I’ve been seized by the need to clean house in my business lately – to get rid of all the systems I’ve dutifully clung to for the last year that don’t work, and really dig into the ones that do. This is not unlike opening your freezer one day and realizing you have a LOT of perfectly good food that’s getting ignored in its frozen state, while you eat peanut butter sandwich after peanut butter sandwich.

Time to defrost and upgrade!

To get clear on what works and what doesn’t, I took the advice of my business coach, Rich Schefren, and created a marketing funnel. This is a grid that looks something like this, with certain measurements down the left margin and your various marketing techniques across the top.

(By the way … why is this my Ultimate Marketing Funnel For Now? Because I’ve really found that as technology whizzes along it’s best to stay loose and flexible from month to month on what’s working and what’s not. I’m always open for the next great thing in terms of getting known. So I advise all to stay loose!)

To make a marketing funnel, you simply use your various tracking tools like web or blog statistics, sales records, and ad tracking logs to figure out what works, and plug those stats right in.

	Net Articles	Email	Sales Calls	Affiliates	Blog	Podcast	Ezine
Annual Budget
Response
Cost Per Response
Leads
Lead Cost
Closing %
Customers
Avg Cost per Customer
Total Customers
Total Revenue
ROI*

*ROI is return on investment – the percentage of how much you’ve made in profit versus how much you spent.

Some of your categories for the top that aren’t included here are Pay Per Click ads, Referrals, PR, Postcard
Campaigns/Mail and Hard Newsletters. Feel free to make this as big an as elaborate as you want. Then refer to it when you’re revising just how you market from time to time.

So here’s what I’ve changed about my marketing funnel (and I’m willing to be wrong here, so let me know if these tactics are really workin’ for you.)

1. TRACK TRACK TRACK. This is a no-brainer, but I’m sorry to say I only tracked about half of my promo tools so far. Duh. I advise you to do better. Track everything! 1shoppingcart.com (which I recommend for everything from sales and affiliate management to ezine broadcasting) has a great Ad Tracker tool just for this. You can’t keep a working funnel without tracking.

2. Drop automated article submissions. In the two years I’ve put my articles out on the Web, I’ve expanded my Google presence by about 2000% percent. Which is great. But I’m just not convinced it will pay off in sales. For now I’m going to lay off on submissions til the end of the year and see how/what’s affected. It could just be my bio line is weak.

3. Beef up the blog networking. I barely get out to other blogs and make blog friends. Yet, that is exactly how some of my clients have beefed up their unique visitor counts to upwards of 20,000 per month. That’s phenomenal! I want some of that, too. Blog carnivals are also a good idea.

4. Create more online events with JV’s. This is a hot area for me – I’ve doubled my list this year to 7500 just by offering all kinds of freebies and getting out to more audiences. Gotta love that!

5. Drop one of my ezines and consolidate. Yep, it’s time for the Joy Letter to move on to history at issue #150. I simply don’t have the time to keep it going any more. I’ll be serving these folks better by consolidating and asking them to move on to this list. And I’ll keep them on file and let them know occasionally when something fun and free is happening on the How Much Joy site, which will continue along with the Blast O Joy blog.

6. Podcast more. Three times per month should do it.

7. Post more often on my blog. I’m going to really consolidate and dig in here with Get Known Now Blog. The list and sales conversion rate is great from it, people get lots of buzz going on it, and it needs to get much more of my attention. My goal is 7X per week, which I’ll do with a combo of fresh and canned (pre-arranged) posting each day.

8. Focus on affiliates and professional referral sources more. I’ve never listed my products with big affiliate sites like Commission Junction, and I almost never do anything to psyche up my affiliates to sell more or promote more of my freebies. And yet – there are more than 450 of them! Time for a little inspiration methinks. And consider also that I could hook my products up with more training organizations. What professional referral sources would work for your message and products?

I’d love to know what’s worked for you lately and what hasn’t. Let me know at info@getknownnow.com.

Suzanne Falter-Barns runs The Get Known Now Blog.