Demystifying Essential Web Jargon: A Beginner's Guide Part 2

There are a lot of acronyms and names for things to learn when you become a digital entrepreneur, and its not just techy stuff. There are a lot of, “business”, terms too that you are all of a sudden expected to understand as soon as you become a digital entrepreneur. 

Knowing what some of these mean will help you understand what is going on in the industry and make it easier to find the help you are looking for and know what tools to use.

This is a beginner's guide. I'll break down some common terms that every online entrepreneur is sure to come across and might want to know.

Funnel

In the realm of online business, a funnel is a journey that your potential customers take to move them from one stage of readiness to buy to another. A funnel could be designed to curate every step your client takes from when they gain initial awareness of you, to when they buy your products or services. It could also be designed to take existing customers and lead them into buying a different product.

In the plainest sense, your funnel is the combination of landing pages, emails, ads, social media posts, and payment pages, in any amount or variety all tied together with automations to reach someone in your audience and lead them to use your products or services.

There are many software solutions that have tools to build and manage funnels, ClickFunnels, Funnels.io, and Pipedrive are solutions that are dedicated to funnels. I use Kajabi which is an all-in-one platform that offers many services including funnels. I have a full review of Kajabi you can read if you are interested in learning about the different features and tools it has to help you run your online business.

Lead Magnet

A lead magnet is a valuable piece of content or incentive offered to prospects in exchange for their contact information, typically their name and email address. Lead magnets are used at the top of the sales funnel to attract and capture leads, enticing people who aren’t aware of you yet to subscribe to your email list or take a specific action. 

The concept is to trade something that is really interesting and valuable to your potential clients for their name and email address. Then they get to test you out as a solution to their problems, and you get to start emailing them to introduce yourself and further show them what you are all about. Its kind of like speed dating. 

A lead magnet can be anything really but some common examples include checklists, cheat sheets, challenges, ebooks, templates, webinars, and free trials. If they like what you offered in the lead magnet, they will want to stick around on your email list to see what else you can do to help them.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

SEO is the practice of optimizing your website and online content to improve its visibility in search engines. In terms of searchability, your content will have keywords, and depending on what Google thinks of you and your content, it will show your pages if it thinks those pages will meet the needs of the person who is performing a search. The more Google thinks your content is the answer its searchers are looking for, the higher your rankings will be for those keywords that get searched.

SEO is something that anyone can do to their website if they have a base understanding of what Google does to determine how to best answer searchers questions. If you are interested in learning more about SEO, I suggest you read my blog article about SEO in Kajabi. It covers a lot of basics about SEO as well as showing some of how you can manage SEO in Kajabi.

Autoresponder

An autoresponder is another name for an email marketing platform. You’ve probably heard of Flowdesk, MailChimp, ActiveCampign, ConvertKit, or Mailerlite, the list goes on and on; those platforms are autoresponders. 

They are called that because you can set up automations so that when people take action on your site they will send premade email content to them so you don’t have to manually respond to everything. Kajabi includes email marketing tools in all of its plans to cover this need for you; however, if you are looking for a standalone platform for this, I recommend Flowdesk.

CMS (Content Management System)

A CMS is a platform that is going to manage a variety of online content. Kajabi is a great example of this because it manages websites, landing pages, email marketing, online courses, podcast hosting, blogging, coaching packages, community, payment processing, and more.

LMS (Learning Management System)

A LMS is a platform that focuses on the learning experience and provides tools for facilitators or teachers to deliver content to students and engage at some level with them. It is pretty common for CMSs to include LMSs

CRM (Customer Relationship Management)

The CRM tool is what keeps track of the contacts in your business. It stores all the contact information you have for each person on your list, and their transaction history, and tracks engagement. In Kajabi, this is all done under the Contacts feature. CRM also includes workflow automations to help you manage your relationship with your prospective and current customers. Automations like sending them emails when they complete forms, or categorizing your contacts by how they engage with your site or emails.

Conclusion

Writing a conclusion to this kind of article is kind of dry, so I turned to ChatGPT and asked it to make the conclusion as if Brandon Sanderson had written it. My family has been listening to the books in his Skyward Flight Series and I think he’s a fantastic author. So here is a robot version of pretending to be him and talking about digital entrepreneurship… you're welcome.

In the vast expanse of the digital cosmos, where entrepreneurs forge their destinies amidst the flux of bytes and algorithms, there exists a lexicon as intricate as the workings of a Shardblade. These terms, like Funnel, Lead Magnet, and SEO, are the glyphs upon which the very essence of online commerce is inscribed. To grasp their meaning is to wield a power as potent as Allomancy, shaping the currents of the digital tide to one's will.

As you traverse the endless chasms of the entrepreneurial landscape, let these terms be your metalminds, storing the wisdom of countless iterations and strategies. With each concept mastered, you unfurl the sails of your virtual vessel, navigating the tempestuous seas of online commerce with the precision of a Mistborn executing a flawless Push or Pull.

So, dear entrepreneur, heed the call of knowledge as if it were the luring whisper of Ruin or Preservation themselves. For in understanding these fundamental principles of the digital realm, you unravel the mysteries of success, weaving your own narrative amidst the tapestry of cyberspace.