Are you currently trying to sell stuff online?
I’m sure you will agree that converting your visitors into sales is hard.
And getting yourself profitable? That’s even tougher.
There’s a simple secret to raising the value of each customer you market to:
Sales funnels. How To Work For Clickfunnels
By creating a well-designed sales funnel, you can dramatically increase your earnings and provide more value for your clients.
In this article, I will present you to ClickFunnels, the software I’m using to build sales funnels for my business.
You do not need any technical know-how to utilize this, and it is going to truly change how you run your business.
Plus:
If you are ready to throw yourself into the ClickFunnels world, it’s one of the best affiliate programs on the market. I’ll be talking about that too later on.
What’s ClickFunnels?
ClickFunnels was made back in 2014 by Russell Brunson and his group. Since that time, Russell has turned ClickFunnels into a $100 million a year company and they just crossed over 65,000 active members as of August 2018.
At its core, ClickFunnels is an application for building sales funnels. With a bunch of additional bells and whistles.
You can use it to construct:
– 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 will even be able to start your own affiliate program (Backpack) and replace your email service with (Actionetics MD).
Essentially, you’re getting everything you need to advertise and sell your products online, without having to hire expensive developers.
And individuals are utilizing ClickFunnels with great success.
If you check out their 2 Comma Club site, you can see that nearly 300 entrepreneurs have already created 1 million dollar funnels utilizing ClickFunnels.
That’s amazing.How To Work For Clickfunnels
What are the best parts of ClickFunnels?
Best Feature #1: Funnel template blueprints
If you have never created a sales funnel before then ClickFunnels has you covered.
Russell has identified 22 different types of funnels that he has employed successfully in his own business.
The funnel forms 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 create as well.
They include simple funnels like the Squeeze Page Funnel which gathers a visitor’s email address and then sends them into a Thank you page when registering.
Or to more complex sales funnels like the 2-Step TripWire Funnel which sells a low ticket front-end product (your tripwire) and then upsells them to your more expensive products with Order Form bumps, and One Click upsells or Downsells.
Moreover, every funnel type has its own set of free templates and paid templates. So even in the event that you don’t have any design skills, your funnel pages will all have a consistent, professional design.
Here’s a high-level overview 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. How To Work For Clickfunnels
Best Feature #2: Good Visual Drag and Drop Editor
While ClickFunnels provides you a wonderful starting point with its funnel and page templates, the ClickFunnels editor is the place you can actually make each page in your funnel your own.
Pages in ClickFunnels are laid out using sections that can have any number of rows and columns. After that you can use your mouse to drag elements around and place them where you want them.
While not as adaptable as Instapage’s landing page editor, it’s still very good and it can be utilized to achieve just about any design you desire.
What I like is that the editor is quite intuitive to use.
Selecting elements on the page and moving them where you want is quite seamless.
Text elements can be edited inline, and changing any element’s properties could be accomplished via the fly-out sidebar.
And contrary to other editors on the market, everything is organized in a logical way. You’re not spending a lot of time searching for what you would like to do.
The main thing is that no coding is required. So you don’t need to spend time studying HTML or CSS or any technical things like that.
Best Feature #3: Nice Selection of Page Elements
Elements (or widgets) are all essential for providing you the flexibility to design the exact pages you woud like and ClickFunnels gives you a large array of them to use.
Fundamental elements include Headline, Image, Text, Button, Input types and Video widgets. These are the fundamental building blocks for any landing page you build in the software.
ClickFunnels also includes a number of advanced components such as:
– 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 membership pages and order and shipping form elements for your order pages.
Each element can be easily customized in the editor sidebar. With majority of elements, you can change common properties such as background colors, margins, fonts, and alignment.
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 very best, legitimate affiliate marketing program that you can be a part of.
First the Fundamentals:
The ClickFunnels affiliate program pays 40% recurring commissions for each referral you make and you can win cool prizes like $500 towards your own dream car once you reach 100 active referrals.
In addition to that, they offer 5%, 2-tier commissions for referring people to the ClickFunnels affiliate program.
