The first component you need for your lead generation funnel is a lead magnet. This is the incentive to get prospective customers to visit your page.

A lead magnet is an offer (usually free) that is dedicated to giving your website visitors some relevant value in exchange for their contact information (an email address at the very least). Some examples of lead magnets are PDFs, eBook samples, articles, webinars, and other limited, exclusive content.

To get your lead magnet to convert, you need a capture to promote it. That brings us to our second step.

Your capture page is going to explain the lead magnet, including why prospective clients would want to download it. The copy should be focused on advertising the end benefit the potential client will get if they opt-in to receive it.

Despite the fact that it’s an important page to have in your funnel, it’s often underestimated, even though it has a lot of benefits. Apart from thanking the subscriber for signing up on your email list, you can use a ‘Thank You’ page to provide instructions as to what happens next, present the options that the site visitors have and start nurturing those leads you get in your sales funnel.

The benefits of a ‘Thank You’ page are:

• Record the completion of the opt-in form.
• Upsell/Cross-sell your own products or affiliate offers.
• Keep the site visitors engaged with your content.
• Give visitors more information regarding their subscription.
• Improve the conversion rate and establish a relationship with new subscribers.
• Redirect their attention to the next step or other relevant products and services you offer.

By this point in your lead generation funnel, your prospective client has converted and is on your email list. Now it’s time to automatically follow-up via an email drip sequence.

You should send at least three email follow-ups. These are meant to engage your new leads.

Before we turn on the fuel to activate this little system that we’ve set up here, we want to put tracking in place. This gives us a read on valuable information, such as:

1. How many people visited the opt-in landing page?
2. How many of those people opted in to get the lead magnet?
3. How many of those people clicked on the sales page?

Tracking is something you can set up in Google Analytics. I’ve written about creating an analytics sales funnel to track leads and revenue before, so check out the tutorial there to get started.

Last but certainly not least is your traffic.

At this point, you have a basic funnel and funnel tracking in place so now it’s time to fuel your sales engine with traffic. Ideally, you want to start with organic traffic methods, gather some data and optimize your funnel. After you’ve done that and are happy with the numbers you can start driving paid traffic as well.