AffiliateMentor, Author at Affiliate Marketing Mentors

Passive Income Sources Online

Looking for passive income sources online? Passive income is definitely the best kind of income and however well a job might pay, there’s always a limit on what you can earn because there’s only a certain amount of hours in the day. But through selling products and services online you can use automation and the ability to sell globally to build a passive and a scalable income which isn’t related to trading your time for money.

So in this post I’m going to share some of the best ideas I’ve found for creating a passive income online.

Passive Income Sources Online #1: Affiliate Marketing

Even without any experience or products of your own to sell, anyone can use a clever online business model known as affiliate marketing to create a passive income through selling other people’s products. With a normal job your sell time for money. Although you get paid regularly, you also need to show up regularly. When you stop showing up you stop getting paid.

Affiliate marketing is different.

Although initially there’s a lot of work to be done, if you stick with it for long enough, your systems and automation will allow you to make sales in your sleep, even after you stop working. Even a small passive income is worth working really hard for because when you can generate a passive income from selling a product/service online you can repeat it, automate it and scale it!

Passive Income Sources Online #2: Google Adsense

Google Adsense is another way you can generate a passive income source online. With Google Adsense you can place adverts on your content and get paid when visitors click on your ads. Content creators include bloggers, website owners, YouTuber’s and other social media influencers.

With enough traffic to your website or video channel, you can monetise clicks through advertising. Earn per click and build up your content over time.

Blogging is one of the simplest ways to generate content online and earn passively through advertising. See also Google Adsense alternatives.

#3: Subscription Products

Even without a subscription product of your own, you can choose to promote affiliate subscription products with a variety of online marketing methods. Subscriptions are a great way to earn a passive income because a single sale gives you a monthly recurring passive income. With multiple sales you can build up a nice recurring income which compounds over time.

Subscription products which are good are business tools and software products. Business tools are particularly good because online business owners need those kinds of products in order to build their businesses.

Once you’ve sold a subscription product to someone who is building a lucrative business with it, they are pretty much assured to keep using that product – potentially for life! If you’ve sold it to them this means you can earn lifetime commissions from the referral!

Passive Income Sources Online #4: Blogging

Yes blogging is a good passive income source for many who have created lots of online content. This blog post is an example of a piece of content I use to drive traffic to this website. Bloggers write content about a particular topic on a website. Over time if they are successful, they will start to get natural (organic) traffic coming to their content.

This happens through blog post promotion, SEO (search engine optimisation) and link building. Typically blogging will take a few months at least before you will see traction in terms of traffic (visitors). Once you start seeing regular visitors to a blog you can monetise it using either affiliate products, advertising or a combination of the two.

Passive Income Sources Online #5 YouTube

YouTuber’s can use a couple of methods of building a passive income online. They can either use paid marketing to place their marketing messages in front of potential customers and sell affiliate products, or they can build up a library of videos and draw in traffic organically through the YouTube search engine. YouTuber’s can also attract free traffic from Google too, who now owns YouTube.

youtube - building a youtube channel — Checkout my YouTube channel here.

YouTube also has a partner program whereby you can earn directly from the platform from advertising clicks, placed on your videos. With enough videos and followers you can turn your YouTube channel into a profitable online business.

Passive Income Sources Online #7: Redbubble

Redbubble is an online clothing and creatives store which allows people to upload their individual designs and benefit from sales made using their logos or images. Making things like shirts, stickers, phone cases, and pillows, Redbubble is hugely popular.

To make Redbubble profitable you need to upload new logos and images which you have ownership rights to on a regular basis. I uploaded a couple of images to the site and occasionally make a sale out of the blue. It’s usually only a couple of dollars but if design is your thing there’s no reason you couldn’t turn this into a very lucrative business.

You can also start your own shop on Redbubble too.

Sales are generated by the website on your behalf, so there’s no customer service or fulfilment needed from you; much like with affiliate marketing.

#8: Photographs

There’s a variety of photography websites which allow you to upload your images and benefit from any purchases made. So if you’re a keen photographer, or would like to be, this is a way to make it profitable and make a passive income from your work.

Here’s a few of the sites which offer the ability to make royalty income from photographic images and/or videos:

Getty Images
Vecteezy
Depositphotos
Dreamstime
iStock
Westend61
Stocksy
Shutterstock

Passive Income Website

Wouldn’t it be great to have a passive income website? Having money coming in 24 hours a day, 7 days a week on complete autopilot? Far from fantasy, this is a reality for more and more people every day. So how can you own a passive income website? Well there’s a few ways you can earn passively from a website. The fastest way is to simply buy one. Affiliate websites can be bought directly from a site called Flippa.com.

