Automated Business Models

I love posts like this, particularly your last line - Many people don't seem to realise that when you ask for something, it doesn't mean you want to be dissuaded or are unaware of the negatives associated.

I think the truly automated path at the moment has a lot to deal with outsourcing, absolutely everything about a business. A couple of close friends of mine run a very large (am not going to post without their permission) Offline marketing firm where everything, including finding prospective clients, processing payments, accounts, doing the SEO work, it's ALL automated.

And I do mean set and forget - the only time they have ever had to do anything with the site was when people stopped doing their job or the site needed an upgrade. Otherwise they just wait for their accounts to grow fat (and boy do they).

Bane

I am going to say Lee Mcintyre for this.

He talks about building membership websites. I don't know if that is the kind of thing you are looking for as it is not strictly "set-and-forget" in the way you defined, but he does talk about how to run that business model completely hands-off (yes outsourcing, but he teaches it in a way I haven't seen many others do).

So in terms of an automated, passive business model, he gets my vote.

His site:
Get More Momentum

Hope that is useful/the kind of thing you are after.

Apart from what EndGame recommends, I also think membership sites come to mind. Jimmy D Brown has a program called membernaire (which I am studying now) and Russell Brunson has his own Micro Continuity Program.

Ryan Lee has a Continuity Summit recently in Oct, might want to see if that fits what you are looking for

Nothing is going to be truly automated to where you can "set it and forget it" and it will go on forever without being tweaked.

I assume you're looking for automation in regards to software that creates sites/pages/blogs with complete with content and automated backlinking in order to game the SERPs.

If that's the case, then the best software is custom software that you won't find on the market (no matter what sales letters will tell you) and even then, strategies will have to be tweaked as time goes on to ensure that footprints aren't left, that loopholes aren't discovered by the SE's, etc.

A good start in searching around to see what is possible is to check out Eli's blog at BlueHatSeo.com.

CDarklock,

Sent you a PM.

creating websites that promote a type of affiliate product with certain keywords for Adsense probably comes the closest to this, anything else I don't think would be truely set and forget.

I'd be interested in seeing what you come up with when you're done though.

I'm thinking the only way a membership site could be set it and forget would be if it were fixed term. And even then you would probably need to outsource some level of customer support. Since customer support is going to be an issue for just about anything, even if it's just a hiccup in product fulfillment, I would thing that having one trusted VA to manage customer support for everything you do would be an important aspect of the set it and forget it model.

John

I automate almost everything in my marketing business. Here are some things I do automate, dont automate, and want to automate. Hope this helps a little.

Some of the things that I DO automate or outsource

1. Link building
2. Website building
3. content writing
4. market research

Some of the things I DON'T automate or outsource

1. e-mailing my list/writing copy for them
2. support
3. creating banners, or graphics
4. Website design
5. Social media marketing
6. Planning SEO campaigns

Here are a few things I WOULD LIKE TO automate or outsource

1. customer support
2. creating banners or graphics (for affiliate programs or display ads)
3. seo campaign development
4. Product launch and JV management

I would like set and forget business models like the following

1. Send an e-mail, have a complete website built and promoted, monetized with my links after indexing and initial promotion.
2. Put together a killer product, send a couple emails, and have a big product launch project done for me including sales funnel development, jv management, product delivery and customer support.

Caliban,

I've mentioned what you've asked in my report as well. However, I would like to drop a quick note in here.

I think most of them don't like to be called "guru", listed their name below.

That's what I saw - they have a sustainable business because of the way they set up their online business model, pay most attention to their affiliate recruiting part or their marketing strategy part of their business:

1) Ryan Deiss - Low To High Ticket Products
2) Lee McIntyre - Low To High Ticket Products
3) SMS/Oz in WF - Low To Moderate Ticket Products
4) Our Tough guy Dennis (the other forum which you and I are in)
5) Bob Serling - High Ticket Products - Pay attention to his marketing strategies
6) Brendon Burchard - High Ticket Products - Pay attention to his marketing strategies and branding strategies

Solely based on my personal opinion.

Aiden Chong

I would like to start by saying that I certianly don't want this to become a debate of any kind so please don't take what I am about to say in that manner. I also dont want to disrespect the OP and "hijack" his thread in any way, I simply want to state my opinion and some of my personal experieinces to support it. I am not trying to sway anyones views or start some kind of heated "back and forth".