You also get 40% commissions by promoting any product in the ClickFunnel’s ecosystem such as DotCom Secrets, Expert Secrets or even the Software Secrets books.
And thanks to the ClickFunnel’s sticky cookie, you will also earn commissions on any upsells that your referrals purchase as they go through their specific funnels as well.
That is not all:
ClickFunnels also has another great feature for affiliates called share funnels.
Inside the Settings tab of any of your funnels, you can grab your Share Funnel URL.
Whenever someone visits this URL, they will have the ability to add this funnel directly into their account if they are an existing ClickFunnels member. If they aren’t a member yet, they can register for the ClickFunnels 14-day free trial then get your funnel added to their account.
What’s really amazing is that this share URL also acts as your affiliate link, and you will get a recurring commission when this new user ends up staying on.
What I do not like about ClickFunnels?
Bad Part #1: Why is adding a funnel so slow?
After picking your funnel type and template, it needs to get added to your account.
For some reason, this process seems to take around 8-10 seconds each time.
While I really don’t know what is really going on behind the scenes, it doesn’t make sense to me why this would take so long. It’s a bit annoying, although just 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 lowest plan. I am really not a fan of software products that limit you in this way.
If you are just building sales funnels for yourself, these limits are most likely okay.
But you may get more annoyed at these limitations if you’re doing client work, creating funnels for multiple customers or promoting ClickFunnels as an affiliate with share funnels.
You’ll need to upgrade to the Etison Suite plan if you would like to develop unlimited funnels.
Bad Part #3: Fairly High learning curve
The scope of what ClickFunnels could do is fairely huge, and it can definitely be intimidating to some.
That’s why ClickFunnels put so much work into the onboarding process to help ease you into the software. The ClickFunnels interface is pretty well made for the most part and once you’ve built a couple 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, however they have now been merged into 2 separate plans.
So how much is ClickFunnels now?
At the moment, 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 limited to generating 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 get access to that, you’ll need to go with the Etison Suite plan. It includes everything, and you receive 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 available. However, you can buy Funnel Hacks for $997 which provides you 6 months of Etison Suite for free and some extra bonuses. This brings the cost down to $166.16 a month.
ClickFunnels does make it easy for you to demo their service with their free, 14-day free trial. It is not limited in any way which lets you give the software a full 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 which you can also have access to for only $19 a month. You can only produce 3 funnels and 10 pages with this plan, but it is 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, even though they can be somewhat slow in responding. They use Intercom, so you can immediately ask questions in the live chat box. Support requests are usually answered in a few hours and I found the staff to pretty helpful to all my queries.
Do I need my own domain? How To Work For Clickfunnels
You do not necessarily need your own domain name to launch a funnel, but I would advise it. If you don’t have one then your funnel URL will look something like http://username.clickfunnels.com.
One nice bonus I did not know about is that ClickFunnels will buy 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 very first game in the onboarding training.
Do they have an active community?
ClickFunnels has an enormous community. There’s the official group on FB with over 100k members and 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 opinions on your own sales funnels and answer any questions that you may have.
There are also other FB groups run by ClickFunnels affiliates that are also very active. The main one I recommend joining is Automation Nation. It is run by Spencer Mecham who is ClickFunnel’s top affiliate.
What integrations do they offer?
Even though ClickFunnels has its own email service provider via Actionetics, it also integrates directly with all the best email marketing software out there.
For payment gateways, ClickFunnels integrates with Stripe, Paypal, Clickbank, Infusionsoft, Authorize.net, and a couple of others. The one limitation with using Paypal though is that it does not support One Click Upsells or One Time Offers. That’s why I would highly recommend going with Stripe if you’re able to.
What is the Funnel Hacks system?
If you’re looking to acquire the $297/mo. Etison Suite plan, then it is definitely well worth it to join 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’ll also get a bunch of additional bonuses and training that 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 due to all the affiliates that are making an effort to promote it.
