MBA1061 How to Create a Simple Marketing & Sales System PT1
2 Feb 2026 · 11 min
Omar Zenhom breaks down three ways to drive traffic to your website: content marketing, SEO, and paid ads. Aim to capture about 10% of visitors' emails, then nurture them with automated sequences using tools like Mailchimp or ConvertKit. Paid campaigns typically cost $200 to $300 to test, or $1,500 to $2,500 monthly with an agency.
Questions this episode answers
Approximately 10% of website visitors.
About $1,500 to $2,500 per month.
About $200–$300 for initial testing/fine-tuning.
Mailchimp, ConvertKit, and ActiveCampaign.
Brian Dean (backlinko.com) and ClickMinded (clickminded.com).
Chapters
Hey O. Welcome to the Hundred Dollar MBA Show. Powerful business lessons every single day with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of the Hundred Dollar mba, a complete business training and community online. And today's lesson is part one of a two part lesson on how to create a simple marketing and sales system for your online business. If you're looking for an easy way to get started with marketing and sales so you know that you're doing something, that marketing is taking place, that you do have a sales system so you can bring in new customers, then you're in luck. As the next two episodes are all about that. Part one will be focused on the marketing part of the system. In part two, tomorrow's episode, we'll be focusing on sales. Now I have to say they both work together hand in hand. Marketing feeds sales. But because this is such a big topic, we had to break it up into two parts or two episodes. I'll be talking about the three ways you can generate traffic to your website, which will be your marketing arm, what to do with that traffic once it's on your site, how to capture leads, and then in the sales portion in part two, we'll be talking about how to take those leads and turn them into customers. This is going to be a straightforward, easy, easy system for you to follow and it's going to give you a great place to start with your marketing and sales for your online business. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. Today's episode of the Hundred Dollar MBA.
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Like I mentioned at the top of the episode, in this marketing and sales system, it all starts with marketing. Getting people to your website and then taking them from a visitor to a lead, making sure that they actually subscribe to your email list. Once they are subscribed to your list, then that's when the sales portion does its job. And that's in part two, tomorrow's lesson. So let's talk about three ways you can market. When I say market, the whole job of marketing is is to grab your audience's attention, the audience that you want to attract, and get them to your website. Once you have them on your website, the final step is again getting them to subscribe to your email list. And there's plenty of ways to do that, whether it's signing up for your newsletter or signing up for a free course, or signing up for a PDF download, that's up to you. But we're going to focus on today is getting them to your website. So there are three strategies I want to focus on today and it's probably the three most effective strategies, especially if you're just getting started and you haven't done this for a while. So the first strategy is content marketing. Content marketing is the concept of attracting people with useful content. This could be a blog article, this could be a podcast episode, it could be a video, this could be an infographic, this could be a report. This could be a comparison chart. All this is great content. And the important thing to know is that it has to live on your website or has to actually point to your website. So if I write up a helpful tip or something like that on Facebook, that's not necessarily content marketing because, hey, it just lives on Facebook and it's a little bit of a struggle for somebody to find who you are and get to your website again. Our job is to get them to the website so we can make them a lead. So let's make sure the content lives on the website. Choose a medium, whether it's blogging or podcasting or video, when people find these pieces of Content, these blog posts, these videos, whether through a search or whether through word of mouth or you shared it on social media. See, there's a difference between sharing what's on your website versus just putting the actual content on Facebook. This is going to attract people to your site. Good, valuable information. There are seven and eight figure businesses that do nothing but content marketing. That's how they run their whole business and all their marketing. So this stuff works. If you write great content, if you shoot great videos and it's useful, it's gonna get known, people are gonna find you and that's how you'll market. So that's one strategy. The other one is SEO search engine optimization. Search engine optimization is a huge subject. You can get a PhD in this subject if you wanted to. And it constantly is changing. There's new things to learn about SEO all the time. And basically search engine optimization is optimizing your website so people can find you easily to through search engines like Google. And this means making sure that you write the right things on your website, whether it's on your sales pages, your feature pages, your FAQs, your blog posts, whatever it is. You need to optimize your site so it's easily found. So you rank high for the keywords that people are searching for in your