With all the automation occurring in today’s marketplace, wouldn’t an “autopilot job” be a great thing to have?
I tried multiple jobs and careers and came to a conclusion: I wanted an autopilot job which worked on my behalf. Even my dream job as a stuntman wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. I endured years of sacrifice, was broke for decades, juggled multiple job roles and commuted for hours on end.
So I decided to look for an autopilot job. I knew I needed to somehow use automation and the internet to sell products and automate the sale.
Autopilot Job – The Internet
I tried several strategies to give me leverage, use automation and escape the time for money trap of working in return for a salary. Here’s a few of the things I tried:
- Forex marketing
- Buying and selling on eBay,
- Selling my own ebooks
- Affiliate marketing
- Google Adsense
After working an eBay business for some time, I realised I wasn’t using the internet and digital technology in the most efficient manner. I had learned the eBay strategy after purchasing an ebook online. As I looked back at the ebook purchase it made me realise how efficient the sale was. It was a digital downloadable product. There was no physical product to move around or post and no customers to deal with. I decided to create my own ebooks and sell them online.
But after several attempts I failed to sell any of my ebooks. I put myself on a marketing course and this led me to another business model. Affiliate marketing is an online business model which lets anyone earn commissions from selling other people’s products over the internet. Again this meant no need to physically post anything or deal with customers personally.
Autopilot Job – Problems
After a couple of years working as an affiliate marketer I was still struggling. Between stunt work, driving HGV’s and working in offices I was blogging, running adverts and attempting to sell affiliate products of all kinds. But much of what I was doing amounted to nothing! My blogs didn’t get traction, my advertising account got banned and I was constantly jumping from one course to another, looking for that magical formula to success!
Success online and an “autopilot job” eluded me for a long time but I never gave up!
Affiliate marketing is basically an autopilot job. However it is also a performance based form of income. If you don’t sell anything, you don’t get paid. Once you start making sales online, you can learn from what works and what doesn’t work to gear up automated strategies to work for you. So initially, there’s a lot of work to be done with affiliate marketing. It’s not magic!
Over time, if you stick at it, you can start to see some sales. Most people will give up before they even see a sale; so the trick is to keep at it! Once you can automate sales, you have effectively got yourself an autopilot job for life and there’s less work to do for greater rewards.
Business Models
My first affiliate marketing attempts were flawed because my information was flawed! I worked hard at the wrong activities and chose the wrong kinds of products to sell too. I would find books, for example, from Amazon which paid me only pennies/cents for a sale. Later, I learned to sell products which:
- Gave me a residual income for each sale – Recurring commission affiliate products
- Paid high commissions on certain products – high ticket affiliate products
- Gave me multiple streams of income including multi-tier commissions – earning from sales made by my team of referrals
- Had a built in sales team – closing sales on my behalf
- Offered a range of up-sells from which I could benefit.
Most affiliate programs only offer a single product. Once you’ve sold that product to a customer, you need to keep finding new customers to keep making sales. A good business model has multiple earning methods and gives you the opportunity to benefit from the lifetime value of a customer.
Affiliate Marketing – Autopilot?
To fully autopilot an online does take some time of course. I doesn’t happen overnight and there’s a few ways to do it. One strategy I’ve stuck to over the years is blogging. Although blogging does take a long time to generate an autopilot income, if you stick with it, it can work wonders.
A faster method is of course paid marketing. But paid marketing is expensive so it’s only a solution for those who have an income and can invest in a good business model.
With low value products like you’d find on Amazon, for example, you’ll struggle making a profit using paid advertising. But with a business model like the one described above (and in the image below), you’ll be much more likely to return a profit from an advertising spend.
Get Started
The good thing about building an online business is that you can do it whatever your situation. If you’re stuck in a job you hate, you can build it up alongside your current income. If you’re time rich but money poor, you can use the cheaper and free marketing strategies to build up your online business.
Most people transition slowly from their jobs while using their income to finance their internet business and fund their marketing budget. Over time, you’ll see your online business income grow. With the benefit of recurring income streams and high value products, the transition from traditional employment to working full time online can be quite quick – 6 months to a year even in some cases!
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