Back in the early 2000’s I wanted to create an autopilot internet business. After buying an eBook which taught me an eBay business system, I was curious if I could sell my own ebooks automatically over the internet. So I created an ebook and attempted to sell it.
I knew the idea of selling a digital product online had a huge potential; no postage fees, no handling and no manufacturing costs. But I didn’t know what it would involve. After building a website and placing my ebook sales page on it, I automated the process of the digital download with a Paypal button. It was pretty straight forward really.
I was then to learn that getting people to my website was the difficult part of this journey. I put myself on one of those “earn money online” courses to learn how to sell my own ebook. It was at this point that I discovered a far better business model known as affiliate marketing.
Autopilot Internet Business: Why Affiliate Marketing?
Why is affiliate marketing a better business model? Selling an ebook from a website can be done by anyone but you’ll only make a tiny amount and that’s if you manage to sell it in the first place. Marketers today are giving ebooks away as a means to build their email lists. So it’s getting tougher to actually sell a digital download since so many are available for free.
To get traffic to a website you can either create a tonne of content, which takes time, or pay for it with an online ad campaign. But paid advertising costs money and if you’re selling only a $10 ebook you’re going to have problems getting profitable. But an affiliate product can sell for a lot more than an ebook and you don’t even need to create the product yourself with affiliate marketing.
Affiliate marketing, if you didn’t already know, is an internet business model in which people sell other people’s products for a share of the profit. While there are a few internet based businesses which can be automated and scaled, affiliate marketing is one of the simplest models which anyone can use.
You don’t need anything to start except a laptop and internet connection. You can do affiliate marketing from anywhere and sell pretty much anything online so long as it has an affiliate program attached to it.
Autopilot Internet Business: What’s The Catch?
What’s the catch? You may be thinking if this business model is so great why isn’t everyone doing it. While many people are doing affiliate marketing it’s still relatively uncommon and most people are still working jobs based on the traditional economy.
With affiliate marketing your job is to be the “middleman” in an online business transaction. This requires some skill and many new affiliates will drop out when they don’t see an immediate return on their activity. In fact something like 95% of affiliates will quit. But that’s because they don’t know what I’m about to tell you 😉 !
The “catch” if you want to call it that is that getting people to a website where you’re selling an affiliate product is probably the most difficult aspect of affiliate marketing. Way back when I was trying to sell my ebook from a website, this was my problem.
I learned many marketing tactics such as paid advertising, email list building and content marketing. This article is a marketing tactic and you’re most likely reading this because I targeted a specific keyword on this page!
Since paid marketing is expensive, and content marketing requires a lot of work, there’s one thing which makes affiliate marketing much, much easier and more accessible. Want to know what it is?
Autopilot Internet Business: Products
Before I had any success with affiliate marketing I struggled and struggled. I would’ve quit if I wasn’t so stubborn and determined! When I eventually made a sale online, it was for peanuts! “How on Earth was I going to make this work as a main source of income?”, I thought!
The answer was in the products and services I was promoting, and how I was promoting them. I sold products from Amazon when I first became an affiliate. That’s because Amazon is the most well known affiliate program and I knew of it. I had even bought from Amazon too so I knew it was a trusted site to buy from. I sold a few products from Amazon but the commissions are so low you would barely notice the money coming in when you made a sale!
Some products from Amazon only pay as little as 1% to affiliates who refer them. So a $100 product would only pay you $1 as an affiliate! Kind of a waste of your time unless you can sell in bulk very cheaply, which is difficult to say the least.
But sell high ticket digital products and it’s a different story.
Autopilot Internet Business: Why Sell Digital Products
Back to the ebook idea and you can understand why digital products are the way forward if you want to automate an internet business. Digital products don’t require handling, manufacturing and postage costs.
These savings are passed on to the affiliate. Advertising costs, which account for the bulk of costs associated with selling of digital products online can be off-loaded to third parties (affiliates). So when an affiliate sells a digital product, they can earn between 30% and 40% of the sale price.
Digital products can be accessed from anywhere globally too which means you can sell to anyone, provided they have an internet connection and a smart phone! That’s a lot of people!
When you make more from selling affiliate products, you can afford to pay more for your advertising costs too. This opens the possibility up of selling in scale to a global audience using paid marketing strategies. With low priced physical products (which pay out tiny commissions), using paid ads is difficult because there’s such little leverage.
High Ticket Digital Products & Subscription Products
The most profitable digital products to sell are high ticket digital products. These are products which pay out $500 or more typically. You can also sell high ticket physical products too. Take a look at the products below. The Amphibious Sub-Surface Watercraft sells for $300,000! As an affiliate of this product, you can earn 8% if you manage to sell it! That’s $24,000 in commissions – plenty of room for playing with some paid advertising, unlike low value physical products from Amazon, for example.
Other good products to promote for affiliate marketers are subscription affiliate products. With a subscription product, you can earn ongoing commissions from previous sales. A good example of such a product is some kind of business tool. Autoresponders for example are needed to operate online businesses. So if you sell one you can earn ongoing commissions for life, assuming your customer maintains their subscription.
Aweber, for example is a good product for online business owners. I’ve had an Aweber subscription for years because I use it in my online business.
Promotion Methods
There’s many ways to promote affiliate products online. Shortly after I was failing to sell my ebook, I found an affiliate marketing course and started promoting other people’s products. But I had a lot of problems and the biggest one was getting traffic. Without traffic nothing can happen even with the shiniest website in the whole of the world! I wasted so much time making my websites look pretty but without actually getting anyone to see them!
Once I realised I was doing this, I started learning. I tried paid advertising and had my account shut down for not complying with the t’s and c’s. Back in the early 2000’s this was a big deal. I couldn’t get it reinstated, so started trying other marketing methods such as blogging and niche website creation. But this is very slow and unless you’re loving the journey (I wasn’t), you’re most likely to quit.
So if you want to get an internet business going quickly, and with less stress and pain, you’re going to want to use paid marketing for your strategy. But you can’t easily do this without promoting the right products and services which give you a larger margin for error while you’re learning – a high ticket and subscription digital business system.
The High Ticket Product Range
A high ticket product range gives you the best opportunity to build a profitable online digital business with paid advertising. Large commissions coming in and recurring commissions coming in regularly means your business can become profitable much more quickly, without messing around forever building content and trying to do everything on the cheap – (what I did for years) before I found a high ticket sales funnel.
Any number of online platforms will let you build a website and get a product up there, ready to sell. But that’s not the hard part. The hard part is the marketing – getting people to your site. So many affiliates drop out because they get their shiny new website up and running but can’t afford the marketing costs to send people to it, or they don’t have the patience to build a tonne of blog posts or upload countless videos to get the traffic for free!
With a high ticket sales funnel, your business model gives you the ability to use paid marketing in a much more cost effective way. So even when you’re learning, you can afford a larger marketing budget while you’re testing out your ads. This is all so much easier when you have a plan to follow, a high ticket sales funnel and coaching and mentoring to help you along the way. Given that 95% of affiliates will drop out, the factor of the 5% is they get help and stay the course!
Summary
I spent years struggling as an affiliate before learning what I have shared in this article. Hopefully it will give you a head start on your affiliate journey, should you choose to take action. Through the use of high ticket digital products, and by getting help and support, my journey was ultimately fast tracked.
You can find a high ticket sales funnel through this website and get help and support if you’re serious about building an autopilot internet business from scratch. Please also join my email list and reply to any email I send you. I’ll get back to you and answer any questions.
Enjoy the journey!
Tim
(P.S. click the image below to get started)