Building a Strong Affiliate Media Buying Team

Written by Peter Day


Hey, it’s Peter day here with some Affiliate Media Buying training. This topic is on building a strong team (which will be needed) to grow larger.

A few months ago we started to create content aggressively, and I’m glad it has been so well-received. Follow us on our blog, our YouTube channel, and our Facebook group called Affiliates Ask Anything.

If you are an affiliate, make sure to join the group. You can ask questions, and somebody (whether it’s other members or us) is going to answer your questions.

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Affiliate Media Buying Team Building.

The topic of this article is about building an affiliate marketing team, which will be key to your business because you will realize that you can only do so much alone.

An average affiliate marketer without a team can usually only handle 3-5 different verticals or offers at the same time.

You might be capable of handling more if you are very disciplined. To grow beyond this, you really have two choices.

  1. Be more disciplined with your own time and time management.

    Do you want to do 10 campaigns at the same time? Be prepared to start early (5-6 am) and finish at night every day.

    What’s important to realize is that it’s not that hard to compete in the affiliate space because most affiliates don’t take on too many campaigns at once.

    Being more disciplined gives you an edge and the ability to stand out.

    Beware not to burn out, though if you work this hard.
    
  2. Choice 2 (the better choice) – Have an actual team to assist you and work hard too.

In our team, we are currently running 30+ completely different affiliate offers, and we keep growing, aiming to have up to 70+ offers in a year being tested.

(Hint: hence the importance of a team!) You would over-work, trying to do that much work yourself!

I will explain how to go from being a single affiliate to having a team and building a good team.

How do you structure the team?

How do you pay people?

Keep in mind, this is all valuable stuff that Tyler and I paid a lot of money to learn through conferences and trial and error.

Become successful individually first, when it comes to Affiliate Marketing Media Buying.

If you are trying to build a team prior to having gotten any meaningful success yourself, then building a team is premature.

This also applies even if you had success on and off. Don’t think that just by building a team you can scale and disregard the failed aspects you’ve had.

If you’re trying to build a team too early, it will be hard for your team to buy into your vision. Why would someone want to be your media buyer. This isn’t me criticizing you, but if someone earns $1,000 a month in affiliate marketing on average, and then they have lost money here and there, it may work for a single person, but it can’t be called a successful business (that a team can join).

How is one supposed to convince someone else to join their team?

I strongly recommend working solo until you earn at least $5,000 a month in profit individually before trying to enlist a team.

Now, even before reaching that threshold of building an affiliate media buying team, if you have some success and can’t (or shouldn’t) hire a full-time media buyer yet, but you could afford some part-time help, my advice is to hire virtual assistants first.

Upwork, in particular, is a really useful site to find freelancers in almost any field who will help you with your day-to-day tasks for your campaigns: making video ads, writing ad copy, copywriters, accounting people, etc.

It can be cheap and flexible: You can find on-demand help from someone.

Whenever you have anything to be done, whether it’s once a day or once a week, there is always talent ready to assist you. This is what you need. Flexible, part-time, remote, outsourced help.

The second phase of affiliate team building:

As important as it is to not jump the gun too quickly, it’s just as important to do it when the time actually comes.

Once you become successful and profitable enough, get your first dedicated team member as quickly as possible.

A virtual assistant that is talented might not be that loyal to you — you are one of many clients of theirs.

Let’s talk about the Ascension model. Once you reach a healthy $5,000-$10,000 a month profit, you can actually start a team.

You can keep your virtual assistants, but now is the time to also get a part-time media buyer as your first member of your affiliate media buying team.

They will run the ads for you that you can’t get to, and you can increase or double the amount of production.

At first, you won’t need a full-time media buyer just yet. But you want someone who will scale with you: someone who starts part-time, with the willingness of moving to full-time later.

The side effect of that is that, regardless of what the person says or promises, it’s not a guarantee, so try to gauge that out. Be transparent and real with them and emphasize your vision (e.g. that you want to grow this to over x thousand dollars a month of profit).

