If you’re wondering how to scale affiliate marketing you’re not alone. Many people get into affiliate marketing not to make just an extra income, but to build a massively successful and profitable business. It can be done with the right mindset, intention and support. You also need the right business model in order to build a scalable online business. See affiliate marketing business models.
Still, you do need to set the groundwork first, before you can scale up an online business. Unless you’re profitable, you could find yourself throwing money into a black hole! Paid marketing platforms will gladly take your money whether you’re profitable or not! So you also need to act with caution. For example if your business is giving you a return on investment (ROI) of just 5%, it might not be the right time to scale. But if your business is returning 50% (ROI), you’re in a much better position to scale up. A small variation in your ROI might mean you’re actually losing money if you’re only just profitable and you start to scale.
However, profit is what you really care about when it comes to scaling. A 5% ROI might only make you a small profit when using a tiny marketing budget, but if this profit relationship holds and you’re spending much more, you will keep earning 5% of your marketing budget – all things being equal.
The easiest way to scale an online business is through paid marketing. Simply increase your marketing budget on a campaign which is already profitable. You might lose some profit margin while doing this, so it’s important that your business is generating a regular and consistent profit before you do! You should also be generating enough consistent profit to be able to take up some slack in the system once you start scaling. Should your profit drop by 5-10% in the scaling process, how would it affect you?
How To Scale Affiliate Marketing – Do More
If you’re not yet profitable, you need to start by making more sales. If you’re a content marketer this can take some time. Scaling up your business through content generation is much more difficult than if you’re paying for advertising. Since creating content takes time, and no piece of content guarantees a massive upsurge in traffic, content marketing is a bad way to scale up a business. But if that’s your path, keep going and keep generating new content. Just expect it to take much longer than with paid marketing.
You can add some paid marketing to get more people to an existing blog. One way to do this is with Google Adwords. Use the dynamic feature which crawls your blog. You can then generate adverts based on your content and send specific web based searches to your appropriate content.
Another way to scale up if you’re a content marketer is to focus on increasing conversions. You can double your conversion rate without creating double the content simply by testing different opt in options (to your email list). Do a split test across many website visitors and see which opt in campaign works the best. A small difference can make dramatic changes if you already have traffic. See increase conversion rate on your ecommerce website.
A good book to read is Grant Cardone’s The 10X Rule which suggests multiplying your efforts by ten to achieve a greater level of success.
To make your online business more scalable though, you ultimately need to make it profitable first, and add the element of paid marketing, which you can turn up very easily.
How To Scale Affiliate Marketing – Slippage
Scaling your affiliate business involves taking a small campaign and increasing its volume, while maintaining its profitability. So if you’re not yet profitable, it definitely isn’t the right time to scale. Before scaling you should be seeing a consistent profit month after month. Make sure you maximise your ability to make the most from your campaign before scaling. This might involve collecting data and looking at your tracking to see if there’s any leakage of your business systems. Make sure everything is working really well in your advertising, email follow up and business systems.
You’ll want to be very sure your business works before increasing your budget. Otherwise a bad month can ruin your profits and when you’re spending much more in advertising budget, this can be fatal!
Example
Let’s say you’re earning 10% ROI and you spend $1000 a month. Your return is $1100 – so you’ve made $100! By increasing your budget to $10,000 a month, you would expect to make a ten fold increase, which is $1000! However, when you come to scale a campaign you’ll likely experience some slippage. This means your 10% ROI could fall to 5% or even less. However, in larger numbers you can see you can still be profitable.
Ideally you want your profit to be as high as possible to account for this slippage; which means you can lose some profit as you increase your marketing budget.
The larger your budget increases by, the greater you put yourself at risk. So it’s wise to gradually increase your marketing budget over time, checking to see if everything still works in your business.
How To Scale Affiliate Marketing – Raising Your Bids & Cross Testing
If you’re running a successful paid marketing campaign, one of the quickest ways to scale up is through raising your bids. So if you’re currently paying 50 cents per click, increase it by 10% and see what happens. This should increase the amount of traffic you’re buying. You can also raise your daily budget on a marketing campaign.
You should also be testing and measuring your landing pages and email follow up to get your numbers right. With a low opt in rate on a landing page, you’ll spend more per opt in. Getting these numbers down is a good place to start before scaling. This means cross testing different landing pages, audiences and email follow ups to find the lowest cost customers.
Knowing your numbers is the best thing you can do before scaling up your advertising campaign. When you understand how much your average cost per customer is, and know your average value of a customer, you’re in a much better position to start increasing budget, knowing how profitable you are and will be.
More Ads
Not all advertising campaigns will be profitable. So it’s important to run many until you find one which works for you and is profitable. Once you do, you can run many more like it and expand the geographical areas which you advertising. Expand to other countries which you’re not currently using, making sure language isn’t a barrier, of course. If your offer is available globally, take advantage of this by placing your advertising globally as well.
Retargeting
Retargeting is a great way to increase traffic to your business. With retargeting, you use a marketing platform to find customers who have already visited your website/YouTube channel. This is super targeted traffic because they’ve already found you online before, so this shows they have an interest in what you’re selling. It’s also super cheap to do retargeting too.
Retargeting can be done with banner ads or video. Test a retargeting campaign with a low budget first, before considering scaling. Make sure you are tracking all your sales too, so you know whether it’s profitable, before increasing the budget.
