make money on autopilot Archives - Affiliate Marketing Mentors

Anybody can build an automated money making system with only a few tools:

An affiliate product – someone else’s product/s which you can promote online
An email marketing tool – known as an autoresponder which collects email addresses and sends out email automatically
A marketing platform – which finds perfect customers for your product/s through paid ads.

There’s other ways to sell affiliate products online too, but this is the simplest way to build an automated money making system, which you can use to make money in your sleep! There’s other ways of product promotion, such as using banners on websites, for example, and there’s other ways of getting people in front of your products, for example blogging. However the fastest and most reliable way to build a money making system is with only three tools: an affiliate product, an email marketing tool (autoresponder) and a marketing platform which uses paid ads.

Automated Money Making System – Products

You can of course sell your own business or product/s if you have one to sell. But for most people the best way to monetise a system is with other people’s products and services. Affiliate marketing is the business of selling other people’s products and services online for a share of the profit. Anyone can join an affiliate program and promote products for a commission.

Amazon, for example is one of the most popular affiliate programs online and attracts thousands of affiliates who promote the many products from the site. But there’s many other types of affiliate program too and you don’t have to just choose Amazon. In fact, Amazon’s affiliate commissions are pretty low in comparison to many other affiliate programs.

digital vs physical affiliate commissions

Digital products pay far more than physical products typically. So if you’re considering building an affiliate business it’s worth understanding the different levels of commissions you can earn from product promotion. Physical products typically pay the least: usually between 5% and 10% of the sale value. Digital products on the other hand pay much more – 30%-40% in most cases, sometimes even more. Then there’s high ticket affiliate products and subscription affiliate products to consider. These are especially useful if you’re going to use paid marketing in your automated money making system. Since paid marketing can get expensive, you’ll want the highest possible return on your investment possible.

Automated Money Making System: Email Marketing

While you can sell affiliate products directly from a website, most people won’t buy from a website, especially on their first visit. Customers on average will need to interact with a business several times before they make a buying decision. This creates a problem for many website based businesses. How do you get more customers to your website and how do you build more trust? The answer is with email marketing. In fact, you can make many more sales if you skip the website altogether and simply send customers to your email marketing campaign.

What advantage does email marketing have over a simple website? On a website a visitor only sticks around for a few minutes. This means you have only that time to sell them something! But once you have someone on your email list, you can send them automated messages over a much longer timeframe. Often email subscribers will purchase something from you even months or years after joining your list.

The email messages you send out are an opportunity to build trust, offer value and help your subscribers get to know like and trust you.

A Marketing Platform

A marketing platform allows you to send qualified and interested potential customers into a lead nurture funnel – (your email marketing campaign). This can be done using any of the many paid marketing platforms such as Facebook, YouTube, Google Adwords, Bing etc. Most advertising platforms allow marketers to target a specific cross section of their audience so that they can place ads in front of people who match their customer avatar.

For example, if you’re selling a Yoga related affiliate product, you might want to target the search term “Yoga” in your adverts. Since the people looking for information on Yoga are likely to fall within the realms of your perfect target audience. Some marketing platforms will allow you to also narrow down your target marketing by other criteria such as age, location, interests and even by their income bracket.

Not knowing who you are targeting your ads towards is a major reason why many fail with an online business.

Target Audience

Once you have identified your target audience and set up an advert, you can send visitors to a landing page where you collect their email address. Why use landing pages?

A landing page is a simple one page website which gives visitors only two choices: sign up or leave. On a website, like this one, there’s much more choice. As such, it means your visitors are less likely to opt in to your email campaign if you use a standard website. So, it makes sense to encourage your visitors to opt in and you can do this by optimising your landing pages for the best performance. This is done through cross testing different pages against each other to see which performs the best.

Other Marketing & Monetisation Methods

While paid marketing can be expensive, it’s the fastest way to build an automated money making system using email marketing and affiliate products. A paid marketing platform gives you traffic immediately, whereas other methods of traffic generation are much slower and less scalable. Blogging, for example is a very slow way to generate interest in your affiliate products. With blogging you can build a similar system but without paying for advertising.

Over time if you persevere with blogging, (or another content marketing tactic), you can build a passive income through organic traffic. However, this will take some time and effort and depending on the topic of your content it can be competitive.

Video content is another way you can generate traffic online. Upload videos on a regular basis to YouTube or TikTok. Over time your channel will pull in visitors which you can send to your affiliate products. Or you can monetise in another way with Google Adsense for example. Adsense lets you monetise content on a website, or a video channel and you get paid for each click of an advert from your visitors. See also affiliate marketing vs Google Adsense.

Summary

To build an automated money making system is possible with only three things:

An affiliate product or products
An email autoresponder – get one for free here.
A marketing platform

Paid advertising can become expensive and you’ll benefit from using high ticket affiliate products and subscription affiliate products which pay larger and recurring income commissions.

If you’re serious about building a profitable online business using this strategy, you’ll need training, help and support and the right products in your sales funnel. Access a free video series here to learn more about the different types of affiliate products you can use.

Is it really possible to make money on autopilot? When I first started looking into making money online, I thought I could just purchase a course and do this. After all, that’s what many of the courses were telling me! “Just purchase this course for $100, and you too could make money on autopilot”. After purchasing many courses I just didn’t find this to be the case. I also worked at several strategies building websites, running adverts and trying to set up my “autopilot money making system“.