The most profitable sites of course are also the most expensive. Checkout this one selling for $85k! The net listed profit for this site is $3,733 per month – nice! Imagine nearly $4k coming in every single month on complete autopilot!

But what if, like most people you don’t have a spare $85k in your back pocket!? You can of course find cheaper websites to buy and there are other ways to generate an income from a website passively. You can do it for much less if you’re prepared to put in some work.

Passive Income Website: Start An Online Business As An Affiliate

Affiliates can use plug and play software to help them build fully made websites with pre-populated affiliate banners, links and all the bells and whistles. You can set up your own online business website complete with products to sell and all the training you need to make it profitable. Get started here.

Building an online business from scratch is easier than ever and far cheaper than buying an existing online business. To make your online business profitable, you need to setup your website initially in combination with an email marketing tool.

You’ll be able to follow a step by step process to do this using the above free account. You’ll also benefit from using existing affiliate products which pay high ticket commissions, recurring commissions as well as regular “one time” commissions. This is a major key to making your income passive. Particularly through using subscription products you can build a passive income through recurring income affiliate programs.

Passive Income Website: The 6 Figure Funnel

The 6 figure funnel refers to the product range you can sell from your website. With most affiliate businesses you only earn a “one time” commission through selling products from your website. But with a 6 figure affiliate sales funnel, you benefit from high ticket sales, subscription products and recurring commissions.

With such a business model, it’s far easier to become profitable through using paid advertising. This means you can more easily create a large business through running and scaling paid advertising.

Passive Income Website: Blogging

Another way to create a passive income website is through blogging. Blogging is a slow strategy compared to the previous example and far less scalable. However, there’s power in a blog if you are able to choose a topic you can sustain over the longer term. Blogging can produce a nice passive income through building content in your chosen niche and compounding your efforts over time. Although it’s a commitment to build a blog, it is another way of generating passive income online through a website.

When using blogging, it can take several months or even longer to generate traction, depending on your chosen niche and the relative competition. But over time if you stick at it, you can generate free traffic from the search engines: Google, Bing, Yahoo etc. This means you can monetise it quite well using either affiliate products or using advertising (e.g. Google Adsense). With subscription affiliate products up your sleeve, you can compound your efforts by generating passive income from recurring commissions too!

Blogging is no doubt a longer term strategy than purchasing a site from Flippa.com, or building an online business using paid marketing. But it’s also a much cheaper option too.

Recap

To recap I’ve mentioned three ways in which you can generate a passive income by using websites:

Buy an existing website which is already making money (Flippa.com). This of course is the most expensive option, particularly if you want a top earning site. Cheaper sites are available too but you should do you due diligence before committing to buy something you don’t know much about!
Build an online business from scratch – using high ticket products, plug and play software and subscription products in your sales funnel is one of the best ways you can build an online business quickly and start earning a passive income from the tools and automation available online. This is the next best thing to a top site and much less costly. Plus you’ll be learning valuable life skills if you choose this path, such as marketing. Access the free account here.
Another option is through blogging. Bloggers find a niche in which they have an interest or passion and continue to create highly useful content in it. Blogging is super cheap but slow. You’ll need to pick a good topic which you can sustain your interest in over the longer term. This ultimately can give you free traffic which can be monetised with affiliate products and advertising (Google Adsense, for example).

Digital Marketing Passive Income

Looking to make a digital marketing passive income? Anyone can use digital marketing in order to generate an income online. With automation and through the selling of other people’s products, you can also make this passive.

Today more than ever people are waking up to the potential of online digital marketing and the ability to earn online on complete automation. But how does this work and what does it take to make it a reality?

Firstly, one of the best ways to turn digital marketing into cash is with a business model called affiliate marketing. Affiliates promote and sell other people’s products using various online digital marketing techniques. They are effectively third party referrers – middle men (or women!), who refer customers to products and services online.

To make a digital marketing passive income a reality, you need to join an affiliate program and learn how to sell online.

Digital Marketing Passive Income: Income Sources

You can also make an income from other strategies of course. Google Adsense allows content publishers to place advertising on their content. When visitors click on the ads, the publishers earn a commission. With enough traffic to a website this can bring home a nice tidy passive income.

However, getting traffic to a website to monetise with Google Adsense needs to be done very cheaply, because you only earn tiny amounts for each click. Since this takes a lot of time and commitment building content, I’m going to suggest that affiliate marketing is a better way to do things.

With affiliate marketing you can still build content to attract visitors. But you stand to make considerably larger chunks of income because you can sell products and earn from your referrals. You can of course use both methods, subsidising the income from affiliate sales with a trickle income from Google Adsense or similar program. See also best Google Adsense alternatives and Adsense vs affiliate marketing.

