Since the early 2000’s I became determined to learn how to create an autopilot money making system. I was inspired after buying an eBook which taught me how to make money from eBay. But it was the eBook itself which sparked a lightbulb moment which has continued to inspire me to this day. After purchasing the book I realised the simplicity of selling a downloadable digital product which could be sold online without dealing with any customers or even posting anything physically.

After writing a couple of my own eBooks and trying to sell them from a website, I realised I was out of my depth! So after purchasing a few online courses which taught me basic marketing techniques, I found another business model known as affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing is a referral based business model in which you refer customers to other people’s products. The referrals can be made in any way, but mostly they are done online through automated marketing strategies: blogging, list building, advertising and using various digital marketing strategies.

A sale is made through a unique tracking link which is tracked back to the affiliate who made the referral. So when a sale is made, the person who referred the sale gets credit for it and they receive a commission. The product owner is responsible for dealing with customers and delivering the product. So it’s a system which can be used to generate an income on complete autopilot.

As an affiliate marketer, you get paid for referring customers to products and services online. If you can learn the tools of this trade you can make multiple sales completely on autopilot using tools and software which can run themselves. As I learned later on in my affiliate journey, you can also promote products which carry recurring commissions. These are products such as memberships and software products which carry ongoing fees. If you refer a product which someone uses in an online business, you can earn commissions on an ongoing basis, potentially for years, or at least for the lifetime of the customer.

One of the main tools of affiliate marketers is an email autoresponder. With an autoresponder you can collect email addresses from a website and deliver an automated sequence of emails to your subscribers. As your list grows you can make a number of sales through using affiliate links in your email messages.

An email list is important for affiliate marketers because it means they can keep and grow a number of subscribers who they can promote affiliate products to. Top earning affiliates grow their email list into the tens and hundreds of thousands of subscribers. A single email, to such an audience can result in a number of sales, and it can all be automated too!

The “sales funnel” is an important aspect of an autopilot money making system. The sales funnel starts with an advertising platform driving website visitors to a landing page where they enter their email. At this point they enter the sales funnel and start receiving email messages.

The affiliate who owns the list will send out messages (on autopilot) helping subscribers with a certain topic. So if someone signed up for golf tips, for example, the messages would be able golfing. Instructional videos can help with learning correct technique for example. In addition to providing value in emails, the affiliate will also promote affiliate products to their list.

The first product in the sales funnel is an “entry level” type of product which is priced at an affordable level. Many subscribers won’t purchase the product, but some will. Once someone purchases a product from the sales funnel, they automatically get offered another product which is of a higher value.

As the customer moves through the sales funnel process, and purchases something, they continue to be offered higher valued products which offer greater value. Using a sales a funnel which offers multiple products is one of the best ways to build an autopilot money making system which is profitable.

Many affiliate marketers make the mistake of choosing low value physical products which don’t earn very much when they make a sale. I made this mistake too when I started learning. Through using higher valued products, you can earn a whole lot more for the same amount of effort. Subscription products and high ticket products are the best kind to use for more profit.

Using a sales funnel like this has another benefit too. With low value products it’s much more difficult to run paid marketing campaigns and come out with a profit. But with high ticket and recurring income products it’s much more attainable. If you’re using low value products you will need to use cheaper marketing strategies such as blogging. It can take a huge amount of time and effort to gain traction when using cheaper marketing strategies like this. With paid advertising you can run an advertising campaign and see results almost immediately.

The other benefit of using a paid marketing campaign for an online business is that is’s scalable. With organic strategies you can spend months building content and hoping that it eventually gains some traction and you start making sales. With paid marketing it’s immediate. You see straight away whether it’s working or not. Once you have created a profitable campaign, you can scale it up by simply increasing your marketing budget. This isn’t so easy with content marketing (e.g. blogging).

The best autopilot money making system I’ve found is the affiliate marketing business model. There are thousands of products online you can promote as an affiliate marketer. By choosing high ticket and subscription products to sell and using a product range rather than a single product, you can gain more traction more quickly through using paid marketing strategies.

There are other ways of course to build an income online with the affiliate marketing model. Blogging, video blogging and through using social media marketing are three other strategies you can use to sell affiliate products online. But whatever strategy you use it’s well worth getting an autoresponder and building an email list. It’s definitely one of the things which has helped me the most with building an online business.