Caramels jelly-o candy canes danish sweet. Dragée pudding cake bear claw cheesecake danish macaroon chocolate bar. Sesame snaps sugar plum muffin jelly-o jelly-o icing dragée powder ice cream. Liquorice danish jelly-o biscuit donut. Jelly-o liquorice chocolate cake carrot cake macaroon cookie. Lollipop tart sesame snaps pastry lemon drops. Chocolate cake sweet roll chupa chups croissant croissant. Jujubes soufflé biscuit fruitcake chocolate tart biscuit sugar plum apple pie. Donut wafer sweet chupa chups sweet candy canes. Dragée apple pie tart cake caramels cheesecake. Lemon drops icing lollipop biscuit soufflé biscuit tiramisu. Ice cream lollipop gingerbread dragée toffee cupcake soufflé gummies biscuit. Gummies biscuit icing marzipan biscuit.
DIY Your Passive Income Funnel in Five Steps
What is a funnel? And why do you need one?
A funnel is the journey your audience takes from their first interaction with you to the purchase of your product or service. You get them there by guiding them through micro commitments that encourage them to say “yes” to you in gentle ways along the journey. Some examples of micro commitments could be clicking on your pin, reading your blog, subscribing to your email list, or clicking on your sales page. A good funnel will build additional trust with your audience at every single one of those micro commitments.
Every funnel contains three stages: discovery, nurturing, and sale. Micro commitments are what move people through each of these phases, and the goal is to get your audience through the funnel as quickly and efficiently as possible.
Whether it’s a passive sales funnel or an active sales funnel (through live launches) a sales funnel is absolutely essential for every single business. Without it you’re throwing spaghetti at the wall and wasting tons of time. Sorry – I know that sounds harsh, but it’s true.
Passive Sales Funnel vs. Live Launch
I’ve worked behind the scenes in businesses that are launch based and in businesses that sell evergreen offers through passive funnels. While they both have their pros and cons, the biggest difference between live launches and passive sales funnels is that a passive funnel can generate consistent sales 24/7/365 instead of just during one “open cart week” per quarter.
For my fellow slow living entrepreneurs, who desire a softer, more thoughtful approach to marketing and sales, a passive sales funnel is the only way to go. A passive sales funnel not only enables you to sell every day, it gives you the ability to do so on autopilot – so you never have to choose between showing up for your business or caring for a sick family member, being a present SAHM, booking an impromptu vacation, or doing whatever the hell else you love to do.
Building your Passive Sales Funnel
Now that you’ve decided a passive sales funnel is the right move for you – let’s talk about how to actually build one.
To do that, I’m going to do something a little unconventional here and show you how to build your passive income funnel upside down. When it comes to building funnels so many people focus on building from the top down, but then get instantly stuck by worrying about how they are going to fill their funnel with new people and jump down the rabbit hole of stressing about social media views and likes. But, if your funnel isn’t set up to push people all the way to the bottom of it, your sales won’t increase no matter how many new eyes you get on it. And I’ve seen time and time again how starting from the bottom of the funnel, with the end goal in mind, can help you build a more strategic, goal aligned funnel for your business. So, the first – err, last? – step is defining your offer.
Define Your Offer
Before you can build any other part of your funnel, you need to determine what the end goal is. What is that you ultimately want your audience to purchase from you. Most often with passive sales funnels the offer should be a low-ticket digital product, something that you create once and continue to sell over and over again. Determine the topic and then choose the delivery format that best compliments your strengths. If you have strong writing skills, consider creating a PDF guide or templates. If you prefer to speak, consider an audio course or a video webinar.
The other essential part of this process is getting crystal clear on your ideal client so you can sell a product they actually need and you can speak their language through your marketing content. The easiest way to set your funnel up for failure is by failing to do the worst to clarify your target audience – please, please, please, don’t skip this step.
p.s. Not sure where to start with market research to define your target audience? Or don’t have a digital product yet and need help bringing your idea to life? Book a VIP Day and let me do it for you.
Sales Page
Okay, you’ve defined your offer and you know exactly who your ideal client is and what they need. Now, let’s take the next step – creating the sales page where your audience will trade their money for your expertise. In order to have an effective sales page, you’ll want to focus on having a website design that is easy to navigate, and copy that is clear and convincing. Marketing studies tell us we have 2.6 seconds to make a good first impression with a website viewer – if after 2.6 seconds you haven’t proven why your sales page is worth their attention, you’ll lose them.
So, a quick loading speed, eye catching design, and captivating headline copy is absolutely essential for this stage of your funnel. Once you have their attention, it is a job for the rest of your sales page copy to keep their attention and prove the value of your offer.
Nurture Email Strategy
But, how did they get to your sales page to begin with? That’s where your nurture email sequence comes in. There are plenty of ways to nurture your audience, the most common is social media. But, the most common way doesn’t necessarily mean the best.
