The internet has only been around for a little over 3 decades and has seen numerous changes. In the dotcom gold rush, unscrupulous marketers created robots that could pump websites at the click of a button. Those websites were often not readable for human visitors.
The search engines got wiser and slapped those robot-generated websites. These low-quality websites stopped getting organic traffic altogether.
Later, savvy marketers found ways to pump up ads to again low-quality websites that had a lot of ads and were selling affiliate products. They got slapped again. The ads arbitration was no-longer profitable for the most.
Some digital marketers left and if you click on many websites from the 1990s and early 2000s. they either return an error page or are completely outdated.
Some more fortunate companies decided to play along and invest the time and money to build websites with high quality content. Such high-quality websites are the results of years of work and continual content creation. The problem is that they require a huge time and money investment Often, there is a big team od writers, programmers and SEO experts behind such successful websites. The other problem is that with the attention span of the average visitor getting shorter and shorter, websites have a couple of seconds to pull in the visitor or they click away.
A new way of doing digital marketing has risen with the creation of funnel marketing. A funnel is just a series of webpages tied together in a specific marketing goal. The purpose of the funnel could be to build an e-mail list and then to market to that list without having to build a big website. The other purpose is to sell a product directly to the customer by having him go through the funnel.
Much testing has been done and many unsuccessful websites have been converted to funnels and saw their revenues skyrocket.
By building a simple funnel with a lead capture page, a salespage and a thank you page, digital marketers were making much more money than by building a website. Furthermore, they saved so much time that they could create many successful funnels once they had the winning recipe.
Funnels seem to be successful because they answer a specific demand from a targeted audience eager to get solutions to their problems.
Some funnel software companies did not hesitate to charge hundreds of dollars monthly for the use of their “magic funnels” showing off the most successful funnels. Are funnels the death of websites as we know it? Funnels have replaced some websites and are very successful in monetizing the business of the digital marketer. On the other hand, there will always be a need for solid good information on the web and high-quality websites. The small websites are the ones that will most probably die from the funnel revolution.
Nathalie Fiset m.d. is a digital marketer and an affiliate of GrooveFunnels and makes a good commission if you get the software through the links on this page.