Great to be here, Kyle; I've great expectations of WA for my business! Thanks for your offer to help; I accept!

I joined WA for 2 reasons:
1 - I've been failing to sell enough of my products (Posi-Dome barrier isolation glove box) via my website and other means for over 15 years, due to terrible conversion. Clearly, I need to fix my conversion - probably by use of a funnel and better contact DB and email followup... I've sold hundreds of units (about $260K per decade), but I need to sell hundreds per month... at a profit.
2 - If improvement in my manufacturing business is too slow, I need a separate, faster growing income stream to keep the padlocks off the doors, and preserve my marriage

I've gotten enough clues from AWOL and MOBE to see huge opportunities for improvement in landing pages on my site ( banthrax.com ) and the potential power of a funnel and repetitive e-mail. If a funnel and e-mail followup process is viable for massively bumping up conversion of my scientific B2B products, I will get it working quicker with advice from someone who knows B2B and sales of disruptive products.

15+ years of manufacturing and selling my products has taught me some powerful lessons. I have viable markets and glowing reviews from customers on 5 continents, and very impressive institutions. I've used websites to drive most of these sales, but at a very high cost per sale, and without marketing that I've been able to scale. I've learned that SEO and PPC are not a good fit for selling disruptive, non-commodity products like mine, but lately it seems that Facebook ads might be (I can get thousands of highly targeted clicks for a few cents each).

I'm starting the general training, but I'll likely spend very little time on SEO, and will seek out social media traffic and e-mail strategies to get most of my attention. As I charge into this, I would really appreciate input and mentorship to help make it happen while I'm still alive to enjoy it. Can you help me out, or suggest someone who might have the experience and willingness to do so?

Steve

You are definitely in the right place now that you have found WA. I would get up to speed on the training and the process of building out a site that is geared for SEO and the proper structuring of your overall site.

It sounds like you truly do have a good product, but you could have the best product in the world but if you don't have marketing there it can make things difficult to get exposure and drive revenue.

The first thing that you may want to focus on is your website and getting that feeling a bit more current. It does feel quite dated and I think if you purchase a nice WP theme (usually less than $100) or even use one of the free 3,400 themes here, that will be much more appealing to your audience and exude more professionalism.

If you need anything at all as you do move forward please let me know and I will give you a hand.

Thanks, Kyle. I appreciate the detailed look and thoughtful comments. I see no big downside to improving SEO for my site, but with 15 years of researching, testing and PPC driving to push traffic, I'm convinced that social media ads, blog ads or other types will provide more quality traffic and be a better investment. My initial plan is to create a new site, here with a complimentary domain for my squeeze page, my funnel and my offer. These are disruptive products, so the prospects need some education before they will buy. It is easy for me to simplify and upgrade banthrax.com, just so I can link to clean product sale & shopping cart pages there for the final e-commerce transaction, at least initially.

I believe the main things I must do are:
1 - Find a compelling, easy to agree way to capture opt ins for this niche, even if I must give them or sell them something unrelated to my product (squeeze page)
2 - Nurture the list with content and good low cost or free offers I find or create, to turn them into customers and defray customer acquisition costs
3 - Sales funnel them into readiness to buy a Posi-Dome or Versa-Dome (without offering too many choices or confusing content)
4 - Continue to offer value and products to the list, even if most are 3rd party products I offer as an affiliate, or buy to resell
5 - Drive traffic to the funnel using facebook ads, SEO, blogs and articles
6 - Tweak everything with split tests until it is STRONG and profitable
7 - Scale it to fill my production schedule and feed in money from other products that appeal to this niche

Does this make sense to you? Please let me know if I'm off base or have missed something important.

Yeah, you are heading in the right direction with your thoughts here. A lead capture should not be your initial focus though, it should be traffic. You can only capture leads if you have a base of traffic and it will be much easier to capture leads if you are an authority within the given space.

Once you have that traffic, your process there is on point for building and managing a list with a high level of success (through nurturing them).

Thanks Kyle. Agreed, but I actually had over 1500 targeted clicks last month from cheap facebook ads, and due to lousy conversion I've nothing to show for them, but some confidence in my social media traffic strategy. I am building a foundation for SEO traffic and for nurturing the contacts after I capture them, but having a funnel for that social media traffic stream is clearly a priority, as traffic is already there.

I am an authority in this niche, as I've been doing sales support and customer service in it for 15 years, but my marketing process has been WAY inadequate... which is why I'm here!

Traffic wont' convert if it is not targeted and if the people are not qualified buyers. FB ads traffic is not always the best unless you are super granular and you already have some metrics on your top converting pages and these audiences.

That is why I recommend starting with SEO and then moving to paid marketing platforms down the road once you have the prowess and organic budget to do so.

Thanks Kyle. Of course I'm working the FB structure to only display to highly targeted prospects, but the jury is still out on how well that's working - trying to be super granular, but FB adds in some secret sauce and I can't be sure. I do have metrics on the old site pages but they're dismal, so the SEO education is critical.

I am working through the training and developing an interest-focused site to off-set the product sales site I already have. The learning is great so far and I'm really eager to get some visitors to track. I hope to see something late this month, if everything goes well. I'm convinced that SEO will have a very low upper limit on potential sales volume, but it will be critical for prospect understanding I need to build a proper funnel for social and other traffic sources.

There is no upper limit with SEO, you can make $100 per month if you work for that or $100K per month. The sky is truly the limit Steve. :)