It wasn’t until much later that I was actually able to generate an autopilot income from the internet. I spent far too much time jumping from course to course looking for the “magic bullet”. Each course I saw promised more than the last, so I spent several months trying this course and that course without earning anything! Here’s some of the courses I took. This, I later learned is called “shiny object syndrome”.

When you’re jumping around all the time, it’s very unlikely that you will progress because you’re not focusing on the single actions which generate results. It is entirely possible to make money on autopilot. You just need to have a longer term focus and be prepared to roll your sleeves up and do the work.

Here’s a few of the main tips which have helped me create my own autopilot money making system.

Make Money On Autopilot – Affiliate Marketing

I tried a number of online strategies including Forex marketing, eBay buying and selling and I even tried to sell my own ebooks. I eventually found an online business model known as affiliate marketing which I believe is the best way to make money on autopilot. With affiliate marketing you can sell other people’s products and services online and earn commissions based on the sale.

There’s a huge variety of affiliate products on the internet. I started out using eBay and Amazon’s affiliate programs. It wasn’t until much later that I realised how low the commissions were offered by eBay and Amazon. See affiliate marketing commission rates. I later learned that digital products paid much more. Digital products pay from 40% and upwards, compared to 1-11% commission rates for physical products.

So I switched to selling digital products online. I was still a long way off automating an money making system though. It took me months to make even a single sale, and even then, I couldn’t easily repeat it. My first sale came from a review website, and although fantastic at the time, this wasn’t something I could easily scale up for more sales.

Affiliate marketing is a great model for making money on autopilot, but I was still struggling years into my affiliate journey. I wondered what I was doing wrong.

Make Money On Autopilot – Subscription Products

I found an online community you can access on this website. Join here. It was here I learned about the power of using subscription products. Subscription affiliate products are different to most products you can promote as an affiliate marketer. They are software or membership products which offer ongoing value to the customer.

Business tools, membership training programs and software fall into the subscription affiliate product category. With these kinds of products you can earn recurring income from the sale you make. This is far better than only getting paid once for selling a product online.

It’s a major key to making money on autopilot online because to automate your income, membership products work wonders. Once you’ve made a few sales, you keep getting paid from those subscriptions. Of course you need to choose products which are incredibly valuable, otherwise customers wouldn’t keep up their memberships. See also lifetime commission affiliate products.

Make Money On Autopilot – Marketing

To sell anything online you need marketing. Without a constant stream of leads and customers, you won’t make any sales at all. There’s several ways to market affiliate products online and you can choose between building an email list, using organic marketing (e.g. blogging), paid marketing and other methods like social media marketing.

Marketing is the biggest stumbling block for affiliate marketers who are trying to make money on autopilot. With blogging, it can take months or even years to generate enough traffic to start making consistent leads and sales. With thousand of visitors every day to a website though, you can make income on complete autopilot. But getting those visitors and getting the right visitors is the hardest part of using a blogging strategy.

With paid marketing it can work much faster. Paid marketing is by far the fastest legit way to make money online. But there’s a problem with paid marketing. If you’re selling products which only pay you $40 per sale, you’ll need to spend less than this for each sale to make a profit.

Even with subscription products to offer, it can be difficult making back more than you spend. This is especially difficult as a beginner with no experience or knowledge. Some affiliate marketer have been known to spend tens of thousands of dollars on paid advertising, just while learning their particular strategy. But if you don’t have this money lying around to spend on advertising, what’s the answer?

Make Money On Autopilot – High Ticket Items

Spending vast amounts of money on advertising isn’t recommended if you only have some low value affiliate products to sell. With digital products which pay 40%-100% commissions you have more chance of turning a profit. Subscription products allow you to make a recurring income from your sales, which gives you a huge advantage.

High ticket affiliate products are your “ace” card because they give you the ability to earn large amounts from single sales. These kinds of products are often digital training and personal mentoring products. Although you can also find large value physical products which pay out larger commissions, too.

A high ticket funnel can pay out much more than most affiliate products ever will because they contain multiple earning strategies:

Subscription products
High ticket products
Multi-tier commissions
A built in sales team
A range of products and automated up-selling done for you.

See also the SFM Digital Business System for more on this.

Marketing Methods – Slow & Fast

There’s slow and fast marketing strategies you can use to make money on autopilot. To do this is no easy feat. Setting up your sales funnel can be pretty simple though and you can follow a step by step process to do so. Access the modules through this link.

With the kind of sales funnel pictured above, you can use paid marketing and build up your online business quite quickly. Some have been known to do this inside a year even, although that’s not typical.

Marketing strategies like blogging, and using organic strategies are cheaper but also much slower and less scalable. Although some have been known to create content which goes viral, and this can have a lasting impact on your business.

Summary

So, is it possible to make money on autopilot? Yes of course it is! However, don’t believe those courses which promise to let you do this through clicking a few buttons! It takes much longer and far more effort that most people are willing to put in. But if you’re serious about starting an online business which lets you work from anywhere and replace your existing income, this is possible. It’s something you’ll need to commit to for the long term however, in order to make it work!

Access a free video series here to learn more about the different online business models.