Are you currently trying to sell stuff online?
Then I am confident you will agree that converting your visitors into sales is hard.
And getting yourself profitable? That’s even tougher.
There is a simple secret to raising the value of each customer you sell to:
Sales funnels. Clickfunnels Affiliate Badge
By creating a well-designed sales funnel, it is possible to dramatically increase your sales and provide more value for your clients.
In this post, I’m going to present you to ClickFunnels, the application I am using to build sales funnels for my business.
You do not need any technical know-how to utilize it, and it will really change the way you run your business.
Plus:
If you’re prepared to throw yourself into the ClickFunnels world, it has one of the best affiliate programs out there. I’ll be speaking about that too later on.
What’s ClickFunnels?
ClickFunnels was created back in 2014 by Russell Brunson and his team. Since that time, Russell has turned ClickFunnels to a $100 million per year company and they just crossed over 65,000 active members as of August 2018.
At its core, ClickFunnels is a software for building sales funnels. With a lot of additional bells and whistles.
You can use it to build:
– Landing pages
– Squeeze pages
– Webinars
– Membership sites
– Every type of sales funnel you can think of, complete with order bumps, upsells and downsells
Plus, with the highest end Etison Suite package you’ll even be able to start your own affiliate program (Backpack) and change out your email service with (Actionetics MD).
Basically, you’re getting all you need to advertise and sell your products online, without having to employ expensive programmers.
And people are utilizing ClickFunnels with great success.
If you check out their 2 Comma Club website, you can see that nearly 300 entrepreneurs have already created 1 million dollar funnels using ClickFunnels.
That is remarkable.Clickfunnels Affiliate Badge
What are the best parts of ClickFunnels?
Best Feature #1: Funnel template blueprints
If you’ve never created a sales funnel before then ClickFunnels has you covered.
Russell has identified 22 distinct forms of funnels that he has employed successfully in his own business.
The funnel types fall into 3 main classes: Lead Capture Funnels, Sales Page Funnels, and Event Funnels. But there are a few additional special funnels like Membership funnels you can make too.
They include simple funnels such as the Squeeze Page Funnel which collects a visitor’s email address and then sends them into a Thank you page when registering.
Or to more complex sales funnels such as the 2-Step TripWire Funnel which sells a very low ticket front-end product (your tripwire) and then upsells them to a more expensive products using Order Form bumps, and One Click upsells or Downsells.
In addition, every funnel type has its own group of free templates and paid templates. So even if you don’t have any design skills, your funnel pages will have a consistent, professional design.
Here’s a high-level summary of how to create your first sales funnel:
- Choose a funnel type.
- Select a template.
- Customize each page to fit your business.
- Add your products and ensure all your email and payment integrations are set up.
- Set a domain name for your new funnel.
- Save your funnel.
Your sales funnel is now live and you can start sending traffic to it. Clickfunnels Affiliate Badge
Best Feature #2: Good Visual Drag and Drop Editor
While ClickFunnels gives you a great starting point with its funnel and page templates, the ClickFunnels editor is where you can actually make each page in your funnel your own.
Pages in ClickFunnels are laid out with sections that can have any number of columns and rows. After that you can use your mouse to drag elements around and put them where you need them.
While not as flexible as Instapage’s landing page editor, it’s still quite nice and it may be used to achieve just about any design you desire.
What I like is that the editor is very intuitive to use.
Selecting elements on the page and moving them where you want is very seamless.
Text elements can be edited inline, and modifying any element’s properties could be done through the fly-out sidebar.
And unlike other editors on the market, everything is organized in a logical way. You are not spending a great deal of time searching for what you would like to do.
The important thing is that no programming is required. So you don’t have to spend time studying HTML or CSS or some other technical things like that.
Best Feature #3: Nice Selection of Page Elements
Elements (or widgets) are all vital for providing you the flexibility to design the specific pages you woud like and ClickFunnels provides you a large variety of them to use.
Fundamental elements include Headline, Image, Text, Button, Input types and Video widgets. These are the basic building blocks for any landing page you construct in the software.
