This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
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How does the funnel system work for selling information products? What does that even mean? What am I talking about? Hey, welcome to Side Hustle School. It's Chris Guillebeau.
Listen, if you wanna start a side hustle, if you wanna make money apart from your day job, maybe even passive income, where you can kinda do other stuff, but there's money coming in on the side, well, you need to develop some kind of system. You need to sell something one way or another. It can be a service, it can be a product, it can be something that's set up to earn affiliate income, it could be an arts project, it can be an app. I mean, there's a long list. But one way or another, you need people coming in and you need people who are willing to often give their contact information and then purchase something, sometimes for a low price, and then later, something for a higher price.
So that's kind of what the funnel system is about. It's about a series of purchases or commitments. They don't even have to be purchases, but a series of increasing commitments that customers make as they become comfortable with you as a business owner or with your business. So how does it work with selling information products? We're gonna hear from a listener who wants to kind of figure this out and get them set up.
It's a classic system, it's a classic sales model, definitely still in use by big companies, small companies, regular people out there. So what are some practical steps you can take to get this going? It could be something very helpful for somebody out there. So I hope you enjoy this episode. Short, action-packed, detailed question and my answer coming up in just 30 seconds.
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Thank you for taking my question. Here's what's going on. I'm considering creating an information product and have heard a lot about the funnel system in marketing. Can you explain how this works, specifically in relation to selling info products? What is the different stages of the funnel and how can I use this approach to maximize my sales?
I'm looking forward to your answer and hope to hear from you. Thanks for all the advice and stories. [Music]
All right, so the funnel system is a marketing strategy. Can it specifically be used for selling educational products or information products of some kind? So let's break down the different stages and see how you can use them to boost your sales.
This is actually a pretty detailed system that can be elaborate. There are multi-million dollar businesses that use this or it can be something really simple that an average side hustler uses. So you've got a couple stages here. Let's see, let's do awareness, interest, decision and action, okay? So the awareness stage is you wanna get potential customers to know you and make sure that they understand that your product actually exists in the first place.
So this is typically where content marketing comes into play. That can be blog posts, Instagram posts, videos, podcasts, something to get attention. And you wanna use free resources here. You want to just give stuff away and get attention. So you could create a series on a relevant topic, some kind of insights that might lead people to sign up for a free webinar.
So now we're going from awareness to interest and here you want to engage your audience and build a relationship. You wanna provide more in-depth content. You want to be using email marketing here. You want to post a webinar perhaps and send a series of follow-up emails to keep people engaged. So we've gone from awareness to interest, now it's decision, right?
You want to offer a low cost product perhaps, could be 10 to $30, maybe up to $50 or it could be up to $100 depending on what you're selling to bring people into the funnel. This helps them commit without taking a significant financial risk. So now you've gone from awareness to interest to decision, they bought something and now it's like, okay, what are you really selling? Like you've helped them, it's genuine, you've brought them real value but once they bought the low cost product, perhaps there's a higher priced product that then follows. So then maybe they bought a $20 mini course.
Well, now offer them a more comprehensive course or a membership subscription, something at a higher price point. And from there, you can kind of do this in lots of different ways. You can do that little mini course and you can do the higher product. You can go beyond that. I mean, some people will do, I've got a $20 product and then a $100 product and then a $1,000 product.
Then I have maybe personalized services that are on top of that, that cost more. Maybe then I've got a program you pay for, over the course of a year. Now, obviously this is a lot of work, right? This is not an easy thing to build out the entire empire. But if you just think about this model, okay, I'm not building an empire right now, but can I think about what my mini course is or my low cost product and my higher price product?
Can I think about building things in tandem so that one commitment leads to the other? That's basically what you want to think about as a side hustler and you can take it as far as you want. So good luck. Let me know how it goes, listeners. Let me know how it goes for you as well.
Let me know how we can be helpful here at Side Hustle School. I make this podcast for you every single day, seven days a week, always completely free. I hope you'll continue to listen. My name is Chris Guillebeau, this is Side Hustle School. [Music]
From the Onward Project.
