Is it really possible to make money on autopilot? When I first started looking into making money online, I thought I could just purchase a course and do this. After all, that’s what many of the courses were telling me! “Just purchase this course for $100, and you too could make money on autopilot”. After purchasing many courses I just didn’t find this to be the case. I also worked at several strategies building websites, running adverts and trying to set up my “autopilot money making system“.

It wasn’t until much later that I was actually able to generate an autopilot income from the internet. I spent far too much time jumping from course to course looking for the “magic bullet”. Each course I saw promised more than the last, so I spent several months trying this course and that course without earning anything! Here’s some of the courses I took. This, I later learned is called “shiny object syndrome”.

When you’re jumping around all the time, it’s very unlikely that you will progress because you’re not focusing on the single actions which generate results. It is entirely possible to make money on autopilot. You just need to have a longer term focus and be prepared to roll your sleeves up and do the work.

Here’s a few of the main tips which have helped me create my own autopilot money making system.

Make Money On Autopilot – Affiliate Marketing

I tried a number of online strategies including Forex marketing, eBay buying and selling and I even tried to sell my own ebooks. I eventually found an online business model known as affiliate marketing which I believe is the best way to make money on autopilot. With affiliate marketing you can sell other people’s products and services online and earn commissions based on the sale.

There’s a huge variety of affiliate products on the internet. I started out using eBay and Amazon’s affiliate programs. It wasn’t until much later that I realised how low the commissions were offered by eBay and Amazon. See affiliate marketing commission rates. I later learned that digital products paid much more. Digital products pay from 40% and upwards, compared to 1-11% commission rates for physical products.

So I switched to selling digital products online. I was still a long way off automating an money making system though. It took me months to make even a single sale, and even then, I couldn’t easily repeat it. My first sale came from a review website, and although fantastic at the time, this wasn’t something I could easily scale up for more sales.

Affiliate marketing is a great model for making money on autopilot, but I was still struggling years into my affiliate journey. I wondered what I was doing wrong.

Make Money On Autopilot – Subscription Products

I found an online community you can access on this website. Join here. It was here I learned about the power of using subscription products. Subscription affiliate products are different to most products you can promote as an affiliate marketer. They are software or membership products which offer ongoing value to the customer.

Business tools, membership training programs and software fall into the subscription affiliate product category. With these kinds of products you can earn recurring income from the sale you make. This is far better than only getting paid once for selling a product online.

It’s a major key to making money on autopilot online because to automate your income, membership products work wonders. Once you’ve made a few sales, you keep getting paid from those subscriptions. Of course you need to choose products which are incredibly valuable, otherwise customers wouldn’t keep up their memberships. See also lifetime commission affiliate products.

Make Money On Autopilot – Marketing

To sell anything online you need marketing. Without a constant stream of leads and customers, you won’t make any sales at all. There’s several ways to market affiliate products online and you can choose between building an email list, using organic marketing (e.g. blogging), paid marketing and other methods like social media marketing.

Marketing is the biggest stumbling block for affiliate marketers who are trying to make money on autopilot. With blogging, it can take months or even years to generate enough traffic to start making consistent leads and sales. With thousand of visitors every day to a website though, you can make income on complete autopilot. But getting those visitors and getting the right visitors is the hardest part of using a blogging strategy.

With paid marketing it can work much faster. Paid marketing is by far the fastest legit way to make money online. But there’s a problem with paid marketing. If you’re selling products which only pay you $40 per sale, you’ll need to spend less than this for each sale to make a profit.

Even with subscription products to offer, it can be difficult making back more than you spend. This is especially difficult as a beginner with no experience or knowledge. Some affiliate marketer have been known to spend tens of thousands of dollars on paid advertising, just while learning their particular strategy. But if you don’t have this money lying around to spend on advertising, what’s the answer?

Make Money On Autopilot – High Ticket Items

Spending vast amounts of money on advertising isn’t recommended if you only have some low value affiliate products to sell. With digital products which pay 40%-100% commissions you have more chance of turning a profit. Subscription products allow you to make a recurring income from your sales, which gives you a huge advantage.

High ticket affiliate products are your “ace” card because they give you the ability to earn large amounts from single sales. These kinds of products are often digital training and personal mentoring products. Although you can also find large value physical products which pay out larger commissions, too.

A high ticket funnel can pay out much more than most affiliate products ever will because they contain multiple earning strategies:

• Subscription products
• High ticket products
• Multi-tier commissions
• A built in sales team
• A range of products and automated up-selling done for you.

See also the SFM Digital Business System for more on this.

Marketing Methods – Slow & Fast

There’s slow and fast marketing strategies you can use to make money on autopilot. To do this is no easy feat. Setting up your sales funnel can be pretty simple though and you can follow a step by step process to do so. Access the modules through this link.

With the kind of sales funnel pictured above, you can use paid marketing and build up your online business quite quickly. Some have been known to do this inside a year even, although that’s not typical.

Marketing strategies like blogging, and using organic strategies are cheaper but also much slower and less scalable. Although some have been known to create content which goes viral, and this can have a lasting impact on your business.

Summary

So, is it possible to make money on autopilot? Yes of course it is! However, don’t believe those courses which promise to let you do this through clicking a few buttons! It takes much longer and far more effort that most people are willing to put in. But if you’re serious about starting an online business which lets you work from anywhere and replace your existing income, this is possible. It’s something you’ll need to commit to for the long term however, in order to make it work!

Access a free video series here to learn more about the different online business models.