ClickFunnels also includes a number of advanced components like:
– SMS Signup
– Surveys
– Pricing Tables
– Progress Bars
– Facebook Comments
– FAQ Blocks
– Countdown Timers
– Custom HTML
Plus, there are specialized elements like Membership elements for your own membership pages and order and shipping form elements for your order pages.
Each element can be easily customized from the editor sidebar. With majority of elements, you can change common properties like background colors, margins, fonts, and orientation.
Then there are element specific properties like the image URL for the Image element or the Button text of your button.
Best Feature #4: The ClickFunnels Affiliate program is awesome
There’s no doubt in my mind that ClickFunnels has the best, legitimate affiliate marketing program that you can be a part of.
The basics:
The ClickFunnels affiliate program pays 40% recurring commissions for every referral you make and you can win cool prizes like $500 towards your very own dream car once you hit 100 active referrals.
On top of that, they offer 5%, 2-tier commissions for referring people to the ClickFunnels affiliate program itself.
In addition you get 40% commissions by promoting any product in the ClickFunnel’s ecosystem including DotCom Secrets, Expert Secrets or even the Software Secrets books.
And thanks to the ClickFunnel’s sticky cookie, you’ll also earn commissions on any upsells your referrals purchase as they go through their specific funnels as well.
But that is not all:
ClickFunnels also has another excellent feature for affiliates called share funnels.
Inside the Settings tab of any of your funnels, you can grab your Share Funnel URL.
When someone visits this URL, they will be able to bring this funnel directly into their account if they’re an existing ClickFunnels member. If they are not a member yet, they can register for the ClickFunnels 14-day free trial and then get your funnel added to their accounts.
What’s really awesome is that this share URL also functions as your affiliate link, and you’ll get a recurring commission when this new user ends up staying.
What I do not like about ClickFunnels?
Bad Part #1: Why is adding a funnel so slow?
After choosing your funnel type and template, it needs to get added to your account.
For some reason, this procedure appears to take around 8-10 seconds each time.
While I really don’t understand what is going on behind the scenes, it does not make sense to me why this could take so long. It is a bit annoying, although only a minor inconvenience.
Bad Part #2: Limits on funnels you can create and visitors
ClickFunnels limits you to 20 funnels, 100 pages, and 20,000 visitors in their cheapest plan. I’m not a fan of software products that limit you in this way.
If you’re just building sales funnels for yourself, these limits are most likely okay.
However you can get more annoyed at such limitations if you’re doing client work, building funnels for multiple customers or promoting ClickFunnels as an affiliate using share funnels.
You will need to upgrade to the Etison Suite plan if you want to build unlimited funnels.
Bad Part #3: Fairly High learning curve
The scope of what ClickFunnels could do is pretty huge, and it can definitely be intimidating to some.
That’s why ClickFunnels put a lot of work into the onboarding process to help ease you into the program. The ClickFunnels interface is fairely well designed for the most part and when you’ve built a few funnels yourself, the whole process does get easier over time.
ClickFunnels Pricing
Over time, ClickFunnels has evolved their pricing plans. In the beginning, they had 3 different pricing tiers, but they have now been merged into 2 separate plans.
So how much is ClickFunnels now?
Currently, the lowest priced ClickFunnels plan is $97 a month. On this plan, you get access to all of the funnel production tools, but you are restricted to creating 20 funnels, 100 pages, and 20,000 visitors. You also don’t get access to Actionetics, their built-in email service provider and Backpack, which allows you to make your own affiliate program.
To gain access to that, you’ll need to go for the Etison Suite plan. It includes everything, and you get unlimited funnels, pages, and visitors. However, this will run you $297 a month.
As far as I can tell, there are no ClickFunnels coupon codes out there. But, you can purchase Funnel Hacks for $997 which provides you 6 months of Etison Suite for free and some additional bonuses. This brings the cost down to $166.16 per month.
ClickFunnels does make it easy for you to demo their service with their free, 14-day free trial. It’s not constrained whatsoever which lets you give the software a complete test before you fully commit.