However, no, ClickFunnels is not a scam. It’s 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 people are utilizing ClickFunnels to build 6 and 7 figure companies.
When people ask, “How can I create a sales funnel”, ClickFunnels is the #1 answer hands down. There’s no other application that can do every thing that ClickFunnels does at the moment.
What else is ClickFunnels used for?
Besides creating standard sales funnels, there are many ways marketers are using ClickFunnels right now in their business.
It’s terrific for creating opt-in funnels to help you generate more prospects and build your email list.
You can create webinar funnels that will help you develop your brand and sell your services and products.
And you can use it to create membership sites where you’re able to gate your premium content so that it’s accessible only to subscribers.
How can you make ClickFunnels work for you? How To Work For Clickfunnels
To start with, you need to have a product or service to market. If you don’t have something to market, then don’t even bother looking into ClickFunnels until you do. Unless you only want to promote it as an affiliate.
Next, you have to be ready to invest 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 coming up with appropriate upsells, order bumps and other OTOs that match or improve your principal product offering.
If you’re unclear how to being, I’d take a look at Russell’s own multi-million dollar sales funnels to provide you with inspiration. Read his book DotComSecrets where he describes exactly the why and how of building sales funnels and how to tell stories to sell your services and products.
And as you go through his own sales funnels yourself you can see how he goes from low-cost tripwire (DotComSecrets) to promoting his flagship product (ClickFunnels).
By building his very own community of raving fans he could 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 components that apply to your own business and create a plan for your sales funnel. As soon as you have that in place, you’ll be ready to start making money with ClickFunnels.
ClickFunnels versus the competition
There are a few ClickFunnels alternatives out there that share some of the same capabilities as ClickFunnels. Two that I use myself are LeadPages and SamCart.
ClickFunnels vs LeadPages
Today, LeadPages is one of the market leaders in the landing page builder space and it’s a very popular tool in its own right.
It also recently added the ability to sell products directly on their pages with its new Checkout widget
Each product comes with a huge selection of nice looking templates. Both have drag and drop editors which make it easy for you to create the designs you desire. And both integrate with all the popular email service providers.
However, Leadpages is significantly more limited in scope compared to ClickFunnels. You use it to create landing pages that can allow you to collect leads. This isn’t a bad thing because LeadPages really shines for building landing pages quickly.
Right now, one of the best strategies for developing your email list is using content upgrades. By creating targeted lead magnets into your most popular posts you can acquire opt-in conversion rates that far exceed your standard pop-up.
LeadPages is the best service for implementing this approach with its LeadBoxes, 2 step opt-ins, and automatic lead magnet delivery which is why they are the most popular popup you will see today.
So if you are 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.
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, as soon as you master the tool, it’s possible to really explode your sales once you start generating sales funnels for all your products.
ClickFunnels vs SamCart
SamCart is a product which lets users build amazing, high converting checkout pages. Which gives it a whole 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 distinct checkout page templates that you may customize.
In terms of flexibility, there’s absolutely 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 allow you to add order bumps, upsells and downsells like ClickFunnels does. You can also quickly create coupons for your products which is another terrific way to increase conversions.
But where Samcart is missing, is the ability to capture leads and create complete sales funnels. Both products come in at the same $97 per month price point, and I find ClickFunnels to be quite a bit more flexible and powerful than 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
– Beautiful looking templates for every type of funnel
– Great on-boarding process for learning the program
– Software continues to get better after every update
– Easily share any funnels you create and automatically earn affiliate commissions
– 2-tier affiliate program
– Free domain name with SSL installed
– 14-day free trial
ClickFunnels Cons
– Limits 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 How To Work For Clickfunnels
Which application you go with depends on your needs and the amount of work you are willing to invest in your business.
Although many of you are selling standalone products, are you ready to put in the effort necessary to make a high converting sales funnel?
If not, ClickFunnels might be overkill for you. It’s possible to 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 access the software but also because the coaching you receive will be both inspiring and enlightening.
Take advantage of the ClickFunnels 14-day free trial, and see if you can use it to grow your business today.
