Autopilot Clickbank Income Pt. 2: How To Get There

Posted by Brett on September 14, 2009

In the first section on Autopilot Clickbank Incomes, we laid out the metrics that many people use to calculate their Clickbank earnings, and how deceptive and false they can often be. While the first section was focused less on the practical side of Clickbank, and much more so on the theoretical side, this section is based around the practical systems and optimizations that any affiliate marketer can use to make sure that their Clickbank income stream becomes as optimized, and input-light as it possibly can. These tips won’t bring you to an autopilot income straight away, however they’re necessary steps for anyone looking to create one for the long term.

The 80/20 rule is fundamental to affiliate marketing optimization. When you’re creating an online business that scales to your lifestyle, you really need to make sure that your inputs aren’t always defining the output. The best way to make sure that your business is output-specific is by applying the 80/20 rule to how you spend your time. After determining what parts of your business offer the best hourly pay rate for you, it’s best to eliminate the 80% of activities that result in only 20% of your income, and focus your energy on the most important and optimized parts. From here, you can use several strategies.

Firstly, you can automate as much of your online work as possible. For affiliate marketers, the primary time-costs are in finding and investigating products to market, monitoring their marketing programs, and analyzing customer behavior on their websites. Thankfully, all three of these activities can be optimized and automated to a specific point.

For finding and investigating products, your best bet is to look for products that are popular, but not ultra-competitive. With the massive range of niche-finding software out there today, this step is about as simple as it can be. Simply invest in a program to take care of your niches for you, and cut those hours out of your timetable.

The second is slightly more difficult. Although computer programs can easily analyze click-through rates and bounce rates, checking out real time marketing performance is slightly more difficult. With numbers alone such false metrics, especially in a world as subjective and human as PR and marketing, you may need to invest some time yourself in seeing which of your marketing and advertising efforts work, and which don’t.

Finally, monitoring and analyzing customer behavior is something that every affiliate marketer will need to put some time into, at least in the initial stages of a campaign. Over time, customer behavior will lead to long term trends and behavioral patterns for your websites, which can make it significantly easier to optimize and automate this part of your work. Best suggestion: spend the first months of any campaign monitoring customer browsing habits and clicking behavior, and after it’s reached a steady point, leave it alone. Only investigate when things are falling, not when they’re simply moving as part of a larger trend.

To read part 1 of this article, check out the free Powercharging Your Clickbank Income report. Feel free to distribute this article in any form as long as you include this resource box.

Autopilot Clickbank Income Pt. 1: Is It A Possibility?

Posted by Brett on September 9, 2009

With such a massive amount of marketers and internet entrepreneurs looking to create an online business that scales around their lifestyle, it’s becoming fundamental for even the simplest business to be able to be outsourced, automated, or optimized to the point where it requires a tiny time upkeep. While this type of business leaves out many specific business models, primarily those based around a service business, it opens big doors in many others; primarily affiliate marketing, online PPC advertising, and automated online commission businesses. If you’re an affiliate marketer looking to create an online income that requires minimal upkeep, or even no upkeep at all, then you need to make sure that your business can truly survive without you.

There are hundreds of money-making products out there promising an online income with zero upkeep and input, all competing with each other. While many can definitely offer this possibility, it’s still easy for online entrepreneurs and marketers to fall for the same old traps. Whether you make your emails an absolute priority, or focus on metrics that aren’t fundamentally important to your income, it’s easy to fall back into the habit of creating work for works sake. This should be avoided for anyone looking to create an autopilot income, as the small tasks that suck time away are often the least important in the long run.

Do an 80/20 analysis on your businesses profit centers. These questions can help you cut the poorly performing parts of your business loose, and let you focus on the most important uber-profitable aspects:

- What are you selling most?
- Who are you selling to?
- How are you selling to them?

When you’ve identified what’s selling, it’s a lot easier to eliminate the things that aren’t selling. Identify the affiliate products that are responsible for 80% of your online income, and eliminate the others. When you free yourself from the work that the others produce, you can maximise the amount of time you spend on the more profitable ones.

Still worried about losing that extra revenue? Think about things this way: How many hours worth of work do the other products produce, and how much extra revenue do they bring in?

When you actually calculate the hourly value of each product, you can make more informed decisions on whether or not they’re worth keeping. For example, an affiliate product that requires only two hours of work per week and brings in $260 in commissions, is paying you a total of $130 per hour. In contrast, an affiliate product that brings in $440 per week, and requires around 20 hours of work per week, is only bringing you $22 per hour.

If the above example proves anything to you, it’s that revenue alone can be a distracting and false metric for measuring affiliate progress. When you measure by revenue alone, you lose a massive amount of potential analysis, and often fool yourself into thinking that you’re earning more than you really are.

To read part 2 of this article, check out the free Powercharging Your Clickbank Income report. Feel free to distribute this article in any form as long as you include this resource box.