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Step by step: how to create a tripwire sales funnel yourself, for free
What is Sales Funnel Marketing?
Do you ever wonder how businesses go from “stranger” to “customer”? Well, there’s usually some kind of stepped process that marketers call the “sales funnel”.
The general idea of a sales funnel is to attract new leads and then build a relationship that eventually ends in a sale. The most simple funnel moves your lead through a series of events with the intention of becoming a loyal and valued customer.
Stages of a Sales Funnel
Marketers have mastered the art of making the sale and there are so many different variables, but the basics always remain the same.
- Awareness – This will be the stage at which someone has visited your website and can relate to your brand. It will comprise the largest amount of warm leads.
- Decision – At this stage, the “stranger” has decided that they would like to hear more from you and may opt-in to your newsletter or download an opt-in. Typically, 20% is a good conversion rate for this stage, which means for every 100 people who visit, 20 will sign up for something free (usually with some kind of added value)
- Interest – This group of people have tried out a few of your freebies, read your content and are following you. At this stage, they will seek out how else you can help them or what products or services you might offer.
- Action – These people have done their research and have decided that you are the one to help them with their pain points. This is usually only about 2% of the people that were in your interest group. That means out of the 20 that opted-in for a freebie or your newsletter, 0.4 people will buy from you. This is purely a numbers game. The more leads at the awareness level, the more you will have at the action level. Traffic will be key.
- Loyalty – These are your repeat customers. The ones who will rave and write testimonials for your products. These are YOUR CUSTOMERS, YOUR PEOPLE.
Everyone in the blogging world knows that to start making passive income, you need to start thinking about more complex sales funnels after you’ve mastered the concept of email marketing.
Funnels also allow opportunities for tripwires or squeeze pages that are loaded with a low-cost offer that fits somewhere in between your Fabulous Freebie and your ultimate products or services.
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An Example of a Working Passive Sales Funnel Template
My best passive sales funnel consists of a simple way of collecting email subscribers through a freebie (Ultimate Blogging Toolkit for Beginners), offering a low-cost offer for a short period of time (Website in a Weekend), and then an email nurture sequence that ends in an offer to sign up for my blogging membership.
When you are thinking of designing your own funnel, it might be easiest to work backward with the big picture in mind and fill in the gaps. Your offers should always relate to each other and make sense at every step up.
When I first got started, this worked best for me.
How to Get Started as a Beginner Building Your First Passive Income Sales Funnel
Email marketing is such an important part of building your audience and nurturing relationships. But email marketing is just the endpoint. There’s a very critical step that so many bloggers are missing out on.
Most bloggers don’t take advantage of the opportunities between providing an amazing opt-in to your subscribers and getting them onto your email list.
Creating an extra-value offer within the original freebie offer can provide additional services or solutions to your readers that can benefit them. And you can earn money doing it. YES!
These offers are often referred to as upsells or tripwires. If you’ve ever downloaded a freebie from a successful blogger, you’ve likely seen one.
It goes something like this: You put your info into a form for the opt-in and click submit. Then a quick screen pops up to tell you that your freebie is on its way. BUT there’s another, limited time offer available as well.
This upsell is the magic that you are probably not taking advantage of.
How to Put The Pieces of a Tripwire Sales Funnel Together
In theory, tripwire sales funnels are a simple concept. Even deciding how the funnel will play out can be easy, especially if you’ve already got some products in your arsenal.
But then try to put the whole crazy thing with all it’s working parts in order! Ughh. This should be the definition of insanity.
Most people outsource this stage or use software like Clickfunnels that is really great at handling all aspects of the funnel. From the landing pages, shopping carts and follow up emails, there is software to do it all in one. (And after doing it the hard way, I can see why people are tempted to pay.)
Here’s the thing. As a relatively new blogger, I bootstrap as many of my resources as I can. I save my income to focus on some of the work that I really need help with. So, I decided that I would try to tackle this on my own. For free. (Or as near free as I could do it)
GREAT NEWS: It can be done.
