autopilot affiliate marketing Archives - Auto Pilot Money Making Software

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.

The idea of autopilot affiliate marketing is very appealing. “Set it and forget it” is the catchphrase. But how many of these kinds of systems actually work? Do they work at all? Or do they only work for the people selling the courses?

In my early years of learning affiliate marketing, I jumped from one course to another learning various online marketing and affiliate tactics. You can read some reviews I wrote about the various courses I took in my article digital profit course review.

This is known by some as “shiny object syndrome”: jumping from one system to another looking for the “magic bullet” which will pay out with the smallest amount of work, understanding or input! I had some success with certain strategies, but mostly it was a disappointing experience.

Autopilot Affiliate Marketing – What’s The Truth?

So what is the truth of an autopilot affiliate marketing system. Well statistics don’t lie. Around 3% of online marketers go on to build successful businesses long term. That means something like 97% fail. That’s a huge amount of disappointed people going into affiliate marketing and leaving. Of course there’s many who will struggle along too, making only a small amount from their online businesses.

But what does that statistic say about the so called autopilot affiliate marketing systems which are offered? Well, probably that they claim it’s too easy to build an online business and be successful with it. Tighter rules have put some pay to those businesses which claim you can turn on a strategy and leave it running without doing any work! Without proper disclaimers on websites, they’ll be punished. But there’s other reasons for the high number of people attempting and failing at internet businesses.

Autopilot Affiliate Marketing – Easy To Start

It’s very easy to start an online business. You only need a credit card and you’re in business! Consider how much more difficult it can be to start a physical business. There’s much more cost involved for a start. An online business is pretty accessible too. Anyone with a smart phone can access a website and purchase an autopilot affiliate marketing business “system”.

But that doesn’t mean they’ll succeed at it. It’s a similar concept to buying gym membership in January and then never actually turning up to a gym for the rest of the year.

The gyms win! And for a small time you win too – thinking it’s the start of a new “you”. This usually happens around the time when you’ve over indulged over the festive season and are having some misgivings about how to change your growing belly! I know, I’ll pull out the credit card and get a gym membership! Then, with that good intention done, it’s back to the Christmas pudding and perhaps some wine!

What Does It Really Take To Make An Online Business Successful?

So the real question when it comes to these autopilot affiliate marketing systems and strategies is what does it really take? What does it take to succeed? Those who have made it know that there’s a lot more to it than simply throwing up a landing page and driving traffic to it.

Although I had some success with a strategy like this, Google banned my adverts shortly afterwards. I lost my Adwords account for years! For most people this will be enough for them to throw in the towel and give up. An autopilot business system can only give you so much. After that it’s kind of up to you. For the average person it’s far too difficult and technical to learn how to build websites and landing pages.

That’s why many companies offer to include these kinds of software within their packages. It takes the hard work out of building an online business. But you’ve still got to be compliant if you’re going to become an advertiser and use paid marketing for traffic. Having a ready made sales funnel done for you is all well and good. But you’ve still got to market it, and this is a skill.

Online Business Owners Are Entrepreneurs

Yes online business owners are entrepreneurs. If you’re moving from a job to become a business owner, there’s a lot more to contemplate than just setting up a website. See the what psychological factors limit the growth of a business. If you think you can “set it and forget it” you’re going to be very disappointed! There’s far more to it. You’ll need to build a sales funnel and then focus on marketing it. This takes time and money. Even with a very good set of digital products, and an automated and scaleable business system and strategy, you’ll still have a lot to learn.

Most people just don’t see this nor do they see the potential of working on themselves. They want fast results and when they don’t get them, they become disillusioned and blame the business not themselves. See why affiliate marketing does not work.

Be Honest With Yourself

Be honest, did you start looking for autopilot affiliate marketing because you want your work cut out? Do you expect to work long hours for several months before seeing a return? No of course not! We want fast results and we’re looking for someone to give us them! Unfortunately those who are offering fast results may not be there to help you when your bubble bursts! Ideally find a company who are realists and who are also honest with you.

Take the time an energy needed to learn what needs doing. You can join an online business community through this site. Just sign up for the free videos to learn more.