You had me with most everything you wrote until this last part (quoted above). I would like to say that autoblogging can be done the "right" way which is not "stealing". I realize you said "most" which I am glad you did because there is certainly a distinct difference.

Unfortunatly SOME autobloggers have taken to this approach which in my opinion has given the approach a bad name. There are several of us who simply don't operate that way.

It is just like anyother IM method out there (in as far as) that it has those who follow the "rules" and those that dont.

I have had more than one author contact me and thank me for sending him visitors to his site via the links I leave in the articles I publish on my sites. Along with this, I have also had several site visitors thank me for pulling related content together for them in one convienent location.

If it's done "right", autoblogging can and does offer good value to both the end user (the consumer) and the original content creator (author).

Thanks...wish you all good luck with your IM!
Robert

I would study the clickbank marketplace and reverse engineer the popular products. Once you have a good product with low refund rates, and a decent gravity, it seems to be truly set-and-forget, with affiliates promoting it.

When I first read your post, I thought of big guys like Frank Kern, and a few others. I really don't follow too many gurus though, so I don't know many others.

If I were starting again, I would probably look for terms like "email marketing".

I'd be interested in seeing the entire system explained in understandable terms. I might buy a product that would explain the details for setting it up (not now though because I know how to do it).

Something like:
1. find your market
2. setup your site
3. setup your autoresponder with a backend sales process
4. drive opt-ins to your list - i.e. give something away
5. optimize the process and get more opt-ins

I don't think you necessarily need to seek out experts to become a guru in set and forget systems.

Granted the best I've known myself are Lee McIntyre (membership site), stevenR's stealth auto blogging system and a lot of you have fast forgotten google sniping by George Brown which was essentially picking very low competition keywords that took no effort to rank and move on to the next site.

I don't think you can instantly automate everything unless you find a firm or IM professional with a team able to do it with your preferred business model right off the bat. But if they could do that, why would they offer the services to do it for you if they could do it themselves.

In which case, your always going to have to put in some initial labour in order to get to the stage of set and forget.

I think the one with the least effort needed is stevens auto blogging system, or the creation of a product whos marketing aim is to become viral enough to attract tons of affiliates. Which results in affiliates recruiting more affiliates and making sales for you.

I could go into the flaws these could have in the future but I am sure you are aware of them.

Now if I didn't want to seek out help, but still very much wanted to become an expert, I'd either look at my current business models (if I already have some) or look at the many different business models and think of ways to automate each single task.

Take for example Adsense sites.

First you need a niche, and you also need keywords for that niche!

I've often seen programs offered by people who have so many projects on going that they instead make a product out of niches they are yet to touch (which they have listed and researched), which means, you pay a monthly fee for your membership, and they provide you with a niche, good keywords and some marketing materials such as articles.

That is the first process of my Adsense business model automated.

This next part could either be done first or second, either way it doesn't matter. If you truly want to set and forget, your not going to want to waste time with CTR and statistics, which means you then look for a proven template that works for adsense.

I personally liked josh spauldings idea on 7 dollar adsense sites. He gives a discounted link in his guide to some proven CTR adsense sites.

next I put up the articles on queue to be posted days apart (the template is based on wordpress, there is also a static html version).

Next bit now depends on how automated you want your business to be. You either have a product created for you that does every single task known to Internet Marketing and employ others to use it, or you purchase several products that each do different tasks and employ others to market with those products for you.

ie article marketing and so forth.

Now if you truly want to be completely hands off, you also employ a cheap analyst to keep track of all your websites statistics. This would only be when you have a considerable amount of sites. That way when statistics are given to you in paper, you only focus on the ones that don't make money, if they can't be improved, you drop them and continue the circle.

phew, done .

Here are some of the things that come to mind, CDarklock . . .

* buying domains and using 301 redirect with your affiliate link, the customer who visits your domain is simply taken to the real website of which you are an affiliate, no interaction with landing pages or anything, set it and forget it

* focus on affiliate programs that are subscription-based and will generate revenue for you each month instead of one time only, if you figure out a lead program that works to create new customers then you have created a long-term income stream, this could be considered set it and forget it

* rely on advertising income from ad networks, placement on your portfolio of websites or other electronic communications like newsletters, mostly set it and forget it because you are not selling ads and trying to collect payments for yourself

* take a look at dorkwebsites.com, it's been talked about before on WF, a lot of stuff is automated from new customer acquisition to self-service management of their account, related to MFA and buying traffic I think,

hxxp://www.warriorforum.com/website-design/144371-has-anyone-heard-dorkwebsites-com.html

hxxps://flippa.com/auctions/70867/Unique-niche-website-platform-25000-month

* another idea is to think about everything you would exclude from "set it and forget it" because you have to perform some type of action or analysis on a daily basis, in those cases consider outsourcing specific tasks, or hire a programmer to assist with automation

Probably lots more to talk about but I need to think about it. Let us know what your resource list starts to look like. Very interested. Thanks!

