‘ClickFunnels for dummies’ is what you search for when you just need to get to the bottom of things.
Just like the book series that goes by the same name, the idea is to do away with the fluff and boil down to the basics you need to understand on the topic.
And that’s exactly what this post is going to do – cut through all the other stuff and get right to the point.
At its core, ClickFunnels is a marketing tool.
But it’s also a whole lot more.
And that’s why there’s so much hype around the ClickFunnels platform, so keep reading to learn more without being distracted by the unnecessary detail.
I’m going to show you the basics and I think you’ll be as excited so many others are about the possibilities that it offers, because there are many.
But before we get started, if you want more detail after you’ve read everything here and you want to know more, go here to learn more about ‘what is ClickFunnels?‘
ClickFunnels For Dummies – The Basics
So what does this website builder platform do that’s causing so much hype online – what is ClickFunnels?
ClickFunnels is a marketing automation tool that gives you everything you need to run an online business in one place.
The idea that serves as the foundation for ClickFunnels is the concept of building a sales funnel online.
If you’ve ever been in the sales world the idea of sales funnels won’t be a foreign concept to you.
If you’ve not been in the sales world, then the whole concept will be completely new and seem like someone is speaking a foreign language.
And the way that ClickFunnels approaches sales funnels is very unique in the online marketing world, which has carved out for them a very specific audience and created a community of raving fans who refer to themselves as funnel hackers.
What is ClickFunnels?
So, what is ClickFunnels? The whole idea here is to get your online sales funnel up and running quickly and completely without getting bogged down in the technical stuff that usually requires some serious custom programming to pull off.
ClickFunnels is a suite of tools specifically built and designed to help you get the marketing arm of your online business up and running.
But if you’re like me, you might be a little skeptical.
By nature, I’m skeptical, especially when I hear the boisterous language that’s so often associated with online marketing, its wild claims and “social proof”, and claims of outrageous amounts of money being made.
It’s called a “BS” meter for good reason, and mine was going off.
But I study this stuff just because I don’t want to be taken for a ride, so after I’d been studying Russell’s stuff for a while the lights started to come on.
I started understanding the “how” and the “why” to the ways he does things and the ways he’s been successful online.
There are some that simply don’t subscribe to the way he does things.
But my goal is to learn and to do my best not to be turned off by someone’s negative review, or bad experience. I encourage you to take them up on their 14-day free trial to try it out and see for yourself.
ClickFunnels is a page builder
First and foremost, ClickFunnels is a page builder. Early on when Russell was working on building online sales funnels he spent thousands of dollars in custom website design and hundreds of hours from initial concept to completion for just one sales funnel.
This kind of workflow simply isn’t sustainable for anyone.
So Russell and his team decided to build something that would give him everything he would need in one tool so that he could speed up the completion of his funnels by quickly building out pages using the visual page builder drag & drop concept.
After lots of trial, error, tweaking, and revising, they ended up with what you see today as ClickFunnels.
ClickFunnels is a cart
Probably its best feature, in my opinion, is its cart and payment processing capabilities. It’s the primary reason that I use it for my stuff.
The integrations with various payment processors are solid. My preference for everything I use is Stripe but it also supports several others:
- Apple & Android Pay
- Authorize.net (via Ontraport, Infusionsoft (Keap), or Recurly
- Bluesnap
- EasyPayDirect
- NMI
- Ontraport
- Recurly
Its one-click upsell capabilities alone make it a game-changer. But then you also have the ability to do one-time-offers as well without breaking the internet or interfering with your customer’s experience, and then you’ll see why it’s so popular with so many people.
It also handles membership sites incredibly well, along with recurring charges. In fact, my course is built using these exact things.
And the sky is the limit for the things you can do with the cart functionality.
The only thing that I do not think ClickFunnels would be a good fit for would be a traditional store with physical products. This would be really challenging to pull off with ClickFunnels, and quite frankly, there are immensely better solutions out there for that kind of shop.
