If you’re looking to generate targeted traffic and sales from Twitter, there may be a few simple strategies and tactics you may not have considered.

In the direct response world, we have a proven tested formula to generate profits through the use of a marketing funnel.

What is it? And more importantly, how can it help you to reap huge rewards through Twitter?

Let’s look at the marketing funnel itself first.

With the “marketing funnel” model, a person makes a small purchase (yes, supplying an email or physical mailing address is considered a payment of sorts), and over time you “funnel” your customers towards more and more high-end products and services, step by step, by selling them to the next level.

So by “funneling” your prospects into paying customers, you’re setting the stage to provide tremendous value to them. So much value, in fact, that your customers begin to look forward to receiving content from you.

And with that value comes the opportunity to take your customer to the next level, where you can sell higher-end goods to them.

And this isn’t a one-sided benefit. Both you and your customer benefit by this relationship. Your customer benefits when he gets even more value…something he really wants. You’re helping him in that regard.

And of course you benefit as well by slowly graduating your customer to your “A” list, where you can provide even more value.

Take a look at a typical online marketing funnel:

Let’s walk through each step of the funnel to gain a clearer understanding of how the funnel works.

1. Your prospect enters the funnel by responding to your incentive or “ethical bribe” to raise their hand and give you their contact information. He is now a lead on your mailing list.
2. You continue to provide value to him, but you want him to make the transition from a non-paying lead to a paying customer. As a result, you give him a front-end, or entry-level, offer on a product or service directly related to the value he received when opting to join your list. You may make the offer at a breakeven or even an initial loss, because you know you will more than make up for it on back-end sales.
3. If he doesn’t purchase your front-end product, you continue to sell him on the same offer or different front-end offers—ideally both, because he just may not be in the market for your initial offer at this time, but may be later.
4. When he purchases your front-end product, he is now a customer. You are now “warming him up” to doing further business with your company. Once he sees that you over deliver on your promise of value, he’ll feel more comfortable buying from you again.
5. You want to graduate him to the next price level, so you make him an offer on a higher-end product or service related to the entry-level one he already bought. If he doesn’t buy, you follow a similar approach as step 3 above. That is, you continue to make him offers, but this time on the mid-level product.
6. Once he purchases your mid-level product, you move onto the high-end product. He is now conditioned to buy from you with confidence and without worry, because he knows what an outstanding value you’ve been giving him. He’s seen the results of your products first hand, so his buyer’s resistance is reduced. He is now on his way to becoming one of your “A” clients, the 20 percent responsible for 80 percent of your profits.
7. You continue to sell him higher ticket items and provide even greater value to him.

The steps I have listed are a very simplified approach. You’ll soon see that there is much more to it if you truly want to be successful in the long run, but it’s not rocket science by a long shot.

For instance, each time he purchases from you, you’ll want to do up-sells and cross-sells. Up-sells are more expensive finishes, grades, styles, or a bigger version of the product (“Do you want to super-size that?”).

Cross-sells are other items that go along with the product. Something complementary. A carrying case, extra paper, ink, blank media, whatever (“Do you want fries with that?”)

After he buys, you’ll want to ask him for referrals, a testimonial, and do everything in your power to make sure he is satisfied. You want him to be satisfied so he’ll buy again of course, but you want also want to reduce your refund rate and gain his endorsement.

You want him to tell all of his friends and colleagues about his positive experience with your company.

You probably know when someone has a bad experience with a company they’re more likely to tell others about it than when they have a pleasant experience. You want to encourage them to tell all about their pleasant experience.

And then you’ll want to develop some kind of residual income, where they pay you so much a month or year forever until they cancel. Not everyone will do that, of course, but your “A” customers probably will.

And you can create different residual levels, just like you have different product levels, all at different price points.

Notice how the width of the funnel gets smaller towards the bottom? The width represents the number of customers at that height, or stage, of the funnel. However, the smaller the width, the more money they are spending with you.

In fact, the amount of money they spend with you can be thought of as being inversely proportionate to the width of the funnel (more or less). So the 20 percent responsible for 80 percent of your profits are at the bottom of the funnel.

The other 80 percent that give you 20 percent of your profits are towards the top. This distribution is a general observation and not a mathematical absolute. It might be 70/30 or 90/10 or somewhere in between.

This is no accident. Your “A” customers, your biggest advocates, are in the smallest segment of your customer base…the bottom of the funnel (but the top in terms of the value you deliver to them).

When thinking in terms of this approach, which is a proven tested model, you might begin to wonder how the same logic could apply in terms of a social media site like Twitter, where the ultimate goal is to gain targeted traffic and ultimately more sales.

Here’s a simplified view of what such a “Twitter Funnel” might look like:

So what does this all mean, and how do you use it for maximum success?

Let me show you some ways I initiate the funnel with respect to Twitter, in a short video I’ve prepared for you. the video is actually the second in a series of my Twitter Traffic Swarm system.

For more on the Twitter Traffic Swarm system, check out the other videos and resources in the series.

No related posts.

I’ve been working on a highly-experimental Twitter project that I’ll be revealing very shortly. I’ll have more details for you soon, plus a video I’m working on right now.

In the meantime, if you haven’t followed me on Twitter yet, you might catch a glimpse—a small piece of it—by watching what happens after you follow.

