I started looking for autopilot business ideas after discovering eBay back in the 90’s. Ebay seemed like the perfect place to be able to automate an online sale. After some buying and selling strategies which required a lot of time and effort, I bought an eBook from eBay which showed me an eBay business system.
The eBook itself though was something I couldn’t get out of my mind. It was one of the first autopilot business ideas I had come across. Simply list a digital product and sell it on autopilot over and over to anyone globally. It led me to a number of other business strategies which were far better and more lucrative.
Autopilot Business Ideas – The Downloadable Digital Product
There was a problem with digital downloads on eBay at the time in the UK. You had to physically post something out, rather than offer a downloadable product. But the idea led me to another business model called affiliate marketing. With affiliate marketing, you can offer other people’s digital products and earn up to 50% commission on the sale. One of the first courses I bought was by a guy called Peter Lexus. You can read about some of the courses I took in my digital profit course review.
Peter taught a simple strategy to sell a digital product he had created. You could choose any product to sell, but I chose to sell his course. I’d got a huge amount of value from his course so was happy to promote it. It involved setting up a website and using an email autoresponder to automate an email follow up series. I sold several courses all on autopilot using this strategy. Unfortunately my Adwords account got shut down too, which kind of put a spanner in the works.
Autopilot Business Ideas – Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is definitely one of the best autopilot business ideas. There’s also drop shipping too, which can be automated. Both business models use an existing business model, product or range of products and you can earn commissions based on the sales you generate through your marketing efforts.
Marketers can therefore spend their time on the marketing side of another business, earning profits by studying the data they collect from marketing, and automating and scaling their advertising campaigns. There’s other ways affiliates generate sales too. Some affiliates create content instead of using paid marketing strategies. This website for example, autopilot money making software, makes money from affiliate sales.
If you purchase something from my email list, or from an affiliate link on this site, I’ll earn a commission on this sale.
Why Affiliate Marketing Is Such A Great Autopilot Business Idea
Affiliate marketing is a great business idea for a number of reasons. Firstly, you can operate it from anywhere globally. All you need is a laptop and an internet connection. You don’t need to physically post anything and you can simply direct customers to other people’s products to earn a commission on a sale. This makes it very easy to automate and scale.
See also why I do affiliate marketing and why you should too!
But there’s also lots of ways to do affiliate marketing and lots of products to choose from. When I started doing affiliate marketing over ten years ago, I chose to be a blogger and use free products which you can find on websites like Clickbank and JVzoo. It was an incredibly slow process. It wasn’t until I discovered better products to promote and better ways to advertise them, that things really changed.
High Ticket Products And Affiliate Marketing
A “high ticket” product refers to the value of a product and also the commission you will receive when you sell it. Most of the products I started selling when I began with affiliate marketing were valued around $100 each. At 40% commission, I earned $40 for each sale. However, this doesn’t leave a lot of room for marketing costs and experimentation.
A high ticket product, on the other hand, gives you more opportunity to use paid marketing and recoup your marketing budget. A $1000 product which offer the same commission rate would pay you $400 for a sale. This gives you a better chance at succeeding with affiliate marketing for a few reasons:
- You can more easily test and measure paid marketing platforms, without losing money
- Scaling up can be done more quickly with high ticket products
- You can build a more sustainable business mode quickly too
Recurring Income From Affiliate Products
Another thing to consider is to use recurring income affiliate programs. Recurring income programs offer ongoing value to customers and are typically things such as software programs and memberships. They give the affiliate, the opportunity to earn commissions on an ongoing basis from previous sales.
This itself is one of the best autopilot business ideas. You sell an item once, and continue to earn money from your customer, month after month, year after year. Even if your commission is only $10 a month, with 100 customers you’ll earn $1000 a month. With a 1000 customers, you’ll earn $10,000 a month.
Of course customers can leave too. So it’s worth choosing products which will offer a lifetime value to your customers. Tools such as email autoresponders and hosting providers offer tools for online businesses which are fundamental and necessary, so they are a good bet! But you’ll still need to learn how to promote them, which is the biggest thing you’ll need to learn as an affiliate marketer.
How To Promote Affiliate Products
There’s many ways to promote digital products on the internet. Digital products offer some of the best rates of commissions to affiliates. Compare commission rates from digital products to physical products and you’ll see a massive disparity: 40-50% in some cases with digital products compared to 3-10% in the case of digital products.
Promoting the products is what you really need to learn as an affiliate. Having the right products is just as important, but learning how to sell products online can take a little longer to fathom. Ideally join an affiliate program which has a community of people who can help you build your online business. (Access free videos on the sign up form on this website).
Despite an online business being one of the best autopilot business ideas, there’s still a lot of work involved in building one from scratch. To get to the point of making sales is the first stage. Then you need to scale up. With the automation involved in an autopilot online business, this is simply a numbers game. Once your figures stack up, and you pay in less than you get out, it might be time to scale up.
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