When it comes to making money online many people want the same thing – to earn automatic income.
But many wonder if the dream of automatic income can come true for them.
After all, most of us have tried many things that did not work out as promised. Believe me, we have all been there!
Most people I speak with don’t mind working. On the contrary, most people I meet with are very hard working.
But they recognize that the Internet holds the promise of doing the work once and profiting many times and that is what they want!
To wake up to new order notices or, better yet, to go on vacation, forget about their online business and come back to more money in the bank than when we left. That is the promise of automatic income.
This IS possible for YOU!
I know because I’ve done it. And now I want to share a few principles of how it’s done so you can do it too.
There is no doubt that AUTOMATION is the name of the game online.
Burn that word into your memory. Automation.
Seek for it like you would seek for a lost friend. If you seek it, you will find it!
Yes, you CAN earn automatic income online!
The logic is simple …
If you can do a task ONCE and then have that task REPEAT automatically you are free to do other things.
This is how autoresponders work. You set up a series of messages once and then everyone who subscribes (no matter when they subscribe) gets that entire series of messages automatically.
In fact, learning to use an autoresponder well is a major step toward automatic income.
But what about other parts of your online business?
Can things like driving traffic or blogging be automated?
They can!
When it comes to automatic income, it’s all about strategy.
Here are my favorite automation strategies.
Automate Your Traffic
You can automate traffic coming to any site your promote, be that your site or an affiliate offer.
If you want automatic income, this is a vital step to both understand and act on.
PAY PER CLICK is a great automated way to drive traffic.
The key here is to create a winning campaign and let it run. That may sound silly. Why would you NOT let a winning campaign keep running, right?
It may surprise you, but I have spoken with hundreds of people who had a winning PPC campaign but decided to “try” something else and gave up on pay per click.
Some simply became bored. Others fell prey to the “grass is always greener” syndrome and went in search of bigger profits.
Please don’t make that mistake. If you spend $100 on pay per click and make $125 back, you have a winner and something that can be improved.
One big advantage of pay per click is that you set the limits on how many clicks you want, how much you spend, bid price per click and more.
You need to know that getting the campaign right takes a bit of trial and error. I’ve not seen anyone hit a home run on their first attempt. But you can learn this easily, and start with a small budget.
Spending $50 on doing some Pay Per Click may be the smartest money you could spend this week!
As with most things, getting started is the key.
If you are thinking that the days of Pay Per Click are over, think again. Facebook advertising IS pay per click and is one of the best methods out there.
ADVERTISING NETWORKS provide much the same benefit as PPC but your ads run on the websites you select.
This is a powerful and very automated way of marketing online.
Using Ad Networks is generally reserved for those with bigger budgets. But there are ways around this. Some sites, like BannerSnack, will place ads for you if you are a member of their site.
Another site to try is BuySellAds.
BuySellAds can place low-cost ads on blogs in your niche. Getting started with them is easy. This form of advertising is highly targeted and great for list building.
EZINE ADVERTISING can create automated traffic as well.
The key here is to place a standing order with publishers (or publishing companies) where you have achieved excellent results.
Publishers love this. Once it’s set up you will love it too.
Here’s how it works. You place an ad with a reputable publisher and test the results. Work with the publisher on ad copy, timing and more until you get it just right.
Then, once you have an ad that is working well, have the publisher run the same ad every week for a month.
If you are thinking this sounds expensive, don’t worry. The key to controlling expenses is the type of ad you use.
Rather than go for solo ads use something like a well-placed banner ad or sponsor ad. These work wonderfully well and are often overlooked by beginning advertisers.
If you want to know more about the types of ads available in ezines get access to my FREE Traffic and Conversions course. You can click here to get it in a new window.
WORKING WITH AFFILIATES is another way to drive traffic automatically.
If you have a product of your own, and you want automatic income, this one should be very high on your list of things to do.
Affiliates and joint venture partners will send you traffic on an ongoing basis without any effort on your part, based on you setting up the relationship once.
That’s the type of leverage you want.
With a strong affiliate program, everybody wins. The affiliate wins because he or she gets paid for promoting and doesn’t have to create products, host sites or do customer service.
You win because the affiliate sends you the traffic you need to succeed.
A true win-win situation!
Automate Your Sales Funnel
A “sales funnel” simply means the process a person goes through to buy a product.
This could be as complex as a squeeze page, 30 follow up email messages, webinars, free reports and more.
Or it can be as simple as a squeeze page going to a sales letter.
While architecting an entire sales funnel would take too long for this article, here is a basic outline.
- A squeeze page that offers a lead magnet.
- Follow up email messages that persuade the reader to take action.
- A low cost “tripwire” product so the barrier to entry is low.
- An upsell to your main or “core” product.
- An upsell to your premium product.
