$30m CEO Explains - Website or Sales Funnel in 2025

There's an aspect to business that most don't know about or refuse to change, that is potentially costing you millions of dollars. And in this video, I'm not only going to tell you what the change is, but how you can go about implementing it in a simple way that can be massive results for your business. But first, if you're new here, my name is John, famously husband, father and online entrepreneur and founder of advanced.

com. And over the past ten years, I've built multiple online businesses that generated over $30 million without having to hustle 24/7 and sacrifice my personal life or stop doing the things that I love. And now I teach other people to do the same.

So what is this mistake that we're talking about today? It's the idea that you need to have a website to succeed online with your business, to find new potential prospects, to convert more customers and clients, to build an audience and to grow your business. And the reality is, you do not need a website.

In fact, I'd go as far to say it's a bad idea to focus on building a website and building an online presence at the very beginning of your business journey, and I'd like to back up what I'm saying by pointing out that I made my first million dollars on the internet with my first ever online business, without ever having a website. And you might be wondering, well, if we don't have a website, how on earth do we find people or allow them to find us and grow the darn business? Well, it's using something called a sales funnel, not a website.

Allow me to explain. The idea with a website is that you've got an online page or home page where you've perhaps got your logo at the top. There, and you've got a series of pages that they can click through, and maybe you have a little bit of text at the top that says who you are and what you're about.

Maybe you have a video that gets to know you, and then you've got other sections down the page that maybe talk about who you are, what you've got going on, what your business is about, and all of these tabs at the top sprout off to complete separate pages. You might have an About Me page. You might have a contact me page, you might have a testimonials page.

And you've got all these different pages that they can be clicking on with no clear intention for the journey, that the prospect is going to go on and get to a point where they do some business with you. The idea with a website is it's got all the information about you and your business, and people can have a look around, click about, find out who you are, but there's no actual destination and no call to action to do some business with you. The difference with a sales funnel is we're going to take a lot of that same information, but we're going to be strategic with how we're implementing it.

So the first thing that we want to do with any business is we want to do what we call lead capture, where someone has to register their interest on a page and give their name and email address to move through to the next step in the process. And in so doing, they join your email list, and you're probably aware that an email list is a very valuable asset that we want in the business. And so the first step is to register their interest and opt in, perhaps in exchange for a free gift to build your list.

Then they land on the next step where maybe you share a bit about who you are and what your business is and what you do. And you'll have perhaps a video on that page, but a button to move through to the next step. Perhaps I'm going to put P for product.

So once you've got that first step where they've had a chance to get to know you and who you are, you make it very clear what to do next. Click the button below to learn about the products that I have and how I can help. So they click through to the next page, where now you're able to get a little bit more salesy and be very upfront about the products that you have, and perhaps even present a special offer that's happening right here, right now in your funnel.

And that might take them to a checkout page where they purchase off the back of that, you might have a one time offer that they now have a chance to take action on, because they are now a customer in your system. And we have a very clear process from start to finish that takes a cold prospect who's never heard of you before leads them very sequentially through a process that has them coming out the other end, not just a lead, but an actual customer and client in. And for your business.

Now, if you're new to building sales funnels, you do need an online tool, and platform is going to be able to allow you to do this, to build those pages, to customize them, make them look beautiful, sell your products, build your email list. The one that we recommend is one that me and my business partner Ryan spent millions developing, and it's called funnel. It's what my entire business is built on, and I think you'll absolutely love it.

And you can get a free trial to play around with it. There's a link in the description box, and we'll talk about that a little bit more later on. So let's quickly talk about the pros and cons of a website and a sales funnel.

The pros for having a website is, quite frankly, you are able to establish yourself as a brand, as an authority, because there's lots of information that they're being hit with all at one time. You look very impressive. You come off very well.

The disadvantage the con is that because it is so distracting, there is no clear path for them to take action. And we would never send intentional traffic to a website. If you're going to run a Facebook ad, an Instagram ad, a tick tock ad, a YouTube ad, a Google ad, you would never spend money on, paid traffic and pointing into a website where it is a leaky experience.

People can leak off that page in so many different places and ways. And equally, let's look at the pros and cons of a sales funnel. Okay?

