The best business ideas are automated business ideas. Automation is where things are heading. In 10 years time automation will have taken many more roles in society. Look at supermarkets, they already have replaced many till operators with automated checkout tills. Uber will be next with self drive cars which are already in the test phase. Where will this leave the average business? Unless there’s automation in place in your business will it still even exist in 10 years time?
Automated Business Ideas
So if you’re going to start a business wouldn’t it be a good idea to start one which can be automated? Automated business ideas such as online businesses offer flexibility of working hours, automation and scalability. How scalable is the average business? Most businesses are limited by a number of things: its scale, customer base and the size of the business premises are just three. A physcial business is expensive to start too. You need staff, equipment and a building before you even open for business.
How many people can a local business serve? It’s finite, unless there’s a global reach through the internet. With an online business you can serve a global audience. Product delivery can be automated with digital products being delivered over the internet or through a drop shipping or affiliate company. This makes an online business the perfect business for automation.
Automated Business Ideas – An Online Business
An online business can be started by anyone with little or no experience. Software and systems make an online business largely automated and imminently scalable. By selling digital products over the internet you can automate the sale and delivery of products globally. You can take payment over a secure online platform and have your products accessible immediately online. It’s the perfect automated business model. But how does it work?
Online Advertising
Starting with an online advert for your products or service, you can send people to a landing page which collects their email address. By offering some free information you give your subscribers something in return for their details. Online advertising is very sophisticated. You can target people by their search queiry, age, location, interests, and a number of other demographics. Once you find a strategy which works, simply increase your daily budget and scale up to reach more people. With the right products you can reach a global audience and scale up massively.
Creating an advert takes a few minutes and you can reach a global audience. Your advert can then run by itself for as long as you want. This is the magic of an online business.
Landing Page
A ‘landing page’ is specifically designed to capture the email address of a visitor. By offering something in return, your landing page visitor hands over their email address for some information which can help them. Once into your ‘sales funnel’ email marketing takes over. A landing page is simply a website page. The main difference is that there are less choices on a landing page: either sign up to the offer or leave the webpage.
Email Marketing
If you only use one of these automated business ideas, use email marketing. After your advertising has brought your targeted visitors to your landing page, you start collecting email addresses. From here email marketing takes over and you can offer a number of digital products to your subscribers while building trust and giving value. (more on products later). This can all be automed too and a number of pre-made emails can be sent out to your subscribers over a pre-determined time period after they sign up.
Email marketing is the ‘killer app’ of online marketing. It’s good because you can send a single email and sell thousands of products simultaneously. As your email list grows so does the number of sales you can potentially make with a single broadcast. All of this can be automated too.
Products and Services
So you can see that all these steps lead up to one thing: selling products. Without suitable products to sell to your email list, you’ll never make any money. So which products are the best and do you need to have your own? There’s thousands of products which you can sell on the internet.
Businesses like Amazon use affiliate marketers to sell their products and pay them a commission based on the sale. What’s great is that you don’t have to store any products, talk to customers or send anything out. All you need to do is join an affiliate program and promote your own affiliate link. Your link is tracked and when a sale is made you are credited with the sale. Automated business ideas don’t come any better than this! Simply promote your link online, the rest is done for you. See done for you internet business.
Different products reward you differently. For example many digital products pay 40% commissions. Physical products tend to pay less to affiliates because they cost more to send out, manufacture and store. Digital products pay more because there are very few costs involved. Digital products can be sent out over the internet (in the case of a document), or accessed through a secure website online. This makes digital products perfect for affiliates: they pay more, they can be sent/accessed instantly and you only need your affiliate link to promote them.
Which Products Should I Sell Online?
As I’ve mentioned, digital products are a good option to sell. However, it also depends on what kind of online business you want to build. If you have a passion and interest it’s worth using that to build an online business. Being passionate about something helps you stay motivated for the long run. It also means you can write and create some content online with a certain authority.
Membership Products
Saying that, membership products give your online business a much better chance at success than single items. Memberships or subscriptions can help bring stabilty to a new business through regular income. With single items you may only make one or two sales at first. This can make it more difficult to gain traction. With subscription sales you make regular income from each sale. Each subscription you sell builds an income, rather than only making you a single commission.
Up-Selling
Choose affiliate products which offer up-sales too. Up-selling is the process of selling more products to existing customers. If you’ve ever been to McDonald’s or Burger King you will have always been asked whether you want “fired with that?” or if you want to “supersize?”. That’s up-selling and it obviously works. Even when the customer only pays a few extra pence for something, over the whole chain of stores worldwide, Burger King and Mcdonald’s make a massively bigger profit, from this one concept. Choose products which pay for up-sells, especially if they do the up-selling!
High Ticket Products
By choosing high ticket products there are a number of benefits besides the obvious extra profit. High ticket products mean you earn more per sale. Instead of promoting a $100 product and making $40 (at a 40% commission), why not choose instead to sell $1000 products and make $400 per sale? High ticket products also make online advertisng much more viable. With lower valued products, online advertising can seem more tricky. You need to get your advertising costs way down in order to make it work. With high ticket items, paid advertising is much more doable. You still need to target the right audience and test and measure your advertising however, but it’s much more viable.
You can also scale a high ticket business much more easily into the higher earning brackets. Consider trying to earn $10,000 from a $100 sale making you $40. You would need to make 250 sales and that’s without factoring in your advertising costs. With a $1000 product (earning you $400 per sale) you would only need 25 sales.
Start Your Own Online Business From Scratch
An online business is one of the best automated business ideas available. It has built in flexibility and scalability. You can operate an online business from anywhere globally. All you need is an internet connection and a laptop. Access training, community and a simple business system which anyone can use to generate online sales which include:
- High ticket offers
- Subscription services
- Up-sells credited to your account
- Built in sales team
Access a free video series here (and free trial) to learn more and get started.