One of the best ways to earn on autopilot is with an autopilot affiliate website. Websites operate 24 hours a day, 365 days a year and without much work or upkeep. So if you can turn a website into a money generating machine, you can build an autopilot income from one!
You can reach a global audience with a website and sell products without even dealing with customers or even touching a product yourself! This is done through the sale of other people’s products – a business model known as affiliate marketing.
Autopilot Affiliate Website – What Is Affiliate Marketing?
Affiliate marketing is a popular online business model where third parties get paid for product referrals. By sending qualified online visitors to other people’s products, affiliates can earn from sales of goods and services they don’t even own themselves! There’s a couple of huge benefits which come with this model of online sales:
- You can sell internationally and to an unlimited number of customers
- The sales are hands free – your only job is to learn how to be the “go-between” in the financial exchange
Websites can facilitate these sales. With enough targeted visitors you can generate consistent, passive online sales. But this requires some planning. Not all affiliate websites instantly make money. So the building of an autopilot affiliate website should be planned carefully.
Autopilot Affiliate Website – Organic Traffic
One way to build an autopilot affiliate website is through careful planning of the keywords around which your site is built. By building a niche website, in a carefully thought out niche, you can ultimately get free traffic to your site. This can take some time and planning.
Start out with a keyword to build your site from by typing in your main keyword into Google’s keyword planner. Look for longer tail derivatives of your best keyword to build a site from.
Your keyword should attract the right kind of visitors to your website. That is, keen buyers not just browsers! Ideally find a keyword which represents your chosen target audience, has low competition on the SERPS (Search engine results pages) and enough traffic to get people to your site for free!
Keep in mind that traffic is split with the first few results on the SERPS. So if you find a keyword with only 50 monthly searches, that’s probably not enough. Divided among the first five results on Google, you might get as little as only 10 hits a month if you got your site to rank in the top 5!
Once you have built your site, you can keep creating fresh content to boost your traffic. Over time, a lot of content will bring in more free visitors. But to make sales from such a website is still tricky, even with a lot of traffic. Most website visitors don’t buy on a website. To make more sales from an autopilot affiliate website, you need to build an email list.
Autopilot Affiliate Website – Building An Email List
On a website, someone only has a few minutes with which to make a buying decision. After that they are gone forever! Studies have shown that a customer needs several touch points before buying something online. To achieve this you can build an email list from your website.
To build an email list you need something of value to offer your subscribers. What is often used by bloggers and website owners is an ebook or some kind of “value add” in the form of a freebie. On this website, I offer free video training for those wanting to build affiliate businesses. Check it out here.
By collecting subscribers from a website, you can build an email list and sell affiliate products through your email marketing campaigns. This gives you more opportunity to build a relationship with your subscribers and promote your affiliate products. If you give huge value in your email marketing, more subscribers will open and digest your email content, and purchase your products if they are a good fit.
Autopilot Affiliate Website – Building A Google? Facebook Compliant Website
Another option if you don’t have the patience for building a niche website is to pay for traffic. To do this you’ll need a compliant website which meets the criteria for the platform you’re going to use for your marketing. Here’s a few of the most popular platforms you can use to drive targeted traffic towards your affiliate website:
- Google Adwords
- YouTube
- Bing
Using paid traffic is far faster than building a niche site. Plus you’re pretty much guaranteed traffic! With a free traffic method, you don’t control the traffic in the same way and it’s much less scalable. With paid traffic, once you hit upon a profitable advert, you can simply add more money to make more sales.
One of the simplest ways to do this is to use a landing page software and build a simple landing page to collect email subscribers.
Why Use Landing Pages?
Why use landing pages? Simple. Landing pages give you more opportunity to make the most from your advertising budget. If you send paid traffic to a website (like this one), your visitors are more likely to browse your site and disappear without having taken any action.
On a landing page visitors only have two choices: sign up to your email list or leave the site. This gives marketers more opportunity to “squeeze” a decision out of a visitor – this is why landing pages are also referred to a squeeze pages.
Using a landing page is much more cost effective if you’re going to use paid advertising for your affiliate business. But you will still need to make sure the pages you use conform to the regulations of the marketing platform you’re using.
Problems With Paid & Free Strategies
There’s problems with both paid advertising and free traffic. While paid marketing is fast and scalable, it comes at a cost. If you don’t make your money back from affiliate sales, you’re not going to be in business very long. Plus you also want to make a profit of course!
The best option if you’re going this route is to use a high ticket affiliate program in your sales funnel. High ticket affiliate programs give you larger commissions and this is better if you a running an advertising budget. You can access one by signing up on this website.
Free marketing strategies such as blogging have their problems too, of course. With a free strategy you don’t control your traffic. Niche websites can take some time to build and don’t rank straight away. It can take a long time and a lot of work to create content which brings in traffic completely for free.
Other Options
Building an affiliate website is one of the best automated business ideas available. But there’s other options to building your own autopilot affiliate website and one is to buy a ready made affiliate website. Sites such as Flippa.com allow anyone to bid on an affiliate website which is already making money. The best paying websites are of course going to cost you a pretty penny!
If you don’t have a few grand lying around to buy an e-commerce store from Flippa.com you can build your own store using Shopify.com.
Shopify allows anyone to create an affiliate website and populate it with affiliate products. What it doesn’t do is advertise your website for you! You’ll need to do that yourself, which means we’re back to the ideas of content marketing or paid marketing.
With low value products in your e-commerce store, paying for advertising can be prohibitive. Using a high ticket product range can give you the best option and at the lowest price if you’re willing to do the work of learning marketing yourself.