To autopilot affiliate marketing you first need to set up systems which sell affiliate products online. This blog, for example is such a system, but it’s not the only method of selling affiliate products. Affiliates use all kinds of methods and strategies to sell other people’s products online. Here’s just a few of them:
- Blogging – Writing web based content
- Video blogging – e.g. uploading videos to YouTube/TikTok for example.
- Social media methods – both paid and unpaid social media marketing can be used.
- PPC – pay per click advertising
- Email marketing – collecting emails from a website/landing page and sending automated messages.
- SEO – search engine optimisation – free traffic from the search engines
- Link building – building back links to websites is part of SEO and means to gain more direct traffic
To “autopilot” these methods takes some initial setup but once certain strategies are organised, they can be scaled up to a larger audience simply by turning up the marketing budget. These strategies are the best ones to use if you want an affiliate business to pay out quickly. If you don’t have the budget to run paid advertising campaigns, there’s other ways which are typically slower to gain traction with. Blogging is an example.
Autopilot Affiliate Marketing – Blogging
Blogging is a notoriously slow method of getting people to your website in order to sell affiliate products. There’s many strategies which bloggers can use to get the most out of their content. But they still will need to work hard at creating the content in the first place. Once they create content, they typically will promote it using various methods such as:
- Sharing to social media sites
- Link building
- SEO optimisation – this can be done with certain plugins.
- Promotion through email marketing
- Paid advertising can also be used to get more eyes on organic content
Over time as a blog gains traction, you should find more and more visitors finding your content. This will depend on many factors such as your blog topic, the relative competition and the promotion methods you use, to name only a few. Over time if your content gets indexed on Google (and other search engines) you should find that your traffic increases exponentially. This may take weeks, months or even years depending on how competitive your topic is. With over 600 million blogs on the internet (and climbing), you should expect competition in most fields, whatever your topic.
The downside of blogging is that it takes a long time to generate traction with it. The benefit is that you can ultimately earn a passive income from content you’ve created previously.
Autopilot Affiliate Marketing – Paid Marketing
Paid marketing on the other hand is much faster method of building a lucrative affiliate business. One of the main benefits of using paid marketing is that you can run an advert and almost immediately see whether it works. Whereas with content creation you can spend a lot of time and see nothing! Not only that but you can also very quickly scale up a campaign which is working if you’re using paid marketing methods.
The downside of paid marketing methods for affiliate marketing is obviously the cost. Paid marketing platforms can quickly take your money and give you nothing in return, except perhaps data! So you need to be careful because most of your advertising campaigns won’t work, at least not straight away. You’ll likely need to run several campaigns and test them out to see which performs the best. Only after a lot of research do many affiliates find a paid marketing strategy which is consistently profitable.
Because of this it’s also well worth using a high ticket affiliate program which pays recurring income. With such a program, your return on investment is going to be much higher than a standard affiliate program. Recurring income can benefit you a lot when it comes to using paid marketing so it’s worth at least promoting a recurring income affiliate program.
Autopilot Affiliate Marketing – Products & Strategies
Your choice of product is one of the most important decisions you can make as an affiliate marketer. With a good product, you can find it a much easier journey than if you choose to promote something which is harder to sell. Plus, the commissions you make from your product choice can vary wildly. Low value physical products may seem like a good bet, but they typically pay much less in commission than their digital counterparts.
Physical products pay from 1% to 20% commission but most of them pay around 5-10%. Digital products on the other hand pay much more. Typically they pay from 20-40% commission. By using high ticket affiliate marketing products and recurring income products you’ve giving yourself a much better chance at making it as an affiliate.
There’s many ways to promote affiliate products too and you need to choose a strategy which works well with you and your marketing budget. If you don’t have a marketing budget, expect it to take much longer to make earnings from an affiliate business. See also organic vs PPC marketing.
Summary
You can make an autopilot affiliate marketing business work if you put the effort in upfront. By choosing scalable methods this will happen much faster than if you choose organic methods which are not easily scalable.
Your product choice is important too. Ideally find products which are super valuable to their users. Subscription and high ticket products will pay out much larger commissions and therefore you need to sell less of them to be profitable.
Ultimately as an affiliate your job is to sell other people’s products and services online which can be done in many ways. If you don’t sell anything, you don’t earn anything and it can take a while of hard work to even generate your first sale online. If you’re ready to get started you can do that here.