Episode 41. Your First Funnel

EPISODE 41: In this episode of the Creative Spark podcast, we take a closer look at the steps inside my new course, the Creative Funnel Formula and see how easy it is to build and launch your first funnel.

As a creative professional, it's easy to get trapped trading time for dollars. You've probably spent years honing your craft and learning practical skills and now the only way you know how to get paid is by seeking out client work. The problem is, your customers view what you do as a fee-for-service and pay you for your time, not your results or expertise.

"You're only one funnel away from financial freedom"—Russell Brunson

I was a freelance illustrator for 13 years. I was fully booked and illustrated children's books for up to 10 hours a day. When I wasn't illustrating, I felt guilty that I should be in the studio. If I took a vacation, I didn't get paid. If I got sick, I didn't get paid. Heck, with some of my deadbeat clients, I delivered the work on time and STILL didn't get paid.

Eventually, I hit burnout and put down my paintbrush forever. I worked in a design studio for many years after that, and while the regular hours and paycheck were great, I still found that I hit an income ceiling, and with design services being devalued every year, there was no sign of a pay rise any time soon.

That's when I began investigating the world of passive income and creative entrepreneurship. The rise of the internet meant that businesses could be built online and niche audiences found in every nook and cranny of the globe.

I no longer need to service clients in my neighbourhood; I could package my expertise and sell it to anyone with an internet connection. The best thing about being a creative entrepreneur is I could channel my creativity into branding, web graphics, sales pages, adverts, social media, and all the communication assets needed to turn my audience into customers. I soon learned that being a creative professional, I was perfectly positioned to build all the steps of an automated sales and marketing funnel.

Creative services are constantly being devalued by templates and online tools, which produce similar results to the untrained eye. If you are competing on time or price with your creative services, it's a race to the bottom.

Following these simple steps will help you plan, build, and launch your first Sales and Marketing Funnel

STEP ONE: Structure your results into a signature framework

People pay money to solve problems, and the more pressing the problem, the more valuable the solution. This is why T-shirts sell for $6, and weight loss programs cost hundreds.

Rather than being known as the expert in your industry and having to compete with all the other so-called experts, by looking at where your skills, passions, and interests overlap, you can create a unique signature framework. This framework becomes the thing you are known for, and there is no competition. Even if multiple people are sharing the same types of content and topics, your signature method is what sets you apart.

The Creative Funnel Formula has been structured as a nine-step framework precisely what is being unpacked here.

STEP TWO: Identify a customer avatar for each step or your framework

If your signature solution has nine steps, and each one of those steps solves a specific problem, you potentially have nine customer avatars to target with your content.

If we take this nine-step creative funnel framework, for example, one potential customer might be struggling to create their perfect lead magnet, so step three of my framework would be most beneficial to them right now.

Another potential customer might be struggling to repurpose their content effectively, so step seven would be most helpful.

Most online marketing courses tell you to invent one ideal customer avatar for all of your content and products, but quite frankly, it's impossible and too vague. Instead, it's much easier to get laser-focused when you solve multiple problems with multiple steps of your framework and target various audiences simultaneously.

STEP THREE: Create an irresistible freebie

In the online marketing space, it's easy to be suspicious of people you don't know, so a freebie, or a lead magnet, is the perfect way to give your potential customer a "quick win" but also for them to get to know you, and what you have to offer.

For this step of the Creative Funnel Formula, decide which action your persona can take, which is the most valuable to them and most straightforward for you to solve, then package that solution into a freebie your persona will love. Think of this problem as a painkiller, not a vitamin. The best problems are painful ones, not "nice to haves".

STEP FOUR: Create an automated sales and marketing funnel

This is where the rubber meets the road. A funnel consists of three things, a traffic source, an offer, and a conversion event.

In the simplest form, a funnel might consist of an Instagram post about your free eBook, a link to grab the eBook, a web page that captures the name and email address, and then an automated email triggered to send them the eBook.

The traffic source in this example is Instagram, the offer is the free eBook, and the conversion event occurs when a person decides to type in their name and email address in exchange for the eBook.