The pros are that you would send paid traffic to this because you're going to be able to squeeze that advertising, spend like a lemon, and get as much juice out of it as possible. You can also track the numbers all the way through. You know how many people land on this page.

You know how many move to the next step and how many leave. You know how many. Then move on to the next page and hear about your product and how many leave.

And so with that data, you can start to make good decisions to improve the conversion rates on these pages and therefore increase the profitability of the business. Another advantage is, of course, being able to build an email list, which, by the way, right now in just one of our main companies, we generate an additional six figures every single month just emailing our offers to our email list. It's a very valuable asset, and a sales funnel allows you to have a system to build that, and you're also able to scale a sales funnel.

You can't scale a website. If I spend $50 promoting my funnel and all the things said and done, I generate $200 in customer revenue, then I now have a system where I can get 4 to 1 on my money. So I will spend more on the front and I will make more out the other end.

But let's talk about the cons of a sales funnel, because it's basically the opposite of a website, right? The advantage of a website was branding and authority building, and that's the piece that we don't really get with the sales funnel. We get conversion, we get email list, we get customers.

But we don't establish ourselves as an authority as much as we could on a website where there's lots of opportunity to plaster our PR and our achievements and testimonials and what people are saying. There's more opportunity to do that on a website. So ultimately, if you're in a position right now where you're deciding between website or sales funnel to grow your business, you absolutely need to start with a sales funnel.

That is what's going to drive the results in your business. Build an audience and make you some money. Second to that comes a website.

Once we start driving traffic through a sales funnel and people start to get to know you, what are they going to do? The people that don't buy are going to go in search for you online. They're going to see what else they can find from you.

That's what we call trickle traffic. That traffic is trickling over the internet to go and look into who you are and what you're about. That's when they come across your website.

So the default position is intentional traffic generation. We point to sales funnels, trickle traffic fines, our website. Now, we do find ourselves in a unique time where platforms like funnels that we've built will actually allow you to have your website and your sales funnel built on the same system.

And this becomes really powerful because it means you can spend maybe five minutes whipping together a very simple website in case people find you. Then you focus all your efforts on your sales funnel. But that trickle traffic can very easily come back and find you.

Find your website. I'll show you an example. This is my main company website ad clients.

com and you can scroll around and get to know me, get to know my business. Obviously I'm in a position now where it's worth my time to build out my website and add more bells and whistles in here because we have a multi million dollar business. But notice how the domain name is ad clients.

com. Now here's an example of one of my funnel pages. This was to promote an event that we ran last year here in London.

And so this is a sales funnel. I'm driving traffic to this page to hear about our event, and click on the button to express their interest and move through to the next step, but check it out. If we look at the web address, it's ad clients.

com, so I can build all of my sales funnels on the exact same domain name that my website is hosted. This makes it really easy for your or traffic to find you. You intentionally drive traffic from social media to your sales funnels.

Most people will take action and move through the process as you intended, but some people might go, let me check this person out, let me see what they've got going on. And they check out ad clients. Dot com.

They find themselves on your website exploring who you are and what you're about. We're killing two birds with one stone, and platforms like funnels are a really powerful way to do that. In fact, just to point out one more thing that funnel does that I just think is absolutely incredible is that you can sell your programs in here, whether it's high ticket coaching or an online course or a service, you can sell your product and you can host that in a membership area, in a training area.

But because everything in your business is under that one main brand name, ad clients, dot com or whatever your website is, the same is true then for when your clients or your customers want access to their products, they can go to your main homepage ad clients. com, click on log in and they will be able to log in to their online account where they purchase one of your products. And it means that your user experience is really smooth.

Have you ever had that moment where you purchase a product online yourself, and then you forget where the login details are and you're going through your email and you're trying to find it, and it's lost because it's on some weird domain name somewhere or here, you know, the company that you bought a product from, you can go straight to the login page and your customers can do the same with you. A smoother customer experience means happier customers and an easier business for you to manage. So go and have some fun playing around, building yourself a sales funnel.

Check out funnel. com for a free trial to our software and play around with it. See how incredible it is?

We've also got a link in the description box and if you want to learn more about how to make a sales funnel incredibly powerful and incredibly profitable, I've got another video for you right here where you can copy and paste a funnel that I have built that's made over $15 million. Check that out. Hope you enjoy it and I'll see you in a future video.