Email still holds the highest ROI for sales conversion. So, instead of funneling your audience to your social media platforms, nurturing them through content and converting them through DMs. I’d encourage you instead to invest your time writing a strategic welcome sequence to get to know you and how you can help them. This is where you can really build connection, establish trust, and engage with your future customers/clients.
When writing this sequence, be sure to keep it focused on your audience, not yourself. Download my free welcome sequence guide to get my formula for writing a 5 part email sequence that turns cold subscribers into smoking hot leads.
Then, ramp up your email strategy and continue selling by writing weekly newsletters that contain exclusive content relating to your offer and give a call to action at the end of each of those emails.
At this stage of your funnel, it’s most important to focus on writing storytelling copy that builds the trust factor with your audience.
Lead Magnet
And how did we get all these new subscribers on your list? By building a top shelf freebie that solves a specific problem related to your offer. A lead magnet (aka freebie) is a free piece of value given in exchange for an email address.
To create a top shelf lead magnet, we’ll need to go back to that data on your ideal client. Because in order for it to work, your lead magnet needs to attract the right type of person – that ideal client. So, when you’re determining what to create your lead magnet about, start by asking yourself things like “Is this topic something that my ideal client is interested in? and “Does my offer specifically relate to this topic?”
Once the answer to both of those questions is a yes, then it’s time to consider the value. You want your lead magnet to solve a specific problem and be valuable enough that they feel the exchange of their email address was worth it, but leave them wanting more (aka your offer, which you’ll invite them into during your nurture sequence.).
In this stage of your funnel, it’s most important to focus on creating “wow I can’t believe that was free” value.
In addition to your lead magnet, blogs are an amazing way to nurture your audience and boost your website traffic. I recommend every business pursuing passive sales, creates a minimum of one blog per month. For more rapid growth, I recommend one per week. Get all the tools and templates I use to write blogs for my six figure clients inside the Blogging Essentials Playbook.
But how did everyone know about your freebie? From my favorite passive visibility platform, Pinterest. The goal at this phase of your funnel is massive visibility. By creating pins that showcase the value of your blogs and lead magnet, you open the door to be discovered by the 450 million users who are actively seeking solutions to their problems on Pinterest. Unlike other platforms that Pinterset is frequently compared to (like Instagram and Tik Tok) it is NOT a connection platform, it’s a search engine, and in my opinion it’s the best place to get discovered by your ideal client.
As a reminder, Pinterest is a platform designed to reach a new audience, so it’s important to focus on crystal clear messaging that activates and intrigues your ideal client, an SEO optimized profile, and content that contains keywords your ideal client is searching.
Want to learn exactly how to get started marketing your business on Pinterest? You’re in luck, I wrote an entire blog about it. Click here to check it out.
Tools for building a passive sales funnel
Now that I’ve walked you through the strategy of creating a passive sales funnel, let’s talk about the tools I use to bring it to life.
- Flodesk is the most user-friendly email marketing platform and in my opinion, the only option for brands who value a highly aesthetic email experience – luxury service providers and wedding professionals, I’m looking directly at you. The templates are highly customizable, there is no subscriber limit (meaning you won’t pay more per month as your list grows like soo many other platforms, and their forms and workflows are super easy to set up. Give it a try for 50% using this link.
- Showit is the hosting platform I use for my website. If blogging is part of your marketing strategy (which it should be) Showit is hands down the way due to their partnership with WordPress.
- Later is the scheduling tool I use to schedule all of my Pinterest content. At the beginning of the month I batch all of my pins, schedule them through Later, and kick back while my systems do the work for me.
- Use the Overwhelmed to Omnipresent Content Repurposing Guide to develop your content repurposing strategy and get more people inside your funnel without wasting additional time creating content.
Let’s Review
Now that we’ve gone through the entire process, let’s flip your funnel right side up. It should have five parts and look like this:
The key to any passive income funnel is to plan every part of your funnel upfront, you’ve done all of that planning in today’s blog, now the only thing left to do is go implement it.
In case we haven’t met yet, I’m Michaela – content writer, behind the scenes expert, and chaos coordinator (aka the virgo energy to your creative spirit).
And I’m completely obsessed with helping you turn your journal full of ideas into profit driving offers with research backed strategy, magnetic content, and streamlined systems. It’s about time you got the all-inclusive support you deserve – and I’m here to make it happen.
If you liked this post and are craving more, here’s how I can help:
Don’t have time for all of this? Book a VIP Day and let me help bring your passive income funnel to life.
Sick of spending hours on content creation? Download Overwhelmed to Omnipresent to learn the exact strategy I use to create enough content for 5 platforms in 2 hours a week.
Subscribe to my newsletter. Every Wednesday, I share tips to help you magnetize your dream clients, eliminate distractions, and propel your business forward that you can read in 5 minutes or less.
