Automated Business Ideas

Looking for automated business ideas? There’s many ways to build an automated business which runs without much input. New technology and software has made it even easier to create an autopilot business online. Here’s a few business models which can work on autopilot:

  • Affiliate marketing – selling other people’s products
  • Drop shipping – similar to affiliate marketing
  • Print on demand – Use existing services and simply send customers
  • Blogging – allows you to earn from affiliate sales or advertising
  • YouTube channel – build a following and monetise with ads, drop shipping or affiliate marketing
  • Create an app – Apps are great business models and they can be sold over and over once you have created one
  • eBook sales – you can create your own eBook or sell someone else’s (affiliate marketing).
  • Sell information products – like the eBook idea but much more valuable items can be sold (affiliate marketing)
  • Build an email list – email marketing – get paid for sending emails!

Automated Business Ideas – Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is one of the simplest business models you can use to generate an income online. By selling other people’s products and services, anyone can earn commissions based on the sales you generate.

automated business ideas

Affiliates can choose from thousands of products and services available online to promote too. They can also choose their marketing strategy. So whether you like blogging, creating videos or want to run paid advertising, there’s an option which will suit your working style and budget.

Affiliates sell anything online. So long as a product has an affiliate program, you can join that program and sell through an affiliate link. The processes involved in affiliate marketing can be completely automated and there’s no need to deal with customers or handle products.

Automated Business Ideas – Drop Shipping

Drop shipping is similar to affiliate marketing in that you refer customers to other people’s products. With drop shipping, you take orders and place them with another company who delivers the product directly to the customer. This can of course be automated too though using a plugin or app which communicates directly with the drop shipping company from a website.

automated business ideas

Like affiliate marketing your main job with drop shipping is to refer customers to the products you sell. Online marketing is therefore the main skill you need to learn for both affiliate marketing and drop shipping. See also affiliate marketing vs drop shipping.

Print On Demand

With print on demand, you’re again a referrer of sales, although with a print on demand business you can design your own clothing range and outsource the manufacturing. Print on demand companies will only take orders and ship when a customer makes a purchase (through your website).

automated business ideas

If you’re into design and creative, a print on demand business might be what you’re looking for. You get to add your own creative input to t-shirt or hoodies and sell them globally using an outside companies.

Here’s 5 print on demand companies who fulfil orders:

  1. Printful
  2. SPOD
  3. Printify
  4. Apliiq Dropship
  5. Teelaunch

Automated Business Ideas – Blogging

I’m a big fan of blogging and you can create a blog in any area which makes it a versatile automated business idea. Blogging is something which takes some time but ultimately you can generate completely free website traffic with a blog. Monetise by selling affiliate products, or even one of the other ideas here such as drop shipping or print on demand.

Bloggers also place advertising on their posts to generate revenue, although you’ll need a lot of traffic to make a small amount from running ads. That’s why many bloggers use the affiliate marketing model from a blog and sell products which are suitable for their visitors.

niche blogging for profit

Create A YouTube Channel

YouTuber’s can build a free, organic following by regularly posting videos on YouTube. You can monetise a YouTube channel with the YouTube partner program, although you’ll need to meet the criteria for eligibility:

  • Get 1,000 subscribers with 4,000 valid public watch hours in the last 12 months, or
  • Get 1,000 subscribers with 10 million valid public Shorts views in the last 90 days.

See this article for eligibility to the YouTube partner program.

create a youtube channel

Alternatively you can monetise with affiliate products which many YouTuber’s do. You can also use YouTube for paid advertising campaigns. But you’ll need a high valued product to sell to afford it. You can use the affiliate products. The most profitable digital products, which are products with high ticket commissions and recurring commissions.

Create An App

If you can create an app and sell it, you can live off the royalties for years! There’s thousands of apps available and many of them are completely free. BUt you can also generating income from advertising on an app, so you don’t necessarily need to sell it to be profitable.

There’s also lots of software out there which can help you create an app with less hassle than you think! Here’s an app builder which can help you!

create an app

Create Your Own eBook

An eBook is one of the easiest things to create. All you need is a pdf creator software and there’s plenty of free pdf creators online if you haven’t got on. You can write an ebook yourself or pay someone to write one for you. Plus there’s thousands of existing eBooks which affiliates can sell for a share of the profit. Just look on Clickbank.com for ebooks in the marketplace and you’ll find loads!

Many affiliates also use ebooks as “lead magnets” to help them build their email marketing lists. I’ve created many eBooks to give away to subscribers of my list. Here’s one of them, explaining the basics of affiliate marketing for beginners.

autopilot business ideas

eBooks aren’t the best sellers though because they are of such low value and many marketers will give them away for free to build their email list.

Sell Information Products

eBooks are the tip of the iceberg and there’s many more valuable products you can sell – even if you don’t personally own them yourself. With the affiliate marketing business model, you can choose to sell digital information products. These are a good choice because they pay much more than the typical physical affiliate product from the likes of Amazon, for example.

Some digital information products offer high ticket commissions and recurring commissions too. So a single sale can bring in a recurring income from repeat custom.

Learn how to sell information products here.

selling information products

Build An Email List

Building an email list is one of the best tactics you can use to build an online income which can be completely automated. With an email list, you collect subscribers from a website and send out automated messages promoting affiliate products and services. The system of selling online through email is a popular one and it can be globally scaled with certain products which area available internationally.

