Can you really make an automated income online which can replace an existing job or career? One of the best ways to do this is through using a business model known as affiliate marketing. By selling other people’s products and services online, anyone can earn an income on complete autopilot. Online purchases are dramatically overtaking the traditional economy and this trend has been given a massive boost over the last couple of years.
Affiliates are third party referrers who get paid commissions for product referrals online. They don’t own the products and services themselves but can make an income through recommending them.
Anyone can become an affiliate and one of the most popular affiliate websites is Amazon, which offers thousands of products you can refer for a percentage of the sale value.
Automated Income Online: Affiliate Marketing
To become an affiliate you only need to join an affiliate program. Once inside an affiliate program you will be able to access a unique identifying link. You use your link to promote the product through. When someone makes a purchase through your identifying link (affiliate link) you are credited with the sale and earn a commission.
There’s many ways in which affiliates can promote their link. Whether they are successful or not depends on how they promote their products and the products they choose to promote. Not all affiliate programs are equal of course and some pay more than others. With Amazon, the commission levels range from 1% all the way up to 20% depending on the category of item you choose to promote. See also Amazon affiliate marketing commissions.
There’s other kinds of products you can promote as an affiliate too, and you don’t need to choose physical products. There’s thousands of digital products which affiliates will promote too. These typically pay much more; often from 20-40% commission on certain items. You can find a lot of digital products on the site Clickbank.com.
Automated Income Online: Product Promotion
Not all affiliate marketers are successful at generating an automated income online though. Something like 95% of new affiliates will quit so that statistic shows that affiliate marketing isn’t easy! With more people becoming affiliates all the time, there’s growing competition. There’s over 600 million blogs on the internet; to give some perspective of just one marketing strategy which affiliates use. Within the next few years this number will be significantly higher!
Not all affiliates use blogging as their strategy though and there’s many ways to promote affiliate products. Here’s just a few of the strategies which affiliates use to sell their products online:
- PPC – pay per click (paid marketing)
- YouTube
- TikTok
- Social media
- Email marketing
- SEO – search engine optimisation
Because there’s a huge range of products to sell as an affiliate, you can promote a wide variety of products in almost any area. Some topics are obviously more competitive than others and these tend to be the most lucrative niches.
Automated Income Online: Best Tactics
The best tactics to make an automated income online are those which can be scaled up to a large global audience very quickly and run on virtual autopilot continuously. One of the best ways to do this is to choose to promote a high ticket sales funnel which contains multiple earning methods:
- One time sales – only pay you once for a sale but are an important part of a good sales funnel
- Subscription affiliate products – pay you over and over again for each individual sale. They are typically memberships and software type products
- High ticket affiliate products – are those which pay much more than average and offer huge value to the customer. A good example is a personal training program which offers one to one tuition.
Here’s a video course run by a personal mentor of mine who explains the different types of products you can sell as an affiliate:
Using Scalable & Fast Marketing Strategies
The slow route to build an affiliate business is through creating a lot of content, or content marketing. With content marketing, you can build up your “portfolio” of content on a blog or YouTube channel, for example. Over time, the search engines should index your content and you will get found in the SERPS – search engine results pages. Although this is a notoriously slow method of going about selling online, you can benefit from passive income over time once you have built a lot of content. That content can keep working for you for years (or decades) after you’ve put the work in initially.
So although there’s a lot of work to do initially, this can pay off if you put the time in.
A much faster method of building an automated income online is through using a high ticket sales funnel and a paid marketing strategy. With a high ticket funnel, you can benefit from multiple products and recurring income affiliate products.
Initially with paid marketing you should tread with caution. You’ll be testing and measuring your advertising campaigns to find those which consistently produce a profit. This requires a bit of patience initially but ultimately this is a much faster way to build an automated income online. Once you know what you are doing, you can cut the ad campaigns which don’t work while scaling up those which are profitable. This can mean you can build a huge online business very quickly and benefit from the automation of selling products online 24 hours a day, 7 days a week!
Access this free video series to learn more and get started.