Digital Marketing Passive Income: Products

There’s literally thousands of affiliate products you can find online to promote as an affiliate. Amazon, for example, is a popular affiliate portal where hundreds of thousands of affiliates promote the products on the site. However, Amazon doesn’t offer the best commission levels and typically only pays between 3%-10% on sales generated on its product range. Amazon does give you a lot of choice however of the products you promote.

You can also choose to promote digital products which typically pay between 30% and 40% commission to referrals. There’s also subscription affiliate products and high ticket affiliate products, both are worth considering if you’re looking to make an income online. With a subscription affiliate product you can earn ongoing passive income from previous sales. High ticket products pay much larger commissions than the standard priced products you might find on Amazon, for example.

Promotion Methods

There’s also several ways you can promote affiliate products. The fastest method is with paid marketing. Once you learn how to run a paid ad campaign and become profitable, you can scale it up by increasing your budget. With affiliate products there’s no need to personally handle products yourself, or deal with customers. This means you can focus on learning the marketing skill. Since this can be automated and scaled up globally, it’s one of the best opportunities to create a passive income from anywhere globally!

Most top affiliates also use an email marketing autoresponder. Autoresponders help online marketers collect email subscribers and automate delivery of follow up messages. With a large list of subscribers, and through using recurring income affiliate products, you can more easily build a passive income online through product referrals.

Another method of generating traction online is through content generation. This blog is an example of content generation. Although this takes longer than through using paid marketing, there’s a residual effect of building a lot of content. Over time, your efforts compound and you can earn a passive income from the work you’ve done previously.

Content marketers use websites, blogs, video and other forms of content to attract an audience. They then monetise their content with affiliate products or advertising, or both! For this to work can take several months of building content before the results can been seen. With paid marketing you can see almost immediately whether a campaign is working or not. Plus paid marketing is very scalable whereas content marketing is more difficult to scale up.

Fastest Methods

The fastest method of creating a passive income from digital marketing is through using paid marketing and a high ticket sales funnel. With a high ticket sales funnel you can sell high valued products and earn larger commissions from their sale. If you combine high ticket products which are also digital products, your commissions are much higher than with low valued physical products. You can also benefit from subscription products within your sales funnel which pay out recurring income commissions.

To learn more and get started access a free video series here.

Solopreneur Business

Are you looking for a solopreneur business opportunity? According to Merriam-Webster, a solopreneur is “one who organizes, manages, and assumes the risks of a business or enterprise without the help of a partner.” It’s basically a solo entrepreneur. A solopreneur works independently and doesn’t hire employees or other team members.

One of the best ways to become a “solopreneur” is with a clever business model known as affiliate marketing. With affiliate marketing, the affiliate promotes other people’s products and services for a share of the sale value. Affiliates use online resources and technology to make sales online. Anyone can become an affiliate simply by joining an affiliate program and promoting their unique affiliate link. When someone buys something through your affiliate link, the sale is tracked back to you and you receive a commission.

Because the internet is global, this gives the affiliate the opportunity to sell products and services globally from anywhere in the world. They only need to learn the skills of selling online. Once they figure this out, they can build 6, 7, and even 8 figure businesses from anywhere! They can do this without needing any products or services of their own to sell.

Solopreneur Business: Affiliate Marketing

Affiliates use many different marketing tactics to place their products in front of customers. Here’s just some of the tactics which affiliate use:

Content marketing – such as blogging and video. Bloggers and “v’loggers” generate content to draw people towards their affiliate offers.
PPC – pay per click marketing is a fast and scaleable strategy used by affiliates to place adverts in front of potential buyers.
Social media – affiliates use social media platforms to find potential customers using Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, YouTube etc.
SEO – search engine optimisation is used by content creators to help gain more traction through organic search results from Google, Bing, Yahoo and other search engines.
Email marketing – most top affiliates will have an email list of subscribers who they promote their products to. With a large enough list a single email can sell many items for an affiliate.

Not all affiliates use the same strategies to promote their affiliate products online. Some use content and others use paid marketing. Paid marketing is much faster and more scalable, but content marketing is far cheaper.

Solopreneur Business: Types Of Products

There’s thousands of affiliate products you can choose to promote as an affiliate marketer. Amazon has an affiliate program and anyone can promote their products for a share of the profit. Amazon pays typically between 3% and 10% commission on product promotion.

Digital products typically pay much more; between 30% and 40% in most cases, sometimes more. There’s also subscription affiliate programs which pay out recurring commissions to affiliates and high ticket affiliate marketing products which pay much larger than average commissions.

