Wouldn’t it be great to place an “affiliate marketing autopilot” on your affiliate business so you don’t have to work at it? Well, in a way you can do this. Websites run 24 hours a day, 7 days a week on autopilot. Autoresponders send automated emails out whenever you want them to. In fact you could say affiliate marketing was already an autopilot method of selling products online.
But there’s still work to do with an affiliate business. Most of this work is set up though and ultimately you want your business to work for you, not the other way round. The fastest way to do this is to build a funnel which offers multiple methods of earning.
Affiliate Marketing Autopilot
The ultimate outcome from an affiliate marketing autopilot machine is of course income. You want to sell affiliate products and services and make money. To do this requires some work but ultimately that’s the end goal; an autopilot cash system!
To automate traffic flow is probably the most difficult part of a sales funnel. Some affiliates will create content and slowly build up traffic over months and years. But to do it faster costs money and you need to know that you’ll get more money coming out the other side than you’re putting into your advertising budget.
Unless you’ve already tested and measured a sales funnel, and product range, you won’t necessarily know how well it works; or even if you’ll make any sales at all!
Small value affiliate products won’t always give you the necessary revenue to learn PPC (pay per click) marketing. With a small value product you will need to be very good at marketing immediately or you’ll lose money while learning. The best way to learn marketing is with a high ticket sales funnel like this one (below), using a “done for you” affiliate marketing sales funnel.
Affiliate Marketing Autopilot – The Six Figure (Plus) Funnel
Most sales funnels offer one product at a set price. You only earn once from a sale so you’ll need to get more sales consistently to make more income. But with a six figure funnel you have multiple earning strategies built into your product range:
- Recurring income affiliate products such as membership and software products
- High ticket items offering much larger commissions than most products
- Multi-tier commissions – give you an income from sales made by your referrals
See SFM Digital Business System for more on this funnel.
Of course just having a funnel like this one doesn’t give you an affiliate marketing autopilot income. It just gives you the product range and software to build one. Once set up with your affiliate links and autoresponder, you only need to learn how to drive traffic into your funnel. To automate this you can use a marketing platform which lets you pay to send traffic into your funnel.
Depending on the value of products within your chosen funnel, you may or may not be able to afford the more expensive marketing platforms such as Facebook and YouTube.
Marketing Your Funnel
With a fully loaded product range which offers multiple high ticket products, you’ll be more likely to recover your marketing budget and make a profit. With a smaller value product range, it’s more difficult to do so by using paid marketing strategies.
But even with the best possible product range and system you still can get it wrong with your marketing. This is something which you’ll need to learn. Access a training and coaching program here.
Most beginner marketers will start small with a reasonably affordable marketing budget. Once they see sales coming in, and have a consistent profit, they can then scale up their advertising budget to send more people into the funnel.
Over time, and once they’ve made a number of sales and successfully built a working campaign, they simply leave it running and build many more. As people go through the funnel, they purchase products and you generate income from:
- Recurring income products (memberships)
- High ticket product sales
- Multi-tier commissions
- A range of up sells – sales closed by an in-house built in sales team
Hey presto! You’ve now got an affiliate marketing autopilot system!
Other Marketing Strategies
Paid marketing is definitely the fastest marketing strategy to use for affiliate marketers. But what if they don’t have such a sales funnel with large value products in it? With lower value products and fewer earning methods, you may have to use other, cheaper marketing strategies.
Some affiliates use free marketing strategies such as content marketing. This article is an example of content marketing. You can also use videos and upload them to YouTube to gain traction with an affiliate marketing business.
However, organic content marketing is much slower than paid marketing. Although you can get traction through free marketing strategies, on the whole it usually will take months or years to see the same impact as you can see with paid marketing within days or weeks.
Blogging As A Marketing Strategy
Blogging is one of my favourite marketing strategies because it’s free to do and I enjoy writing. However, it’s not easy to gain traction with affiliate marketing through blogging. You have to keep at it for a while before you see any real traction from your efforts. Here’s a strategy I picked up several years ago and stuck with it.
Ranking Content On Google For Long Tail Keywords
Use Google’s Keyword Planner to find long tail keywords within your niche. Then compare your keyword phrase on Google with a simple search. Look for the number at the top of the page. I generally look for those phrases which give a result of less than 10 million:
Try the same search again only with quotes around your key phrase like so:
This number should be less than 10,000 and denotes the competing pages for your particular search phrase. The fewer the better.
Once I’ve done a bit of digging into the key phrase, I write some content with the keyword in mind and using an SEO tool to help me write. Some of my content will make its way to the first page of Google with this little strategy. Of course I’ve written a lot of content which didn’t have the desired effect too! It’s a long term strategy and some will hit and others will miss. But the key is to write quality content which will stand the test of time.
You can also use this same strategy for building niche websites too. For more on this strategy checkout this article on creating niche websites.