Download The Blogging Essentials Playbook to get access to the exact tools and templates you need to create top shelf blogs in half the time.
What is a funnel? And why do you need one?
A funnel is the journey your audience takes from their first interaction with you to the purchase of your product or service. You get them there by guiding them through micro commitments that encourage them to say “yes” to you in gentle ways along the journey. Some examples of micro commitments could be clicking on your pin, reading your blog, subscribing to your email list, or clicking on your sales page. A good funnel will build additional trust with your audience at every single one of those micro commitments.
Every funnel contains three stages: discovery, nurturing, and sale. Micro commitments are what move people through each of these phases, and the goal is to get your audience through the funnel as quickly and efficiently as possible.
Whether it’s a passive sales funnel or an active sales funnel (through live launches) a sales funnel is absolutely essential for every single business. Without it you’re throwing spaghetti at the wall and wasting tons of time. Sorry – I know that sounds harsh, but it’s true.
Passive Sales Funnel vs. Live Launch
I’ve worked behind the scenes in businesses that are launch based and in businesses that sell evergreen offers through passive funnels. While they both have their pros and cons, the biggest difference between live launches and passive sales funnels is that a passive funnel can generate consistent sales 24/7/365 instead of just during one “open cart week” per quarter.
For my fellow slow living entrepreneurs, who desire a softer, more thoughtful approach to marketing and sales, a passive sales funnel is the only way to go. A passive sales funnel not only enables you to sell every day, it gives you the ability to do so on autopilot – so you never have to choose between showing up for your business or caring for a sick family member, being a present SAHM, booking an impromptu vacation, or doing whatever the hell else you love to do.
Building your Passive Sales Funnel
Now that you’ve decided a passive sales funnel is the right move for you – let’s talk about how to actually build one.
To do that, I’m going to do something a little unconventional here and show you how to build your passive income funnel upside down. When it comes to building funnels so many people focus on building from the top down, but then get instantly stuck by worrying about how they are going to fill their funnel with new people and jump down the rabbit hole of stressing about social media views and likes. But, if your funnel isn’t set up to push people all the way to the bottom of it, your sales won’t increase no matter how many new eyes you get on it. And I’ve seen time and time again how starting from the bottom of the funnel, with the end goal in mind, can help you build a more strategic, goal aligned funnel for your business. So, the first – err, last? – step is defining your offer.
Define Your Offer
Before you can build any other part of your funnel, you need to determine what the end goal is. What is that you ultimately want your audience to purchase from you. Most often with passive sales funnels the offer should be a low-ticket digital product, something that you create once and continue to sell over and over again. Determine the topic and then choose the delivery format that best compliments your strengths. If you have strong writing skills, consider creating a PDF guide or templates. If you prefer to speak, consider an audio course or a video webinar.
The other essential part of this process is getting crystal clear on your ideal client so you can sell a product they actually need and you can speak their language through your marketing content. The easiest way to set your funnel up for failure is by failing to do the worst to clarify your target audience – please, please, please, don’t skip this step.
p.s. Not sure where to start with market research to define your target audience? Or don’t have a digital product yet and need help bringing your idea to life? Book a VIP Day and let me do it for you.
Sales Page
Okay, you’ve defined your offer and you know exactly who your ideal client is and what they need. Now, let’s take the next step – creating the sales page where your audience will trade their money for your expertise. In order to have an effective sales page, you’ll want to focus on having a website design that is easy to navigate, and copy that is clear and convincing. Marketing studies tell us we have 2.6 seconds to make a good first impression with a website viewer – if after 2.6 seconds you haven’t proven why your sales page is worth their attention, you’ll lose them.
So, a quick loading speed, eye catching design, and captivating headline copy is absolutely essential for this stage of your funnel. Once you have their attention, it is a job for the rest of your sales page copy to keep their attention and prove the value of your offer.
Nurture Email Strategy
But, how did they get to your sales page to begin with? That’s where your nurture email sequence comes in. There are plenty of ways to nurture your audience, the most common is social media. But, the most common way doesn’t necessarily mean the best.
Email still holds the highest ROI for sales conversion. So, instead of funneling your audience to your social media platforms, nurturing them through content and converting them through DMs. I’d encourage you instead to invest your time writing a strategic welcome sequence to get to know you and how you can help them. This is where you can really build connection, establish trust, and engage with your future customers/clients.
When writing this sequence, be sure to keep it focused on your audience, not yourself. Download my free welcome sequence guide to get my formula for writing a 5 part email sequence that turns cold subscribers into smoking hot leads.
Then, ramp up your email strategy and continue selling by writing weekly newsletters that contain exclusive content relating to your offer and give a call to action at the end of each of those emails.
At this stage of your funnel, it’s most important to focus on writing storytelling copy that builds the trust factor with your audience.
