What’s the Secret to Affiliate Success?…Part II

Okay, here’s Part II of the Secret to Affiliate Success Part I post I did.

This time I really want to talk more about scaling and WHY that’s a big secret to success in affiliate marketing. I already talked about HOW last time.

If you really think about it, building scale is an important part of any business. If you own one hot dog stand, you’re very limited in how much money you’ll make in one day, and on top of that it will consume all your time.

So how do you scale a hot dog stand?

You hire out someone to run your hot dog stand, heck, franchise it out, give then 90% of the profits and you take 10%. Now do this 100 times, and you’ll be making 10x more than you were with just one hot dog stand and have free up all of your time (except for possibly training new hot dog stand owners)!

Now you can imagine the enormous time and money it would take to sell a 100 hot dog stand franchises to people and get them up and running.

In most traditional businesses it’s REALLY hard to scale. Even in online businesses, outside of affiliate marketing, scaling can be a pain in the butt.

Think about it.

Even if you’re selling a software product online, how difficult would be to take your company from $1M/year to $10M/year? With 10 times the sales you’re going to need 10 times the customer support, ten times the server capacity, bigger office space, etc, etc, etc.

A lot of start ups go belly up because they face fast growth in the beginning and they can’t handle it, that is they can’t scale fast enough to handle the growth. Now that’s a scary thought!

So what makes affiliate marketing different?

If you take your affiliate business for $500/day in sales to $5,000/day in sales you don’t have to worry about : hiring more employees, getting more office space, or anything like that.

Now the only bottleneck you may face here is your credit card limit, if you want to make $5,000/day in sales you’re most likely going to have to spend $2,000-$3,000 A DAY on ppc to hit that. If you get an American Express Gold card and build up your history you’ll have nothing to worry about (BIG TIP).

The ability to easily and rapidly build scale is what makes affiliate marketing a really unique business model.

I mean, what other business can you go into and start making $10k/month profit in within 3-6 months?

Now, last time I talked about how you need to build a team and a system to do the work of building scale in your affiliate business. I realized I talked above most people’s heads, so let me give more practical advice that newbies and intermediate affiliates can start applying right away.

Lets say you have success with dog training, you understand what keywords convert, what copy works. You’ve setup a nice review site, where you review various dog training ebooks etc.

So how do you scale this?

Easy, promote other types of pet training ebooks using the same methodology you used for dog training. You can go into cat training, bird training, etc.

In different markets you need different strategies to be successful. You want to milk one market as much as you can before you go into another market, pet training is a perfect example.

So if you’re just starting out don’t get overwhelmed by Part I of my post, just do this:

1. Find a good niche, you’ll know it’s a good niche when you start making consistent profits!
2. Build on your success by split testing your landing page, split testing your Google ads, adding more keywords, and expanding your campaign onto other PPC search engines.
3. Now go into closely related niches (ie dog training, cat training, bird training) and use the same strategy you used in the original niche and duplicate your results.

It really is THAT simple!