Here’s an example of a high ticket product which affiliates can promote to earn a large commission. Although most people aren’t in the market for a submarine, some people clearly are! So if you can sell one of these you can make an 8% commission on $300,000! That’s $24,000!

Get Started

You can get started today with your own online business from scratch. Access the free video series below to learn more.

Digital Business For Sale

If you’re looking for a digital business for sale, you can start one here. Learn more with the free video series.

A digital business system can give you products, software and training so that you can start an online business without any products of your own, experience or technical skills. There’s several ways you can build an online business and depending on your preference you could decide to build any one of several business models:

An affiliate marketing business – selling other people’s products
A drop shipping business – distributing products directly to customers through your website
Print on demand – direct selling of your customised printed logos or images to customers
Import Export business – wholesale purchases distributed individually through your website

Digital Business For Sale – Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is one of the most popular digital business models because it allows anyone to set up and sell other people’s products with the minimum of fuss. Using a step by step online business system, you can set up a digital storefront (website), an email marketing list, landing pages and a marketing strategy from your laptop.

All of these systems can be automated, which means a digital business can be easily scaled. With digital products, as a third party referrer, or affiliate, you can earn from 30-40% commissions on any products you sell. With physical products, like you would find on Amazon, for example, the level of commission is much lower. Amazon pays between 3% and 10% for most of their product referrals.

Marketing Methods

If you want a digital business which requires no work, expect to pay a lot for it on sites such as Flippa.com. Flippa.com sells affiliates websites and e-commerce websites. To start your own digital business from scratch will require more work, but costs much less. Once you have set up your digital business using the step by step process, you’ll need to choose a marketing strategy. Marketing is perhaps the most important part of business. Without marketing, all the shiny websites, sales funnels and products are useless! You can think of marketing for your business like the heart for your body! Without it, there’s no life in a business.

There’s several ways to market an online digital business and once you have completed the video series you can access training, help and support to learn which strategy is best for you. Here’s a few marketing strategies you can choose to build an online digital business with:

PPC – pay per click is one of the most popular marketing methods. You pay for ads to show to your target audience. When they click, you pay to send them from an advert to your website.
Content marketing – blogging and video are two popular methods of generating website traffic for free through content marketing. This article is an example of a blog post. This type of marketing can attract traffic for free, but takes longer than PPC.
Social Media – you can use paid and unpaid social media marketing to attract people to your online business. Again, the free methods are generally much slower, but can build (organic) passive traffic over time.

Why Start A Digital Business?

Over the last few years there has been a clear shift to the online world. Traditional businesses can’t compete with price, choice or convenience which is offered from shopping online; whether for products or services, information or training.

Traditional bricks and mortar businesses are struggling, particularly over lockdowns in recent years. Businesses that thrive in recession are the go-to businesses of the future; they are digital businesses. So if you’re thinking of building a more sustainable future start a digital business.

Businesses That Thrive In Recession

More than ever people are looking for businesses that thrive in recession. With big tech layoffs, AI and automation taking over many sectors of employment and rising costs of living it’s easy to see why.

A recent Gallop poll showed that people are dissatisfied in their jobs, too. So even without threat to employment, people are looking elsewhere for their own well being and happiness. According to the poll only 15% of workers are engaged at work. This means that 85% are unhappy in their jobs or with their bosses.

So what is the answer for broken workers and broken systems that no longer support long term job security? Perhaps it’s businesses that thrive in recession; online businesses to be more specific.

Businesses That Thrive In Recession

Traditional jobs are in decline, so even if you like your job you may soon be given the push; particularly if your job can be replaced with automation or moved online.

The chart below shows e-commerce business versus traditional store sales. As you can see, there’s a massive increase in e-commerce sales and a steady decline in traditional sales.

This is only set to continue and speed up especially over recent years of lockdowns and pandemic responses. Many traditional stores are closing or have closed already.

ecommerce sales — Source: https://www.oberlo.com/statistics/us-ecommerce-sales

Businesses That Thrive In Recession

Whenever there’s a recession there’s a shift from the traditional economy to the digital economy. This is all the more apparent today (in 2022). So if you’re looking for a recession proof business, your best bet is to look online for some kind of digital business.

There’s many online business models which you can use to generate an income from anywhere. All you need is a laptop and internet connection. Print on demand, e-commerce stores, affiliate businesses and drop shipping businesses are just a few of the possibilities. Since more people are shopping online, it makes sense to provide some kind of service online to future proof an income source.

Businesses That Thrive In Recession: Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is one of the most popular online business models. In affiliate marketing, products can be sold online by third party referring “affiliates”. The affiliate receives a commission based on referral sales they make. Because you don’t need any products of your own to become an affiliate, it makes it one of the most accessible business models available. Plus you can become an affiliate for pretty much any product you can find online; providing you can find an affiliate program connected with the product.

