That is why funnels are wide at the opening and extremely narrow, sometimes even pointed, at the bottom. This upside down pyramid shape also works extremely well online for building your business.

This is exactly the reason why an online marketing funnel is so important. You focus, or funnel, the attention of your prospects in a very specific way, providing value, building a relationship and eventually presenting an offer.

Much like a funnel directs a stream or flow into a very narrow channel, you want to focus on a niche inside a niche inside a niche.

This makes the marketing funnels you develop much more effective. In other words, instead of getting into weight loss, or even weight loss for women, marketing funnels will be more successful if you offer weight loss products aimed at, 'weight loss for overweight grandmothers over 50'.

Once you focus on a niche, you need to build your online marketing funnel. This is going to hopefully take your prospect through the following stages.

This activity is filling your funnel at the top.

Offer them something for nothing!

This is known as an 'opt-in bribe' or 'opt-in freebie'. Get your audience interested.
In exchange for signing up to your newsletter or email list, you send your subscriber a high-value report, checklist, e-book or list of resources, or some other piece of content that solves a big problem or answers a big question in the minds of your target audience.

Here is where you begin to build your relationship with them. Offer them a lot of value.
Continue to answer questions and solve problems.

Send out emails on a continual basis through an autoresponder program that handles the task automatically.

Later on, after sending several additional emails that deliver a lot of free value, make a bigger offer. If your list purchases either your smaller or larger offer, immediately offer them an upsell, which is a pricier option.

The number of people that you interest enough to sign up to your email list, will very much depend on your offer and it's perceived value and use, basically, if you are getting very little interest in your offer, you need to make it an irresistible offer they simply cannot refuse, AND will gain a lot of use from, target your offer at your target market.

As you build a relationship and build trust with that small group of people that do sign-up, when you initially make an offer, you may only see a few patchy sales but this will improve over time as your group grows.

The funnel is always a trickle down process, where you eventually end up dealing with a smaller number of very interested people rather than a huge group of people that are mildly concerned about what you have to say, and more importantly......very rarely buy!

However, search engine algorithms do change and your free traffic can grind to a halt at the flick of a switch.

Hence, a portion of your traffic used to keep you funnel topped up, should also include paid traffic because the greater the numbers at the top of your funnel, the greater your sales and profits will be at the bottom.