Sales Funnel Explained - Sales Funnel Tutorial For Beginners (Step By Step)

Hey, everybody. This is Russell Brunson, and today we're talking about sales funnels, tutorials for beginners. And to do that, I want to show you guys my very first sales funnel I built as a beginner. In fact, this is a picture of me here on slide. This is me with my shaved head making a potato gun. This is the very first. One of the very first landing pages for how to make potato gun dot com. And there's a doodle of me shooting potato guns because I am a potato gun expert. But we're talking about just the basic concepts behind a sales funnel, because I think at first, people get all complicated, like, oh, it's going to be really difficult. It's going to be hard. The way you understand this is really, really simple. So here is an actual potato gun. I don't know if you can see on the camera or not, but we're gonna walk you guys through this. When I first created this with my buddy Nate Plone, I was going to college at the time. I was trying to figure out, how do I make money on the Internet? And someone said, you should sell information products. I was like, that's awesome, but I don't know anything about anything. And then that weekend was spring break, and Nate and I went and we made potato guns. Had a great weekend. And then fast forward to the next Monday. I'm back in school, sitting there, kind of like, doing the board school thing. And all of a sudden, I was like, what? Wait a minute. I know how to make a potato gun now. That's an information information. Can I create a product about that? And so I was freaking out. I went online at the time, there's a website you could search how many people were searching for different keywords. And there were 18,000 people a month searching for the phrase how to make a potato gun or potato gun plans or spud gun plans. And nobody had a product. And I was like, light bulb. I'm gonna make a product. Teaching that. So I got Nate. We went down to Home Depot. We got a video camera out. We filmed this whole thing, and we made our very first video, the very first product. And I put it online, and I didn't know how to sell anything. So I just had, like, a basic website. The website was like, hey, come and buy my thing. And then I went to this thing called Google. You guys may have heard of it before. And on Google, they had these things right here, and on the side, there were these ads. And so I would pay for the Google Ad, Someone would click on the Ad, they'd come over here, they would see this thing, and they'd be like, oh my gosh, I must buy this DVD so I can learn how to make a potato gun. And some of them would give me money. And initially, when we first started selling this, we were selling it for 37 bucks a piece. And so people would buy that. And that was my business. And I remember putting the ads up and I was spending about 10 bucks a day. Let me do the math over here. So I was spending $10 a day in ads over here. And from that, I was averaging about one sale a day. Now, as a college kid, I'm looking at this, I said, okay, I give Mr. Google 10 bucks and then he gives me back 37. Means I got $27 to put in my pocket. Next day, I gave Mr. Google 10. Bu. He gave me back 37. I put 27 in my pocket. I kept doing this and I was like, I am the smartest man alive. And then something evil happened. The guys over at Google decided they want to make more money, and so they changed their algorithms. I'm not going to get into that, but they changed their algorithms. So no longer was it like, I spend $10 and I make 37. Instead, I started spending $10. Excuse me, like, my ad costs went up, so I started spending $50 a day to make one sell. Okay, now, I'm not the sharpest tool in the toolbox, but I gave Google 50 bucks and they gave me back 37. And I was like, wait, I lost money. And then I gave him 50. And then I lost 37 after three or four days. I'm like, wait a minute, this game sucks. I'm losing. And so I turned my ads off. I'm like, I can't play this game. And I remember being frustrated. And then one day I got a call from my friends, and my friends had a similar business to me. He said, hey, Russell, I think I figured it out. I said, figured what out? He's like, I stopped. He didn't call it the funnel. He's like, I created this thing called an upsell. He called it an OTO one time offer. He said, what I did is every single person bought my product. I then upsold them something else. And I was like, well, why would I do that? He's like, well, have you ever been to McDonald's before? I'm like, yeah, you know, you go to McDonald's and you go through the drive through and you're like, hey, I want to order a Big Mac. And the Dude's like, cool. Do you want to supersize it? Do you want fries and Coke with that? And