Today we’re going to be talking about the five top tools for funnel building. So let’s hop right into this topic. If you are ready to start building your funnels and you’ve let me listen to all these episodes that we’ve had over this past month. The first week of August, we started out with What is a Funnel Anyway?, then Why Your Funnels Leak, and finally 3 Pages Every Funnel Needs. So you’ve got the basics. Now let’s go into the tools that you need to make all of this stuff work.
So if you’re ready to start, there are just a few things you need before you can get started. Here are some of the most popular options when it comes to putting together both free and paid funnels. The first one is the one that I actually got started on way back when I first started building funnels was Leadpages.
When it comes to building opt-ins Leadpages.net is a long time, the top choice of those creating funnels, but it definitely has been giving a run for its money, with some of the latest products and services that have come out today. They’ve tracked and tested a variety of page styles to determine which ones convert best and then make it easy for you to build similar pages for your funnel. It does come with a monthly fee though. So before investing you’ll want to make sure that you can recoup your investment. Secondly, is ClickFunnels.
ClickFunnels is a more all-inclusive program. Again, it has a monthly fee, but it allows you to have your email, your funnel, your shopping cart membership area, all of that, all in one program in ClickFunnels. So, it’s a little bit more to it than just a funnel builder. And it also is going to be a little different pricing-wise, but it is a top competitor for those that want to build sales funnels.
And finally, my personal favorite is OptimizedPress, OptimizedPress is a plugin and you purchase it one time, but then you do have a yearly maintenance fee that you can, you can purchase the maintenance package. And I do that every year because then they allow you access to their directory, not a directory, but to their forums where you can ask questions and get help. And there’s a help desk. So that is invaluable if you run into problems with Optimizepress. So it is the favorite of the three-page builders or funnel builders, lead pages, click funnels, and optimized press. Then you’re going to also need to have a payment processor. And I know that this is called the top five tools, but I really couldn’t narrow it down from three down to two in the payment processors. So there’s going to be three of those as well, but two of them work extremely similarly.
So I’m going to blend those two together. So the first one is probably the most well-known payment processor that you probably have used, which is PayPal. It’s the simplest. And it allows you to take payments online for a very reasonable fee. And it can often also act as a shopping cart.
The second one is Stripe or square, Stripe and Square are both apps that you can have on your phone as well. It is a payment processor. You can send invoices, you can use it as a shopping cart. You can use it to check people out via your phone. It has many, many options, and co they’re all comparable when it comes to phase PayPal, Square, and Stripe are all very comparable when it comes to phase. So that part really doesn’t matter. It’s all about personal preference and how you, what you like about each one, because they all have the little things that are different about them, but they’re not a huge difference.
So you can say that there’s a lot of options here and that these are just the options that I personally have had experience with. And of these I out of the Leadpages and ClickFunnels and OptimizedPress, I settled on really liking and using OptimizedPress someone else may you could go and poll people that have used these different tools and someone else may vote for a different one. The same is true for payment processors. You might ask someone else, do you prefer PayPal, Stripe, or Square? And they would tell you something different. My preference there is PayPal, and I’ve used it for 14 years in business. So you’re going to get different opinions because we are all very different people, but these are the tools that you can choose from when you’re creating funnels. And then you, at the most basic level, must have one, a way to create web pages.
A simple WordPress website will feel this need with a little bit of work, but it’s a lot easier to use something such as LeadPages or OptimizePress, or ClickFunnels so that you don’t have to put in all the extra bells and whistles yourself a way to capture these email addresses is the second thing you’re going to need. And we talked about before ActiveCampaign, MailChimp, Constant Contact, or those email service providers. And then you’re going to need a shopping cart, which as I just shared, all of these payment processors can act as a shopping cart as well. And then finally, just remember to start small, build the funnel framework, as simply as you can use the tools that don’t cost you a fortune. And once you have several up and running, you’ll be able to see where you can improve and the tools available to you so that you can make your funnels convert better and work more efficiently as you build up over time.
I hope that this series on Funnels 101 has been helpful to you over the last few weeks. If you have any questions don’t ever be afraid to reach out and ask, that’s what this podcast is all about is answering your questions about being a VA, working with the VA, and all the things.
Finally, I wanted to share that next month, all during the month of September, I’m going to be doing a series called Back to the Basics. And I’m going to just answer those basic questions about getting started as a virtual assistant. So if you have a question, please submit it to me. You can even ask a question in the comments below.
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