Here’s another clue:

Check out this post I made on Tony Blake’s forum (and take a second to register while you’re there—I highly recommend it!)

No related posts.

I’m giving away copies of my popular website software “Power Effects v2″ to all my readers, as well as my followers on Twitter.

There’s no opt-in and nothing to buy. I will offer you the option to get the Master Resale Rights version for a song, but only if you wish.

You can find all the details, plus a demo of the software here.

Why am I doing this? What’s the catch?

No catch, other than my asking you to “Retweet” and let folks know about this freebie.

And my motive is transparent and rather simple.

I want to meet and network with new folks on Twitter, and I figure the best way to do it is by giving away something of value with no strings attached.

Perhaps later, when you’re interested in copywriting services or any of the marketing products of mine, you’ll remember me and decide to do business with me.

Plus—I’m doing a case study here (you’ll see what I’m doing with Twitter) that I’ll talk about in the next few days, so you’ll want to keep an eye out.

But that’s it in a nutshell.

Enjoy!

No related posts.

Yesterday I downloaded a couple chapters of Joel’s Comm’s Twitter Power book, and I noticed something interesting on that site.

Joel had a link you could click that would send you to Twitter with a tweet already filled in for you. He obviously did that so his visitors could tweet and spread the word about his book promotion, but up until then, I had never seen that strategy used before.

It’s something that’s certainly worth testing. Given Twitter’s non-pitch atmosphere, I’d recommend only trying it to encourage tweets about pure content or freebie giveaways, though.

What do you think? Feel free to test it out by tweeting about this blog post, which should definitely have mass Twitter appeal and does fit the pure content criteria.

(To see what I did, just right-click the link above, select “Copy Link Location” if using Firefox or “Copy Shortcut” if using Internet Explorer, then paste it in notepad or any text editor.

By the way, lots of useful information and resources in Joel’s book. You can see some of the changes I already made to my Twitter profile as a result (you can also connect with me on Twitter there).

No related posts.

A few days ago I wrote about how I finally jumped on the Facebook bandwagon.

Since then as you probably know, I’ve been connecting with lots of people for networking and friendship purposes.

It’s a great way to build relationships and get in contact with other like-minded business folks, any one of who could be the missing link in a future (or present) project of yours.

So if you haven’t done so, I suggest you start looking at your own clients and associates and begin hooking up with them on Facebook as well.

I’m not talking about a “personal social” setup similar to MySpace and other sites. After all, you can set up your Facebook profile to be as professional-looking as you like.

I see some big things ahead for Facebook, BUT…

There’s another phenomenon that’s been around for a bit, but lately seems to be taking the online world by storm.

I’m talking about Twitter.

If you’re not familiar with Twitter, it’s sort of a “mini-blog” you can publish in real-time, as you go about doing things in your business and life in general.

In fact, Twitter originally started as a platform to text messages from your mobile phone to let the world at large know what you were doing at any given moment.

I know it sounds kind of silly at first glance. In fact, I originally thought so too. But after seeing what some of my friends and colleagues were doing with it, I can tell that it has the power to be a tremendous business and marketing tool.

Unlike where your email subscribers and clients get your email messages (which have to hurdle their way through spam filters and other obstacles), in Twitter your friends and associates can choose to “follow” what you’re doing and get targeted messages delivered to the device of their choosing. No more spam filters.

You can also follow what other marketers are doing as they post links to videos and other resources in real-time.

In fact, you can even link Twitter and Facebook together (just do a search on Facebook for “Twitter” for the Facebook application that let’s you do that.. or go here).

And like Facebook, Twitter doesn’t cost a nickel to join or use.

So if you’re not on Twitter, I’d check it out. If you want to see what I’m up to in my day-to-day activities and get information I don’t make available anywhere else, you can connect with me here.

Just click on the “Follow” button under my picture.

And if you or anyone you know would like to connect with me on Facebook as well, you can do so here.

No related posts.

Ok, yesterday I wrote about my new adventures with Facebook. Looks like I’ll have much more to write about in the days ahead about Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, among others.

But something interested happened today that I want to share with you. You may slap yourself in the forehead and say, “John, you idiot, this is old news.”

That may be, but this is the first time I’ve noticed it.

Here’s what I mean…

We all know about PPC ads scraping content off your web page for relevancy so it knows which ad to run.

After all, if my page is about skiing and the ad shown from Google or another provider is about golfing, well, it’s just not going to get clicks.

So we’re in agreement that the ad provider needs to “scrape” your page to learn what it’s about, right?

But what if you posted a link to another site that your visitors might be interested in? In the old days,you COULD have a site about skiing and a link to a golf site if you wanted, and all the ads would show skiing-related ads.

But (and here’s the “duh” part you might be screaming at me as you read this)… if those ads can go and check out your links and scrape the content there, dont’cha think it has a better chance of providing relevant ads?

Well, I’ve long suspected that was the natural evolution of these things, but I finally got confirmation today.

While I’d love to give you all the details right here in this blog post, it’s necessary for me to send you to this thread on Michel Fortin’s forum to see what I’m talking about. Look for my post on that thread and note the image I posted. I promise you it’ll all become clear once you read this.

No related posts.