Having a sales autopilot system, which generates money is the goal of most affiliate marketers. With an affiliate product, you don’t personally have to do the “back end” selling, customer service or even touch a product. Affiliate marketers promote products at the “front-end” of a business, and earn commissions based on the sales they generate.
With the right kind of products, and an automated and scalable marketing “engine”, you can create a sales autopilot system which churns out cash. But how do you create such a system and what’s involved in the process?
Sales Autopilot – What To Sell?
The best way to build such a system is to use an existing product range. You can use any affiliate product of course but a range gives you more chance of success.
To use the best marketing platforms too, is expensive. So a product range will give you a greater return and make the process more easily achievable. There’s many ways to build a sales autopilot though and you don’t have to pay. But doing so will make your journey a much easier (and shorter) one.
If you’re looking for free strategies to build a sales autopilot, checkout my article autopilot money making system free. Keep in mind that this is a much slower process and there’s more work involved.
Generating Autopilot Sales
Affiliate marketers generate autopilot sales in a number of different ways. Some use paid marketing and scale up once they find a profitable campaign. This is by far the quickest and most effective method.
Other affiliates go the cheaper (but slower) route of creating content, such as this article. Over time, with enough content and visitors, you’ll start to see sales coming through from your previous work. As your body of content grows, so should your income.
You can also choose to use recurring income products too, as an affiliate. With a recurring income product, a single sale gives you an income, rather than just a single commission. This is a good strategy to use whatever your marketing methods are.
Which Marketing Strategy?
The key to marketing is to find a strategy which works for you and your specific situation. If you don’t have time, paid marketing would probably suit you better. If money is more of an issue, you can create content instead, which is cheaper (free).
Or, you can even use a combination of paid marketing and content generation. Building a sales autopilot system is the easy part. Especially if you get a ready made sales funnel. Once you have one, there’s still work to be done. You need to learn how to build an effective marketing engine to drive targeted visitors into it and deliver products and services which are valuable to them.
Some marketers use video and others write blogs. There’s many social media marketing strategies too. Choose your path wisely and stick to one until you have mastered it. It’s very easy to jump from one marketing strategy to another and get lost in the process. Sticking to one path and mastering it is a far better strategy.
Ideally too join a community of like minded people and get the help you need.
How A Sales Funnel Works
A “sales funnel” is the main strategy online business owners use to generate autopilot sales. They sell products through a marketing funnel by getting people to opt in to their email list. Once in the email list, a marketer can follow up with regular emails and build a relationship with their subscribers.
Over time this list get larger and larger and the marketer can send out a single email and reach tens of thousands of people at once. If those people are tuned in to your messaging, they are much more likely to purchase a product you recommend.
Anyone can do this too if they get the right help. You can use other people’s products and services to monetise an email list and sell products globally.
Sales Autopilot – Scaling Your Business
If you choose a good product range and use paid marketing, scaling your business is much more achievable. Whereas if you use content marketing and other free strategies, it’s much more a long term deal. With content marketing, you should expect to create a lot of content in the first instance. Not much will happen for a long time and this is a tough strategy. But if you keep at it, your traffic and sales should at some stage dramatically go up!
Bloggers and content marketers hope for their content to get traction by going viral. With a good piece of content which gets shared around the internet, it can make their business. But this of course isn’t guaranteed! You might work for months or even years before you see any kind of dramatic traction.
With paid marketing it’s different. Initially you can test and measure your advertising to see what works. You’ll quickly see which campaigns work and which don’t and you can stop those which don’t work very quickly. Once you hit on a profitable campaign, you can increase your budget to reach more people very quickly. If you have a scalable campaign and there’s plenty of traffic available, you can see a sudden rise in your traffic, leads and sales.
Online business owners can build 6 and 7 figure businesses by using paid marketing. Of course they spend a lot of money testing and measuring their advertising before they even get to the stage where they can scale up.
Autopilot Sales – The Customer Journey
To create a sales autopilot isn’t an easy thing, even with all the right tools and support. The main thing to get right is to find the right people for your particular product range. Get this wrong at your peril! Finding the right targeting for your audience is important. With online marketing platforms you can target people down to extreme details such as their age, interests, where the live and what they have been looking at online!
This is an amazing time to build an online business just because of the technology available at your fingertips! But you can easily go off course and get it wrong too. Get the wrong audience and you can spend heaps of time and/or money sending the wrong people to products they’re not interested in.
The key thing to keep in mind is the customer journey. This is the journey the customer takes in order to land at your products. If they watch a video on YouTube for example, and click a link which takes them to someone else talking, there’s a massive disconnect. They are likely to leave. It’s nice to have some congruency in your dealings with someone when you buy something. If you keep being passed from one person to another, you’re likely to lose interest. See sales funnel landing page for more on this.
Your Customer “Avatar”
The customer “avatar” is another important piece of the jigsaw when creating a sales autopilot system. A customer avatar is your perfect customer in terms of who they are, how they think, where they live and so on. The more detailed you can get on who your customer avatar is, the better you’ll be at zoning in on targeting them with your online marketing strategies.
If you own a physical shop somewhere, for example, you’ll get an idea of who your perfect customer is. Over time, you’ll see people come and go. The customers who stay with you, and keep buying from you are you perfect customers. With an online business this can be a little more tricky. You don’t have the experience of owning that physical shop and knowing the people who come in every day. So you’ll need to delve down into who exactly will benefit from your products and services. What are their main problems and pains? Where do they live? How old are they and how can you best deliver your products to them?
When you can answer these questions, you’ll be in a better position to target your perfect customer avatar with your marketing efforts.
Testing And Measuring
The top online marketers have built 6 and 7 figure businesses. Many spend upwards of $20k a month just on marketing, driving targeted visitors into their sales funnel and making sales.
But they don’t start out by spending this kind of money. They start out small by testing adverts at £10-$20 a day. Over a month of spending $20 a day, you’ll have spent $600. With a good sales funnel, you should know your numbers so you can test and measure a campaign without losing too much capital. If a $600 campaign returns only $500 in sales, you know something is wrong. So you try again.
Testing and measuring is how these marketers all begin. They find a strategy which delivers a return which is greater than their investment reliably over and over. Then they can scale up and increase their budget knowing that their budget has given them a positive return. Even for a low return, they can still scale up their sales autopilot to make larger percentages.
Example Of Some Numbers
For example. Lets say a marketer spends $500 and only makes $550. They are still in profit and they have built an autopilot sales funnel which works! They’ve made $50 by spending $500. So if they then increase their budget to $2000, they will make $2200 all things being equal.
A good funnel should give you a larger return than 10% of course. But you can see how the power of scaling a funnel aggressively can be used as a strategy to make more money.
Ideally, your sales funnel should give you a return of 2:1 which means you pay in $1 and get $2 out. Then, you can scale up and pay $20,000 a month and get $40,000 out! However, unless you’ve a lot of cash to burn on testing your sales funnel, you should definitely start with small amounts you can afford to lose.
Why Build An Sales Autopilot?
Of course this all seems like a lot of effort. Why would you want to do this? Well if you’ve read this far, you must be at least a little interested? A sales autopilot gives you freedom: both financial freedom and time freedom. Before the coronavirus outbreak, a sales funnel system was attractive because it meant people could escape their uncomfortable jobs and careers and live with more choice.
At the moment during lock down, it’s a slightly different story but the same carries true. A sales funnel can give you complete autonomy over your income which is incredibly important if you want to be free from a boss or an employer. But more so now, people are looking for ways to earn for themselves without relying on their jobs during lockdown.
If you’re serious about building an online income and even if you have no experience, you can get access to training and resources here which can help anyone earn online.