What’s the Secret to Affiliate Success?…Part II
December 8th, 2007 by 
Amit
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:
- Find a good niche, you’ll know it’s a good niche when you start making consistent profits!
- 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.
- 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!
affiliate strategies american express dog training pet training ppc affiliate marketing scaling
Posted in PPC Marketing, Super Affiliate Mindset, affiliate marketing | 
Hey Amit, thanks for taking the time to write this up, excellent guide.
There it is in a nutshell. One of your best posts ever! It’s all about the scale baby.
Find your technique, scale it, replicate it. Yup… it’s really as simple as that. If you find success in one sector, move on to the one next door and find all the juicy profits in there as well. I’ve increased my business 400% in the last 2 years following this strategy, and I can confirm it most definately works. As soon as you find a way to make $10 a day, you can create any income stream you want.
It’s just a question of hard work for a while to get there (but so, so, worth it)
I agree its easy to scale AM without the bottlenecks like the other business, but the big problem is PPC based AM’s defensibility!…You may go from 30k/day profits to $30/day pretty quickly with no control.
I would say keep AM as your cashcow and use the cash to build defensible online business (with a potential for a 10x future sale)
I agree with BigCheck though. Sudden changes like the notorious Google Slap can drastically kill one’s income, which is why it’s good not to put one’s all eggs in one basket.
Hi BigCheck,
That’s a good point! However, a lot of that depends on the market and the strategy you use for ppc affiliate marketing. There’s ways of doing this business that are much more stable than others.
OK, where do I start with your program - I’m sold.
Great info, Amit.
Thanks.
Amit:
You’re amitlicious for sharing this info. I have a question and could use your help. I’m running a $100 profit campaign through YSM and bidding on 30K longtail keywords. Out of all those keywords only 1-2 is generating about 5-10 a day, but a competitor is bidding up on that keyword and i’m losing profit.
What should I do? I haven’t started google yet because i’m just header redirecting my page.
Wow AmitRawks.
You’re bidding on 30k longtail keyword and only 1-2 is generating 5-10 a day?
If the rest are giving u zero traffic in a month i suggest you delete it.
As for the 1- 2 keyword are you putting them in a seperate adgroup?
so you will have 2 adgroup with 2 keywords on each. Now you can write an ad that are laser focused for that keyword.
Let your competitor be no.1 and you below him because you’re ROI focused NOT position focused.
>> market and the strategy you use for ppc affiliate marketing
Everybody wants to think their strategy may survive any future google slap. But remember google will do anything (without alienating the searcher) to increase their eCPM/query…So rich content sites may work now in adwords but not necessarily always. Anyway as i said there is nothing wrong in scaling up when things work, infact i would suggest to be as agressive as possible!.
I think it’s easy if you can afford to “waste” $5,000 dollars on a learning experience in the beginning (assuming that most newbies lose money when they first start) - but what if you can’t afford to waste even $3,000 dollars a day on AM? is there hope for you yet?
You guys must have pretty high incomes if you can afford to spend $3,000 a day on AM. I’d like a post that tells me how to start on a very low budget.
If you are spending 2-3K to generate 5K in sales, how much is your commission on that 5K in sales?
You are right. Internet Marketing is also comprised of different styles of Marketing. The challenge for new Internet marketers is that it’s all theoretical until they make their first dollar.
You mention in this post the American express gold card is the best option for use with high end campaigns. Most likely since the spending cap is relative to your purchasing habits and history.
I have also read that Starwood card if very good as well. Collecting points to use for travel and hotel. Can anyone shed some light on the American express card for affiliates? pros and cons