It is possible to make automated sales online even without any products of your own to sell. This can be done with a business model known as affiliate marketing. With affiliate marketing, “affiliates” promote and sell other people’s products for a share of the profit. Because they don’t have to handle products or deal with customers, affiliates can focus on advertising the products through their affiliate links, to generate sales.
This process can be completely automated, and scaled up to a global audience.
Automated Sales Online
So how can you benefit from automated sales online? Anyone can learn the strategies which affiliates use to generate an income through selling other people’s products on the internet.
There’s thousands of products you can choose from and many ways to promote them using automation. Whatever your background, or choice of product, you can promote them through various tactics and strategies:
- Blogging – this article is an example of a blog post. By creating content and getting people to visit it, you can put affiliate products and/or adverts in front of them to generate income.
- PPC – pay per click advertising is the fastest way to generate website visitors who can be turned into online sales
- Email marketing – most affiliates will have an email list. This allows them to communicate via email to subscribers in bulk and promote affiliate products to them.
- Social media marketing – you can use both paid and unpaid social media marketing methods to generate online sales.
- SEO – search engine optimisation is use by bloggers and content creators to attract website visitors from the search engines: Google, Bing, Yahoo etc.
Automated Sales Online: Types Of Affiliate Products
There’s thousands of products you can sell online as an affiliate marketer. The best products to sell as an affiliate are those which are most valuable and pay the best rates of commission. Amazon, for example has an affiliate program which anyone can join. However, Amazon pays quite low levels of commission; generally from 3-10% on product referrals. Although there’s a lot of products to choose from Amazon, the levels of commission are pretty low. Digital products are good for affiliates because the levels of commission are much higher – typically from 30-40%.
Subscription affiliate products are much more worthwhile than “one off” sales because they allow affiliates to earn on a recurring basis for each referral they make. So a sale can give you a monthly commission rather than a one off payment.
High ticket affiliate products are also worth considering if you’re looking to make automated sales online. A high ticket product will typically pay out a commission of at least $500. When it’s often the same amount of work involved in making a sale, it’s worth choosing high valued products if you’re going to become a referrer.
Building An Email List
Most top affiliate marketers will build an email list of subscribers and promote their products to their list. Building a list can be done using many different marketing techniques but the fastest way is through using paid marketing. To build an email list, you can send targeted visitors to a landing page where you offer something of value to your visitors.
By testing different landing pages against each other (cross testing), you can find out which ones perform the best. Once you have learned how to find the right visitors and to optimise for performance, you can scale up your marketing efforts quickly when using paid marketing. Simply increase your daily budget.
Over time as you collect more email subscribers and sell your affiliate products, you will find building an email list is one of the best ways to sell affiliate products. See also email marketing for affiliate marketers.
Get Started
If you’re ready to get started with building an online business and making automated sales online, you can access a free video series here to learn more.