Get rich quick scammers have long been making the process of building a successful business sound easy since way before the Internet.
The pitch has always been: "Just buy MY SYSTEM, and you won't have any more problems because MY SYSTEM will make millions for you."
While there may be a powerful persuasion lesson buried in the hype within that statement, making the system sound like the magic solution that does all the work…
The truth is often far different.
As someone who has personally bootstrapped a business that generates millions of dollars online from a $95.40 investment...
My experiences have proven that it takes a lot more than one funnel to create true, lasting success with an online business.
This post will compare and contrast the difference between the "one funnel away" sales message and "reality" with the goal of helping you understand exactly what it takes to create the business of your dreams.
Because YOU CAN build a highly lucrative business that will give you ultimate time, location and financial FREEDOM!
And it's worth a hat tip that Russell Brunson is incredibly smart marketer, and I highly recommend his free book.
Simply stated, building a business online is not as simple as the marketers selling you courses and software make it sound.
And in this post, I’m going to explain the one-funnel away challenge, and help you separate the truth from the lies.
I’m also going to reveal to you the truthful “7 not so simple steps” to REAL success with an online funnel.
No more buying software, courses, or memberships promising fast success or passive income online.
There is a lot of smart but hard work to achieve a lifestyle you thought was only a dream world if you stay in the game long enough.
So with that, let’s get started.
What is the “One Funnel Away Challenge” Concept?
The ‘One Funnel Away’ concept is the idea that you are ‘one funnel away from making 6 figures with your online business.’
In other words, gurus will try to get you to buy their ‘one-funnel’ systems by making you believe that it is simple and easy to become profitable online if you use the right funnel.
But unfortunately, this kind of talk packs in a lot of hype!
Is the One Funnel Away Challenge Idea Just Hype, or Not?
This idea that there is 1 thing you need to make life-changing income from home is hype.
The simple, dirty truth of the matter is there are actually 7 steps to succeeding online… not 1.
Trust me! I’ve grown my business to multiple millions of dollars in profits THE HARD WAY. I had to learn by making mistakes and adapting… and I can tell you right now that you cannot create instant success in one step by implementing a certain type of funnel.
Why Just One Funnel is NOT Enough
One funnel is not enough because the funnel is only one small piece of the larger puzzle. Gurus would like you to believe that their funnel will solve all of your problems.
But if you buy into this gimmick, you will only be making them a lot of money! They are trying to sell you on a system that is not complete.
And to prove it, I’m going to give you the TRUTH about what you need to succeed.
So let’s put the myths to bed and figure out what you actually need to do to make money as a digital marketer online.
Success Lies in These Metrics
These are the most essential metrics that you could possibly focus on when it comes to a successful online digital marketing business.
Audience
You need to focus first and foremost on your audience. Have you properly identified them? Are you helping them? Are you creating real value that will make their lives better?
If not, no funnel is going to make your business successful.
Traffic
Without traffic, your funnel won’t even be discovered by potential buyers. So if you don’t focus on this key metric, you won’t sell a single unit or convert a single visitor.
Offer and Delivery
Your offer and delivery must not only solve your customer’s main problem… they must also deliver on what you are promising.
If you can’t create real value and transform lives, you need to go back to the drawing board… and I will explain ‘why’ in just a moment!
7 Steps to Create REAL Success Online
These are the 7 steps that fake gurus don’t bother to tell you about! They’ll try to make it sound like all you need is ‘the perfect funnel’ to make money online. But this is simply hype, and not the truth at all.
They are just trying to sell you a product!
Here are the 7 steps that I have personally seen proven over-and-over again in my own online digital marketing business. My wife and I have taken our business to the 6-figure mark, and I can absolutely tell you that there is more to the process than just a single or 1-page funnel.
Here are the steps.
1. Build an audience with an urgent need for a solution
Your customer base is going to be comprised of the audience you build. But in order to build this audience base, you are going to need to define exactly who you are trying to reach.
