How to make a sales funnel without monthly fees

Photo credit unsplash.com/@imchenyf

If you want to start selling a digital product online, I wrote this exactly for you. I know there are tons of choices out there, but you have to pay monthly fees for them. Here’s a way for beginners to sell a digital product online with minimal costs and no coding.

With all the sales lingo and terminology that makes you grind your teeth, why don’t we re-define the sales funnel in a friendlier way. Are you comfortable bartering? Well we can start with that. A sales funnel is the bartering method for the contemporary millennial era.

The virtual barter: visitor’s attention and email address for self-help, feel-good organized knowledge.

Sales funnels are also known as click funnels. Is a cylindrical, plastic cone with one end narrower than the other the first thing you imagine when you hear sales funnel? How about a click funnel? What do you see? I see the Atari game Tempest clicking on neon colored particles through a black tunnel.

Well okay, maybe the sales words are needed to communicate knowledge between sellers, but are they needed for consumers? If you want to buy something from me, are you in my sales funnel or have we established some kind of rapport?

Let’s just get to the point. If I want to sell a digital product and you want to buy my digital product among the millions of digital products online, how will you find me? It’s easier said than done.

For the beginners to selling digital products online, here’s an overview. I have to establish the presence, value and communication of my product to find you online. Actually, more like allowing you to find my product easier. Notice how I mentioned three elements. Allow me to elaborate.

1. Presence — There shall be fixed location, easily-reachable, which contains the content, details and price of the product available for a monetary exchange. This means allowing an item transaction.
2. Value — There shall be an informational representation of what the product contains, offers, allows you to do or not do preferable with sources of proof.
3. Communication — There shall be widespread distribution of the information noted in presence and value of the product. This is the information targeting the destined product user.

In this writing I will focus on how to build your digital product’s value-exchange. Best of all, it will be using tools which do not have monthly fees.
It is granted that hosting any website online has some associated fees so you will need your own website. I don’t know about you but if I build something, I hate to pay monthly fees to keep it running.

This section will cover the rapport-building, value exchange or what is also known as the sales funnel. Here are the main components of a sales funnel including descriptions:

1. Website — where prospects can find you
2. Landing page — your proposition and offer
3. Email registration — initial value exchange
4. Drip Campaign — building rapport with additional value
5. Monetary Transaction — getting paid for your speciality knowledge

Explaining the parts is as follows. A website is needed with a public domain name and access to a server which allows you to upload software to it such as WordPress.

The landing page is where prospects will arrive after making initial interest in your product. This page will contain any details to persuade the prospect and allow further communication with you mainly through email messages because they are interested in what you have to offer.

If your proposition got the prospect’s email address without exaggerating lies, then good job. Nowadays, your brief 2-page colored PDF, weekly newsletter, or virtual gift of spam will not make you feel entitled to get someone’s legit email address. The average landing page reader is smart enough not give away their precious inbox after enduring years of spam. This part should be highly-targeted for your niche to grow your email list.

The drip campaign, which is another silly term, is where your prospect becomes a lead. We will just call it an email campaign. This is where you should send email message offering more value to your lead. Trust is earned and rapport is not free (paying attention). From the emails you send, you are building the lead’s trust in you. Break that trust and you have no sale!

As a sales analogy to real life, think of a stranger approaching you and the first question they ask is if you would like to buy an exercise book they wrote. You won’t buy unless you get to know how the book can help you specifically and reading a few chapters first.

The last but not final step is getting the ultimate value-exchange; money! We want the lead to pay us for the help we’ve provided. The lead becomes a customer. So even if our emails gave away 50% of the product without being paid, we should have built enough trust and thirst for the lead to buy-in.

Now let’s get technical and start building. Here are the steps I will walk you through to build your own value-exchange system. Free tools will be used where applicable staring with WordPress, a software system that’s been around for years to reach maturity and mass adoption. It is one of the reasons we can keep our expenses low.

The outline of the steps are:

• Server hosting
• WordPress Install
• WordPress Theme
• Email Opt-in Plugin
• Email Messaging Campaign Plugin
• Ecommerce sales plugin
• Merchant Payment Processor

Server Hosting
Get your web hosting from wherever, whoever, I don’t care who you choose as long as they have cpanel and QuickInstall, it will be easier for you. With QuickInstall, which is located in cpanel, you can choose to install WordPress using your email address and domain name.

