How to build a funnel for your personal brand that immediately generates more revenue

As we discussed in the previous letter it is hard to just plug your offer/product and see good results from it. Sure, some of your most loyal followers will buy it, but that is not what any business wants. 

You want to be able to convert as many people as you can into potential buyers, and the only way to do that is with a strategy.

You need a plan to get the prospects to buy your offer, you can’t just expect them to buy just because they like you (although it really helps), you need to give them a reason, to convince them. And more importantly, you need to get active and put the product in front of them, with all it has to offer, ready to be bought.

This is the reason why a funnel is so important. Because it is a strategy, and most personal brands not have one.

A marketing strategy

The most important thing to remember is that this is a MARKETING strategy, meaning that its success will highly depend on how you position your product in the market rather than how well you structure the funnel itself.

Obviously, the structure is important but there are a LOT of different funnel structures, ultimately what will make this work will be your ability to convince and persuade your prospects of why they need your product. You need to make them want to buy it.

How do you convince anyone of this? 

First, you need a great offer.

The irresistible offer

If you are reading this you probably already have a product that you are trying to sell. But most likely you don’t have a good enough offer yet.

So, what makes an offer good?

Let’s say you are selling a fitness program. That is your product.

What you need to do is start adding things on top of it. You can include a coaching call to guide them through the program. Maybe you add a planner in the form of a notion template. Or maybe you add a meal plan along with it.

Or even better, you add all of them.

The idea is that you stack as many things as possible with your product to make it as irresistible as possible. Think outside the box, anything that you can add that won’t take much of your time.

The idea is that you add all of these as bonuses to the initial product so that the prospects see them as a free thing that is included.

The best bonuses are those which you only need to make once and then you can include for anyone to use. (Templates, scripts, and roadmaps are the most common ones)

Those are the little things that will push a lot more people to buy a product that they would not have bought otherwise. In some instances, these bonuses are so good that people end up buying just to get one of them.

The value ladder

As I mentioned in a previous letter the funnel is basically the relationship between the customer and the brand. It is the path they take from the moment they meet the brand to the moment they buy the offer.

For this to happen you need to gain the trust of the customer. How do you do that?

You progressively add more and more value to the customer.

You go from the smallest amount of value to the biggest amount of value you can provide, which will be the offer mentioned previously.

This ladder can have as few or as many steps as you want. And in each step, a transaction will take place. In exchange for whatever value you provide, the prospect will give you something in return. We start with low-commitment transactions and end with high-commitment ones at the end (Usually meaning expensive ones).

If you are a content creator you already have the first step in place even if you don’t know it yet.

What is this first step?

Your content, hopefully, you are already creating content that is valuable to others.

And what do you get in return?

A follow. (A low-commitment transaction) As long as your content is valuable, you will have no problem getting people to follow you.

The job of the funnel is to take as many prospects as possible through your value ladder up to the last step. Your final offer.

But before we go through each of the steps it is important that you know what a lead magnet is.

The lead magnet

It doesn’t matter what type of funnel you are running, in every single one of them you are going to want to get their contact information. You want to be able to reach out to them, so you need their name, email, and in some instances, their phone number.

How do you convince them to give you their contact info?

Again, you need to provide enough value so that they are willing to give it to you in exchange for that value. This value is usually provided in the way of a template, a short ebook, a roadmap, a meal plan, etc. 

Whatever it is, you have to make sure that it is something related to your offer, and that will leave the prospect wanting more of that thing.

You need to make sure it is the right amount of value. Too little and they won’t even consider buying your final offer. Too much and there will be no reason for them to buy your offer. You need to leave them hungry for the real thing.

This will be the second step in your funnel.

The personal brand funnel

As I mentioned before, there are a lot of different funnel structures. It would take a lot of time to go over all of them so the one we are going to be discussing is the one that most successful personal brands use.

Step #1.  Follow 

As mentioned before the first step will involve them following you on your social media, this is called the top of the funnel since it is the stage in which the biggest amount of people will be involved.

The most important thing to remember in this step is why they will be following you. We have not discussed this yet, but we need to remember that the reason why anyone will buy your product is because it will solve a problem for them (What problem is your product solving?). The aim of your content should be to educate people on this problem and make them aware of it so that you can then present its solution.

Step #2. Lead Magnet

Now that you know what the lead magnet is you just need to know where to put it so that people can see it and make the transaction.

There are two places where it can be placed, either in your bio or on any given post in your platform. I would advise using both. Creators usually like placing a lot of links in their bios, but in my experience, this can lead to confusion and people not following through with any of them. I’d say just plug your lead magnet in there and maybe something else (Ideally you’ll want to use a custom domain as the link in your bio because it looks a bit more professional, but you don’t really have to).

