What is ClickFunnels?
OK, before we get into all this, we need to be honest with each other. We’re guessing you’ve seen the main title of this page, and already you’re cynical about the whole thing. At the back of your mind, you’re thinking ‘what are they trying to sell me?‘. You’re thinking ‘I’m no idiot – they’re in this for the money. If they really knew how to make money with ClickFunnels, they’d be doing it – not writing about it and trying to get me to buy it.’
Well, you’re right. But here’s where we’re going to be honest: this website, and even this webpage, is our sales tool. Exactly what you thought it was. We want you to read to the bottom, and we want you to click on a link. In fact, let’s try it now:
!! click here NOW because we want you to !!
Did you do it? Of course you didn’t – why should you? Most people – just like you – are pretty internet-savvy. Hardly anyone clicks on a link unless they have a reason to do so, and right now you don’t have one. So our aim is to give you a reason. And how are we going to do that – especially now you know exactly what our intentions are?
Well, for one thing, we know that you’ve googled ‘How to make money using ClickFunnels’, so we know you’re looking to either start up an online business, or you’re already an internet marketer who wants to increase the sales efficiency of your current business. We also know that you’ve heard of ClickFunnels (because you typed it into your browser), and we also know that you’re curious as to what it is, and how it works.
So over the next few minutes, we’re going to explain to you what ClickFunnels is, and how it can help you to make money online. You might ask why we’re giving you all this information – this isn’t a buy our product not someone else’s comparison site, so what do we expect to gain? Well, whilst we’re being honest with each other, here’s the answer:
We want you to sign up for a free 14-day trial of ClickFunnels.
If you do that through this page, we’ll potentially make some commission along the way. And if we show you that ClickFunnels works for you, then we increase our chances of you signing up. And how do we know ClickFunnels works? Simple – we use it ourselves.
So what is ClickFunnels, and How Does It Work?
The short answer: ClickFunnels is a web-based sales platform that offers an all-in-one solution to your online business. It’s a marketing tool that uses the concept of ‘Sales Funnels’ to convert visitors to customers; leads to sales. It’s not expensive, it’s extremely simple to use – just drag and drop, no coding required – and it’s very good at what it does. A lot of the small to mid-earning digital marketers out there are using ClickFunnels, or at least started off on the platform. It’s run by a SaaS (Software as a Service) company called Etison LLC, headed up by the online marketing guru Russell Brunson. And before you ask, yes – ClickFunnels uses its own software to build its own websites (and Russell Brunson is one hell of a funnel builder)!
The range of features included with ClickFunnel are designed to be scalable: as your business increases, so do the tools available. But just to give you an idea, here’s some of the features you’ll get from day one:
Some of the Basic Features of ClickFunnels
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What’s a Sales Funnel?
There’s nothing new about the concept of sales funnels, in fact the term was coined way back in 1898, by an American advertising man called E. St. Elmo Lewis. Basically, it’s a way to drive traffic in the most efficient way possible. The easiest way to think of it is to imagine getting a top salesman to hold your customer’s hand and guide them through the sales process from start to finish. The word ‘funnel’ is important here, as the aim is to create a direct path for the buyer without any distractions – they see only what you want them to see, based on their intent to buy.
Why is that important? Well, think about it. Have you ever gone on-line to search for a product and landed on a really confusing website, with loads of flashing banners advertising unrelated products that aren’t what you’re looking for? We bet you have. And what happens next? – you spend about three seconds looking for your item, you don’t find it, and so you close the page and go back to Google to look for another supplier.
A sales funnel totally removes all the unwanted distractions – it lets you drive traffic along a predefined route with a predefined message, and it’s completely geared up to converting visitors into customers. Back in E. St. Elmo’s day the funnel had four stages: Awareness, Interest, Desire and Action (known as the AIDA model). ClickFunnel doesn’t try to re-invent the wheel, it just redefines those stages to make them more relevant to today’s online marketing. So the stages of a typical sales funnel look something like this:
A Typical Sales Funnel
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We should point out that this is only a simplified version of a sales funnel. ClickFunnels offers users a lot of different funnel types, all finely-tuned for specific sales purposes.
Why Use ClickFunnels to Build Funnels?
As we’ve already mentioned, ClickFunnels is a drag-and-drop editor – you can very quickly create effective sales pages without any coding. To keep this nice and easy, ClickFunnel provides an extensive range of funnel templates – pre-configured frameworks that have been tested and proven to convert. Remember when Apple coined the phrase “there’s an app for that”? Well it’s safe to say, whatever your business: “there’s a funnel for that!”
In our experience, it takes less than an hour to build a fully-functioning sales funnel. It can integrate with any existing software, so there’s no need to replace stuff that you already know well (we use it with MailChimp and Shopify). However you choose to configure ClickFunnels, you don’t need a web designer or someone to help with 3rd-party integration – it just works with everything, out of the box.
So What are the Best Ways to use ClickFunnel to Make Money Online?