Amazon, for example has an affiliate program which anyone can join. By joining an affiliate program and promoting your unique affiliate link, your sales are tracked back to you and you are rewarded for the referral. You don’t have to personally handle products or services yourself and therefore your only concern is whatever marketing strategy you use to connect customers to products through your unique identifying link (affiliate link).

This can be done is several ways such as blogging, video, using paid advertising platforms or social media. See also affiliate marketing promotion methods.

Best Affiliate Businesses To Choose

There’s huge choice in affiliate marketing products and services. The success you have is dependent on a number of factors including your promotion methods and the products/services you choose to promote. Some of the best products to promote are business tools and services which help affiliates themselves.

For example, Aweber is a business tool used by affiliates to build email lists. From their lists they can promote their products. An email autoresponder is one of the best tools you can invest in when building an online business.

Therefore it makes sense to promote it because it’s highly sought after and highly valuable. Products such as autoresponders also give affiliates a recurring income when they generate a sale because software products charge a recurring fee and many of them pay affiliates recurring commissions.

High Ticket Affiliate Products

High ticket affiliate marketing products are also a good idea if you decide to sell other people’s products online. Most affiliate products you might find on Amazon, for example, are valued at below $100. As such you’ll only earn between 1-10% of that as a referral partner. This means you’ll need to sell a lot of products in order to make your online business profitable.

However, with high ticket products you stand to make a much larger commission on each sale. Take this flying hovercraft for example which sells for $190,000! As an affiliate for this product you could earn 8% of this if you refer a sale! That’s $15,200 in commission for a single sale. While most people can’t afford this kind of purchase, especially during a recession, people do buy such items.

Business training courses, tools and software are good things to sell during a recession because more people are looking for a means to make a living online. This makes an online business one of the best recession proof businesses you can invest in.

Access a free video series to learn more about how to start a recession proof business from scratch.

How To Sell Other People’s Products Online

Wondering how to sell other people’s products online? Anyone can do this by joining an affiliate program and promoting their products/service through their unique identifying link, or affiliate link. Affiliates get paid from product referrals; it’s one of the most popular and simplest ways to make money online.

Amazon, for example has an affiliate program which anyone can join. When you join Amazon’s affiliate program you get access to a dashboard on Amazon’s website. It’s here where you can find your unique affiliate link dashboard and start promoting your link to generate sales. Amazon isn’t the only company you can partner with to promote products. You’ll find affiliate programs for almost any product you can imagine. A website called Hammacher Schlemmer lets you promote products which are valued far higher than most products you will find on Amazon. Here’s an example of a product you can promote; the amphibious Sub-Surface Watercraft!

On this particular item you can earn 8% of the sale value. That’s $24,000! So by choosing high ticket affiliate products you stand to earn a lot more per sale than from promoting low valued products like you might find on Amazon.

How To Sell Other People’s Products Online

Of course joining an affiliate program and getting your affiliate link is only the beginning. If you really want to earn from selling online, you’ll need to learn the strategies for selling online. There’s several ways in which you can promote your affiliate link to make money. These can be divided into two main categories; paid marketing and unpaid marketing. Free marketing requires a lot more work than paid marketing of course. This piece of content is an example of a free marketing strategy (blogging), which although is free takes time to create.

Paid marketing is a much faster method of making sales online but the catch is that it costs money! Here’s a few of the main strategies which affiliate marketers use to generate sales through their affiliate links:

Blogging and v’logging – video blogging
Content generation – creating written, video some other type of content (e.g. charts, maps, images, presentations, webinars, diagrams, pictograms, screenshots, gifs, memes, comics, infographics etc.
Email marketing – many affiliates build email lists of subscribers and promote their links to their subscribers.
PPC – Pay Per Click advertising is a fast and scalable strategy used by affiliates
Viral marketing – using posts and content which get rapidly shared on social media

How To Sell Other People’s Products Online

Depending on the product you choose and your particular circumstances, preference and abilities, you might choose any one of the above methods, or choose a combination of more than one. Your choice might also depend on the particular affiliate products you choose to promote.

For example, if you’re promoting low value products from Amazon, it will be much more difficult to make your business profitable using paid marketing. But if you choose high ticket affiliate products, paid marketing would be a more viable choice, because your return on investment will be much more (covering the cost of advertising).

One of the most popular methods of advertising affiliate products is through an email marketing list. With an email list, you use some form of marketing to send targeted visitors to a landing page. Here you collect their email address and follow up with some useful information which they have subscribed to receive. You can also promote your products to your subscribers (through your affiliate links).

