Part of the guide: Affiliate Marketing
Today I want to talk about something different.
Something most Internet Marketing blogs and marketers rarely ever talk about.
Internet Marketing strategies and practical examples of business models. Most marketers are too busy selling you traffic generation tricks & ppc guides or conversion optimization plugins and SEO tools to ever talk about what you’ll actually do with them.
It’s very simple.
Internet Marketers sell products or services to people who need and/or want them. Or they convince people who don’t need or want them to buy them. Now hopefully you want to create a moral, legally sound business model with the former option.
You do this by finding a problem to solve. This could be helping women lose weight, helping marketers make money online, or helping guys pick up women. There are 1000s of different niches out there that are built around these common problems people have in the real world.
The way to Internet riches is to identify a common problem of a group of people that is growing by at least 500 per year and create products and/or services to help them. Easy concept.
You need to pick a niche where the group of people have several obstacles to overcome in order to achieve their desired result or outcome.
At least 3 obstacles, and create a product that helps them overcome each one.
Examples…
Mens Dating
- Obstacle 1: Approaching Women
- Obstacle 2: Going On A First Date/Dating
- Obstacle 3: Escalating To Sex
Those are three extremely common obstacles men face in meeting, dating, and seducing women. Now because of these common obstacles, there is a gigantic pick-up industry & products that teach men how to overcome these obstacles, and millions of dollars are exchanged every year for them.
Weight Loss
- Obstacle 1: Changing Your Diet
- Obstacle 2: Exercising
- Obstacle 3: Staying Healthy
Internet Marketing
- Obstacle 1: Getting Traffic
- Obstacle 2: Generating Leads
- Obstacle 3: Generating Sales
In some niches, there are only one or two obstacles, while in others there are literally dozens. Dozens of problems they have to overcome in order to achieve their desired outcome.
You can create a product or service around each obstacle. You can also create a flagship high-ticket (expensive) product that teaches everything for a lot more money.
When deciding to create a new online business, draw that diagram.
Write the start on the far left and the desired outcome on the far right (like picking up women or having a great body or making money online), next write down the obstacles that your potential new audience has to overcome in order to go from start to desired outcome.
That diagram should be the basis of your entire sales funnel and marketing system. When you really understand your audience, their desired outcome, and obstacles; you can better serve them, increase conversions, and make more money.
To make a lot of money online, you need a sales funnel that sells multiple products. You need to increase your average customer lifetime value. By creating products around each obstacle for your audience; you can increase your ACV from $50 to $500, literally 10 times increase.
Once you’ve mapped out at least 3 major obstacles your audience has to overcome in order to achieve their desired result; create a product that solves each obstacle.
Now create your sales funnel. Your sales funnel should start with a main website or blog and several landing pages. Your main website/blog should direct all traffic to your landing pages or squeeze pages.
Your squeeze pages should be designed to get visitors to join your email list. You can either seriously leverage your squeeze pages and opt-in process or not. You can leverage a squeeze page by pre-selling your subscribers on your products.
You do this by creating a report that gives them a basic overview or blueprint they can follow to reach their desired result. The free report or video should explain the obstacles they need to overcome and give some very basic practical information on how to do it.
Now people are in your funnel, on your email list; you can pitch them the first product in an automated email sequence. This will always generate sales and revenue if you do it correctly – always. You can next set up a second email sequence to go out to subscribers who’ve bought the first product pitching the solution to obstacle 2.
….and again for the next product which solves obstacle 3. Obviously, a lot of people won’t purchase every product, for whatever reason. So it’s also a good idea to create a flagship product which combines all 3 products into 1 solving your audience’s entire problem in one course. Sell this to all subscribers who don’t purchase all of the single products and increase the price according to value (3 x single product price).
You were never meant to do this alone
Reading this changes nothing. Doing it with people who show up changes everything. That is the whole difference between the people who transform and the people who keep starting over.
Start free →You now have a sales funnel that WILL convert and generate thousands of dollars in revenue automatically when you send new targeted leads into the system. You can get the traffic and leads through blogging, paid advertising, or however else. Remember how I said you only really need to target a group of people that grows by 500 per year?
Simple reason why. We all want to make at least $100,000 a year. Anything less and being an entrepreneur just isn’t very cool. Most people think making 6 figures online means selling thousands of products. The reality couldn’t be less true.
You only need 500 customers who each spend $200; which equals $100,000. Create 3 products that solve 3 obstacles ultimately solving your audience’s problem and sell them for $67 each.
500 customers who each buy the 3 products is $100,000. Not bad at all, from a customer base growing at merely 500 buyers per year. This can be done in any niche, and it works very well; like clockwork.
In Prosperity,
David Wood
P.S. Leave me your thoughts, comments, and questions below.
Comment
Sarah Mills
This post is absolutely fantastic! I’ve been in the internet marketing game for years, and I can honestly say that this is one of the best breakdowns I’ve seen. Thank you for sharing such valuable information!
Mark W.
I’m really curious, David. Do you have any concrete evidence of these methods working? It sounds great in theory, but I’d love to see some real-world results to back it up. Do you have any case studies?
Amy Johnson
This is so insightful, but I’m left wondering about the sales funnel part. How do you create a funnel if your audience is not quite ready to buy? Do you have a strategy for warming them up first?
Peter Hale
While I appreciate the breakdown, I think it’s a little too simplified. There are far more obstacles to creating a successful sales funnel than just overcoming three. There’s so much more involved, like product quality, customer trust, and market competition.
Emily Garza
Hey David! Long time no see! This post brought back memories of the early days of internet marketing. How have you been? Let’s catch up soon, maybe grab a coffee or something!
Carlos Ortega
I had a similar issue when I started my online business. It was hard to get traffic and even harder to generate sales. This strategy definitely resonates with me, and I’m excited to apply some of these techniques to improve my business!
Lisa Rivera
This is a great post, but have you heard about Funnelicious? It’s a tool that helps automate the funnel process and boosts conversions by tracking customer behaviors in real time. It might be worth checking out!
Michael Reyes
Wow! I learned so much from this. The idea of tackling customer obstacles one by one really clicked with me. I feel like I can now better serve my audience and, hopefully, increase my revenue. Thanks for the great post!
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The framework itself, map the obstacles, build something for each one, is honest craft. What I’d want to sit with is the sentence right after it, about a funnel that ‘will always generate sales… if you do it correctly, always.’ That’s the part that turns a legitimate business model into something closer to a machine for extracting money regardless of whether the product actually helped. The obstacles are real. The certainty in that one sentence is the part that should give anyone pause.
Sorry if this is obvious to everyone else, but I’ve been trying to figure out my own three obstacles for weeks now and I keep landing on more like six or seven smaller ones instead of three clean ones — is that a sign I’ve picked too broad a problem to solve, or is three just a rough guide and not an actual rule?
To structure what Hollis is pointing at: the post gives 1) find a problem, 2) map three obstacles, 3) build a product per obstacle, 4) sequence them into a funnel. Steps one through three are sound advice for any small business. Step four is where the ‘always generates sales’ language creeps in, and it’s the one step the post doesn’t actually walk through with the same rigor as the first three. That’s the gap worth asking about.
Meera’s step four gap is the one that sinks this for most people I know. Nobody here is building a big enough list to sequence products into.
Lonnie’s audience-size point is the one that gets ignored every single cycle I’ve watched. The ‘three obstacles, one product each’ funnel isn’t new, it’s the same tiered offer structure direct sales companies have built since before either of us started, just wearing an email sequence instead of a home meeting. Works the same way it always did: fine if you already have people to put into it, mostly theoretical if you don’t.