SHITTY NEWS: It may take a lot of time and you may shed a tear or drink a bottle of wine (or two). This may not be a solution for the light-hearted or un-tech savvy.
But if you’re game, I’m going to walk you through the steps I took to get a fully functioning (and money making) tripwire sales funnel set up!
How to Create a Passive Income Funnel for FREE
To create this fully functioning, albeit duct-taped version, you will need to download a few plugins and have external software to make it all work.
- WooCommerce to host your tripwire product and provide the shopping cart so that people can purchase and access the product
- Elementor plugin (free version) to create three pages: You’ll need to create an opt-in page with your freebie offer, a tripwire/squeeze page for your low-cost offer, and a thank you page (cause that’s a nice addition). Now I will tell you that I got frustrated with my lack of creative skills and finally bought the entire landing page kit from BluChic which works beautifully with my theme to avoid having to create all the pages I needed for this step. And honestly, it was money well-spent. But, if you’re looking for free – Elementor has some great templates to get started.
- Mailerlite (or any other email service provider) to set up a signup form for the freebie that will direct the new leads to a URL success page which will be the Tripwire/Squeeze page with your low-cost, time-sensitive offer
- YITH plugin- So that you can redirect to your “Thank You” Elementor page instead of the generic WooCommerce thank you page. This is a great place to share what your customer should do next – visit your social media, check out your blog etc.
How to Manage the Tripwire Sales Funnel Once You Have Collected the Subscriber
You will also want to set up a nurture email sequence to not only thank your new customer for signing up for your freebie but also to give another opportunity to buy if they didn’t purchase the low-cost offer immediately.
After they have received the initial full automation sequence, I add all my subscribers to a master list to receive regular weekly newsletters.
Once you have the sequence all set up, it pretty much just works for itself. The only thing you need to do is drive traffic to your blog to sign up for that freebie offer and as traffic builds, you’ll start seeing those tripwire sales roll in. This is the crux of passive income.
Passive Income Sales Funnel Tips
- Make sure that your offers are related and make sense. You wouldn’t offer a free cleaning checklist and then offer to sell an ebook on eating healthy.
- Your tripwire or squeeze page should be low-cost. Think something between $9 and $47 (depending on your audience and the offer)
- Use tripwire funnel sales to pay for additional marketing like Facebook ads
- You can create ads for your freebie and use a plugin like AdInserter to automatically insert them into your posts at specific places
- Don’t stress if it seems like it is taking too long for your funnel to work for you. It’s all about the numbers. Drive traffic to your blog, market your freebie and the rest will happen naturally
LET’S BUILD YOUR WINNING SALES FUNNEL TOGETHER! SCHEDULE A COACHING SESSION HERE
Conclusion
Tripwire sales funnels can take a little time to set up, but they are definitely worth the work. Any way that you can create another opportunity to help your readers and earn an income is a win-win in my books.
Have you implemented your own passive income sales funnel? Did you do it on your own or do you use software? Let me know in the comments below!
Find other great tips on growing your business online!
Affiliate Marketing for Beginners: A Complete and Simple Guide
100+ Best Blogging Tools and Resources for 2020
18 Legitimate Ways to Make Money and Work From Home in 2020
great guide. I just think I need to master the traffic part a bit better before the funnel.
THank you, Robert! Yes, traffic is a really important part of the funnel process but once you have it coming, get on building that funnel for extra income!
Thanks for this great resource, Sasha! So often you see people saying that the only way to do these things is to pay for expensive software, and while it’s faster and easier that way, I really appreciated this refreshing how-to. I’m a bit of a DIY-er myself with this stuff, so it’s all great info for me to keep in mind. 🙂
You’re welcome, Lia! The DIY funnel isn’t necessarily the easiest or for the light-hearted but it definitely can be done! I’m so glad that you found this article on building funnels helpful 🙂
Great advice from one of my favorite #GirlBosses! I think when bloggers are first starting out, they sometimes forget about the sales funnel. This is a great reminder to really consider that each post should have a purpose!
