How to Budget to Start Affiliate Marketing
One of the biggest questions people have when it comes to making money online is “how should I start?”. The reality is there are thousands of ways to make money on the internet.
However, I would heavily advise borrowing a lot of money to start your business. In this post, I am going to talk about how to start a business with no money in internet marketing and scale it to 7 figures.
Living like a broke college student
If you are looking to start a business from scratch, the main thing you want to focus on is keeping your personal expenses as low as possible. This is step one for giving yourself a shot to succeed.
I know there are many expenses you can’t live without but try as hard as you can to minimize them. This will free up a little capital for you to get started.
Typically I would recommend saving up around $5-$10k to start a business as a minimum. Do whatever it takes to get this amount. This is how much Peter and I started with at first.
Find a mentor
One of the first things Peter and I did once we had a business idea, was to seek out a mentor who could lead us on the right path. We pooled our money and paid him $3,000 for training on how to run search engine ads to affiliate offers.
Within a few months and a few more thousand dollars of testing budget, we were able to create a profitable campaign on search.
A good mentor doesn’t have to be someone you meet in person either. One of the best mentors we had early on was through a digital course that we purchased. We never met him in person but he started us on the right track.
We have also had incredible in-person mentors.
I know it sounds like too much, dishing out thousands of dollars to pay for a mentor, but in reality, one good mentor can save you HUNDREDS of thousands of dollars of trial and error in this industry.
I don’t recommend that anyone get into the internet marketing industry without first investing in either a digital course or a mentor.
Don’t hire domestic
One of the biggest mistakes you can make when you are just getting started is overpaying for work that you outsource. In the very early days, peter and I hired a virtual assistant from Bangladesh for a very small hourly rate compared to what you would pay in the US.
This ended up being one of the best hires we’ve ever made. He did TONS of work for us that helped us scale in the early days.
He even put in 8 hours of work on his wedding day.
It’s not easy to find a loyal VA that does everything perfectly. I would recommend using www.upwork.com to seek out international talent.
A good VA can help with anything in your business from replying to comments on your Facebook ads to replying to emails from your leads, and more.
Scale on credit cards
Once you find a campaign that is profitable it is a great idea to scale on credit cards. When Peter and I finally landed on a profitable ad campaign back in the day, we had basically spent all our money on testing and coaching.
So we got as many credit cards under our names and business as we could and began maxing them out. We were able to ask for credit limits very frequently because we paid them off so fast and also racked up lots of cashback rewards.
You should ONLY do this if you are profitable.
Don’t rack up debt on a credit card testing different stuff. That’s a very bad idea.
Keep your business lean
Lastly, the most important thing you can do is keep your business expenses as “lean” as possible. Buy a tool that you haven’t used in months that bills $99/mo? Cancel it. You can always get it again.
You want to minimize expenses as much as possible.
Don’t go for that office space downtown that you think you need to grow. You don’t need it yet.
Racking up too many expenses in your business will kill it fast as soon as you hit a speed bump. Keep things as simple as you possibly can until you absolutely need to pay for them to grow.
The worst mistake you can make in the first year of your business is making a salary based hire. This will bleed you dry if anything happens.
Let me know in the comments if these tips were helpful
Tyler