Building an automated affiliate marketing machine isn’t as difficult as it used to be. Nowadays you can purchase a high ticket sales funnel which allows you to use paid marketing to drive targeted visitors into your “machine”.
Of course your digital products will need to offer value to customers. Would you buy a product which didn’t offer value? Ideally, you should have a number of high value products within your sales funnel. Why high value? Because you can charge a higher price and your customers will stay with you, giving you an income for life.
Building An Automated Affiliate Marketing Machine – Recurring Income Products
When I first started out as an affiliate there was a lot I didn’t understand. One of the best things I’ve learned is to choose recurring commission affiliate programs to promote. This is because you can earn an income from each sale rather than just a single commission. Even if you only earn $20 a month (from a subscription or membership product), with only 10 members you’ll earn $200 a month. With 100 members, you’ll earn $2000 a month.
Recurring income products are definitely the way to go with affiliate marketing.
Ideally also use digital products too. Most subscription products are digital. Digital products usually offer a higher level of commission than physical products you might find on a site such as Amazon. Amazon pays somewhere between 3% and 11% to it’s affiliates for a sale. With digital products you can earn up to 40 and even 50% commission.
Automated Affiliate Marketing – Promotion
The hardest part about building an automated affiliate marketing machine has to be marketing. Once you have a sales funnel in place with a range of digital products (see free video series), you’ll need to promote your sales funnel with some kind of marketing strategy.
To completely automate and scale an online business will take a considerable amount of testing and measuring of a paid marketing strategy. Paying for marketing is expensive too so you’ll need a good high ticket sales funnel with a number of high value products to promote. Otherwise you simply won’t make the money back you’ll be spending on marketing.
With a lower value product range, or fewer high ticket products to sell, you can promote your sales funnel with cheaper or free marketing. However, free marketing strategies take much longer than those you pay for. Plus they are less scalable.
A Six Figure Sales Funnel
A six figure funnel looks something like this. There’s a product range not just a single product. Most affiliates will promote a single product and only make a single commission. That means they don’t get recurring commissions from each sale like you would with a membership product. With a high ticket funnel like the one above you have multiple income streams from :
- Subscription products – memberships and software products
- Up-sells – products to offer to existing customers which the affiliate can earn from
- Entry level product – a low value product at the start of the funnel
- Multi-tier sales – earn from sales made by your team of affiliates
- High ticket items – products which offer more value also offer higher commissions
Marketing Engine – PPC
Pay per click marketing, or direct response is the favoured marketing strategy of the six figure affiliate earner. Some affiliates do create content of course but this is more difficult and does take longer. With direct response marketing, you pay each time someone interacts with your advert. This makes it easy to measure.
By testing and measuring advertising, affiliates can determine which adverts work the best. They can then make decisions to cut poor performing ones and scale up the profitable ones.
This still takes time, effort and of course marketing budget. But once you’ve discovered a profitable advert, you can simply leave it running and go on to create many more.
Affiliates start out with a small manageable budget and can increase it to many thousands of dollars/pounds per month. As they see profit coming in, they know it is a safe bet to increase their daily budget and increase the number of visitors and subscribers they are getting into their sales funnel.
The Customer Journey
The customer journey is the path of your customers through your advertising and into your sales funnel. One of the major problems affiliate marketers face is losing the attention of people as they view their content or advert/s.
With the online world, there’s huge competition for attention. If you pay to get someone to your website, you’ll want them to subscribe to your sales funnel because they’re more likely to purchase something if they do.
So you want to target the right audience and make their journey congruent with your main marketing message. Otherwise you could spend a lot of money and not get any subscribers or customers.
Success With An Automated Online Business
After a lot of testing and measuring, you hopefully will arrive at a profitable advertising campaign. Consistently making a profit on your advertising spend is the goal for many online business owner. Once you have done this congratulations! You’ve now built an automated affiliate marketing machine. You can now repeat this success with other adverts and scale up your existing campaign to let more people flow into your sales funnel.
You’ll also want to work on areas of your business which you want to improve too. By studying your data and looking at your sales, you should be able to identify where your business is working well and where it needs improvement. You can cross test adverts to improve your opt in rates and marketing budget. You can also test and measure different marketing strategies and change your email follow ups accordingly.