Is Automatic Income a Reality or a Pipe Dream?

Louis Allport here, and let’s talk through a couple of ways that autopilot income is possible online...

I know, I know... it's a subject that is often talked about. It's also the subject of an extensive interview I recently carried out with a very successful online marketer (available to free members of this site).

Unless you want to be entirely detached from your business (which I wouldn’t recommend) it’s not entirely possible for income to be achieved on autopilot. The only way you can really detach yourself is for you to become more of a business owner and to employ someone who looks after the running of your business.

The real definition: Here is what Internet marketers often mean by "autopilot income". It's money that keeps coming in without a huge amount of effort. This IS possible but it can take time to get there since there can be a lot of set-up work. Websites don't just build themselves!

And even when you are able to pretty much let your websites run themselves, it is suggested that you still check on things -- if not daily then at least a couple of times a week. Or at least have regular meetings with the person who is running your business (if you've decided to take more of an ownership, rather than management role).

Bad things happen to good websites: Sometimes websites do go offline; sometimes links stop working; sometimes there could be an issue with your web host; whatever. So if you (or your business/website manager) don’t keep an eye on your sites at all, you could be in for a nasty surprise when you look to see how much money you've earned.

The product to sell: One possible option you could choose to take when looking to generate automatic income is to create "how-to" educational products; for example: eBooks or training videos.

These products can be physical products, either CDs or DVDs, or they can be in a purely digital format, such as downloadable eBooks, audio files, or videos.

If you're looking for mostly hands-off income, the digital product route is recommended over the physical product route, as there are far less things that could go wrong. The downside is you get higher refunds (because there's no proof of delivery) and your customers will be less attached to your product and therefore less likely to bring you repeat business (because people naturally value something physical above something intangible like an eBook).

Generating traffic: If you are interested in creating as much auto-pilot income as possible, it's important that you set up an affiliate program through which others can promote your product.

If all goes well then your products and affiliate program should gain traction. In theory, what this means is that once you have a quality product and a sales page which demonstrates an ability to convert visitors into customers then the income should start flowing in as you increase the traffic to the sales page.

It is also suggested that on your sales page you try and integrate an opt-in box (perhaps using a floating pop-up), so you can follow up on visitors. Why? Of course not every visitor to your site will become a customer. As a very broad rule of thumb no more than 1% to 2% of visitors will ever buy anything from your site. This is especially true with information product offers, since it's not something tangible like an iPod. So an opt-in box gives you the opportunity to turn a casual visitor into a repeat visitor, and then into a customer by sending them back to your offer multiple times.

Sending a repeat message: Why not send out a seven-part training course, for example, that is related to your product offer? You can send out a new email every three days using an autoresponder service such as Aweber. Of course, each email you send out links back to your site.

The effect of this approach will mean that, overall, when you look at your stats you are going to have a higher visitor-to-sales conversion rate than if you didn’t choose to have an opt-in box on your website and hadn't followed up with them by auto-responder.

If you do use an autoresponder email sequence, it is suggested you make the information in it very valuable, or maybe link each email back to a page on your website containing valuable information. In addition, you need to find other ways to keep sending the visitor back to your product offer again and again and again. You can do this by including promotional links at the top and bottom of your articles, and maybe in a PS at the bottom of every email you send out, for example.

Maybe after ten emails, if they haven’t bought, send out affiliate promotions to your list, to continue maximizing the inherent value of your list. You can even do this by auto-responder, for example:

Once you have an offer that converts then you need to set up an affiliate program either using software like Post Affiliate Pro, a service like AffiliateTracking.com, or a payment processor with built in affiliate tracking like ClickBank.com. Or, just search Google for "Affiliate Software" to find a multitude of options.

Affiliates through ClickBank: ClickBank takes product payments for you, tracks traffic that your affiliates send, and even pays your affiliates. It makes your life a lot easier if the running of your affiliate program can be outsourced in this way.

Here's a ClickBank example: Let’s say you are paying 60% commission on your eBook product sold through ClickBank. As a rough guide, ClickBank generally takes 7.5% per transaction as their fee. If all your sales are coming through affiliates via the ClickBank system you are therefore making 32.5% profit per sale (what's left over after 60% commission and the ClickBank fee).

(Please note: These numbers aren't entirely accurate as things are a little more complicated than that with ClickBank, but this gives you a broad idea of how it works.)

Now, ClickBank has a huge affiliate base (over 100,000) but it's important to ask yourself: How or why would they know about your product and therefore want to promote it?

So, it's important to consider either advertising on ClickBank itself to get affiliates, or else you could have an "Affiliates: Sign Up Here" link at the bottom of your webpage and hope that some people:

Affiliates through your customer base: Another way to get affiliates is by trying to get as many customers as possible to sign up to promote your offer by having a prominent affiliate sign up link in your product download or members area.

Generally you will find a very small percentage of affiliates send any traffic at all. And only a small percentage of those make any decent quantity of sales. So out of approximately a thousand affiliates maybe 50 actually send you any sales and maybe only 10 send you any decent quantity of sales.

This is why it is very important to remember: the bigger your affiliate base the more sales you are going to make. So your priority becomes to grow your affiliate base as fast as you can.

You can also promote your products directly yourself, of course. I know this means it is not really autopilot income. But once proven marketing systems are in place it does become somewhat more automatic.