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What Is Funnel Hacking?- Ultimate Guide 2020

Have you ever wondered what funnel hacking is and why everybody is talking about that?

It’s a term that describes the researching and modeling of successful online businesses by spying on their salesfunnels . It seems to be tricky but it’s actually not that hard.

Read everything you need to know and more in this article.

What is a Sales Funnel?

A sales funnel is like an optimized sales process, a revenue funnel.

When traffic is generated for a product, a service, or another business opportunity, it will be lead through a sales funnel – at least if the business that’s offering the service, product, or whatsoever is up to date.

sales funnel picture

It’s a process that leads a potential customer to a series of steps to your marketing goal, whether is be getting leads or making sales.

The typical sales funnel is created out of multiple steps, and it leads your prospects from the first contact with your product or your business to a fully completed purchase.

In case you haven’t heard about marketing funnels yet, you could probably think that the best and easiest way to make sales is to offer a product or service on a landing page, a simple website or an online store.

The prospect will somehow find your offer, and he can buy it or not – the end of the process.

But what if I told you that you’re losing a ton of money in doing so? What if there was an opportunity to promote and offer your product or service that is way more effective?

That’s where the marketing funnel can help out.

The funnel will lead your prospect to a landing page on which your front end product will be shown.

Of course, the funnel should be well designed and show the prospect which problems he will no longer have when buying your product or hiring you for a service.

But that’s not the end, the important question here is: When is a prospect most likely to buy something?

hand grabing money out of laptop
Make Upsells while a buyer is hot!

Yes, right after he purchased something. The threshold to spend some money has already been crossed, and that’s the best time to get your prospect to spend some more money on your business.

The marketing tactics you need to grow your profit are right in those funnels. So, you’re prospect purchased one of your products or services. He has now become your official customer.

What does the funnel do next? The funnel will lead him to the next step called upsell or order bump.

An order bump would just be an additionally offered service or product. An upsell should be more expensive than the front end product or service.

marketing sales funnel drawing

Depending on the customers choose to buy the upsell or not, the next appearing steps of the funnel will be influenced.

For example, in case the customer purchases the upsell, there could be another upsell. In case he doesn’t, the next funnel step is a downsell, a cheaper offer than the upsell, and so on…

Roughly outlined, that’s how a marketing funnel works.

Of course, there are a lot more tactics to the funnel, and that’s not everything funnels have to offer (e.g., the funnel doesn’t end when the customer doesn’t buy one of the up- or downsells, the process continues with email marketing).

If you want to learn the science behind funnels I highly recommend reading the free book Dotcom Secrets.

What is Funnel Hacking?

man with binoculars

Funnel Hacking is a concept Russell Brunson and the Clickfunnels team established and described in Russell Brunson’s book Dotcom Secret (a must-read for any online marketer).

But what exactly is Funnel Hacking?

Let’s define this in one sentence: “The art of examining your competitor’s sales funnels to model and test their strategies in your own marketing and sales processes.”

Obviously, the process is not just copying and stealing everything from another funnel. Probably, that is what your competitors would do.

The purpose of funnel hacking is to use and test already proven systems and funnels that are already producing a lot of money.

Of course, there is a lot of information that you don’t have, and you have to keep this in mind. However, the ultimate goal of funnel hacking is to find applicable strategies for your own business.

It’s a three-step system that will show you:

1. How to spy on your competition and get the right information

2. Find out where and how they drive traffic

3. And how to rebuild and model off what successfully works

Possible Disadvantages of Funnel Hacking

To be honest, there aren’t many disadvantages to the funnel hacking process. The only problem is when you start getting lazy. When you stop funnel hacking and start copying your competitors’ funnels, that’s where the drawbacks start.

When copying a competitor’s funnel, you forget to adapt it to your personal brand and your targeted audience.

Funnel Hacking is crowned with success, but funnel copying won’t be nearly as successful as Funnel Hacking. Rather would it damage your business because you would be stealing someone’s funnels.

Furthermore a possible lawsuit is around the corner. So never ever just copy or steal someone’s funnels or designs. It’s totally unethical.

It’s legal to model off but not to steal someones literary properties.

Rather use them to get inspiration and ideas that you can implement into your own funnel.

Benefits of Funnel Hacking

Everything you’ve heard before already showed that Funnel Hacking is one of the most effective marketing skills out there.

Why start from scratch and lose a ton of time and money when you can use a proven strategy that’s already generating money?

Advantage Number 1: You save a crazy amount of time with testing new funnels.

Advantage Number 2: You save a crazy amount of money while testing new funnels and wasting your time.

Advantage Number 3: You are able to grow your business and with it your profit.

Advantage Number 4: Funnel Hacking enables you to find your competitor’s weaknesses and make exactly the money they are losing.

Advantage Number 5: The Funnel Hacking helps you understand your competitors and your business niche better.

One of the most frustrating thing when you start an online business is where to start.