Many shared web hosting companies have Cpanel and Quickinstall. VPSs do not.

Cpanel installers. The one-click installs are a lie.

See? That has to be about 99 clicks there to install.

WordPress Install
Once you receive your confirmation email from the WordPress CMS, login and you will be at the dashboard page. Ensure you have the latest WordPress core installed for security. According to WordPress, this update could be everyday. Just kidding, but it seems like it. Then you will want to disable all the bloat plugins which pretend to be free, but are really not. I uninstall them as well, which is another security tip.

Get the latest WordPress version core or it will be hacked.

Default plug-ins trying to sink their teeth into your wallet.

Deactivate and delete the plugins shown. They are unnecessary.

WordPress Theme
Don’t be an amateur by accepting one of the default themes pre-installed. Go out there and find something more appealing. You can check themeforest.net for many themes, including one free theme per month if you’re a registered user. I use them too. After installing your delightful new theme, don’t get too excited yet. You should customize the theme through the settings so your website can be unique. Uploading your own logo and making at least one post should be the minimum if you’re lazy and just want to test it out.

I got this premium theme free from themeforest. It’s mediocre quality.

Upload your premium theme by FTP or using the build-in uploder

Email Opt-in Plugin
From here we will need a premium plugin. The features of this one plugin are amazing. You get analytics just as you would with MailChimp, Constant Contact, Get Response, Aweber etc. Those service owners are rich. I’m not. You might be flabbergasted to find out Mailster is a big round $0 per month. Here are just a few of the features you will get from a premium plugin, which I personally purchased but not affiliated with:

• html email templates
• Personalized high-dpi logo
• Email mx record verification
• Tracking email opens
• Email notifications
• Import/export subscribers
• Cron jobs

The Mailster plugin menu and dashboard.

The plugin is not free but it’s totally worth the one-time price. After getting and installing the plugin. You will need to configure it. Here’s how followed by screenshots:

1. Create List
2. Create a form, set List Options and Double-Opt-in
3. Create a subscribed thank you page for the double opt-in
4. Click the Use It! Button and copy the shortcode [newsletter_signup_form id=1] to use on your landing page. (Widget and iframe available)
5. Create campaign Autoresponders

1. Create a subscriber list and name it.

2. Create a form and set the options shown in the screenshot.

3. Enter your “thank you” page url at the bottom of form settings.

4. The button settings and shortcode when you click Use It! at the top of form settings.

5. A new autoresponder requires a campaign form as shown here.

An email campaign is the email messages you will send periodically to your list of prospects. An autoresponder is a message you want to email out after a set period of time after a visitors signs up on your landing page. Creating a new autoresponder opens a new campaign form. The difference between the two is that autoresponders have two triggers for the message to be sent; an event trigger and a time period trigger. A campaign is triggered only at a specific time period.

This part requires good strategy because at this point you have earned a prospect’s email address turning them into a lead. With the double opt-in method, the email address is verified. Now to decide how many autoresponder messages you should send.

I use six autoresponder messages to build rapport by shoving value into the visitor’s inbox.

Congrats, you’re not done yet! Now you are ready to sell or at least ask your prospects for a donation but you will need another plugin to receive a payment. This way you can automate your transaction in exchange for delivering digital goods.

I recommend a bank account, an online payment gateway such as Stripe and the premium plugin Digital Paybox, which I spent hours researching. Digital Paybox has:

• Multiple payment gateway such as stripe and even bitcoin
• Multiple currencies
• Fixed and flexible pricing
• Temporary download links to prevent theft

Once you install and activate Digital Paybox plugin, fill out the settings section with a charming message your new customer will receive. Below the message section are fields for each payment processor to be added. Choose the one you would like to use.

The Paybox transaction email message and settings.

Add a file of your digital product and price using this form shown.

Copy the shortcode generated from the file upload and paste it on your sales page.

This is how the Digital Paybox widget will appear on your sales page.

Well done! That is the A-Z process of a sales funnel. If you had any difficulties setting this up or need me to setup a sales funnel for you, reach out to me on my twitter.com/therutkat or instagram.com/rutkatfitness.