Not all of these steps are necessary. But by using them all you will be in the best position possible to make automatic income online.
No matter how your sales funnel works, the process can be automated.
Here are a few ideas about automating the parts of your sales funnel.
Your email follow-up can be automated by your autoresponder.
Affiliates will automate your traffic because they not only send you traffic but will many times create their own marketing (like reviews and special offers) that enhance your own sales process.
Joint venture partners might offer a bonus to your product that can only be received through them. This is a way to automate the sales process and actually close the sale or increase upsells.
As you grow larger you can have a telephone sales department with an 800 number with people who know how to close the sale answering the phone 24/7.
Bottom line – there are many ways to automate your sales process.
And it is well worth taking the time to do since standalone sales letters don’t convert well anymore.
Automate Your Content Marketing
Another great idea is to automate your content marketing.
What is content marketing? Simply the process of providing high-quality content for free in order to build goodwill. Once your readers are helped by your content, they will want to know more about you.
This increases the chances that they will buy from you, hence the marketing part of content marketing.
When it comes to content marketing and blogging, the #1 objection is “I don’t know how to write” or “I don’t have time to write” the content.
If that sounds like you, it’s time to learn about curation.
Curation is simply the process of gathering together the very best resources on a particular topic and then reporting on those topics with a little commentary.
It can be more involved than that, or less involved.
Matt Drudge does well by writing headlines and then pointing visitors to sites with full stories.
That is a form of curation.
Another way to automate your content is to work with contributors.
Here’s how that works.
You establish a blog about a particular topic. You then invite others who are authoritative in that field to contribute to your blog.
Why would they do that?
For the exposure. Even if your blog’s readership is tiny, the expert you ask will want to reach them.
Remember this: Experts ALWAYS want to get their name out there.
Of course, the bigger your audience the better.
And, in the beginning, you might need to pay a small fee to get a big name to post to your blog. But it will be more than worth it if the big name will promote your blog to his or her audience.
They win because their writing is seen on another site. You win because they give you the content for your blog.
Do this well enough and you never have to write a thing while you own a blog that is chock full of high-quality content and attracts real traffic.
You can also republish articles that other people have written if you do it with integrity. You want to keep the resource box intact and credit them for the article.
And ALWAYS ask for PERMISSION first.
Never, ever plagiarize. Never.
Grab articles that appeal to you. Put them on your website or blog and give the author credit for it. This can be a tremendous way to build content.
You can use great PL content. As long as the PLR content is changed significantly (some say 50%, others 30%) using high-quality PLR can be a huge time saver.
If you do these things, you will be well on your way to automatic income. But we are not done yet!
Automate Your Affiliate Program
The easiest way to automate your affiliate program by getting into the ClickBank marketplace.
Work with the people at ClickBank to help you rate highly in the ClickBank marketplace. I’ve done that before and it worked very well for me at the time.
Build a great affiliate tools page so that affiliates who find you through ClickBank have something to use while promoting your product.
Pay a better than average commission. And have a great product – one that affiliates will be proud to promote.
Clickbank will not only pay your affiliates for you but they will do all the tax reporting too.
If you do all these steps, you may well have both automatic income AND a booming business. But with a booming business comes one challenge … time to provide customer support.
Can that be automated too?
Automate Your Customer Support
You can automate your support to a large degree.
If you provide customer support it is vital that you can be reached personally. Email is good enough in the beginning but will soon become overwhelming.
That is when you need a good support desk.
A support “desk” is simply a piece of software that allows customers to contact you via a support “ticket” and by which you can reply. It’s like an email thread but more organized.
A support desk is a good idea once you grow a bit.
Here are three good options for support desks.
- Zendesk. We used them for years and they are very good.
- HelpScout. We moved to this about a year ago and prefer it, especially on mobile devices.
- Intercom. A newcomer but a solid choice and very personalized.
Whether or not you own your own product, there will be questions about the products you promote and sell.
The way you automate this is to hire a virtual assistant who loves to do customer support.
You might not love doing customer support but there are people out there who do love it.
Hire them and you both win!
Here are some places to go to find virtual assistants:
- VA Classroom An excellent website run by industry professionals.
- Team Double Click. I have had several people work with me from TDC. They do an outstanding job.
- UpWork is another, although it’s not my first choice for virtual assistants.
- TaskRabbit is an excellent site for researchers, errand runners and more.
Conclusion
It is really never too soon to think about automating your business and creating automatic income. The key is balance and priorities.
When it comes to priorities, starting with your email marketing is the key. That step simply must be automated before you even consider automating anything else. So start there.
If you are thinking about automation and take the time necessary to set up the right systems, you can automate 90% or more of your business.
Start automating your business today and soon you will be able to look for those orders notices first thing in the morning. That’s called automatic income, and that is a beautiful thing indeed!
