Everyone wants to be an “autopilot affiliate” marketer. The ability to have a business running completely by itself sounds pretty amazing. But how realistic is this? Can anyone accomplish it? What does it take to automate a complete business on the internet?
Autopilot Affiliate
What does it mean to be an autopilot affiliate? Affiliate marketers promote other people’s products over the internet and earn commissions based on the sales. The process, once set up, is completely hands off. So the ideal scenario is to have a business running on the internet, 24 hours a day on complete autopilot. Your content leads prospects through a sales funnel and offers them various products. As they purchase them from your automated email marketing campaign, they are taken further down the funnel.
From there they are offered up-sell products after their initial purchase. They can buy subscription items which give you a monthly income too. As your list of subscribers grows, so does your income. And all completely on autopilot. At least that’s the theory!
In practice, it’s of course much more difficult. There’s a lot to do even before you make a single sale. If you get it wrong, you could fail to get any traffic at all. Your products might be a bad match for your traffic. Your paid advertising campaign might fail to get anyone to subscribe.
But, if you manage to get the right products and set up a good sales funnel, your main job is to advertise your landing page. This is the main job of an affiliate marketer.
Autopilot Affiliate Marketing
Marketing, surprise surprise, is the main job of an affiliate ‘marketer‘. Affiliates promote other people’s products over the internet. Unless they get good at marketing, they won’t sell anything. But they also need a good product range and a good strategy and this comes down to how well they understand the different affiliate marketing models.
For example, digital products pay out more than physical products. Typically, digital products pay 40% of a products value to affiliates. Subscriptions are even better because they pay out again and again for each individual sale. You can build a business on the back of subscriptions.
You only need a few subscriptions to make a good monthly income from affiliate marketing. It’s a much better way to earn than by selling single products again and again. If you’re going to promote items online, it’s also a good idea to choose items which keep paying you. That’s working smarter, not just harder.
Then there’s high ticket items. High ticket items allow you to grow your online business much more quickly. You can use your income from high ticket sales to quickly scale an online business. As your income grows you can re-invest more back into making more sales.
Up-sells allow you to earn from customers you have referred previously to a product range. By choosing products with up-sells, you can earn substantially more than you would with a basic single product.
Multi-tier sales allow you to earn commissions from other people. Similar to multi-level marketing, multi-tier sales give you yet another income stream. Top “autopilot affiliates” use digital products, subscriptions, up-sells, high ticket and multi-tier sales in conjunction with one another. This generates multiple streams of income as their businesses grow.
Autopilot Affiliate Secrets
All of this starts with advertising though. Without advertsing, the affiliate won’t make any sales. Ideally you would be able to generate sales through free methods. You can too. The main problem though is it is much more difficult and time consuming to do so. With a business system which has all the above strategies in place, you are better off with paid advertising.
Content marketing is slow and time consuming. You can make affiliate sales through content marketing but it’s not as easy to scale as paid advertising. Scaling is the main focus of top affilaite marketers, so they tend to focus all of their activities on using paid advertising.
Paid advertising can be automated just like content is available online 24/7. Both methods allow affilaites to put their business on a “virtual” autopilot. Paid advertising offers a greater opportunity though, especially with a high ticket product range. As your business grows you can afford to put more money back into advertising. If you have learned how to double your expenditure when you’re promoting your products, you can then scale up very quickly and easily by increasing your budget.
Initially, affilaites start out paying out a few dollars each day to see if their marketing methods work. As they test and measure their advertising, they learn what works and what doesn’t. By cross testing their adverts with other similar adverts, they can create a ‘winning’ advert which pays out more in sales than it costs in fees. By continually driving this cost down with cross testing, this drives profits up. Once a good advert is working and making double your daily spend back in profit, you are in a place to increase your budget and scale up.
Affiliate Autopilot System
The main work of an affiliate marketer is the testing and ‘tweeking’ of their advertising campaigns. They might also create content, like this article. Once they have determined which adverts work well, they can scale up and increase profits with a single ‘tweek’ of their budget. This is the real secret of an autopilot affiliate system. See also autopilot money making system.
Once your daily budget produces doble your spend in profits, simply ‘turn up’ your daily spend and earn more profits. Top affiliates are known to spend thousands a day in advertising costs. However, they have built up gradually to this over time and know they will earn more back from their campaigns.
With a product range, their advertising campaigns can also bring in sales later on too from up-sells, high ticket products and multi-tier sales. By knowing the value of a customer and their return on investment over the long term, affiliate marketers can strategically plan their budget and future growth.