An autopilot online business is basically a sales funnel. A sales funnel sends subscribers into an email marketing system and promotes affiliate products. As subscribers move through the funnel they can purchase products. The entry level product in a high ticket sales funnel is a relatively cheap product. It usually sells from $40-$100. As the purchase is made, automated software automatically offers another product to the customer. The next product within a range typically offers more value to the customer and therefore carries a larger price tag.
Sales funnels with multiple products can earn affiliates a good living. Plus with a scalable marketing strategy, the affiliate can simply increase their marketing budget to sell more of a product.
Autopilot Online Business – The Landing Page
From an advertising platform the online marketer sends targeted visitors towards a landing page where they collect subscribers information. The landing page offers a “legitimate bribe” in exchange for the subscribers information. This is usually something of value such as an ebook or series of videos.
Once someone enters their details into a landing page, they are automatically sent a series of email messages. These are sent through an autoresponder. An email autoresponder can send a number of automated messages over a long period of time.
This is an important part of an autopilot online business because it’s where the selling of products begins. With a website, someone only has a small amount of time to make a buying decision. But with an email marketing campaign, a relationship can be built up over a much longer period of time.
Autopilot Email Marketing
Email marketing is one of the best ways to build an affiliate business. With affiliate marketing you don’t need your own products and services to sell. You can simply refer people to other people’s products! With email marketing this can be much easier because you can connect with your audience over a long period of time. Over time, if you give value to subscribers through your emails, you can get them to know, like and trust you.
Once you have built some trust up with your subscribers, they are much more likely to purchase from you; especially if the products you promote will help them. Email marketing is a fundamental part of many affiliate businesses. Some top affiliates build their email lists into the tens of thousands of subscribers. One email message can reach many people. If enough of them make a purchase, a single email can be a huge pay day for an affiliate.
Affiliate Products
Affiliate marketers can sell pretty much any affiliate product they want. There are all kinds of affiliate products and some pay more than others in terms of commissions. See affiliate marketing commission rates and affiliate marketing business models.
One of the best ways for affiliates to automate their online business is to choose a product range which offers multiple up-sells within their sales funnel. Once they have referred a customer once, their customers are automatically offered more products within a sales funnel. See SFM Digital Business system for an example of this strategy.
By referring subscribers to affiliate products the affiliate earns a commission. This can be automated through their email marketing list and scaled up to an ever growing audience of subscribers. As the list grows in size, the affiliate should see a growth in their earnings is their messaging is working well and they offer the right products to their subscribers.
Targeting Your Perfect Customers
Depending on the products you choose to sell, you will need to attract a certain audience. If you’re selling flowers, you don’t want business opportunity seekers on your email list, for example and vice versa. So your perfect customer will depend on the products and services you decide to promote.
Targeting your perfect customer is therefore pretty important if you’re going to generate sales of your affiliate products. See also how to know your target market. But before you can target your perfect customer with your advertising strategy, you need to get to know who they are. This is known as knowing your customer “avatar”. When you know who your best customers are, how old they are, where they hand out online etc. you’re in a better position to target them with your advertising more specifically.
Paying for advertising can get costly so if you know who to target and how to get your message across well, you can save a lot on the wrong kind of customer.
Summary
Anyone can build an autopilot online business using the affiliate marketing model. Most affiliates will use a blog website to attract visitors or a landing page to send visitors directly from a marketing platform. Once you have mastered this step, you can get hundreds of visitors to subscribe to your email list every day! As your list grows, and you have a product or product range to offer your subscribers, you should make sales by automating messages to your email list.
With a good product range, your customers will automatically get offered other products which can help them. If your product range offers customers subscription affiliate products and high ticket products, you can earn more per customer than for standard one-off payment affiliate products. For more on affiliate marketing business models access a free video series by clicking on the image below.
