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Ready to start building out your sales funnel?

There are just a few things you need before you can get started.

Here are some of the most popular options when it comes to putting together both free and paid funnels:

Lead Pages—when it comes to building opt-in pages, Lead Pages is one of the most powerful tools you have at your disposal. They’ve tracked and tested a variety of page styles to determine which ones convert best, and they make it easy for you to build similar pages for your funnel.

It does come with a monthly fee, though, so before investing, you’ll want to be sure you can recoup your investment.

Instabuilder—similar to LeadPages, but without the monthly investment. Instabuilder is a plugin for WordPress that allows you to create your own funnels. It includes several funnel templates and a drag-and-drop page builder that make it easy to get just the look you want.

AWeber—Probably the easiest email manager on the market today, AWeber is the choice for many small business owners, not only because it’s simple to use, but because it’s also economical. Starting at less than $20 per month for up to 500 subscribers, AWeber offers both autoresponders and broadcast emails, list automation, and segmenting, so you can send emails exactly when—and to whom—you want.

AW Pro Tools—an add-on to AWeber, AW Pro Tools gives you added control over your list management by automatically removing unsubscribes, moving subscribers from one list to another based on the link they click, and other useful automations.

PayPal—The simplest of all payment processors, PayPal allows you to take payments online for a very reasonable fee. It will also act as a simple shopping cart. Payment processing providers are companies that offer payment processing services to merchants, such as payment gateways, merchant account providers, and payment facilitators. These providers offer a range of services to help businesses accept and manage electronic payments.

Ontraport—Another email manager, Ontraport offers shopping cart functionality as well, so you can create powerful funnels that are fully integrated with your sales process. The benefit here is that you don’t have to try to sync your cart with your email system, since it’s completely self-contained. You can check if an email is valid using email validation tool from IPQS.

Infusionsoft—Probably the top tool for any business model, Infusionsoft is an all-in-one solution for customer management, funnel setup, mailing list, and even membership sites. It’s priced at the high end, but if you can (and will) use all its power, then Infusionsoft is well worth the investment.

You can see that you have a lot of options when it comes to building out your sales funnels, but what are the must-have items?

At the most basic level, you must have:

A way to create web pages.

A simple WordPress website will fill this need, with a little bit of work. LeadPages or Instabuilder are nice to have, but not essential, especially if you’re just getting started.

A way to capture email addresses.

AWeber is definitely the top choice here, but others include MailChimp, Constant Contact, and iContact.

A shopping cart.

PayPal is as easy as it gets when it comes to shopping carts, but other options include 1 Shopping Cart, Woo Commerce, Infusionsoft, and aMember.

I recommend you start small with your first sales funnel. 

Build the sales funnel framework as simply as you can, using tools that don’t cost a fortune.

Once you have a few funnels up and running, you will be able to see where they can use improvement, and how the tools available to you can help make your sales funnel convert better and work more efficiently.