Usually four months, which is actually right around 100 days. You get your first payment at 0 days, the member is excited for 30 days and pays the second, less excited for the next 30 and pays the third, then settles into "I have to get my money's worth" mode up to the fourth payment around 90 days. Shortly thereafter, having lost interest and realised he doesn't really get anything out of it anymore, he cancels.

The problem at most membership sites is that they "settle in" and don't provide any excitement after that initial rush. You join a PLR site, and there are a thousand things to download. You download all the ones you want in the first month, and then in the second you realise that now you're only getting five or six things a month. That feels pretty pathetic compared to that first thousand, so in the third you try to justify that monthly expense, but in most cases... you can't. Not compared to that thousand downloads in month one.

Meanwhile, here's someone else with his new membership site for the same price, and he's got another thousand downloads over there.

A possible solution to this is staging your membership site as a series of consecutive fixed-term sites that last three months. As the third month starts, you begin promising to drop a big new exciting bunch of stuff on your members, so the excitement builds up again until you hit month 4 and there's another rush. If you keep doing this, with new drops on months 7 and 10 and 13 and so on and so forth, it might be possible to keep your members very happy indeed for a very long time.

Alternately, you could just do three-month fixed term memberships as entirely different products.

Yea Caliban,

Apart from all of the facts which you've just mentioned, I like the idea of what our "tough Dennis" is doing. After a few months, there will be a "veteran" section that would be unlocked, and only those who had been in the community for over four months, can participate in that particular section.

That's a great idea!

How about another 4 months later, to get in to another secret invisible "pro" or "expert" section?

Just an idea...

Aiden

Great to hear these small little gems from seniors like you. Caliban.

Thanks for the heads up!

I'm glad that Rachel joined the "hideout" as well.

Thanks for starting up this thread. Learned a few stuff right in here...

Aiden

CQDarklock, are you looking more towards researching membership sites or did the conversation just sort of end up that way?

For me, the Benwell brothers (Matt and Rob) immediately come to mind, simply because they have been so prolific in pushing out products over the years that have heavily promoted the 'automated' angle. Whether these products are good or not are immaterial, and I simply offer them as additional case studies for you to add to your resource list.

Paul

We may need to talk more indepth sometime...

Did you get a chance to check out the videos? Would be interested in hearing your thoughts and impressions.

As long as you have affiliates promoting your products, I think that's about as close as set and forget as it comes.

I'd be looking at the guys who build their sites around user generated content.

I don't know where to find them but I am talking about sites such as Hubpages, Squidoo, eHow, Ezine Articles etc. I tried to find some people who have been there, done that a while ago but had no such luck.

Forums are another obvious one.

The startup work for these business models would be pretty high but there are big rewards in the end.

Hello there

I'd thought perhaps a product like Massive Passive Profit from Bill McRea could help build an automated business with regular income? I don't know if that would be the answer, but something along the lines of automation of blog creation with automated blog content taken from freemium source as taught by Oz/SMS Warrior.

Would that be the answer in the long run? I meant long run as in next 5-7 years.

Best

Speaking of automated models, I have been doing a little research on what Dennis Becker is doing with his paid IM membership forum/site (e1kad), and he seems to have built up a large group of loyal members who are perfectly content paying $39.95 per month to access the content and forum on his site.

I think the huge number of downloads available there, coupled with the community aspect of the forum that he manages, is a key factor in keeping members satisfied enough to continue with their membership for a pretty long time.

My point of view is you can make something like that, HOWEVER, you will probably need to employ people to achieve that. It will still require some monitoring though, but that's not that bad

The only truly set and forget incomes streams that I have are from websites (monetized with adsense or affiliate products) where I have done the appropriate SEO to get them a decent amount of traffic that keeps coming year after year.

Some of them have been earning for 5 years now with little to no maintenance - maybe 2 or 3 hours a YEAR. (contrary to popular belief you do not need to keep adding new content to a site to maintain rankings - at least not if you pick the right niches).

