Wouldn’t it be great owning an autopilot affiliate website? A website which generates income from selling affiliate products entirely hands free? There’s a couple of ways to do this:
- Build a Google/Facebook compliant website and send paid traffic to it
- Build a lot of content and generate traffic from SEO for free (search engine optimisation)
In this article I’m going to talk about these two strategies and how you can make them work for you. If you’re successful you can build an entirely automated income from the internet! Of course you can also do a combination of the two, using SEO and paid marketing.
Autopilot Affiliate Website – Products
To make your autopilot affiliate website more effective it’s useful to look at what affiliate products you’re going to sell. It’s entirely your choice which products you are going to sell as an affiliate. If you’re building content, it is probably a good idea to choose a product which lines up with your topic.
Your topic should ideally be something you’re at least interested in, even passionate about. Working on something you don’t give a s*#t about makes the job of building content very difficult! So I wouldn’t recommend it! See also best niche to blog about. I did actually do this and it turned out to be a bad idea. So I would always recommend creating content on a topic you know about, or at least have an interest in.
This topic choice may give you your product which you want to promote. Your topic should line up with your product choice. There’s no point promoting a seat belt cover on a website which talks about flower arranging! Your product needs to match your target audience. See also how to know your target audience.
Different types of affiliate products will pay different levels of commissions. So it’s useful to know which pay the best. Here’s a quick overview:
- Physical products pay 3-10% commissions
- Digital products pay 30-50% commissions
- Subscription affiliate products will often pay recurring commissions (monthly payments from each sale)
- High ticket products pay much larger commissions, most pay out over $500 for a single sale.
Of course you can sell high ticket digital products, or high ticket physical products, both of which will pay more than low value physical products. See what is high ticket affiliate marketing. The best products to choose will depend on your topic and how you’re going to promote your website.
Autopilot Affiliate Website – Organic Traffic
If you’re going the organic route to get traffic to your website, expect a longer journey before you can get enough traffic to make your site profitable. There’s a couple of things you can do to help you speed up this journey, but it will usually take several months of content building before you can reap the benefits through using SEO as your main strategy. See also how to increase organic traffic to your blog.
- Build an email list – an email list lets you control your traffic which is hard earned through SEO methods. An email list will help you speed up the process. See free autoresponder for affiliate marketing.
- Use subscription products – when you make an organic sale through SEO it can be after a lot of work. Subscription affiliate products, which pay recurring commissions, can help you attain more consistent income more quickly.
Building traffic organically means creating a lot of content. This takes time and you will need to consistently add new content to your website on a regular basis. Over time, your work compounds and you can find your website is generating traffic without much work. Ultimately the goal is to build a autopilot affiliate website which generates traffic, leads and sales without you lifting a finger! To get this working you’ll need a lot of targeted traffic, a good opt in offer and a product which is worth a lot to your audience. See also website conversion optimisation.
Autopilot Affiliate Website – Paid Version
To build an autopilot affiliate website through using paid traffic is a much faster way to build an affiliate income. However, you’ll need a marketing budget, a Google/Facebook compliant website (which doesn’t contravene terms and conditions of your advertising platform), and ideally a nice high ticket sales funnel to monetise with.
The last thing you need when building this out is to be hit by your advertising platform with a penalty for contravening their terms and conditions. So make sure you read them if you’re going this route. You can also join an online community through this website, who can help you set this up from scratch. Sign up to the free email video series to learn more and join.
Paid marketing is expensive, especially if you’re using platforms such as YouTube and Facebook. So to monetise effectively you’ll need a high ticket offering and subscription affiliate products. Without these it can still be done, but your margin for profit is much lower so it’s much more difficult.
Once you set up your sales funnel, you main focus is on marketing. Learning marketing can take some time in itself, so getting a simple step by step setup of your sales and marketing funnel is of huge value. You can start that process here.
Organic Version Vs. Paid Version
There’s advantages and disadvantages of each of these ways to generate an autopilot affiliate website. With SEO it can take a long time before you start to generate enough traffic to see sales coming in. But it’s a cheap way to do it. Plus with SEO you ultimately build a digital resource online which can make money for free for years to come potentially. Your efforts are compounded over time, even though in the early stages there’s not much to show.
With paid marketing you can get much faster results. Plus, once your sales funnel is profitable, you can scale up globally using the data you collect. the downside is that you’ll need a lot of marketing budget first to test your funnel and learn about it, and then to scale up and build your business.
You can of course use a combination of the two methods. Many affiliates will build an SEO blog website to slowly build their free traffic, while also building a site which is dedicated for sending paid traffic to.
According to your available time and budget, choose your promotion methods accordingly!
Summary
Building an autopilot affiliate website is a challenge, whichever way you do it. But ultimately it can give you a passive income which comes from using the systems and automation you build to help you promote and sell affiliate products online.
Using subscription products can help you speed up this process and you should also definitely use an email list which helps you control your traffic, and build relationships with your subscribers on autopilot. See free autoresponder for affiliate marketing if you don’t already have an email autoresponder service. See also the power of email marketing for more on this topic.