autopilot affiliate marketing Archives - Affiliate Marketing Mentors

It is possible to completely autopilot affiliate marketing which is a good reason to become an affiliate. With the affiliate marketing business model, third parties refer customers to products online. They don’t need to personally own the products themselves or even deal with customers.

The systems and processes of selling online can be automated completely. Although some affiliate strategies are faster and more effective than others, there’s several ways you can do this as an affiliate:

Blogging – A digital “asset” can be built which grows in size over time. Ultimately online content can sell your products for you.
PPC – Pay per click marketing can be used to send customers directly to affiliate products or to a landing page where an email list can be built.
Email marketing – Email marketing is a very effective way in which affiliates sell their products on autopilot. The bigger the list, the more you can sell.
Social media – Many automated processes can be used through social media marketing too, both paid and unpaid social media marketing methods.
SEO – search engine optimisation can be used to generate traffic to affiliate offers.

Autopilot Affiliate Marketing Methods

To become an affiliate marketer you only need to join an affiliate program. You’ll then get access to your unique affiliate link. This link is your referral link which is tracked back to you when a sale is made. The next step is to learn how to promote your affiliate link.

There’s many ways to do this and your strategy will depend on your circumstances and marketing budget. For example, if you’re working in a busy job, you might choose to run paid advertising to build your business. If you aren’t tied to a full time job, you can use your time to build a digital “asset”. You might choose blogging or video blogging, for example.

Your affiliate marketing business model has some say in your marketing methods too. If you are selling low value affiliate products from Amazon, for example, this can limit your ability to run paid advertising. But if you have a high paying program with recurring income, you are much more able to profit with paid ads.

The method you choose to promote your affiliate products will determine the timescale with which you’re likely to create an autopilot affiliate marketing business. Paid marketing is faster, but obviously more expensive. It’s also more scalable than content creation, which can take a lot longer.

Autopilot Affiliate Marketing: Email Marketing

Email marketing is one of the best resources you can use as an affiliate marketer to automate your business. Whether you use paid marketing or content creation to build an affiliate business, email marketing can help you. Email marketing is a strategy in which affiliates collect emails from a website or landing page.

aweber - automating an affiliate business

By offering some kind of free giveaway to visitors, affiliates can collect emails and build a list of subscribers. On this website for example, I give away a free video series to subscribers. They join my list to access the free videos and I follow up with useful emails which help subscribers with a specific problem: (making money online). I also promote affiliate products which I’ve found helpful to me and earn a commission when someone buys something from my list.

The email list is such a powerful tool for a couple of main reasons:

It gives you more time to communicate with your subscribers than you could possible do from a website alone.
You can built trust by offering value, entertainment and insight.
Statistics show that most online customers will need several touch points before they make a purchase. This is more possible with a list than a website.
You can control your flow of traffic better when you own the list. Otherwise you rely on SEO, link building and/or paid traffic for potential customers. Either way it costs either time or money, or both. A list puts you in control of your traffic.

Autopilot Affiliate Marketing Fast & Slow

The fastest way to make with affiliate marketing is through using a high ticket sales funnel and running paid advertising. To qualify for the highest levels of commission with a high ticket sales funnel you will usually need to invest in the products yourself. Then there’s an investment in learning marketing, which can take some time. So this method of building an affiliate business might suit someone who wants to escape their 9 to 5 job/career.

autopilot affiliate marketing sales funnel

This method of building an affiliate business is fast and scalable, but still not without a fair amount of sacrifice. Many affiliates quit because they don’t realise the time and commitment they need to invest upfront, before they can benefit from the commissions! With high ticket products and subscription products you can earn more than average on sales you generate and recurring income from subscriptions.

A slower but cheaper method of building an online income from affiliate marketing is through content creation. Blogging, for example is a much longer term strategy which can take weeks, months or even years of work before you start generating a passive income from it. However, once you have built the content you can continue to earn from it potentially for years afterwards. So depending on your situation and available time, you should choose wisely! Of course you can do a bit of both paid marketing and content creation. See also 22 ways of promoting affiliate products for some other methods.

Summary

Anyone can build an autopilot affiliate marketing income by selling other people’s products and services online. To do so isn’t easy and it will take some serious commitment however.

By choosing the right products and services to promote, and finding a marketing strategy which suits you, you are giving yourself the best chance of success.

Access a training program here to get started with your affiliate business today!

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.