So, I would say the "go to" person for that would be Terry Kyle. Why? Because he knows SEO.

I don't actually know of anyone who teaches a whole method on it, but if you cobble together the pieces of keyword research and SEO then you have the method.

Of course, not all sites will maintain their rank. Some seem to fall off so it's not fool proof but if you have enough of them then you will be all set.

Having your own product or membership site IMHO will never be set and forget because you will always have customer support issues as well as having to keep the product "fresh" (especially if it is in the MMO niche).

Yeah, sure you can outsource, but then you have to keep an eye on the workers.

Lee

Look up Ben Roy's niche website products. He has a cool Ubot app that can install a niche wordpress site including all the settings and posting the content in an SEO-friendly way.

Great stuff and I've bought like 3 or 4 things from him.

Also, set up some Rapid Action Profits or Payspree sites and get some Web 2.0 action to recruit affiliates...might not be as automated as you want but I figured I'd share it anyway.

Good luck buddy!

Cheers,

Brad

CDarklock - when you say truly automated set and forget do you mean no human interaction (even via outsourcing) at all? If you are talking about a fully automated "system" that runs itself and makes meaningful amounts of money, I think you'll be hard pressed to find anything. You can't really generate meaningful revenues without providing value, and at least as far as I can tell, no FULLY automated computer system or web app can provide enough real value to generate meaningful revenues.

I think a site based around user-generated content, with employees or outsourced workers managing it, is probably the way to go.

Another option is simply any type of content-based site that generates primarily ad revenue, where you pay other people to generate all the content.

That's pretty much as "set and forget" as it gets if you're talking about something that will provide actual value to users and generate meaningful revenues...

Setting up e-courses via autoresponders, and setting up an affiliate program to drive traffic to it is pretty much automated, and you build a mailing list at the same time. Study Jimmy D. Brown for this, he's a master at it.

My 2 Cents.

The perfect process. Its about defining tasks, creating workflows and hiring Virtual Assistants

Get The Perfect Process

I heard about the negative press on Massive Passive Profits. I guess it isn't that great. But the point I'm trying to make, is the ability to automate blog creation quickly and automate the content on each blog so it can earn passive income from Amazon, ClickBank and AdSense.

If there are some services out there that solves my problem, I would be happy to check out. As I said, i am looking for something long term.

Long term for me means 5-7 years. I might not be doing internet marketing after that.

Best

Answer to your question is a tough one. This is due to the fact that their has been a higher influx of scam based "automated business model" launches throughout the year & they were all bogus products.
I know the product names but not the product owners.

My analysis shows the following:

1. Multiple product launches consisted of the following types of products that showcased "automated business models"
1. Automated Traffic via Submitters
2. Automated Traffic via Facebook
3. Automated Income via Auto-blogging
4. Automated Traffic via spinners

They ALL had the same sales type format which was as follows:

Headline
Video | Checkout Button
copy content
Step 1 | Step 2 | Step 3 (step 1-3 image)
What the product is "NOT" statement
300 copies only, crossed out with 23 left image
Guarantee Statement
2nd order button

Other issues involving these "styled" launches
1. The product owners are not who they say they are
2. Some product owners have teamed up with one another (simply bought various domain names, and launched each others product literally on a schedule that was either bi-weekly or monthly -- Check JV-Notify & you will see)
3. They have non-existed upsell offers - meaning that the upsell was not complete or simply not there
4. NONE of them had any true means of customer support.

You will be able to easily find all of these launches easily by looking at their main sales page & when you see that same ugly design of:

Video | Checkout Box PLUS the "step 1, step 2, step 3" image, you will know exactly what I'm talking about.


What names come to mind? Who are the gurus? Who are the experts? Who are the up-and-comers? Which products spring into your mind when you think of this sort of business model? If you wanted to become an expert in this subject, where would you go?

Sent you a PM.

No beating around the bush here.

I think Adam Short does a good job in showing people how to get websites ranked in the search engines, thereby creating a sort of "set and forget" business model. Niche Profit Classroom I think his course is called.

Caliban,

I've been meaning to to try to get back in touch with you since we missed catching eachothers calls a few days back. I will try to catch you later today so we can talk about this and a few other things as well.

Robert

What's your current thinking now CDarkLock?

Have you any revelations so far?

Best
Tessa