So take a moment and think about who you are writing or speaking to.
What are their challenges? What are their needs? What is keeping them awake at night?
This audience has a problem that you can help to solve. And when you identify this problem, you can move on to step 2.
Have you identified the problem and determined what to sell?
2. Solve their problem
It is one thing to identify a problem. But it is quite another to solve it! Back-engineer the needs of your audience, and find out what can be done to help them with their problem.
The problem with the ‘one funnel’ hype is that it isn’t helping anyone. These gurus want you to spend money on their product. They are not actually trying to teach you how to help other people find success.
The only way to build organic web traffic, gain an audience, and help other people is through content.
Yes, you can sell affiliate products or even your own widget/gadget… but if you don’t provide real value to help your audience, you are going to be in for a serious day of reckoning!
Can you successfully solve the problem your target market has?
3. Gain their trust
This may be the most important part of the entire process.
And yet… a funnel has nothing to do with this!
Prove to your audience that you’re a real person. Prove to them that you know what you’re talking about. Prove to them that you can actually, legitimately help them.
How?
By creating valuable content!
For my wife’s meditation niche business, we spent years creating videos, blog posts, and other content to establish her as an authority in the market. We put out content for free that was actually helping people.
Then, after a few years, when we released our first membership program, we already had this audience of people who trusted us and knew that what we were doing was changing lives.
No funnel could have built this kind of trust. It takes valuable content, hard work, and real results to do that.
Do you have an email list that trusts you? Do you have Facebook fans, YouTube followers, Blog readers, Instagram fans that know, like, and trust you?
Have you figured out how to deliver value?
4. Get your copywriting skills dialed in
Believe it or not, most of my wife’s sales on her website have come from WordPress posts… not sales pages.
Copywriting is the ability to communicate your value proposition in a way that triggers action.
This could be a sales letter, a sales video, a blog post, etc. You need to be able to create content that is going to live on a page, attract attention, communicate about your audience’s needs, and deliver your message effectively.
Funnels are a part of copywriting, but they are only a very small part.
You don’t want to create a ‘pressure cooker’ moment for your audience. When they visit your site, you want to be able to capture their attention with a story and show you are willing (and trying) to provide real value free of charge.
Sure, you may offer a product… but by offering so much value for free as well, you are showing them that you value the relationship more than you value a one-time purchase from them.
This helps to build up that trust that we were just talking about, and a one-funnel concept does not account for any of this.
Do you know what copywriting is? Have you read the best copywriting books?
Did you know the One Funnel Away Challenge Sales Page Has 19,783 Words Written on the page?
Can you do that?
5. Have your tech all set up
There are a few technical needs that you MUST have in place if you really want to potentially earn money through your skills as a digital marketer.
And one of them is a shopping cart. At some point, you are going to need to collect payment from customers in exchange for what you’re pitching in your offer.
Obviously, the recommendation from the 1 Funnel Away challenge is to use ClickFunnels for this.
Personally I prefer to use a Clickfunnels alternative.
Either option is difficult if you are new, because they both have learning curves.
Such is life!
On WordPress, there are plugins out there to help and a wide variety of developers who can customize WP to do anything you'd like.
One of my favorites is called the ‘eStore plugin.’ It’s created by a company called Tips and Tricks HQ, and it costs $49 to buy it. That’s it!
It is the simplest shopping cart I’ve ever used,
Currently, I use two different carts, called Thrivecart and Samcart. I use both of them in different situations.
6. Deliver on your promise
It is one thing to use your copywriting skills to sell your product to customers. But it is quite another thing to create a product that actually delivers what you have promised!
Craft an offer that will solve your audience’s problem - and then deliver on it.
Help people through the process of transformation. This is what people want. Overhyping products that are not actually going to help people in their life is a bad move.
It will, more often than not, result in higher refund rates, and people will realize that you were actually just trying to sell a product instead of trying to affect real, positive change in the lives of your audience.