Learn more about how to get paid to send emails!

Autopilot Business Ideas

I started looking for autopilot business ideas after discovering eBay back in the 90’s. Ebay seemed like the perfect place to be able to automate an online sale. After some buying and selling strategies which required a lot of time and effort, I bought an eBook from eBay which showed me an eBay business system.

The eBook itself though was something I couldn’t get out of my mind. It was one of the first autopilot business ideas I had come across. Simply list a digital product and sell it on autopilot over and over to anyone globally. It led me to a number of other business strategies which were far better and more lucrative.

autopilot business ideas

Autopilot Business Ideas – The Downloadable Digital Product

There was a problem with digital downloads on eBay at the time in the UK. You had to physically post something out, rather than offer a downloadable product. But the idea led me to another business model called affiliate marketing. With affiliate marketing, you can offer other people’s digital products and earn up to 50% commission on the sale. One of the first courses I bought was by a guy called Peter Lexus. You can read about some of the courses I took in my digital profit course review.

Peter taught a simple strategy to sell a digital product he had created. You could choose any product to sell, but I chose to sell his course. I’d got a huge amount of value from his course so was happy to promote it. It involved setting up a website and using an email autoresponder to automate an email follow up series. I sold several courses all on autopilot using this strategy. Unfortunately my Adwords account got shut down too, which kind of put a spanner in the works.

Autopilot Business Ideas – Affiliate Marketing

autopilot business ideas

Affiliate marketing is definitely one of the best autopilot business ideas. There’s also drop shipping too, which can be automated. Both business models use an existing business model, product or range of products and you can earn commissions based on the sales you generate through your marketing efforts.

Marketers can therefore spend their time on the marketing side of another business, earning profits by studying the data they collect from marketing, and automating and scaling their advertising campaigns. There’s other ways affiliates generate sales too. Some affiliates create content instead of using paid marketing strategies. This website for example, autopilot money making software, makes money from affiliate sales.

If you purchase something from my email list, or from an affiliate link on this site, I’ll earn a commission on this sale.

Why Affiliate Marketing Is Such A Great Autopilot Business Idea

Affiliate marketing is a great business idea for a number of reasons. Firstly, you can operate it from anywhere globally. All you need is a laptop and an internet connection. You don’t need to physically post anything and you can simply direct customers to other people’s products to earn a commission on a sale. This makes it very easy to automate and scale.

affiliate marketing - autopilot income from your laptop

See also why I do affiliate marketing and why you should too!

But there’s also lots of ways to do affiliate marketing and lots of products to choose from. When I started doing affiliate marketing over ten years ago, I chose to be a blogger and use free products which you can find on websites like Clickbank and JVzoo. It was an incredibly slow process. It wasn’t until I discovered better products to promote and better ways to advertise them, that things really changed.

High Ticket Products And Affiliate Marketing

A “high ticket” product refers to the value of a product and also the commission you will receive when you sell it. Most of the products I started selling when I began with affiliate marketing were valued around $100 each. At 40% commission, I earned $40 for each sale. However, this doesn’t leave a lot of room for marketing costs and experimentation.

A high ticket product, on the other hand, gives you more opportunity to use paid marketing and recoup your marketing budget. A $1000 product which offer the same commission rate would pay you $400 for a sale. This gives you a better chance at succeeding with affiliate marketing for a few reasons:

  • You can more easily test and measure paid marketing platforms, without losing money
  • Scaling up can be done more quickly with high ticket products
  • You can build a more sustainable business mode quickly too

Recurring Income From Affiliate Products

Another thing to consider is to use recurring income affiliate programs. Recurring income programs offer ongoing value to customers and are typically things such as software programs and memberships. They give the affiliate, the opportunity to earn commissions on an ongoing basis from previous sales.

autopilot business ideas

This itself is one of the best autopilot business ideas. You sell an item once, and continue to earn money from your customer, month after month, year after year. Even if your commission is only $10 a month, with 100 customers you’ll earn $1000 a month. With a 1000 customers, you’ll earn $10,000 a month.

Of course customers can leave too. So it’s worth choosing products which will offer a lifetime value to your customers. Tools such as email autoresponders and hosting providers offer tools for online businesses which are fundamental and necessary, so they are a good bet! But you’ll still need to learn how to promote them, which is the biggest thing you’ll need to learn as an affiliate marketer.

How To Promote Affiliate Products

There’s many ways to promote digital products on the internet. Digital products offer some of the best rates of commissions to affiliates. Compare commission rates from digital products to physical products and you’ll see a massive disparity: 40-50% in some cases with digital products compared to 3-10% in the case of digital products.

Promoting the products is what you really need to learn as an affiliate. Having the right products is just as important, but learning how to sell products online can take a little longer to fathom. Ideally join an affiliate program which has a community of people who can help you build your online business. (Access free videos on the sign up form on this website).

autopilot business ideas - marketing your affiliate business

Despite an online business being one of the best autopilot business ideas, there’s still a lot of work involved in building one from scratch. To get to the point of making sales is the first stage. Then you need to scale up. With the automation involved in an autopilot online business, this is simply a numbers game. Once your figures stack up, and you pay in less than you get out, it might be time to scale up.

Access an online business community and “all in one” business system with a number of online entrepreneurs and training materials at your fingertips by signing up for the free videos on this site.