he starts offering you upsells. I'm like, yeah. He's like, if you look at the math, he's like, McDonald's actually loses money selling a Big Mac, but they make all their profit when someone buys the fries, the Coke. I was like, okay. He's like, right now you're losing money selling your potato gun dvd. You just got to sell these guys fries and the Coke, and you'll be profitable. And I was like, I still don't quite get it. He's like, what do you, like, if someone buys this? Like, what's the next thing you can do? If you were trying to serve this person, like, what's the next thing you could serve them with? I said, well, when someone buys a dvd, the most annoying thing is now they have to go to Home Depot and they have to buy the pipes and to cut them and, like, all this stuff to make this amazing gun. He said, well, what if instead of you telling them to go buy the stuff, what if you upsold them a kit that did this whole thing? I have no idea if this was going to show up on camera or not, but I thought it looked kind of cool. And so he said, make an upsell where you sell them the kit. So here is. Here is the kit. So I did some math and I started calling around, and I found these guys in Northern Idaho who actually made potato gun kits. And I would spend. I would start selling these for 197 bucks. And now this became my very first funnel ever. Again, I didn't know it was called the funnel at time, but someone would come, they click on the ad, they would see my dvd, they would buy my DVD on the next page. I would upsell, say, hey, the DVD's coming. Do you want me to ship the pipes with you too? So save you some time. Just one 97 bucks. People like that would be fantastic. And they clicked the button, they would buy it. Now, what happened if you look at the math was interesting. So Google didn't change their ad costs. They still were charging me 50 bucks a day, right? Change. But it came here, and I spent $37. So I lost some money. But then what happened is that one out of three people who bought the DVD would buy this, right? So let's say I got a bunch of clicks over here. Boom. And there's three people right here that bought the dvd. One of these people then would go and buy this for every DVD I sold. So I made $37. One. Three of those people bought this. So I take 197, I divide it by three, but do the math, that's 65 bucks. So if I take $65 plus $37, seven plus five equals 12, 910, 102. So now I was making $102 for every single person that bought the DVD. Does that make sense? Because one out of three bought the kit as well. Okay, so now I was on Google. I was paying 50 bucks a day in ads, but I was making on average $102 a day. I put $50 in, I got $102 back. And all of a sudden I started looking and I was like, I am the smartest man alive. Again, I spent $50, I get back $102. And so I was back in business. Potato gun sales were cranking. I was having a good time and I realized, wait a minute, potato markets like this little like, what other markets could I do this with? I started thinking, I said, well, what if I did this in speed reading? I met a guy who was the world's fastest reader, Howard Berg. And so we set up a funnel for speed reading. And it worked. And we said, what if we did this in the dating market? I found someone who's a dating expert. We plugged it in. What if we did this with supplements? What if we did and we started doing this and the funnels obviously tweak every single time, but the concepts are the same. And I became obsessed. And over the next five or six years, I launched over 100 different funnels in 100 different markets and became obsessed with it. And it became so much fun. But this concept of a funnel works in any business. And so what I wanted you guys to understand is this is how simple it really is. It's not some complicated thing. Sometimes we get all complicated. It's very simple. It's like we buy an ad to sell something, somebody buys that thing, then what's the next logical thing they need? Well, they bought potato gun. The next thing they need is they need a potato gun kit. And that becomes my funnel. And that's kind of where we take people through. Alright, I hope you love that tutorial about how I turn one of my hobbies into a sales funnel and turn it into money and how you can do it as well. If you don't have a ClickFunnels account yet, go to iloveclickfunnels.com, get a free trial along with a whole bunch of other really cool bonuses that you are going to love. On top of that, I want you to stay tuned because the next video is coming up here. About five seconds. I'm going to walk you guys through seven different sales funnel secrets to help increase the conversions and how much money you make on every one of your funnels. With that said, let's watch the next video. Let's go.