ClickFunnels is a great tool for funnel building. But it won’t do the work for you, you still have to invest time, and money, to get the best from the platform. There are basically two ways to make money with ClickFunnels:
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Sell Your Services or Goods through ClickFunnels
This is the easiest and most obvious way to make money. We’ve already discussed the many funnel templates available, so now you just need to decide which one best suits your needs. Well, obviously you need to have a killer product or idea, and you need to have all your online marketing copy written and an initial email list of potential customers. And you need to have planned for the unexpected (actually we hate that phrase. How the hell can you plan for the unexpected?). If you’re mulling over a few different e-commerce ideas, here are some examples of how ClickFunnels can help:
Ways to Make Money with ClickFunnels
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Earn Affiliate Commission by Promoting ClickFunnels to Others
If you don’t actually have your own product or service to sell, but you have some sales-smarts, then you can choose to simply promote ClickFunnels itself. This is known as the ClickFunnels affiliate program, where you make money by referring new customers to ClickFunnels. So basically, you use ClickFunnels to sell itself.
You’ll need to understand about adding value, but ClickFunnels is a great tool and it’s easy to promote (we’re doing it right now!) You can choose to add value by creating Facebook ads in your groups, blogging about ClickFunnels, or other social media, or you can opt to sell ClickFunnels affiliate products such as Russell Brunson’s Expert Secrets Book or Dot Com Secrets Book. Or by some completely new way that nobody else has even thought of. Yet.
Once you start generating revenue with referrals, you can start to create Share Funnels. This is a built-in feature that gives you the opportunity to share your own funnel building skills with your leads. It’s easy enough to implement – just allow Share Funnels in your ClickFunnels account. If another account holder clicks on your link, the funnel that you’ve designed will be added to their available templates. If they’re not yet a member, they’re invited to start a 14-day trial.
The best way to maximise this is to offer added value as a bonus. This is because ClickFunnels uses a ‘sticky cookie‘ to track usage back to you: if a someone clicks on a Share Funnel or affiliate product link, you’re identified as the account that brought in a new member and you get a commission. Automatically, and every month.
Now here’s something about the ClickFunnels affiliate program that’s quite unbelievable: when you sign up for the free 14-day trial, you automatically get enrolled in the affiliate programme and you can start promoting ClickFunnels immediately – so it’s actually possible to earn commission without having to pay a penny for the software.
We’re going to say that again: in the first 14 days, you can make money without paying a penny.
Just take a minute and think about how incredible that is! Why would they do that? It’s actually a very simple answer – ClickFunnels confidently expects that you’ll want to continue using the software. Most affiliate marketers go on to do just that, because it’s proof positive that ClickFunnels works.
The amount you’ll earn is dependent on achieving certain thresholds, but even the basic level is surprisingly generous. As far as commission goes, it’s one of the best affiliate programs out there. Remember, your leads are tracked with sticky cookies, so you’ll always get paid if someone signs up through your ClickFunnels affiliate account. This happens automatically, and recurrently. Every month. Warren Buffet once said “If you don’t find a way to make money while you sleep, you will work until you die.” He was talking about earning a passive income, and this is a great way to start.
There’s a way to earn extremely high affiliate commission, which is known as the One Funnel Away Challenge. It’s an extensive 30-day course which helps you with your funnel building by giving a solid understanding of the core fundamentals of direct response marketing. It’s actually worthwhile taking the course yourself, as you’ll benefit from a funnel tailored specifically to your business, including email lists and email marketing, landing page, sales page, upsell page, facebook ads/social media presence and follow-ups. And once you understand how powerful this is, if you then go on to sell it you’ll receive 100% commission.
But that’s not all: there’s a further incentive for affiliates known as the ‘Dream Car Bonus’, where the company will lease a car for you up to a value of 500 USD per month once you’ve referred 100 customers. They’re effectively giving you a free company car, and they’re still paying you the commission! What’s more, once you double that referral number to 200, they’ll double the value of the car to 1000 USD per month. We don’t know what your dream car actually is, but we bet you can get pretty close for a grand a month!
As you can no doubt tell, ClickFunnels really pushes the affiliate program (because, of course, they want you to succeed). If you find yourself flagging and you need any additional incentives, they run an ‘Affiliate Bootcamp‘ webinar to rekindle your appetite.
How Much Does ClickFunnels Cost?
Like we’ve said, the first 14-day trial is free. After that, you’ll need to sign up for a monthly package, and there are two main tiers, as follows:
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A Final Word
ClickFunnels isn’t a magic bullet. It takes time and effort to make it work – of course it does. But we hope we’ve shown you that if you’re prepared to put in the hard work, it will make you money from day one. As Russell Brunson says: “if you do nothing, nothing will happen”.
ClickFunnels is not the only solution out there, but we think it’s one of the best. How do we know? As we’ve said before: we use it ourselves. And we make money from it. So if you’ve decided it’s worth looking into – and it’s free, so why not? – there’s only one more thing you need to do (you know what’s coming, don’t you.) Yep – Click the button.