Usually it requires a lot of time to build up the traffic you need to test your funnels. Or it requires a lot of money to test multiple audiences and adsets.

But by utilizing funnel hacking you can save time AND money and of course a lot of stress. Model what already works.

Why Is Funnel Hacking So Important?

The easiest way to build a profitable marketing funnel is Funnel Hacking. Not only one profitable marketing funnel but lots of profitable funnels, landing pages, email sequences, Facebook ads and so on.

It doesn’t matter in what niche you are, what your business is about, or what you’re trying to sell: You are not reinventing the wheel. Some other marketer is already crushing it in your niche, and that’s the point you need to start.

Right where your competitors are crushing it, you should start doing the same thing: Hacking their funnels and hacking their success too.

Do you want to grow your business? Funnel Hacking is a two in one solution: fast lane and shortcut at the same time.

Check out this free webinar and dive deep into Funnel Hacking!

How To Funnel Hack in 2020

face spying through hole

Basically, there are only 2 steps to do for successful funnel hacking. You’ve got to:

1.Do your research

2.Model what you found

But of course, this is the totally simplified macro perspective of this process. We need to get total clarity about every single step our competitors are doing and how their funnels work.

Let’s dive deeper into those steps.

The Research Phase

funnel hacking illustration

Check out who’s in the market. Gather all the big and small names of your competition and try to find out who’s successful and who maybe isn’t.

Of course, we can’t just take a look at their numbers. But there are a couple of hints and metrics we can check out to estimate what’s going on.

Google the product or service that you desire to build a business around.

Fair warning! Just in case you won’t find anything or anyone and you think you’re an innovator and you’re bringing a completely new product into the market… DON’T!

Everything has been tried and tested already. If there’s no one on the internet who’s seeling what you’ve been thinking about… it’s because it doesn’t work.

Remember: Don’t reinvent the wheel. Take one that exists and use it!

Back to the process. After finding out your competition get on Similarweb.com and throw their website URL’s in the search bar.

similar web search bar
SimilarWeb

Similarweb will show you where your competitors’ traffic comes from and where he advertises. Furthermore, you can check out his ads.

See if your competition has a decent amount of traffic.

similar web traffic graphic
Similarweb Traffic Overview

Then find out where the traffic is coming from.

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Traffic Sources

Also don’t forget to check out their social channels.

similarweb traffic sources graphic
Similarweb Social Traffic

Finally one of the most important steps. Find out on which networks they are advertising. When you join a Similarweb membership you can also check out their exact ads and ad copy!

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Display Advertising in Similarweb

Pro Tip: If you find an ad that has been around for a while it’s most likely one that works! Otherwise, it wouldn’t be online for so long.

If you can find a site that has a decent amount of traffic, a clear source where it’s coming from and ads that have been around for a while you’ve probably found a winner. That means a funnel that makes money!

By the way…also pay attention to retargeting ads and banners that appear on other websites as well.

Alternative research approach

Register a free Clickbank account. Clickbank is an affiliate network and payment gateway for all kinds of products that you can buy online.

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Clickbank Marketplace

When you register on Clickbank just get on the marketplace and select a niche that you like.

clickbank sorting metrics

Then you can sort for popularity and/or gravity. That will show you the most successful products on Clickbank. What makes them successful? They pay money to their affiliates!

Now take your findings back to Similarweb and again perform a search for them.

See if you can find some clear indicators for a winning funnel. Again you’ll want to pay attention to a consistent traffic stream, a clear source, and ads that been around for a while.

Purchase the Product

Now we’re getting into the next step of your research. If you found a potential winner, buy it!

Check out their funnel and experience it. Funnel hacking requires to see the single steps of the funnel to figure out what the upsells and downsells are, that make it successful.

hand holding credit card in front of pc

Sometimes it can be just more of the same product, other times higher or lower priced additional products.

To see the backend of the funnel and subscribe to the email list as a buyer…you need to buy to uncover every landing page you can.

BUT don’t just buy the product and look at the funnel once. Record it!

Use a chrome extension like GoFullPage and make a screenshot of the whole funnel. Capture every single step of the funnel and save it on your hard drive, so you can come back later on and model of the design and feel of the pages.

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Also, save all the email you get after the signup and purchase the product to see the email sequences your competition sends their subscribers and buyers.

You need to figure out everything that happened on their front end AND their back end.

If there are videos, then you’ll want to record them to re-watch them later and use a similar sales copy. Use a simple screen recorder like Screencast-o-Matic for that.

Alternatively, you can also make a screenshot of every step and try to extract the URL of the video but that can be tricky sometimes if people protect the source URL.

Organic traffic sources

Search Engine Optimization

seo letters

Sometimes it can happen that people solely rely on organic traffic. That means they don’t pay for advertising but they are utilizing Search Engine Optimization to rank in Google.

Or they are using audiences they have built on social media. Either way, there is a solution to funnel hack both.