Email List Vs Website

While you can also sell affiliate products directly from a website, very few visitors will actually buy from a website on their first visit. Most website owners therefore have learned to offer a “freebie” giveaway on their websites in order to encourage people to sign up to an email list.

Once a website visitors signs up to your email list from your website, you have a greater opportunity to build a longer term relationship with them and sell your affiliate products. On a website, on the other hand, they only have a few minutes to make a buying decision. Most website visitors will leave without having taken any action.

With an email marketing list, you can email your subscribers over a much longer period. Often people will sign up to my list from my website and make a purchase months (or even years) after they subscribe! This just isn’t possible on a website and most visitors will leave after only a few minutes, never to return!

Selling Through Blogging

Although blogging is a slower way to generate traction online, it’s a popular method because it’s super low cost! Bloggers create a lot of content on their websites to attract the attention of search traffic. Search traffic is the traffic which comes from search engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo, Duckduckgo and the like. When someone types a keyword into the search bar on Google, they are delivered a number of website pages in the results (SERPS – search engine results pages).

The goal of a blogger is to rank their content on the SERPS so that they get free traffic to their website and make affiliate sales – either directly from website banners or through their email list.

Blogging is a slow strategy but if you find a topic you enjoy writing about it can be very lucrative. Plus, if you stick with it for long enough it can give you a passive income, potentially for years! However, in most affiliate topics there’s a lot of competition. So it’s important to choose wisely because you’ll likely be blogging for a long time before you break through and start seeing a large volume of free traffic.

PPC – Pay Per Click Advertising

Pay per click advertising on the other hand is much faster. You can pay for visitors who are using search engines for their queries and place ads in front of the people you want to attract. You can also use YouTube, Facebook or one of the many other social media platforms to pay for traffic. Paid traffic can be turned on almost instantly, whereas traffic from blogging can take months, or even years to get in volume.

Paid traffic is also much more scalable than content marketing. So once you find a winning advert which generates profit, you can simply turn up the daily budget to make more sales. However there is an interim period where affiliates will need to test and measure different adverts (at their own expense). Most adverts won’t lead immediately to profit and to find which adverts are profitable can take some experimentation.

Pay per click advertising allows you to try out different ads to see what works and what doesn’t. When you find a winning ad, you can simply leave it running and create many more; scaling up the good ones and cancelling the ones which perform poorly.

If you’re interested in getting started with your own online business, access a free video series through this link.

Hands Free Business

I always liked the idea of a hands free business that worked behind the scenes, even when I didn’t. Despite this sounding like a pipe dream, it’s actually a reality for many online business owners.

Online business owners can benefit from selling directly from their websites. With digital sales, products can even be accessed remotely from anywhere. This means the business owner only has to set up their marketing software and they can make sales 24 hours a day, 7 days a week on complete autopilot.

So what would it take for you to build a business like this? While there’s many “push button” solutions to this, the real challenge is in marketing your website, once set up. E-commerce stores, print on demand businesses and affiliate marketing websites all offer the ability to set up a digital store-front in a few simple steps.

Get started by accessing a step by step training here. This will take you through building your own digital store. You’ll also be able to access all the training you need to learn how to promote it. This is the main key to setting up your hands free business. An online store with products ready to sell is only the start of the process. Marketing that store effectively is where many online business owners become unstuck.

Hands Free Business – Marketing A Digital Store

Once you have setup your “digital store”, you will effectively have a website from which you can sell products and earn income from sales you generate. One of the simplest business models which allows you to do this is affiliate marketing. With affiliate marketing you can promote other people’s products for a share of the profit. Digital products typically offer the best levels of commission. Since they also offer the ability to sell globally with no postage/handling costs, this saving is passed on to the affiliate.

Affiliates typically can earn from 30-40% commission from promotion of digital products. Whereas with physical products, like you can find on Amazon, for example, the commission levels are much lower.

Marketing your digital store can be done in several ways all of which fall into the category of either paid or unpaid marketing:

Blogging or video blogging (v’logging)
PPC – paid advertising (Pay Per Click) using platforms such as Google Adwords, Facebook, YouTube, etc.
Social media marketing – social media platforms offer both paid and unpaid marketing opportunities
SEO – search engine optimisation; goes with content marketing (blogging and v’logging

Hands Free Business – Subscription Products

One of the best things you can promote to create a hands free business are subscription affiliate products. With most products you can promote as an affiliate you will only get paid once for the sale. But with subscription products (such as membership products and software products) you can earn an ongoing income from sales you make.

