Who doesn’t love the idea of making money in their sleep? 🤑
Creating a business model where you can not only help people but also make passive income is the dream, right? I know it was my dream that I’ve turned into a reality.
And guess what? You can too. If you’re wondering where to start or how to make this happen in your business, I’m going to share my method with you and how I’ve managed to make money while I sleep (and walk my puppy!) in my business using evergreen funnels.
Say goodbye to the days of secretly wishing you can do it, and grab a pen – we’re going to make this happen! 💪🏼
What Is an Evergreen Sales Funnel?
An evergreen sales funnel is simply a set of automated steps that guide a customer from initial awareness of your course to purchase. It’s designed to be “evergreen” – always running in the background, so that you don’t have to manually start and stop it.
An evergreen sales funnel doesn‘t have to be complicated and can be very easy to set up. Of course, you can dive deeper and create a more complex funnel as you get used to funnels and the process behind it, but you definitely don’t have to start out with all the bells and whistles.
Here’s an example of a simple evergreen funnel to give you an idea of how easy it can actually be:
- You post something on social media, asking people to take action and visit your opt-in page
- People land on your freebie opt-in page and then sign up by leaving their email addresses
- They are then added to your welcome email sequence where you send them more information and invite them to visit your sales page
- They will then land on your sales page that showcases an offer for your online course
- Purchasing of your offer will then take place, and the funnel has succeeded!
Nothing scary about that, right? It’s just guiding your followers or visitors through your content, through interacting with you, to your offer. So, let’s dive into what you need to set up your own evergreen funnel, step by step.
1. Create an Evergreen Offer
The first thing you need to sell on evergreen is an offer – a digital product like an online course. Once you’ve created your online course, I strongly recommend that you launch it live at least once before selling it on evergreen.
Launching live means that you have a launch start date, and an open cart period, and then you close the cart for everybody – this is the opposite of evergreen. Launching something live normally gets you better results and the conversion rates are higher because there’s more energy and excitement around your launch.
This is what you need when you start! You want to hear the questions your potential customers have, you want to interact with them and you want to get comfortable with presenting and talking about your offer and perfect it before trying to sell it in your sleep.
Another thing to consider when selling/designing your offers on evergreen is the ability/inability to offer help and solutions to people who are looking for that support at that specific moment in time. For example, one of my clients is teaching prenatal yoga for pregnancy. It doesn’t make sense for her to just launch her course twice per year and in between tell the women who are interested “Oh so sorry, the cart is closed, come back in six months”, because they are pregnant, they are on their own deadline and in six months they might already have had their baby, right? So, she needs an evergreen version of her online course.
This is something that I teach you inside my program Blissful Sales Accelerator: how to create an evergreen version of your online course, how to set up evergreen funnels, downsells, upsells, do sales calls, etc.
2. Set Up Sales Pages
Once you have your online course set up in a way that works for your students, so that they can get started at any time, you need two sales pages. One sales page with the full price (this is what you link to on your website), and one sales page with a bonus offer (this link is only for people in your funnel).
Linking to your offerings on your website, from my experience, rarely works. It’s important to have them on there, but people need to be in the right mindset before they buy, and they need an incentive like a discount that’s only available for a short time. This is what an evergreen sales funnel does.
3. Create Your Funnel
Next, you set up a simple funnel like an email sales funnel, and sell your evergreen course to your new subscribers in your welcome email sequence. It’s even better if they’ve signed up for your freebie that’s related to your online course because signing up for the course is the next logical step for them to take to dive deeper into the topic you teach.
In your emails, you want to continue providing value, building trust, and developing a relationship with your lead up until the final moment before they convert. If your new subscriber has been opening and reading your emails, the hard work is done. Now you just have to make an offer.
The key is to add urgency in a way that’s authentic and not pushy. Tell them that you have a special offer just for them that you think they could be interested in. Talk about the results they would get and share your special offer that’s only for them. Don’t be dishonest and say your course is only open for enrollment for the next 48 hours, for example, if this isn’t the case and you’re just trying to get them to buy.
You can follow your offer up with more testimonials, a gentle reminder to join, tell them about your 1:1 services, etc. There are no rules – the order of the emails doesn’t matter. You can send a daily email or spread it out slightly to every other day.
The only thing that IS important is to make an offer. Too often we leave our potential customers alone, trying to figure out how they can get the help they are looking for. Your job is to guide your new subscribers to the offer that is right for them, so you can help them and make money.
You’ll also want to pay close attention to your conversion rates – these will guide you to continue to tweak your evergreen content until you get it just right. Do things step by step and take your time, keep it simple, and be patient. I promise it will be worth it in the end!
4. Drive Traffic to Your Funnel
Your funnel won’t work if no one’s in it, and this is where a lot of people slip up. If you’re complaining because nobody signs up for your freebie or your product, my first question is always how many people have actually seen it? How much traffic do you have? How many visits do you have on your sales page?
If you only have 20 page views on your sales page for example, and nobody buys, it’s probably not the quality of your offer – your numbers are too low and you need to work on getting your offer in front of the eyes of more people.
There are three methods for this. Firstly, utilize free marketing tools like social media/platforms that work as search engines like YouTube, Pinterest, etc. You’ll need to create content, show up consistently, and build a content library for your audience to access.
I always recommend creating content that has longevity first and can work for you in years to come (I have a blog post from 2017 that still brings me website traffic). This kind of content could be a YouTube video, a podcast episode, a blog post, etc.
After creating this content, you can then repurpose it onto your social media platforms so that you don’t get caught in the trap of feeling like you’re on a hamster wheel trying to consistently churn out fresh content for every platform!
The next method you can try is getting in front of other people’s audiences by pitching to be on their podcasts, inviting them to collaborations, venture workshops, master classes, etc. This can also help you with your content creation because they might want to then do partnerships with you and do guest blog posts, or be on your podcast!
Paid advertising is the final method for increasing your traffic and not something I would recommend doing when you’re first getting started. From my experience, you need to have a proven offer that you’ve already sold to people who know, like, and trust you, before trying to sell it to strangers.
This is the final step of getting your evergreen funnel to run like clockwork – creating consistent traffic. Remember, you don’t need fancy tools or webinars, simply create a version of your online course, and add it to an email sequence, tweaking as you go.
If you’re ready to make passive income and learn all about creating, selling, and launching digital offers, I’d love to invite you into my program Blissful Biz Incubator.
Inside the Blissful Biz Incubator, I teach you how to design your brand, grow your audience and create and launch digital offers like an online course.
What really sets it apart is that you get a ton of video trainings to help you implement things and take action, but you also get 1:1 coaching, group coaching, and personal feedback and critique for work you submit.
Go to www.susannerieker.com/application and get all the details.
