What exactly is a sales funnel and how does it work? I’m glad you asked! Your sales funnel is a critical piece of the online marketing puzzle. It’s the difference between being a ‘drive by’ marketer or having an automated sales machine that sorts the targeted buyers from the tyre kickers.
I know that introduction sounds very ‘salesy’ and I know that there are some amongst you that would rather categorise their subscribers as ‘community members’ rather than ‘prospects’ or ‘targeted buyers’.
Sales related topics are one of those things that many of us struggle with at some stage. Calling someone a prospect may seem like you are just thinking of the prospective dollars rather than whether you are doing the right thing by your subscribers.
Stop right there!
You are in business, right? And businesses are supposed to make money, yes? Good – I’m glad we got that cleared up 
. What I’m getting at here is that it doesn’t matter what you call your subscribers. Whether it’s prospects or leads or ‘friends I have yet to meet’. At the end of the day they are on your list and it is up to you to deliver to that list.
So… let’s say you have a list of 50,000 people. You’ve built this list from one of your sites and you know that some of the people are interested in niche marketing, some like blogs, some are affiliate marketers and some aren’t sure what they want to do yet. You could leave them all on that one list, knowing that every time you send a message out only some of the people on the list will be interested in the topic … or you can build a funnel which places the people with a specific interest into a more specific list where you can deliver good, relevant information and products to them every time.
A good number of article marketers are so focused on the content creation process that they totally overlook to promote their articles. I great way to start out is by ways of social media marketing and seo.