Having an affiliate marketing autopilot business is something many affiliates aspire to have. It’s a great idea too, if you can make it work. However, as most affiliate marketers know, to get to this stage requires a lot of work! Affiliate marketing can work on autopilot, but there’s a lot involved first to get the wheels of an affiliate business running. Once you get it running, you don’t have to do much else. Money and sales come in, and you benefit from the work you have done previously!
Affiliate Marketing Autopilot – What Does It Take To Build An Autopilot Affiliate Business?
Many affiliates are hardwired to be workaholics. Building an affiliate business that works takes a certain type of dedication, too. If you can get yourself through the tunnel though, things can work by themselves. There’s more than light at the end of the tunnel to be found, too! There’s financial freedom potentially for affiliates who stay the course and don’t give up. Many will give up of course and less than 10% of new online business owners will actually make the course. More like 3% in fact!
There’s a few tactics which long term affiliates use to their advantage beyond the obvious autopilot money making software used in their business systems. Most affiliates will use a combination of blogging, video and paid marketing techniques to get their products in front of a scalable audience. This is a large part of the skill of course and those who quit usually do so because they can’t get their marketing methods to work.
If they do, and they can automate the process, they’ve built a largely automated business which will run without them! That’s pretty huge when you think about it. No more commute, no more bosses. You will Never have to work in a job ever again. And you have the ability to live anywhere in the world! The implications are pretty vast if you can make an online business work for you.
Tricks Of The Autopilot Affiliates
So what kinds of business model do you use to create an autopilot affiliate business? I wish I had asked this question many years ago. Unfortunately I spent years promoting the wrong kinds of products and using the wrong marketing strategies too! Just by using recurring commission affiliate programs, for example, you can get a huge head start on other affiliates who are doing the same as you.
Imagine selling a single physical product once a month from a blog. If you choose to sell a book from Amazon, you’re likely to earn less than $1 a month from a sale. However, if you sell recurring commission products, you can earn $20 a month from each customer. So after 100 sales you’ll either have $100 in total, or a recurring commission of $2000 monthly. You can work your ass off for either but it’s obvious which one is the best bet!
An affiliate program which offers recurring income is a good start. But you can also benefit from using product ranges, rather than selling a single product. High commission affiliate programs pay much larger commissions than most. Digital products pay around 30-40% commission compared to physical products. These are just a few of the strategies used by affiliates who have built affiliate marketing ‘autopilot’ businesses.
Affiliate Marketing Autopilot – What’s Not On Autopilot
What’s not autopilot about an affiliate business is the set up. You can set up an advertising platform, purchase a ready made sales funnel and even automate emails to send out to your subscribers. But you will need to test and measure your advertising and ‘tweek’ your marking accordingly. The fastest way to build an online business which has automation built into it is by using a digital product range and marketing with a scalable strategy. This isn’t cheap and if you’re looking for a cheaper alternative, expect to roll up your sleeves and spend a good deal of time creating content.
Blogging, for example is an example of a slow marketing strategy. Unless your content goes viral very quickly, you can expect to be writing for a long time before you can see money coming in – especially on autopilot. However, that being said, as your reach increases and with a good strategy, you can see traffic, leads and sales coming in from content you’ve created years earlier. The more content you have out there, the more the likelihood if it getting found.
What Goes Wrong For Affiliates?
Many affiliates start out with the idea that building an autopilot business online is an easy thing. It’s not! It’s easy to get distracted by the many different courses and strategies you can use to generate content, sales and leads. You need a good blueprint to work to as an affiliate and you need to stick to it long enough to see the results. Otherwise it’s far too easy to give up.
Well meaning relatives and friends will doubt your mission too, which won’t help you gain trust and belief in what you’re doing. Unless you have a strong belief if what you’re doing as an affiliate, and follow it through to the end, it’s a difficult path for even the toughest entrepreneur! When you start out as an affiliate, your inbox will be full of conflicting information. People will promise you easier results than the path you’re already on. You’ll lose momentum and switch paths. There’s many more mistakes you can make as an affiliate too.
Affiliate Marketing Autopilot – Members
One of the surest ways to build an affiliate business which will eventually run itself on autopilot is to use membership products and help your members achieve success. Online business owners need software too. Email autoresponders are one of the most vital pieces of an affiliate marketers “took kit”.
Once someone starts making their living from affiliate marketing, and you’ve helped them get there, you will most likely have made a loyal customer for life. This means that even if you only make a membership commission of $20 a month, you have still made an income and not just a commission. With a scalable marketing strategy up your sleeve too, you can find many more like them.
High Ticket Products
High ticket products are pretty important too for an online business. Unless you want to be creating content forever, you’ll need to use some paid marketing to scale up your business. You can use free strategies of course but they will take much longer.
With a high ticket product range, you can more easily recoup your advertising spend as you make sales. With smaller value products and lower commissions, this is much more difficult. In fact, many of the more expensive marketing platforms will be out of reach without a high ticket program. Ideally use high ticket recurring commission affiliate programs.
Access An Online Training Resource
Learn more about affiliate marketing and getting started with your own online business. Access an on-demand training series here.