Next, you are going to plug it under some of your posts. How often will you be doing this? It really depends on the platform you are on but anywhere from two to five times a week should be fine, just avoid spamming it.

Step #3. Your offer

Now, we’ve done all of the above to get to this point. They should be aware of the problem that your product is trying to solve and they should already have an idea of what that solution is because of your lead magnet. 

So, all that’s left is to put the final offer in front of them and sell it like it's the final answer to their problem. Which should be, if it is not you might want to consider changing some things, we are not in the business of scamming people.

You will have to make a sales page for your offer. I’m not going to go into how to make one in detail because again, it would take a long time (I’ll make sure to cover it in the next weeks). The most important thing to mention right now is that it doesn’t need to be the best and most optimized sales page ever made.

The reason for this is that it is not a cold sales page, most of the leads that come into it will most likely be already warm, ready to buy. Since they have already gone to the rest of the funnel they will only need one last push.

This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t take your time to make it as good as you can, it just means that it is not something you should be worrying about to get perfect.

So, how do you take your leads to this final sales page? Two ways.

The first thing that you’ll want to do is direct them from the lead magnet. Whatever your lead magnet is, at the end of it you will include a section specifically directing them to it. There’s no need to over-explain anything just yet, that will be included in the sales page itself. A little overview of why it is the next step that they should take in their journey should be enough.

The second and most important way of directing your leads to that sales page will be by directly contacting them through email. 

This is probably one of the best ways to do it since you can speak directly to them.

So, to do it you’ll want to write an email sequence that is triggered by them getting the lead magnet. An email sequence, as its name says, is a sequence of emails that you will send to anyone who takes a certain action. In this case, it should be a 3-5 email sequence that the prospect should receive over the course of 1-2 weeks starting the moment they get the lead magnet.

The main objective of this sequence will be to persuade the prospect to click on the link that takes them to your sales page. The content of these emails should provide value to the prospect, establish authority, and include a call to action for them to go to your sales page almost ready to buy.

I will go over how to write a good email sequence in another letter.

Now, the only thing that’s left is for them to buy.

Non-buyers

What happens when they don’t buy?

There are lots of reasons why someone might not buy, not having enough money, don’t fully seeing the benefits of it, maybe it just wasn’t the right time, or maybe even they just forgot.

Whatever the reason might be it doesn’t matter because now you have their contact information.

So once the email sequence ended and they haven’t bought you are going to then add them to another email list.

This should be an email list to which you will be continually sending emails for the rest of your life.

Why because a lot of people won’t buy the first time they are presented with the product. So, you’ll need to keep reminding them.

Ideally, you should be sending this type of email a couple of times a week, but I’ve seen anything from once every two weeks to daily emails work well. So, it really is what you see works best for you.

The content

You didn’t make the sale, you’ve lost the battle, but not the war.

Now you don’t need to try to convince them with every single email.

Now, it is about making a connection with them.

The main goal of these should no longer be to convince but to provide value to them.

You can include useful information, tips, routines, whatever it may be. And you can mix those with some more personal emails. And every once in a while, you are going to remind them of your product or tell them about a new one you are making. Build a relationship with them.

Keep them up to date with whatever it may be that you are doing and throw some useful information related to all the problems that are related to your product. 

Eventually, a lot of people end up buying when it is the right time for them.

Copywriting

As you might have already noticed, there is a lot of trying to convince people in a written format, the emails, the lead magnet, and the sales page. Here is when knowing copywriting could be very useful. If you have the time I recommend you learn how to do it before writing any of these. If you don’t you can always hire a copywriter to do this for you. 

Software

Finally, I have to mention that to do all of the above you’ll need to learn and pay for some platforms to host your opt-in and sales pages, and for an ESP (email service provider) to automate your email sequences.

To host your funnel, the most common one is click funnels but you can find cheaper ones if you want to. This will allow you to make your opt-in and sales page, as well as receive payment.

For email, depending on the size of your audience you can even find some free ones. Convertkit has a nice beginner-tier plan that goes up to 10k subscribers.

Additionally, you might need something like Zappier to link the ESP to the funnel site. Everything you need to know about how any of these work you can find with a quick Google search.

There’s a lot more to funnels and it can vary a lot depending on the type of offer you are running and the type of funnel that you want. This is the most basic one, but that doesn’t mean it is not good, quite the opposite. It is something that has been proven to work. So, it is always a good place to start and build different things from there.