If $97 or $297 a month seems like too large a commitment for your current budget, there’s also a semi-secret, unadvertised Share Funnel plan that you can also have access to for just $19 a month. You can only create 3 funnels and 10 pages with this plan, but it’s a great way to try out ClickFunnels on a budget.
Everything else you should know about ClickFunnels
How is their support?
ClickFunnels support is fairly good in my experience, although they can be a little slow in responding. They utilize Intercom, which means you may immediately ask questions in the live chat box. Support requests are usually answered within a few hours and I found the staff to fairly helpful to all my questions.
Do I need my own domain? Clickfunnels Affiliate Badge
You do not necessarily need your own domain name to launch a funnel, although I would recommend it. If you don’t have one then your funnel URL will look something similar to http://username.clickfunnels.com.
One nice bonus I did not know about is that ClickFunnels will get you your first domain name for free and even set up SSL on it for you. You can learn how to do this from the first game in the onboarding training.
Do they have an active community?
ClickFunnels has an enormous community. There is the official group on FB with over 100k members as well as the ClickFunnels Avengers FB group (for affiliates) that has over 30k members.
Both groups are very active and it is a great place to get feedback on your own sales funnels and answer any questions you might have.
Additionally, there are other FB groups run by ClickFunnels affiliates which are also quite active. The main one I suggest joining is Automation Nation. It’s run by Spencer Mecham who is ClickFunnel’s top affiliate.
What integrations do they provide?
Even though ClickFunnels has its own email service provider via Actionetics, it also integrates directly with the best email marketing software out there.
For payment gateways, ClickFunnels integrates with Stripe, Paypal, Clickbank, Infusionsoft, Authorize.net, and a few others. The one limitation with using Paypal though is that it does not support One Click Upsells or One Time Offers. That is the reason why I would highly suggest going with Stripe if you can.
What is the Funnel Hacks system?
If you’re looking to acquire the $297/mo. Etison Suite plan, then it is definitely worth it to sign up with Funnel Hacks instead to save some additional money. For $997, you are going to receive six months of the Etison Suite plan which is $1,782 in value.
You will also get a lot of additional bonuses and training which include:
– 6 Week Funnel Hacks Master Class ($2,997 value)
– Instant Traffic Hacks ($1,997 value)
– Inception Secrets ($1,997 value)
– SOAP & Seinfeld Email Sequences ($997 value)
Is ClickFunnels a scam?
I believe ClickFunnels gets some negative buzz around it because of all the affiliates that are trying to market it.
However, no, ClickFunnels isn’t a scam. It is definitely the real deal.
It’s a great software with an amazing affiliate opportunity. So many people are using ClickFunnels to build 6 and 7 figure businesses.
It is a great software with an amazing affiliate opportunity. So many men and women are utilizing ClickFunnels to construct 6 and 7 figure companies.
When people ask, “How do I create a sales funnel”, ClickFunnels is the #1 answer hands down. There’s no other software that can do every thing that ClickFunnels does at the moment.
What else is ClickFunnels used for?
Besides creating standard sales funnels, there are plenty of ways marketers are using ClickFunnels right now in their business.
It is great for creating opt-in funnels to help you generate more prospects and build your email list.
You are able to produce webinar funnels to help you develop your brand and promote your products and services.
And you can use it to create membership sites where you’re able to gate your premium content so that it’s available only to subscribers.
How can you make ClickFunnels work for you? Clickfunnels Affiliate Badge
To start with, you need to have a product or service to market. If you do not have something to sell, then don’t even bother looking into ClickFunnels until you do. Unless you just want to promote it as an affiliate.
Next, you need to be ready to commit time and money into creating your value ladder and constructing your entire sales funnel.
That means creating a lead magnet or low-cost tripwire product to get clients or customers into your funnel. And then coming up with appropriate upsells, order bumps and other OTOs that match or improve your main product offering.
If you’re unclear how to being, I’d have a look at Russell’s own multi-million dollar sales funnels to provide you with inspiration. Read his book DotComSecrets where he explains precisely the why and how of creating sales funnels and how to tell stories to marketing your products and services.