Obviously, this gets more fun (and complicated) when there are multiple traffic sources, say Facebook ads, Google search traffic, blog posts, a podcast, YouTube videos, all talking about your audience's problems and how to solve them. There might also be multiple offers to solve numerous issues. Multiple landing pages with up-sells and down-sells to other products and multiple email sequences nurture your audience in different ways, depending on how they entered your funnel and what actions they've taken inside your funnel.

In the Creative Funnel Formula, we keep it nice and simple. Start with an opt-in funnel, and start building your audience. Once your funnel is automated, you can keep filling your email list on autopilot whilst you begin creating your products and adding in the up-sells. At the very beginning, EVERY creative business should start with list-building.

STEP FIVE: Craft your funnel assets

Once you've created your barebones funnel, it's time to craft the words and images that help unify the different pieces. Your funnel should lead someone on a journey where they take actions at various steps along the way.

The words of your funnel should help guide them on that journey, and the images help unify all the different pages, so they're not aware they're jumping around from WordPress to Squarespace to Mailchimp and so on.

The process should be invisible and seamless. This is where your words and pictures come in—branding at its most creative.

STEP SIX: Develop an ongoing content creation strategy

Now that you have chosen the avatar for your first funnel and a lead magnet, you can develop a content strategy that leverages that step of your framework.

Technically, you could build out nine funnels, all pointing to your signature framework but with multiple entry points.

For example, the person looking for help to find their niche might be attracted by an infographic of the overlap method on Pinterest and click through to read post on my about it. The person looking for help repurposing content might see a Facebook ad for the Content Genie, which is my content repurposing spreadsheet and enter my funnel that way.

Your content strategy looks at the first step you have chosen in your framework and your avatar and outlines how to attract and convert them to buy your products using targeted content.

STEP SEVEN: Repurpose your content around topic clusters

In recent years search engines have shifted away from indexing content around keywords to prioritising topic clusters instead. This means that you need to publish widely on that core topic with pillar content and cluster micro-content around that topic, which links back to your pillar content for you to establish your authority on a topic.

This is why it is vital to get strategic about your content and not just publish ideas as they come to you. By focusing all your pillar content around the nine steps of your signature framework, you can establish authority on each of those topics and create micro-content, which links back to form a cluster.

With a clear content repurposing strategy, you can leverage your content to attract people to your products and services, as well as establishing authority through search engine optimisation (SEO). I have developed a content strategy template and a content repurposing tool that lives inside the Creative Funnel Formula course to help you automate this process.

STEP EIGHT: Create your sets of launch graphics

When you are launching a new opt-in funnel using content marketing, a large amount of content needs to be created. First, you need blog posts, pillar content, podcasts, videos, Instagram carousels, and then all the micro-content that promotes it. Making all of the social media graphics gets much easier when you are strategic about it and batch create everything.

The Content Genie™ repurposes your words in order to know what pictures need to be made. I've also included matching editable Canva templates as part of the Creative Funnel Formula to help speed up the process.

STEP NINE: Launch your offering and start filling your funnel

Whether your offering is a free eBook or a $2000 course, you will need to build all the pieces of your funnel and then launch it. For most people starting out with an opt-in funnel, your launch might include: Updating all your social media links. Sprucing up your blog. Pushing the go button on your content marketing strategy.

For a high ticket offer, such as a course based on your signature framework, you might need to open a launch window and generate lots of buzz leading up to the cart open date. Then you can roll out ongoing strategies to encourage people to sign up before the cart closes. But, again, many different launch strategies depend on your niche, your audience, your stamina, the size of your team, and the value of your offering.

For your very first funnel, rolling out a one-month content marketing strategy is a great place to start. After the month is over, take stock of your goals and results, look at what worked and what didn't, optimise your funnel and then relaunch it with another month of content marketing. The Creative Funnel Formula takes you through the launch and review process step-by-step.

So that's it for the steps. Imagine waking up to a notification on your phone that you earned money while you were sleeping? How great would it feel to be valued for your expertise and paid for results rather than the time you spent?

What can you package and offer for sale online?