marketplace. So if you sell an online course on yoga for beginners, I would love that course, by the way. Then you need to rank high for keywords like you yoga for beginners or just getting started with yoga or doing yoga for the first time, things like that. How do you make sure you rank high for those keywords? Well, that's what SEO is all about. That's why people really study SEO and optimize their site for that. You want to make sure that you're on the first page of Google for your keywords and that's going to give you free organic traffic to your website. It's one of the best forms of marketing. If you could do it right now. How do you leverage SEO? How do you actually implement this? Well, you can hire a firm, you can hire people to do it for you, and that can cost some money, or you can learn it yourself and implement it yourself. What you actually have to do on your site is not a lot of work, but once you understand how it works, you can implement some things to really optimize your site to rank a whole lot better. This is especially powerful and effective if you're in a market that has no idea about SEO. So if you want to get your hands dirty and learn More about SEO so you can optimize your site. I'm one of those people, I like to roll up my sleeves and learn. I love SEO. It's one of the fascinating topics in online business. There are two sources I recommend. Number one. Brian Dean backlinko.com Great blog, amazing free resources and blog posts that are basically guides. Awesome, awesome source. If you're on his list, he'll also let you know when he has a course for sale or when he opens up enrollment for one of his courses. He also specializes YouTube search engine marketing as well. Another option is clickminded.com this is actually a very good course on SEO. It's very good for those who just want to get started. There's a lot of great materials. The guy who teaches this course or started clickminded actually did search engine optimization for Airbnb. So two resources for you to check out. The third way you can market and drive traffic to your website is of course paid traffic. Paying money to get people to click on a button and get sent to your website. The most common paid traffic source is Facebook marketing. But Google AdWords is also a great option, especially if you're marketing for a very niche business or a local business. Now again, you can hire somebody to take care of it for you, and it depends how many campaigns, how much money you're spending, uh, how many marketing materials you need. But you can hire somebody for about between 1500 and 2500 dollars a month to kind of manage all of your page traffic, manage your Facebook ads, Google AdWords, Instagram ads, if you want to do that. And that's kind of pricey for some people, and I completely understand. And some people actually have a base fee and then plus a percentage of how much you spend on ads. There are other options that you could search for. I know there are some companies that do like a la carte, like per campaign. And of course you can learn it yourself. This is going to take some time, an investment of time, but it can be done. I actually took the course that's in Lynda.com about Facebook marketing. It's a little dry, but it's comprehensive. And Lynda does a good job of updating the courses to make sure that it's relevant and up to date. But there are tons of other courses out there that you can use for Facebook marketing or Google AdWords for that matter. Paid traffic is one of those things that's going to take some time to optimize and it's going to take some money to really fine Tune. Whenever I start a new Facebook campaign or something like that, I'm gonna have to spend about $200, $300 just to really fine tune it. You know, I'm gonna waste some money because I'm trying to still figure out what is gonna work and what's not gonna work. And there's no exact science. You might have to create, you know, 12, 15 different types of ads with different audiences to see, hey, this is what works. This is what drives traffic for the lowest price possible. So there you go. You got content marketing, you got SEO, you got paid traffic. These three are a great place to start when it comes to bringing people to your website. Now, once they're on your website, whatever you're driving traffic to, make sure they give you their name and email address, or at least their email address. That's the whole point. You want to make sure you'll be able to contact them. You can't guarantee they'll be back on your website again. So when they're on your website, you spend so much time and effort and money to get them on your website, you got to get their email. So make sure you have an easy way for them to give you their email. Make sure it's a good idea or it's a good exchange. So make sure you give them something of value like a video course or a PDF download. And you gotta convert that visitor into a lead. You really want to optimize your site for lead generation. Meaning that how many people, what percentage of people that visit your website actually give you their email address? You should at least try to shoot for 10%. 10% of the people that go to your website are opting in. So you got to give them a good reason to give their email. And it's got to be easy and in their face and up front. And that could be in a form of a free trial or a free course or a free taste or whatever. Once they opt in and you have their email address, what's next? Well, we'll talk about that in a second. But before that, let me give love to today's sponsor.