Even if your subscription commission is only $10 a month, with just 100 sales you’ll be making $1000 a month passively from those memberships! Good subscription products to promote might be business tools and software because they offer huge value to business owners. Businesses need those products in order to function and so they are a good choice for affiliates if they want to earn recurring commissions.

An example is Aweber, which is an autoresponder software product which affiliates use to generate sales.

Hands Free Business – Autoresponder

An email autoresponder is a pretty useful tool if you want to build a hands free business. You can access one for free here. Autoresponders help website owners build email lists from their websites.

So what’s so good about email autoresponders? An email autoresponders lets you collect visitors’ emails from your website so you can follow up with automated messages to help them in some way. You can also use them to promote your products and that’s where the magic of a hands free business really lies!

Of course you can sell products directly from a website but most visitors will require a “getting to know you” period of a few exchanges. In fact it typically takes several touch-points between you and your website visitors before they will make a purchase from your website. How many touch points before a sale will depend on your particular niche and your visitors. But usually it is around 6-8 times a visitor needs to see your website before they buy.

This creates a problem for those who want to sell automatically and create a hands free business from a website. That problem is solved with an email autoresponder which can connect you to your website visitors over a longer period of time.

Target Audience

Another key factor to your success in building a hands free business is your target audience. Once you set up your online store (get started here), you’ll probably be keen to get people to come and see it. This stage of building a hands free business is fundamental to your success. Unless you target your audience well, you’ll be tempted to try and sell your products to anyone and everyone you can find online. This is a huge mistake because most people searching online are not looking for what you have to offer. Only a tiny slither of all the millions of people online are actually right for your particular offer.

It can be a frustrating experience when you discover this without prior knowledge, only to find much of your efforts have been in vain! When you understand your target audience, you’ll have greater success and much more quickly than if you randomly attract visitors haphazardly or randomly!

A large step towards this understanding is to get to know your customer avatar. Your customer “avatar” is your perfect customer – those specific people who are right for your offer and can be found through specific targeting in your online marketing. See the customer avatar worksheet pdf for more information on this.

Summary

Having set up your online store, learned about target audience and run a few ads, you will probably have some data from which you can learn. This is simply the beginning of this journey and unless you test and measure different adverts, you won’t get to know what works and what doesn’t in terms of making sales. Once you run a successful advertising campaign, you’ll start making some sales from your digital store (or sales funnel if using an email list).

You can also create content too to attract the right people to your website or email list. Blogging and video blogging are two methods you can use to attract website traffic organically. Although this method takes much longer than running paid advertising, you can ultimately create passive income with this strategy. That’s if you stick at it long enough!

A hands free business is much more viable today than it was only just a few years ago. However there’s work involved in making it a reality. If you’re ready to get started you can do that here!

How To Stay Motivated In Business

If you’re wondering how to stay motivated in business, you have probably discovered that motivation doesn’t work! Well, not always anyway. Sometimes motivation can get the wheels spinning, but ultimately you’re not going to be motivated all the time. That means that some weeks you’ll lack motivation and your business can suffer as a result.

So what’s the answer? In any business you need the long term view together with short term strategies which can be broken down into tiny daily steps and habits. Once you start creating habits out of the little things, it’s much easier to sustain your efforts even when you’re not feeling motivated.

How To Stay Motivated In Business: Habits

Mini habits are daily action steps you can do every single day. On their own they will not immediately launch your business into the stratosphere. But, over time they will have a compounding effect. Firstly, forming mini habits is incredibly powerful and starts momentum in your chosen direction. Think of a habit like brushing your teeth. You probably do this without thinking but over the years it will have kept your teeth healthy and saved you a fortune on dentist bills!

You want to apply the same strategy to your business. Create daily habits which start very small but which over time have a compounding effect. One habit I’ve created for my online business is to write a blog post every week. Some weeks I’ll write more and some less. But it started with a weekly habit which became a daily habit. Now it feels wrong not to write a blog post.

There’s nearly 600 blog posts on this site now. Each one on its own doesn’t amount to much. But the compounding effect means I now benefit from free traffic from the search engines.

How To Stay Motivated in Business: Accountability & Connections

Another thing that’s useful is to find yourself someone who will hold you accountable. If you’re starting an online business for the first time, this can be difficult. Often, we are surrounded by people trying to get you to quit, rather than egging you on! This makes for a difficult environment and to help combat this you need to surround yourself with like minded people who want you to succeed.

There’s a popular quote from Jim Rohn :

“You’re The Average Of The Five People You Spend The Most Time With”

Look at the people around you and ask yourself whether they really want your success. Chances are good that some people would rather maintain the status quo and not have you doing better than them financially. They can subtly pull you back and sabotage your best intentions. Beware of the nay sayers and find people who will lift you up rather than pull you down!