ClickFunnels is a content management system (kind of)
It’s something you hear people talking about all the time in the ClickFunnels Facebook groups – “can I just replace my whole website with ClickFunnels?”
The short answer is actually yes.
But let’s not get carried away.
If you’re going to replace your entire website with a ClickFunnels site you need to know a couple things:
It has no blogging capability to speak of.
Sure you could hack something together, but once again, this is one of those areas where there are other tools that are much better suited for this kind of feature set
Custom fields and other such fine-grained customizations are much simpler with other content management systems.
But to be clear – it’s something I always talk with my clients about – don’t try to force a tool to do something it wasn’t built to do.
If your site needs are relatively simple, and the main priority is sales funnel related, then ClickFunnels is powerful enough to do what you need it to do. If you need more robust functionality, it’s not out of the question to look to a more appropriate solution like WordPress.
ClickFunnels is an affiliate management platform
One of Click Funnels’ newer features is Backpack, which is an add-on that you can use to recruit, manage and pay affiliates.
To be honest, working with affiliate programs can be a big headache. It can be confusing, technically challenging, and frustrating.
The good thing about Backpack is that it’s highly configurable and flexible and integrated right in to your ClickFunnels account.
It helps with cookie management, affiliate ID tracking, payment parameters and management, and a lot more.
When your funnel gets to the size where you need to really have a strong affiliate management tool, Backpack can be the perfect solution.
ClickFunnels is a type of CRM and marketing system
ActioneticsMD (now called Follow-up Funnels) is another add-on service to the primary ClickFunnels page-building system. ActioneticsMD combines advanced customer-profile info with the ability to create “follow-up” funnels which is where serious conversions and money are made.
You see, the front-end funnel is what’s usually used to grow an initial list, or break-even on ad-spend.
But what happens after that is where the magic happens and it happens through these follow-up funnels.
The tool primarily serves as a follow-up marketing tool that lets you segment and dial in messaging to specific audiences with specifics demographics and needs by looking at their social profiles, what magazines they read, how long they stay on your site, how often they come back, and a lot more.
You can then model your marketing sequence to fit who these people are and what they need.
ClickFunnels For Dummies – Why Is This Important?
So now you know a little about the answer to the question “What is ClickFunnels?”
But you may be thinking, why is this important?
So here’s the deal.
What normally would take an extensive amount of web development work and a sizeable budget to do is made simple using ClickFunnels.
How do I know?
Because I’ve actually built these kinds of funnels manually myself for clients in the past.
Long before ClickFunnels was the mature platform that it is now, I was tasked with building these kinds of sales funnels using what we had at the time, and it took a lot of work.
ClickFunnels founder Russell Brunson tells teh story about how much time, budget and energy went in to creating the online sales funnels he was building before the days of ClickFunnels.
It would take months of expensive development time to build what needed to be built and it was really hard to make adjustments once the funnel was complete was challenging to say the least.
ClickFunnels For Dummies – How do you make money?
Here’s the secret about ClickFunnels that you won’t hear the gurus talk about:
You have to have some kind of idea of WHAT you are going to sell using ClickFunnels.
That’s the bad news.
But the good news is really good.
If you’re launching an online business of any kind – whether you’re a writer, or a coach, or a blogger, or even selling cars, a cleaning business, or travel agency – you really should already have an idea about those things because you’ve already spent some time defining your expertise and talking about your subject.
You don’t have to reinvent the wheel, you just have to learn how to frame up your knowledge in a way that delivers the greatest amount of value, then develop a value ladder, and use ClickFunnels to implement it.
But hear me out:
Even if you don’t have an idea, there are resources available to you to help you figure what your product or service is going to be.
This was the biggest problem for me when I first ran into this idea of online sales funnels.
It all sounded fascinating and exciting, but I didn’t know how I could apply it to MY business and expertise.
