Online businesses that run on autopilot deliver products around the clock without any human intervention. Websites accept payment automatically, and deliver products globally, all without the owner lifting a finger! Anyone can be a part of this digital economy too. The business model is known as affiliate marketing. With affiliate marketing, anyone can step into the space of owning a “digital store” from anywhere in the world, and learn how to profit from the growing digital economy.
Businesses That Run On Autopilot – Affiliate Marketing
Many businesses run partially on autopilot. Online advertising can run by itself, but with a physical business there needs to be someone serving the customers and delivering the goods. With affiliate marketing though, you can run an online business from anywhere and tap into a pre-existing business; operating solely as a referrer of customers to that business.
This can be done completely remotely, which is what makes affiliate marketing so attractive. Anyone can tap into someone’s business model and send customers to it for a share of the profits.
There’s many affiliate programs on the internet. Amazon is one of the best known affiliate programs online. Anyone can join Amazon as a partner and use their products to earn commissions on the sale of goods. Amazon may not offer the best deal to affiliates, but it does offer a huge range of products which anyone can use to earn from. Take a look at Amazon’s commission rates in the chart below.
These rates are subject to change and I believe at the time of writing, Amazon offers somewhere between 3 and 11% commissions on its product range to its referrers.
Businesses That Run On Autopilot – How Do Affiliates Generate Sales?
Affiliates generate sales by either building content and publishing it online, or running paid adverts to generate sales. Many affiliate marketers use an email list of subscribers to help build relationships with potential customers. They then automate a number of email messages which can be sent out to their subscribers. Email addresses can be collected from a website (like this one) by offering some free giveaway product to their visitors. (Sign up on my site for access to an online business training resource and community).
Selling Digital Products Over The Internet – Businesses That Run On Autopilot
One of the most popular models of affiliate marketing is selling digital products. Digital products pay much larger commissions that physical products like you would find on Amazon. With a digital product, affiliates can earn up to 40% and sometimes even 50% commission on a sale.
Digital products don’t need posting and once manufactured, there’s far less expense involved in their creation than with physical products. Physical products carry many more costs than digital products do. With a digital product, there’s no need for storage, delivery or handling costs. Everything can be accessed and delivered over the internet with a digital product. The savings can therefore be passed on the the affiliate marketers who account for the largest costs: advertising.
Best Digital Products To Use
Some of the best digital products for an affiliate marketer to promote are offered by recurring commission affiliate programs. With a recurring commission program, you can benefit from many commissions from each individual sale. These tend to be products such as memberships and software products which offer ongoing value.
It’s also a good idea to choose products which offer a number of services within a product range. That way, you only need to promote the first product in a range, and you can benefit from sales which a customer may purchase later on.
Some of the best businesses that run on autopilot are ones which offer recurring commissions. Once you’ve sold multiple memberships or subscription products, your income keeps coming in month after month, regardless whether you continue working or not.
A Product Range
With most affiliate programs, you only sell one product. Once you’ve sold it, you need to keep finding new customers. The vendor (owner of the products) gets to keep the customer for the long term, but the affiliate loses out. Hence with many affiliate programs, the affiliate marketing isn’t building their own business – they are helping other companies build their businesses but never get to “keep” any customers for themselves!
With recurring commissions and a range of up-sell products, an affiliate benefits from the lifetime value of the products they promote, and gets continual commissions even years after their initial referral.
Multi-Tier Commissions
A multi-tier commission is a commission you earn as an affiliate based on the sales made by your team of referrals. This is another way to reward affiliates for the longer term. If you are interested in building a long term online business, multi-tier sales can dramatically help you because they give you a performance related pay which equates to the amount of successful affiliates you enlist into promoting a product range.
High Ticket Commissions
Product ranges which offer multiple high ticket products within their range offer huge potential for affiliate marketers. With a number of high value items in your “digital store” your business model lets you afford to more easily use paid marketing platforms. This in turn makes for a more easily scalable business than with many other lower value items you could sell. Having only low value items in your online business means you can’t afford to pay for marketing as easily. The best models use a combination of high ticket, recurring commission, multi-tier and use a product range with a built in sales team. Access a business model which offers all of these by signing up on this website for the free video series.
Strategies Used By Affiliate Marketers
Although affiliate marketing is one of the best and most easily accessible businesses that run on autopilot, it does take some time to get traction with an online business. There’s also a variety of different strategies you could choose when starting out as an affiliate.
Organic Marketing
Organic marketers use free or low cost marketing such as blogging or social media marketing. This is a slower strategy for affiliate marketers and it will depend on your business model and own personal circumstances which route you choose to take.
Organic strategies include niche websites, blogs, social media and other low cost methods to build a following and sell affiliate products.
Paid Marketing
Paid marketers use marketing platforms such as Bing, Facebook, YouTube and Adwords to put their message in front of a very targeted audience. By starting small and finding out which strategy brings a positive return on investment, marketers can gradually increase their marketing budget and start to see traction quite quickly. It’s also wise to use a daily or monthly budget you can afford to lose in the first instance. The newer you are to marketing, the more likely it is you’ll spend money you don’t get back. As you get better, you’ll start to see sales and can play with larger amounts and scale up.