Lead Magnet
And how did we get all these new subscribers on your list? By building a top shelf freebie that solves a specific problem related to your offer. A lead magnet (aka freebie) is a free piece of value given in exchange for an email address.
To create a top shelf lead magnet, we’ll need to go back to that data on your ideal client. Because in order for it to work, your lead magnet needs to attract the right type of person – that ideal client. So, when you’re determining what to create your lead magnet about, start by asking yourself things like “Is this topic something that my ideal client is interested in? and “Does my offer specifically relate to this topic?”
Once the answer to both of those questions is a yes, then it’s time to consider the value. You want your lead magnet to solve a specific problem and be valuable enough that they feel the exchange of their email address was worth it, but leave them wanting more (aka your offer, which you’ll invite them into during your nurture sequence.).
In this stage of your funnel, it’s most important to focus on creating “wow I can’t believe that was free” value.
In addition to your lead magnet, blogs are an amazing way to nurture your audience and boost your website traffic. I recommend every business pursuing passive sales, creates a minimum of one blog per month. For more rapid growth, I recommend one per week. Get all the tools and templates I use to write blogs for my six figure clients inside the Blogging Essentials Playbook.
But how did everyone know about your freebie? From my favorite passive visibility platform, Pinterest. The goal at this phase of your funnel is massive visibility. By creating pins that showcase the value of your blogs and lead magnet, you open the door to be discovered by the 450 million users who are actively seeking solutions to their problems on Pinterest. Unlike other platforms that Pinterset is frequently compared to (like Instagram and Tik Tok) it is NOT a connection platform, it’s a search engine, and in my opinion it’s the best place to get discovered by your ideal client.
As a reminder, Pinterest is a platform designed to reach a new audience, so it’s important to focus on crystal clear messaging that activates and intrigues your ideal client, an SEO optimized profile, and content that contains keywords your ideal client is searching.
Want to learn exactly how to get started marketing your business on Pinterest? You’re in luck, I wrote an entire blog about it. Click here to check it out.
Tools for building a passive sales funnel
Now that I’ve walked you through the strategy of creating a passive sales funnel, let’s talk about the tools I use to bring it to life.
- Flodesk is the most user-friendly email marketing platform and in my opinion, the only option for brands who value a highly aesthetic email experience – luxury service providers and wedding professionals, I’m looking directly at you. The templates are highly customizable, there is no subscriber limit (meaning you won’t pay more per month as your list grows like soo many other platforms, and their forms and workflows are super easy to set up. Give it a try for 50% using this link.
- Showit is the hosting platform I use for my website. If blogging is part of your marketing strategy (which it should be) Showit is hands down the way due to their partnership with WordPress.
- Later is the scheduling tool I use to schedule all of my Pinterest content. At the beginning of the month I batch all of my pins, schedule them through Later, and kick back while my systems do the work for me.
- Use the Overwhelmed to Omnipresent Content Repurposing Guide to develop your content repurposing strategy and get more people inside your funnel without wasting additional time creating content.
Let’s Review
Now that we’ve gone through the entire process, let’s flip your funnel right side up. It should have five parts and look like this:
The key to any passive income funnel is to plan every part of your funnel upfront, you’ve done all of that planning in today’s blog, now the only thing left to do is go implement it.
In case we haven’t met yet, I’m Michaela – content writer, behind the scenes expert, and chaos coordinator (aka the virgo energy to your creative spirit).
And I’m completely obsessed with helping you turn your journal full of ideas into profit driving offers with research backed strategy, magnetic content, and streamlined systems. It’s about time you got the all-inclusive support you deserve – and I’m here to make it happen.
If you liked this post and are craving more, here’s how I can help:
Don’t have time for all of this? Book a VIP Day and let me help bring your passive income funnel to life.
Sick of spending hours on content creation? Download Overwhelmed to Omnipresent to learn the exact strategy I use to create enough content for 5 platforms in 2 hours a week.
Subscribe to my newsletter. Every Wednesday, I share tips to help you magnetize your dream clients, eliminate distractions, and propel your business forward that you can read in 5 minutes or less.
Download The Blogging Essentials Playbook to get access to the exact tools and templates you need to create top shelf blogs in half the time.
Leave a Reply
content marketing
Case studies
Organization/ productivity
HOW TO
RESERVE list
consider this the
Don't see what you're CRAVING?
© 2021-2024 MOMENTUM VIRTUAL SERVICES | TERMS | PRIVACY POLICY | photos BY FLOURISHING TREE PHOTOGRAPHY x Melissa Douglas photography
© 2021-2023 MOMENTUM VIRTUAL SERVICES
TERMS, PRIVACY POLICY
PHOTOS BY FLOURISHING TREE PHOTOGRAPHY X Melissa Douglas Photography
+ show comments
0
+ add a comment