By Julie Hood

One of the very best ways to sell your course is with a funnel.

And for a lot of my clients, the word “funnel” seems like a vague and mysterious technique. 

So let’s simplify it a bit.

A funnel is just a series of steps, often emails, that take a student from interested to “sign me up today.”

And it doesn’t have to be complicated. 

Step #1: Start with the End in Mind

When you’re ready to build a funnel, start by answering the question, what do I want someone to do? 

For this example, we will say that you want someone to sign up for your course. 

However, typically when they first find out about you, they aren’t quite ready to buy. So we’ll use a funnel to help them along the way. 

Step #2: List What Prospects Need to Know

Make a list of what prospects may need to know before they buy. To help, I’ll get you started:

• What is the course?
• What is the transformation it promises?
• Why should I learn from this instructor?
• Can I learn from this instructor?
• What is the cost?
• Have others been through this course and gotten success?
• Can I do it?
• Do I have time?
• Does this course solve my problem?
• What makes this course different?

Step #3: Create a Sequence of Emails to Answer These Questions

This is the fun part… come up with a set of emails that connects with your potential students and answers these questions. 

Choose which of the questions you’ll answer inside your funnel and which ones you’ll answer on your course sales page. 

Step #4: Get Started with a Freebie

Think about the journey of the potential customer, and design a freebie that gets them started down the path. 

Your freebie won’t get them all the way to the finish line, but it does give them a solution to an early piece of the puzzle. 

To keep this simple, consider sharing a one-page resource guide or list of the best tools. 

Everyone wants to know the best tools, and you can create the “Top 7 Tools to _____” list pretty easily as the expert. 

One essential tip: your freebie must be related to your course. It needs to be a piece of the puzzle in the problem you are solving (and not some random list). Connect the dots for your future student. 

(For example, I have a webinar checklist I give away. But that would be a terrible freebie for my 24 Hour Course Creator course. A much better freebie would be the Top 7 Tools for Creating an Online Course.)

Step #5: Create the Emails

Use your email newsletter software to set up the series of emails. Typically this is a “campaign” or an “autoresponder”. 

Remember you want to nurture (and not nag!) your potential students. 

Consider using some version of the following emails:

1. Download and Welcome Email – to give them the freebie and welcome them to your list.
2. Problem Email – to talk more about the problem your course solves and hint at your solution.
3. Education Emails – to educate your prospect about solutions (for example, if I were selling a funnel course, this email would be educational and would also share why they should learn from me).
4. Case Study Emails – to talk about others who have been through your course and the results they received. Make sure you include a helpful lesson or two (and don’t just brag about your students). 
5. Offer Emails – to describe your program and ask them to sign up.

You may need to experiment a bit with the order and sequence of these emails, but try to write them as if you were talking to your prospect in a live conversation. 

Step #6: Design the Pages

Your next step is to design the pages for your funnel. 

You’ll need:

• Landing page to sign people up for your freebie. 
• Thank you page once they have signed up. 
• Sales page to sell your course.

Depending on how much time you have, you may just want to write the content for these pages in a Google doc, and hire someone from Fiverr to help you get the tech part finished. 

Your email newsletter tool might have the functionality to create the landing page and thank you page, but if not, there is a new tool called GrooveFunnels that right now is available for free (this is a deal! I pay $450 a year for my landing page software). And it integrates with many of the most commonly used email newsletter tools. 

So there you have it – the six steps you need to create your funnel. And remember, we want to “fail fast or succeed”. So put your first funnel out there, see what works and what doesn’t, and change it. Constant improvement really is necessary! So don’t be disappointed if your first attempt doesn’t get results. Just keep tweaking and improving your funnel until you get the results you want.  

Now Take Action…

Get the One Funnel Away Training

In January, I signed up for Russell Brunson’s One Funnel Away challenge because I wanted to be able to test-drive it for you… to find out if it would be helpful for you. 

I wanted to know if it would cut down the number of times you need to fail. 

And it will…. if you do it, step-by-step, day by day. It’s set up as a 30-day challenge with assignments each day. 

Here’s what I loved about the training:

• Russell’s training on creating your offers, your hooks and your stories. This is priceless. 
• Russell’s training on getting your offer in front of the right people. 
• The step-by-step, day-by-day process they put together. 

And you know I like to tell you exactly how it is. There was one thing I didn’t like – the platform they used to host the training made it really hard to find the lessons. But if you can have patience with that, you will learn a LOT from this training. 

The next *One Funnel Away* challenge starts soon. You should be in it. 

So you don’t have to fail 150 times!

(And I got a great question this week from Melissa – she was wondering if she did the challenge, does she have to sign up for Clickfunnels? 

The answer is No, you don’t have to use Clickfunnels. The funnel training from Russell and the bonuses will work with any tools you have. The training does show you how to use Clickfunnels for implementation so you can just use your own tools to do the same stuff. You’ll need some kind of landing page software and an email newsletter software.)

👉 Go to http://www.CourseCreatorsHQ.com/one-funnel-away to sign up and get started. 

Podcast 9: Kajabi Review – 6 Reasons You Should Choose Kajabi

On this episode of the podcast, I share a review of Kajabi and 6 reasons why you should use Kajabi to host your course – and a couple reason why you wouldn’t!

(And if you do want to sign up for Kajabi, let me know. My bonus this month is free coaching with me!) 

Listen in here (or your favorite podcast player – just search for Course Creators HQ.)