zine articles or any other lead attraction techniques, once a prospect gives you permission to contact them, your sales funnel has begun.

If you’re going to reach that goal, you have to get really good at driving traffic to your website. Anyone online needs to develop this skill early on in their online career.

You absolutely have to drive strong amounts of traffic to your capture pages if you want your business to be successful.

2.) Regular Contact.Keeping your list happy and trusting in you and your offers is the next part of your sales funnel strategy.

If you aren’t providing quality content through your autoresponder, you will more likely lose them as customers. The goal from the start is to show your people that you can offer them value. After your people get to know and like you, they will be much more likely in the future to return to your websites.

Constant following up with updates for your list both keeps them informed with good content and helps to weed out the people who really don’t belong on that list.

3.)  Marketing.You can start marketing to your prospects when these relationships have been developed.  This is where you start to promote more of what you have to offer to your prospects.

You’re still trying to build trust while giving excellent info that they are starting to excitedly anticipate.

They are starting to wait anxiously for your email autoresponders to arrive with something new and interesting for them.

The more you can keep your people interested, the more they will put into their own business. This, in turn results in positive results for your own online business as well.

All of these steps bring you to yet another step in your sales funnel. You potentially now have both front-end and back-end sales. Both streams are working towards your sales funnel becoming the profitable internet business you’ve strived for from the start.

Since your contact list is growing, you can breathe for a bit.  The difficult first-steps toward success have been taken.

Don’t forget my Sales Funnel Strategies to help you make the most out of your sales funnels and build that finally successful business you’ve always dreamed of.

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 Figuring out your niche is an important aspect of sales funnel development, right? This is really the integral part of your business development. If you aren’t there yet, then this needs to be the focus of your attention.

You may have found a profiatble niche, but is it one you care about. For example, my niche is internet marketing. I’m fascinated by it and have learned a great deal about it over the years. Since everyone wants to start out there, it’s very profitable, but it’s also extremely difficult to break into with one of the highest failure rates.

You do want to make sure there is some level of competition, though. Competition is where you get new product ideas for long term business health. There does still need to be a market for what your interests are and what you want to sell.

So you’ll have to do a little testing. When you’re figuring out how profitable your niche is, you can test it out before rolling out our entire project. Get everything ready to collect names and make some font-end sales.

This really isn’t a dfficult thing to do. Use two pages, a landing page that gives away a free report that follows up with a sales page for a related inexpensive product, like a full version of the free report you gave away.

If you don’t have one yet, then look for a PLR product that you can cut and paste a little to create a short report out of a book you can stick your name on. Once you give out the report, you follow up with the sale of the book. If you’re in a popular niche, then it makes sense to create a follow-up and try to get that first sale.

But you do need to start converting propsects. It might be okay to get names, but results are tracked by sales. You’re not going to get any real meaningful results you can track until you do. That’s okay if not, though. Once you have your list, moving forward is great, but in the beginning, you want conversion numbers to work with.

When you’ve figured out that you can make money form your niche, you need to get to planning your sales funnel. The primary focus here should be meeting the needs of your customers and providing value and quality.

Be sure to tailor your products to your customers throughout your funnel. Over time, you can add more and more higher-priced products and services and make the most profit on the back end.

Adjust your sales funnel to your customer’s specific needs. At first, you may start out with a broad topic niche, like martial arts. Over time, as you do more research on martial arts, you find that people in that niche are looking for more specific things, like "bo staff training" or "Tai Chi for more powerful fighting". As you drill further down, you can address specific issues, like dealing with injuries or getting off your plateau.

Drilling down into your topic helps you in a couple of ways. First of all, it helps you to learn more and be able to provide more value. Besides, it helps you decide what to put into your sales funnel.

Finding the right niche can be take time and work, so be patient. This is a business, after all, and everyting you do takes time and patience until your machine is running smoothly. You must be able to change with your customers’ needs. Keep adjusting and learning as time goes by and needs change, and you’ll find a successful formula for your sales funnel.

You can learn more with the Quick Start Guide to Sales Funnels.

Click here to learn more

This is the last video of a series with regard to Easy Video Producer and how to use videos to enhance your business and boost your profits. It’s really simple to use, so be sure to at least go check it out. The service is free, and you can use it to make a crapload of money. See you next time, and have fun!

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