Thank you!! That’s a great point, Kate!! It is so important to write with purpose and know what you want from each post!!
Creating a sales funnel that works has been one of my biggest struggles so far. These tips were really helpful and I’m definitely going to implement them into my strategy. Thanks ?
I totally hear ya, Danielle! I had such a tough time wrapping my head around it at first. Once I got all the technical end of it in order, everything else was easy-peasy. So glad that you enjoyed this article and that it helped you figure out your own funnel.
This is the best article I’ve seen yet!!!
Thank you, Victoria! I’m so glad you enjoyed it!
Lots of great advice. I’ll haveto reread it later for specifics. Thank you!
Thank, Susan! Hope you have an amazing day!
great article, thanks! Althought not many individuals know how to build a proper sales funnel and control a customer journey.
Thank you! You are so right. Building and understanding the sales funnel process can definitely take some time, but is so worth the effort!
Thank you for the detailed, easy to understand information on sales funnels. It is the next step in my blogging journey. I have this pinned for future reference.
Thanks, Colleen! So glad that you found this useful to build your own sales funnel!
Working on a sales funnel is on my to-do list. This is a great guide!
Thank you, Jessica! I’m glad this article found you at the right time! Good luck with your funnel!
This is a great post with lots of value. Thank you for this!
Thank you, Petra! I’m so glad that you enjoyed it!
Love the fact that yo are presenting a way where the money can be saved. I am paying for it because I cannot handle all the work in this particular area. For beginners who want to save money, your post is the best resource.
Exactly, Nadia! I think if money isn’t an issue, I would definitely go a more automated route but this is a perfect way for beginner bloggers who are bootstrapping their way to success!
Thank you for all of the detailed information. I especially appreciate that you listed the specific plugin tools you used. I’m not quite ready for this yet, but I will refer back to it when I am!
Thanks, Lisa! I’m so glad that you enjoyed this post. I wanted to make sure to list the plugins that I used so that everyone has an opportunity to create their own passive sales funnel for free. It is tough, but it can be done!
Once I gain more traffic, I will definitely implement a sales funnel! Thanks for the information!
You’re welcome, Halle! I’m so glad you enjoyed the article! Can’t wait to check out your funnel!
Thanks for this helpful post. Great guide!
I’m so glad that you enjoyed the post and found it helpful!
Building sales funnels is no joke! I’ve tried many different ways to do it with many different software solutions. I haven’t found the perfect solution for me yet and I’ve had lots of bottles of wine in the process. Thank you for simplifying the process for those of us who struggle.
You can say that again, Shellie!! I was so relieved when I finally got it in order, so glad to know that I wasn’t alone in drinking my woes away lol
Very helpful! Thank you.
Thank you, Kendra! Once you nail that sales funnel down, it’s such a great feeling! I’m really glad that you found this post helpful. 🙂
As a digital marketing coach, I must say that this is a detailed post. Nice job laying it out.
Thank you, Michelle! I’m glad you enjoyed it!
Came across this post on my Pinterest and I am really happy I clicked through. Great advice! I am ready to start making my blog some money and really needed the advice. I was wondering if you have another post that really explains the step by step process of creating this funnel using your tools/resources? I have seen several of these, and while the top level set up seems doable, I would LOVE a real guide!
I don’t have a step-by-step guide Ashli, but that’s a great idea! I know how frustrating it can be to get all the working parts moving in a funnel! I’m glad you found this helpful to create your own funnel.
This was super helpful, Sasha! Thank you so much! ?
So glad that you enjoyed the article, Lindsay! Do you already have a funnel in place? I’d love to hear about it!
Thanks for this post. I am a new blogger but know this is vital for my blogging to continue. I plan on looking at he company you recommended.
Hi Liz! Building funnels are a great way to grow your subscribers and to start to bring in passive income. So excited to watch your journey! Thanks for reading and commenting. 🙂