I always liked the idea of a hands free business that worked behind the scenes, even when I didn’t. Despite this sounding like a pipe dream, it’s actually a reality for many online business owners.
Online business owners can benefit from selling directly from their websites. With digital sales, products can even be accessed remotely from anywhere. This means the business owner only has to set up their marketing software and they can make sales 24 hours a day, 7 days a week on complete autopilot.
So what would it take for you to build a business like this? While there’s many “push button” solutions to this, the real challenge is in marketing your website, once set up. E-commerce stores, print on demand businesses and affiliate marketing websites all offer the ability to set up a digital store-front in a few simple steps.
Get started by accessing a step by step training here. This will take you through building your own digital store. You’ll also be able to access all the training you need to learn how to promote it. This is the main key to setting up your hands free business. An online store with products ready to sell is only the start of the process. Marketing that store effectively is where many online business owners become unstuck.
Hands Free Business – Marketing A Digital Store
Once you have setup your “digital store”, you will effectively have a website from which you can sell products and earn income from sales you generate. One of the simplest business models which allows you to do this is affiliate marketing. With affiliate marketing you can promote other people’s products for a share of the profit. Digital products typically offer the best levels of commission. Since they also offer the ability to sell globally with no postage/handling costs, this saving is passed on to the affiliate.
Affiliates typically can earn from 30-40% commission from promotion of digital products. Whereas with physical products, like you can find on Amazon, for example, the commission levels are much lower.
Marketing your digital store can be done in several ways all of which fall into the category of either paid or unpaid marketing:
- Blogging or video blogging (v’logging)
- PPC – paid advertising (Pay Per Click) using platforms such as Google Adwords, Facebook, YouTube, etc.
- Social media marketing – social media platforms offer both paid and unpaid marketing opportunities
- SEO – search engine optimisation; goes with content marketing (blogging and v’logging
Hands Free Business – Subscription Products
One of the best things you can promote to create a hands free business are subscription affiliate products. With most products you can promote as an affiliate you will only get paid once for the sale. But with subscription products (such as membership products and software products) you can earn an ongoing income from sales you make.
Even if your subscription commission is only $10 a month, with just 100 sales you’ll be making $1000 a month passively from those memberships! Good subscription products to promote might be business tools and software because they offer huge value to business owners. Businesses need those products in order to function and so they are a good choice for affiliates if they want to earn recurring commissions.
An example is Aweber, which is an autoresponder software product which affiliates use to generate sales.
Hands Free Business – Autoresponder
An email autoresponder is a pretty useful tool if you want to build a hands free business. You can access one for free here. Autoresponders help website owners build email lists from their websites.
So what’s so good about email autoresponders? An email autoresponders lets you collect visitors’ emails from your website so you can follow up with automated messages to help them in some way. You can also use them to promote your products and that’s where the magic of a hands free business really lies!
Of course you can sell products directly from a website but most visitors will require a “getting to know you” period of a few exchanges. In fact it typically takes several touch-points between you and your website visitors before they will make a purchase from your website. How many touch points before a sale will depend on your particular niche and your visitors. But usually it is around 6-8 times a visitor needs to see your website before they buy.
This creates a problem for those who want to sell automatically and create a hands free business from a website. That problem is solved with an email autoresponder which can connect you to your website visitors over a longer period of time.
Target Audience
Another key factor to your success in building a hands free business is your target audience. Once you set up your online store (get started here), you’ll probably be keen to get people to come and see it. This stage of building a hands free business is fundamental to your success. Unless you target your audience well, you’ll be tempted to try and sell your products to anyone and everyone you can find online. This is a huge mistake because most people searching online are not looking for what you have to offer. Only a tiny slither of all the millions of people online are actually right for your particular offer.
It can be a frustrating experience when you discover this without prior knowledge, only to find much of your efforts have been in vain! When you understand your target audience, you’ll have greater success and much more quickly than if you randomly attract visitors haphazardly or randomly!
A large step towards this understanding is to get to know your customer avatar. Your customer “avatar” is your perfect customer – those specific people who are right for your offer and can be found through specific targeting in your online marketing. See the customer avatar worksheet pdf for more information on this.
Summary
Having set up your online store, learned about target audience and run a few ads, you will probably have some data from which you can learn. This is simply the beginning of this journey and unless you test and measure different adverts, you won’t get to know what works and what doesn’t in terms of making sales. Once you run a successful advertising campaign, you’ll start making some sales from your digital store (or sales funnel if using an email list).
You can also create content too to attract the right people to your website or email list. Blogging and video blogging are two methods you can use to attract website traffic organically. Although this method takes much longer than running paid advertising, you can ultimately create passive income with this strategy. That’s if you stick at it long enough!
A hands free business is much more viable today than it was only just a few years ago. However there’s work involved in making it a reality. If you’re ready to get started you can do that here!