And as you go through his own sales funnels you can see the way he goes from low-cost tripwire (DotComSecrets) to promoting his flagship product (ClickFunnels).
By building his own community of raving fans he can then upsell his various different products and events like Funnel Scripts, Funnel Hackers Live, and much more.
As soon as you’ve gone through his funnels, then you can take the parts that apply to your own company and create a plan for your own sales funnel. As soon as you have that in place, you will be ready to begin making money with ClickFunnels.
ClickFunnels versus the competition
There are a few ClickFunnels alternatives out there which share a number of the same capabilities as ClickFunnels. Two that I use myself are LeadPages and SamCart.
ClickFunnels vs LeadPages
Today, LeadPages is among the market leaders in the landing page builder space and it’s a very popular tool in its own right.
It also recently introduced the ability to sell products directly on their pages using its new Checkout widget
Each product features a huge selection of fine looking templates. Both have drag and drop editors that make it easy for you to build the designs you desire. And both integrate with the popular email service providers.
Leadpages is significantly more limited in scope than ClickFunnels. You use it to create landing pages that will allow you to collect leads. This is not a terrible thing because LeadPages really shines for building landing pages fast.
Right now, among the best strategies for growing your email list is by using content upgrades. By producing targeted lead magnets into your most well-known articles you can acquire opt-in conversion rates that far surpass your typical pop-up.
LeadPages is the best service for implementing this strategy with its LeadBoxes, 2 step opt-ins, and automatic lead magnet delivery which is why they are the most popular popup you’ll see today.
So if you’re primarily concentrated on lead generation, I would definitely suggest trying out LeadPages.
However, if you are selling a product or service, then ClickFunnels is the better choice. While it comes with a higher learning curve than Leadpages, once you master the tool, you can really explode your sales once you start creating sales funnels for each of your products.
But, if you are selling a service or product, then ClickFunnels is the better choice. While it comes with a higher learning curve than Leadpages, once you master the instrument, it’s possible to definitely explode your sales as soon as you begin creating sales funnels for each of your products.
ClickFunnels vs SamCart
SamCart is a product which lets users create amazing, high converting checkout pages. Which gives it a lot in common with ClickFunnels.
SamCart is targeted towards getting set up and selling fast. It supports both Stripe and Paypal and it includes 17 different checkout page templates that you may customize.
In terms of flexibility, there is no comparison between ClickFunnel’s drag and drop editor and SamCart’s.
ClickFunnels is infinitely more powerful in that you can design any checkout page you can dream about. SamCart only allows for some basic customizations to its pre-made templates.
SamCart does permit you to add order bumps, upsells and downsells such as ClickFunnels does. You can also quickly create coupons for your products which is just another terrific way to increase conversions.
However, where Samcart is lacking, is the capability to capture leads and build complete sales funnels. The products come in at the same $97 per month price point, and I find ClickFunnels to be quite a bit more flexible and powerful compared to Samcart.
ClickFunnels Pros
– Best software for building marketing and sales funnels
– Editor balances ease of use with flexibility
– Integrates with all major email and payment providers
– Amazing looking templates for every type of funnel
– Great on-boarding process for learning the software
– Software has been better after each update
– Easily share any funnels you create and automatically earn affiliate commissions
– 2-tier affiliate program
– Free domain name with SSL set up
– 14-day free trial
ClickFunnels Cons
– Limitations on the number of funnels, pages, and visitors with the standard plan
– Plently of things to understand, a steep learning curve
– Split testing is pretty basic
Final Thoughts Clickfunnels Affiliate Badge
Which application you go with depends on your needs and the quantity of work you are willing to invest in your enterprise.
Although a lot of you are selling standalone products, are you willing to put in the effort required to make a high converting sales funnel?
If not, ClickFunnels could be overkill for you. You can collect leads or market your front end product more cheaply with alternative services.
But if increasing the average lifetime value of your customers is important to you, then I really suggest giving ClickFunnels a try.
Not only to get access to the software but also because the coaching you receive will probably be both inspirational and enlightening.
Take advantage of the ClickFunnels 14-day free trial, and see whether you can use it to increase your business now.