I’m a web developer after all, and my skills are built around helping people do business better online by building the tools they need to make things happen.
I was confused about what I could offer for the longest time.
I spent months thinking through different scenarios, only to end up frustrated not knowing how I could make it work for me.
Then it happened.
I opened an email from Russell Brunson and the ClickFunnels team that showed me how another web designer named Cathy Olson had used sales funnels to book her business solid along with having other low-price offers that she used to build out her value ladder, and I finally knew what I needed to do.
Around that same the first One Funnel Away Challenge was starting up and I was able to put all the pieces together for the first time from what I learned from Cathy’s funnel, and from the One Funnel Away Challenge – it was awesome!
What I was able to achieve from what I learned during that time was far beyond what I ever thought I would be able to do:
- I quickly grew a brand new email list to over 1500 subscribers
- I developed my first book and created a book funnel and an DIY web design program resulting in thousands in sales
- I’ve sold more than $10,000 using the tactics & strategies in OFA
- I grew my sphere of influence from a couple hundred people to thousands
- I’ve been interviewed several times on several different podcasts, webshows & virtual summits as a result of my work
- I’ve launched a YouTube channel, and a podcast that are still growing all the time
Why do I tell you all this?
I tell you all this because you don’t have to have it all figured out before you test out ClickFunnels yourself.
The resources that are available to you during your 14 day free trial period are beyond amazing and there are a ton of templates, funnels, and resources included so you can put it through the paces to see if it’s going to work for you.
And if you need a little extra help like I did, then the One Funnel Away Challenge is the best $100 you will ever spend to learn digital marketing, guaranteed.
ClickFunnels for Dummies – How do you use ClickFunnels?
The whole idea behind ClickFunnels is to make things fast and easy to launch your online sales funnels.
Here’s the kicker:
Once you have that idea of how your knowledge can earn you money, and deliver outrageous amounts of value, you’ll be unbelievably grateful for a tool like ClickFunnels because it makes EVERYTHING associated with building out that workflow as easy as it can possibly be.
ClickFunnels as a tool gives you everything you need to get things going and fast.
You don’t have to be a web developer or tech wizard either.
Because of all the resources available to you in your ClickFunnels account you can have your own online sales funnel up and running in as little as an hour.
That means from the time you sign up, it only takes a short amount of time to get your website content loaded, and your funnel completely configured to be ready to go live!
ClickFunnels for Dummies – Do you have any examples?
You can use ClickFunnels for any industry – it’s not just a tool for marketers.
Here are a few examples:
How to build your own WordPress blog
Website Content Blueprint
Websites Are Not Dead
One Funnel Away Challenge – Russell’s iPhone Funnel
Free ClickFunnels Custom Template – Personal Brand Funnel Template
Free ClickFunnels Custom Template – Real Estate
Free ClickFunnels Custom Template – Fine Dining Restaurant Funnel
Free ClickFunnels Custom Template – Dentist & Practitioner Funnel
Free ClickFunnels Custom Template – Personal Trainer & Fitness Funnel
Free ClickFunnels Custom Template – Construction & Contractor Funnel
Next Steps
That’s the bird’s eye view of everything you need to know about ClickFunnels and more than enough to get you started.
Have any questions about any of this? Just leave me a comment below.
OR
If you’d like some help implementing what you’ve learned here I want to invite you to join my free Facebook group, Digital Marketing Mastery – would love to have you over there.
Disclaimer: Many of the links you’ll find here are affiliate links and proudly so.
I recommend them because they’ve helped me do what I do and I have great confidence that you will get value out of them as well – hence the recommendation and affiliate links.
It’s my belief that if a product or service can help me in my business then it can help you in yours too. I’m either currently using, or have used these products and services I recommend – I will never support or feature something that I don’t believe in completely!
So by following any of these links and making a purchase, I’ll receive a commission. I always recommend you do your own independent research first before you purchase anything.