How To Stay Motivated In Business: Align Your Values

If your business doesn’t motivate you, it may be that you’re in the wrong business! Or perhaps you’re approaching it in the wrong way. When your business aligns with your values, you should feel good about what you’re doing. But if you’re only in business only for the bottom line, it could be that your heart and mind are going in different directions.

A business might always be a challenge, but you’re ultimately the driver of it. If there’s a lack in motivation, it could be that you’re no longer passionate about what you’re doing.

To stay motivated in your business, you need to find a way to align your values so that you fully believe in what you’re doing, enjoy the process and rise to the challenges. If you’re feeling like you’re burning out, it might help to understand your reasons for doing business in the first place. In Simon Sink’s book Start With Why, he explains why it is your “why” which ultimately determines the success, or otherwise of a business.

Set Goals & Have Fun

Goals are one of the most important ways you can maintain motivation in any endeavour. Unless you have short, medium and long term goals which motivate you forward, the status quo will become the norm. Your habits will become chores and you’ll lose sight of what you intend to create with your business. Remind yourself why you’re in business frequently. List the reasons you are building a business:

More freedom
More choice
Fun and enjoyment of life
A personal challenge
Self growth
etc.

Goals too can be used to help maintain your focus and clarity. When you’re losing motivation, it’s often a sign that you have become indifferent to your goals, milestones and mission. Revisit your initial reasons for what you’re doing and recharge by taking a break, arranging to have fun and remind yourself of what you have already created.

Sometimes it’s just a small pep talk which you need and a pat on the back! Rome wasn’t built in a day!

Motivation Doesn’t Work

Have you noticed that motivation doesn’t work? You attend a motivational seminar, and you’re all hyped up, but after a week you’re back to your “normal” self. The motivation has gone.

A motivational video on YouTube inspires you into action. But again, the initial excitement goes away when you’re faced with reality. You join the gym after putting on some weight. You watch a few inspirational videos and start going regularly. Before long, your old habits catch up with you and you lose your enthusiasm. By the time it’s March, you haven’t been for weeks and consider cancelling your membership!

Motivation is sporadic and fleeting, at best. Some days you’re motivated and others you’re not. So how can you maintain your motivation levels over the longer term, in order to accomplish something meaningful to you?

Motivation Doesn’t Work, Habits Do

How often do you brush your teeth? Most people have made a habit out of brushing their teeth. Even when they’re not motivated to do it, they still get that simple job done! But why then do we not make habits out of doing things we intend to do? Going to the gym, building that online business or learning how to play an instrument are all within reach of everyone who has the discipline of creating habits out of doing simple things regularly.

The problem comes with building this discipline. Most people are motivated to change something in their lives which isn’t working. So they are starting with old habits which are working in opposition to what they want; eating too much, drinking alcohol, watching television, busy lazy, etc.

To change things, use that (fleeting) motivation to build tiny habits, rather than try to change everything overnight! Habits are like a freight train; they gain momentum over time and eventually become unstoppable. Old habits which don’t serve you are often acting against your best intentions. They are the momentum you already have.

Motivation Doesn’t Work, Use Tiny Habits Instead

Since motivation is so fleeting, it’s much better to use this motivation to build tiny habits. Tiny habits, or mini habits are habits which are so small that they are like brushing your teeth. Once you’ve created the habit, it feels wrong not to do it. Once the tiny habit is established, it is much easier to add to it in a meaningful way. You won’t always be motivated to achieve a goal so it’s much easier to use your (limited amount of) motivation to build tiny habits which will ultimately accomplish the goal for you, even on your bad days.

In Stephen Guise’s book Mini Habits, he uses the idea of a single daily push up. It’s fairly easy to do just one push up a day. It’s also fairly easy to commit to doing it, much harder to spend an hour in the gym every day. A mini habit should be something which takes you closer to your ultimate goal, but is easy enough to do even on your worst days.

Once you have established the daily push up, it’s far easier to add to it, and maintain it. Whereas if you start out with a larger goal, it’s easier not to do it, or to quit! So choose a daily habit which would be super easy to do, even when you don’t feel like it. See also motivation vs habit.

Online Business

I struggled maintaining the motivation to build an online business. But I realised that I didn’t have to do it all at once! I only needed to do a little step each day. A daily blog post was my tiny habit, and there’s now nearly 600 blog posts on this website!

Most people are motivated to escape their jobs and live with more financial and time freedom. An online business can give you this, but it takes consistency to make it happen. Some days you’ll be motivated and other you won’t! That’s why it’s vital to build some habits you can establish over the longer term.

If you’re ready to take the first step in building an online business, access a free video series here to learn more.