It would be a shame if you had a talented media buyer who ends up being unable to devote all of their time to your business down the line because they have another job.

Be honest, and ask them to be honest with you. If they are unlikely to ever go full-time with this, you are much better finding another talented candidate, unless you quickly need someone temporarily.

A story about getting our first media buyer

About 4 years ago, Tyler and I were running every single Facebook ad ourselves — a team of two.

At least we were outperforming many single media buyers. Then we got our first part-time media buyer randomly.

He reached out to us on Facebook as he wanted training. We told him that we were not doing training at the moment, but he can become our first media buyer and get a lot of training anyway.

Our intention was, obviously, to get our media buyers profitable, so it came with plenty of training.

This person joined our team, part-time first while having a main job elsewhere.

He started to be very successful, and we thought, “if only this guy could go full-time…”

So we asked this guy a serious question: “If we can guarantee that we would give you $4,000-$5,000 as base commission, would you be willing to quit your job ASAP and do this with us?”

Well, he was 100% on board. What was needed to get this person aboard is a guaranteed commission.

Once he was full-time, he had outstanding results — some months he earned $80,000 a month for our business.

Tyler and I were also running our Facebook campaigns in addition to that.

As mentioned before, we’re still running Facebook campaigns ourselves, that’s been bread and butter, but we have a team. At one point we actually had 15 media buyers, but we slimmed up since, as we had some lazy media buyers, and we kept only the most successful ones.

An affiliate media buying team has been really powerful, it enabled us to run 20-30 different Facebook campaigns at any given time.

Our long-term goal is to get media buyers on other verticals.

  1. Be aggressive about getting offers – If you only have 1-2 good offers, there’s not much your media buyer team can do with those.

    So start getting very aggressive in terms of getting a lot of good offers.

    It’s a simple equation: good offers = money, terrible offers = no money. It’s almost that simple. You could be the worst media buyer, but if you have 4-5 phenomenal offers, you might profit literally just because the offers are good.

    I’ve said it before: No amount of strategy and knowledge are more important than good offers themselves. They are the bread and butter of the entire situation.
    
  2. Go after quality offers – A mistake that Tyler and I made originally was that we thought growing was all about the number of offers.

    We thought, “if we have 100 offers, we’re going to make more money.” We quickly realized that it’s not about the number of offers, it’s about the number of good offers.

    Before that, at one point we brought on 30 offers, thinking that if we just tested them all, we would find a winner. 28 out of 30 of the offers failed and we lost so much money that we couldn’t recover from juts 2 good ones.

    And don’t forget that or you’re going to make the very same mistake we made unless you listen to real-world experience. It’s better to have only two good offers than 28 bad offers.

    Right now, as I said, we do have 20-30 offers at any given time, but the vast majority are really good offers. We select the good ones, and so should you. Quality over quantity. So think about that.

    Ask questions to your network like what are the conversion rates? What are the EPCs? How many people are succeeding in this type of thing? Do your due diligence. Prior to even testing the offers with your own money, make sure that at least some other people are succeeding on those offers.
    
  3. Apply to be our media buyer – We have no tolerance for people being lazy. But if you’re not, and you have experience in affiliate marketing (at least earned a couple of thousand dollars a month before), feel free to apply to be a part of the Day Brothers media buying team. There are two ways that you can apply.

Closing thoughts

In the meantime, stay tuned for more content. My next video will be about the top 3-4 verticals that like in terms of offers. Tyler will also put out some good content soon as well.

Watch this Affiliate Marketing Offers video here.

Subscribe to our YouTube channel Optimize to Convert and make sure you are on our email list: on our blog, optimizetoconvert.com, go to the “Free community” at the top. When you do that, you’ll be redirected to our Facebook group, double opt into that list.

And join us and ask any questions in our Affiliates Ask Anything Facebook group.

We look forward to putting out more content and helping you. Enjoy the content, and I hope the affiliate media buying tips helped a lot here.

Peter