Autopilot money making websites operate around the clock 24 hours a day 7 days a week. How do they make money? By selling other people’s products and services with a clever business model known as affiliate marketing. Affiliates link to products and services around the world. When they make a sale through one of their affiliate links, they earn a commission. All of this can happen completely hands free. Products are delivered by the manufacturer and the referrer (affiliate) gets paid for delivering customers.
In order to get visitors on a website though there’s a few things which affiliates do. You can’t just build a website and expect visitors for free. It doesn’t really happen like that. There’s over 600 million blogs on the internet and getting your website found is one of the biggest challenges for affiliate marketers.
Autopilot Money Making Websites – Traffic
Traffic is difficult to obtain which is perhaps one of the reasons why 95% of affiliate marketers quit. There’s two main ways to bring targeted visitors to a website. You can either pay for it using PPC (pay per click advertising) or get your traffic for free by creating content (like this article). See also PPC vs organic traffic.
To get a slice of organic traffic you need to create content. Once your content gets found on the SERPS (Search Engine Results Pages) you can start to see visitors coming to your website in growing numbers organically. See also how long does it take to make money blogging.
Paid traffic is faster and more scalable however, and many affiliates will use pay per click advertising. Of course in order to build your autopilot money making website using paid marketing, you need to pay less in advertising than you make in commission.
Autopilot Money Making Websites – Sales
Turning traffic into sales can be done through placing affiliate links on your website. When someone clicks on your link and subsequently makes a purchase, you earn a commission. You can place contextual links within your content, place banners or advertising and collect email addresses from your website. Email marketing is a large part of selling from a website and most affiliates will build an email list. See also email marketing for small business owners.
Why build an email list? Email lists are used for the building of a longer term relationship with potential customers. From a website, a visitor only sticks around for a short time; usually only a few minutes.
After that they are gone, potentially forever. By offering a value giveaway on a website you can collect email addresses and build a large list of subscribers. Automated messages can be delivered to your subscribers over months and even years.
From these messages you can build trust by delivering value. Online shoppers are much more likely to buy from someone they trust and most online purchases happen after several touch points between the customer and the marketer. (See also how many touch points before a sale).
Choosing A Product To Sell Online
There’s literally thousands of affiliate products you can choose from to monetise a website. Most people are familiar with Amazon which has it’s own affiliate program. Anyone can join Amazon’s affiliate program and start promoting their products from a website.
Your product choice will depend on a few things. How you get website traffic, your particular topic of interest and what you earn from your products all have a bearing. So if for example you’re creating an information website on the topic of fitness, you’ll want a fitness related product to sell in order to monetise it.
You can also monetise a website through using advertising too. Google’s Adsense program, for example, is a popular choice and you can place text advertising on your content. When someone clicks on your ads, you earn a small amount. See also Google Adsense vs affiliate marketing.
Turning Visitors Into Leads Into Sales
Traffic generation can be a major hurdle for affiliate marketers. So it can take some time learning strategies for getting people to your website. Once you start attracting traffic to your website your job isn’t over! You need to turn those visitors into leads and then turn your leads into affiliate sales. This can happen automatically once it’s all working, but first there’s some work to do!
Firstly look at your product and decide who you are wanting to attract. This means understanding your target market persona – the type of person who will buy from your website. If you’re a content creator (like me) you’re going to want to choose a topic you enjoy writing about. That way, it’s a whole lot easier to create content to bring in your target market. Or, you can use paid marketing if that’s not your bag! Send people directly to a landing page and start building your email list.
To build an email list you need something of value to offer your website visitors. On this website for example, you can access a free video series and learn more about this topic and building your own online business.
Email Marketing Is The “Key”
Email marketing is the key to selling from a website and although you can sell a product directly from your website, a list is much better. With an email list of subscribers you can collect tens and even hundreds of thousands of subscribers to sell affiliate products to. On a list, you have a greater opportunity to sell because you can interact with your subscribers over a much longer period of time than is possible on a website.
Anyone can build an email list from a website and sell affiliate products to their list. This is a skill well worth learning. Once you have learned how to do this and successfully sell an affiliate product once, you can rinse and repeat over and over and of course automate the process to boot!
Learn how to get started online with affiliate marketing here.