Let’s assume the main source of traffic comes from search engines. Then you want to use a tool like Semrush to spy on your competition.

Semrush gives you all the website data you can think of… How much traffic the site has, which keywords they are ranking for, what positions they have and which backlink they got.

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Semrush Search Bar

Also, you can audit your competition and discover flaws that you can utilize to outrank them.

So when your competition uses SEO and you want to rebuild their website, use Semrush to uncover all their secrets and take advantage of that.

Social Media

If you figured out (through Similarweb) that your competition uses social media to drive their traffic then you need to dig a little. But don’t worry. If they have a decent stream of traffic the social media presence will be easy to find.

Similarweb will show you which channel they are using, even if not you could just check out the common ones like Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest etc and you would easily find all the social pages you’re looking for.

social media symbols

Now find out if they have a Facebook group. Check out their channels, How does their banner look like? Do they have links in the descriptions? How often do they post? What kind of content are they publishing?

All of that shows you step by step, how they are able to build the traffic on social media and then redirect that to their funnels.

When they have a Facebook group, of course, join it and see what’s inside. Do they have any lead magnets od special offers? Gid deep and document everything you find, and then we start modeling!

Rebuild in your own style

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Now it’s time to do the real work. The actual funnel hacking process. Revisit everything you have saved during your journey.

All the landing pages, emails, funnels, the copy, videos, headlines, ads, and so on… just everything you’ve seen in the front end and in the back end.

Choose a platform where you can rebuild the whole funnel. If you’re not very tech-savvy I recommend using Clickfunnels. It’ll give you a lot of templates and it’s super easy to use.

Re-Read the headlines and sales copy and start filling your sites with your own style. Don’t copy but model what already proved to be successful.

Re-shot the videos, write the emails, so when people give you their email address you can fire off to retarget and upsell them.

Rebuild everything in the feel and fashion of your competition, but use your own style!

The most difficult part will be the product. A lot of product creators put a lot of effort into their creations.

But you can model that off as well, you can pay a freelancer to do the work for you or you can try to find appropriate affiliate programs to replace the product and save some work.

When you’re done with that, it’s time to drive some traffic. Again check out the ads you found for those who do PPC or start building your own website or social media channels.

Of course, the paid route will be quicker, but also more expensive. Even though you’ll model off a successful ad, you still need to figure out the best target group and do some testing.

When you start with SEO and build a website it’ll take some time until traffic kicks in of course. So prepare yourself for some months of work and waiting. The same applies to building a social media following and monetizing it.

But it’s totally do-able! You just need some money or some patience.

If you want to dive deeper into funnel hacking you can check out Funnel Builder Secrets. It’s a free webinar and you’ll get access for 24 hours, to learn from one of the best funnel hackers in the world. [Learn more]

He’ll show some more tips and tricks to from his “funnel hacks training” and share some valuable insights you’ll get nowhere else.

What Is Funnel Hacking Live?

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Funnel Hacking Live potentially back in 2021

Where can you find the most successful funnel builders in one place? Never and nowhere one could assume. Luckily, that’s not the case.

The most successful funnel builders and marketers will gather at a conference called Funnel Hacking Live. All of the online marketers from Funnel Hacking Live will be sharing their strategies.

It’s an Event created by Russell Brunson the Co-Founder of Clickfunnels. Once a year he gathers some of the best funnel hackers and online marketers in the world to present the newest trends and strategies in digital marketing.

Furthermore, it’s the event where a lot of marketers get their prices on stage like the dream car award, two comma club award, or two comma X.

So if you’re a funnelhacker, this event is certainly one thing you should visit in your life.

Watch The Full Documentary

Funnel Hacking Live Documentary

How to Get a Free Funnel Hacker T-Shirt?

Maybe you have seen one of those shirts somewhere already. It’s like a batch or uniform for those of us who dedicate our lives to reach our goals by digital marketing.

It’s a sign that you belong to this funnel hacking tribe and build funnels.

And the best part of this: You can get this Funnel Hacker T-shirt totally free!

free funnelhacker t-shirt process
Get Your Free T-Shirt

It’s pretty simple. You basically just need to sign up for a Clickfunnels trial and just watch a couple of videos.

Then you follow the instructions and you’ll get your Funnel Hacker shirt sent to your house. You don’t even pay for shipping costs!

If you want to check out the whole process. Read this article about the Funnel Hacker T-Shirt.

Conclusion: Funnel Hacking in 2020

As you can see Funnel Hacking isn’t that hard in theory. Of course, it’s a simplified description of the process. But in the end, you’ll need to rebuild your findings and still test some stuff out.

The real work is not the research but the implementation. Setting up your marketing funnel, landing pages, email list, and building a business from scratch.

When you want to learn that process from the best of the best you’ll have the opportunity once in a year at the funnel hacking live event.

But during the Corona pandemic, it’s still unclear whether and when this event will take place again. So your second best bet is the FunnelBuilderSecrets webinar, to dive deeper into the process.

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