Have you figured out all of the solutions your audience needs to get results? Does your course, membership program, or guide solve these problems?
7. Drive traffic
At some point, in some way, you MUST be able to drive traffic to your website.
This is how you get people to actually see your offer… and single-funnel systems absolutely do not take this into account.
A lot of these systems rely on running ad campaigns that bring rubbish, non-targeted traffic through your website anyway.
Personally, I have found that organic, pre-qualified traffic, built up from two to three years of content production (through a blog, podcast, or YouTube channel) is the best way to build a digital marketing business and make it successful in the long term.
You can then use this traffic to build an Email List, and that is a HUGE tool that you can also use to go on and market your offers to people who will actually legitimately be interested in what you are trying to sell.
When it comes to high-quality traffic, the word you want to keep in mind is RELATIONSHIP.
If you are not cultivating an audience and nurturing a relationship with that audience through valuable organic content, then you’re going to struggle when the time comes to pitch your offer.
The more trust you’ve built up with your traffic (the more of your content they have consumed and found truly helpful), the more likely they are to buy when you release a product or introduce an offer.
Do you know how to scale Facebook advertising? Have you figured out how to get free traffic?
Where and How to ACTUALLY Get Traffic - What Fake Gurus Never Told You
The main thing that the fake gurus will never tell you is that making money online is a process that involves a full spectrum of mechanisms and metrics.
Do you remember when I promised to reveal the secret ingredient that has proven to work successfully in my own business?
Well, here it is. You cannot just use a sales funnel to sell your products to customers. You need to use a full-fledged approach that takes all aspects of the giant spectrum of the customer experience into account.
To put it in very simple terms, you need to follow all 7 of these steps. You need to…
- Build an audience
- Help them solve their problems
- Earn their trust
- Dial in your copywriting skills
- Set up your tech correctly
- Deliver on your promises
- And start driving traffic
Proven Successful Online Business Model
Do funnels work at all?
Of course they do!
But that’s not the big question.
The big question is this...
Can you really help people to solve the real problems they have? And are you doing it with integrity, with their best interests in mind?
Your ability to communicate effectively before the sale and to actually deliver on your promises are the clutch-points that will have the greatest bearing on whether or not you are a success in the digital marketing world.
The tech is actually the easy part.
How to Incorporate Facebook Ads to Your Funnel - Success Guaranteed!
Facebook ads can absolutely help to bring more traffic into your website… but you can’t rely on the gurus to tell you how to do it, because they are almost always going to show you outdated methods that worked 6 to 8 months ago… not methods that are going to get you traffic right now.
I have two different playlists on my channel that can help you to figure out how to make Facebook ads work for you.
The most simple and lowest risk way to figure out Facebook advertising is to start playing with $5 a day on Facebook.
As you dial in those ads and run tests, you will start to see greater success… but that is the only way to guarantee that you will figure out what is going to work the best.
The Power of Testing to Achieve Success in Your Funnel
I cannot overstate the importance of testing to achieve success with your funnel! I talk about this in a lot of my content, and I can tell you with 100% certainty that testing different funnel models is an absolute requirement if you want to maximize your success in digital marketing.
You simply cannot know what is actually going to work without performing effective split testing on everything!
Conclusion
At the end of the day, we all want to be successful. We all want to live life on our own terms, and we all want to prosper while doing it.
And if you are like me, you also want to help people along the way at the same time.
Digital marketing has helped me to achieve all of this… but I can absolutely tell you that a ‘one funnel’ system is NOT the answer. It is a lie, it is false-hype, and it will not live up to its promises.
Real success online takes 5 very difficult but life changing success steps.
If you want more information on how to make funnels work for you in a way that will actually bring success, drop a comment and let’s talk about it! I love sharing my knowledge with others, and I am always up for answering any questions and responding to your comments!
Thanks for reading! Now, get out there and CRUSH IT!!!