One of the first things you got to do when you start a business is acquire a business address. You need it to register your business. You need it to open up a business bank account. You even need it to register for email marketing. Yes, you need an address on the bottom of your email marketing newsletters. But if you work from home, like a lot of us do, you don't want to put your home address and have your customers show up to your door. And you don't want to spend the extra money every single month on having a business office. This is where Earth ClassMail comes in. They hook you up with a swanky business address and all the mail that gets sent there gets scanned and uploaded to your account in the cloud. That means you never have to check physical mail ever again. You could see it anywhere, anytime from your phone or your laptop. Pretty cool. So cool. We signed up. We absolutely love it. And we've been using Earth ClassMail for over a year now. And Earth ClassMail wants to hook you up with a free month so you can get started with your business address. Just go to earthclassmail.com mbamonth and use coupon code MBAMONTH. Again, that's earthclassmail.com MBAMONTH coupon code MBAMONTH.
All right, now that you have your visitor's email address and they're on your email list, the next step is to nurture them so they can actually become a customer. How do you do this? Well, you do this with some automatic emails, emails that fire automatically when they sign up. Now, you can use any email marketing service. Pretty much any of them do it. The ones we recommend is Mailchimp, ConvertKit and ActiveCampaign. They all have different options and different things, but we personally use ActiveCampaign. It's more robust than the other two, even though I have to say, ConvertKit's actually been improving and really been adding a lot of great features. So it's probably comparable to activecampaign these days. But basically, when somebody signs up, you can send an automatic email to welcome them to your email list, deliver that promise that you promised them, the PDF, the course or whatever, and let them know, hey, my next email, I'm going to be telling you more about what we can offer you. You're going to tell them a little bit more about, hey, your product, your service, whatever you want them to buy. And really what you're trying to do here is you're trying to convey value. What is in it for them? And that's when the sales process begins. And tomorrow we're going to talk about the different options you have when it comes to sales. Can you do it via email? Can you do it via phone? Can you do it on a webinar? How do you get that person from being an interested person to somebody who actually gives up their hard earned dollar for your product or service? I don't want to reveal too much because we're going to cover a lot in tomorrow's lesson But I want to give you a little bit of a hint. When we buy, when we buy anything, whether we buy something worth $5 or 500 or 50,000, the reason why we buy it is because we believe that the value we're getting from that product is greater than the price we paid. Or I should say, the price we will pay. Think about it. Whenever you bought something in the past, you believe the value of that product was greater than the price, and that's why you bought. How do you make sure that happens in the mind of your customer? That's what we're gonna be talking about in tomorrow's episode where we talk about the sales portion of your marketing and sales system. Thank you so much for listening to the $100 NBA show. If you love what you hear, leave us an iTunes rating and review. By leaving us a review, you enter our weekly random draw. We call it free riot Friday. Every Friday, we announce a winner. Somebody wins a lifetime membership to one of our programs. This month we're giving away easy course or 30 day course on how to build an online course. It's worth $500, but somebody wins it every week. All you gotta do is leave us a rating and review on itunes and you enter our weekly random trick draw. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. The beauty of systems is that once you set them up, you just have to maintain them. The setup is what all the work is for. But there is maintenance, there is tweaking, there is improving. But there is a sense of relief once you set them up because at least you finally got it done and you have a system in place, a system that you can rely on. So go ahead and start implementing. You can start doing the marketing portion of the system today. So roll up your sleeves and get going. All right, I'll check you in tomorrow's episode part two of this lesson. I'll see you then. Take care.
