How We Scaled to Over $10,000 Daily Ad Spend Per Campaign
Tyler and I have been known to easily take an affiliate marketing campaign to over $10,000 a day of revenue, if it’s a good campaign. A lot of this boils down to your offer: if you are trying to run a poor offer, or you have some strict caps, or the quality has been kind of wishy-washy on the offer; then it could definitely be difficult to actually scale it to $10,000 a day.
We’re going to discuss some strategies and what to look for in your affiliate marketing campaigns, that can actually scale that high, and we’ll dive into a lot of training throughout this post.
Obviously, the strategies are going to be different depending on if you’re doing native ads or a different traffic source. All those traffic sources are good, Tyler and I just focus heavily on Facebook, and it has become one of our areas of expertise.
I will explain what to look for, and what to avoid, in your affiliate marketing offers when you’re trying to take this extreme approach – basically doing over $10,000 a day in revenue on the offer.
I want to make a pretty clear disclaimer: there are a lot of benefits to promoting lower volume things; if you’re spending $4,000/day on an offer that’s earning you $1,000/day of profit, there’s nothing wrong with that, those are great campaigns.
But the benefit of the campaigns that we can spend over $10,000/day on, is that if you’re operating at 30% profit margin and spending $10,000 a day, you’re going to earn $100,000/month of profits.
#1: You really have to be shooting for a minimum of 30% profit margin
Before attempting to scale much larger. You should be spending about $3,000 a day, on least at a 30% profit margin before taking the campaign over $10,000 a day.
The logic behind it is that if you’re struggling to get a really solid margin when you’re spending 2-3-4,000 dollars a day, how do you expect that margin to sustain itself when you take it even higher?
There’s a good possibility that you might lose some of your margin, you might start operating at about an 18-20% margin.
So you might make less of a profit margin, but just the sheer factor of doing the volume play is going to earn you more money. For instance, would you rather spend $4,000/day, earning $1,000/day with a 25% profit margin (which is fine); or earn more by spending $11,000/day at an 18% profit margin. Just due to the sheer volume play, you can start making over $2,000/day.
There’s a time and place for this volume play strategy, and the campaign has to really meet the criteria. You’re nuts to think that you can do this with every campaign or every affiliate marketing offer – a lot of things have to align to be able to do this.
You can have a lot of great campaigns that spend 2-3,000 dollars/day that get 20-40% profit margins, and those do add up, but a lot of Tyler’s and my income has come from monster affiliate marketing campaigns.
Every year we have at least a couple of monster campaigns that have done $700,000 of revenue in a month – we’ve earned a quarter million dollars in a month from some highly successful affiliate marketing campaigns.
Most of our income over the last 2-3 years has come from just a small handful of these large campaigns. We are continuously on the hunt for more of these, because they’ve become our bread and butter.
I’m going to share with you some of the insights I have gathered over the years regarding what to look for within the offer, what to look for when scaling, what to look for on Facebook, plus more affiliate marketing tips.
To summarize, the first thing to understand is that you must be shooting for a minimum profit margin of 30% when you’re spending about 2-3,000 dollars/day, and the logic behind that is that you need some wiggle room in case your margin drops down to 15-20%, or as low as 10%.
When jacking up your affiliate marketing spend really high, you’re going to need some kind of wiggle room to work with. So, a 30% minimum profit margin within the spending range of 2-3,000 dollars a day before you should consider the possibility of scaling any affiliate marketing campaign to over $10,000 a day.
#2: Have access to a lot of capital
There are a couple of ways to do that:
a) Credit cards. If your bank is restricting your credit limits, you can apply for credit cards from other providers. For example, my credit is pretty tapped out with Bank of America at the moment, but AmEx will be happy to give me a credit limit, or Discover.
I’m sure that I could raise my credit at Capital One. So, in my experience the credit has been dependent on the bank – when we’ve tapped out one bank for the time being, we’ll just work with other banks but sometimes, they will only provide so much credit.
Occasionally, I have gone a little deeper with the credit. So, instead of just asking for a credit card limit raise, sometimes, we’ve shown them our tax returns, pushing for higher raises.
We’ve been persistent to get higher credit limits.
When I started to use Capital One, my card had a $20,000 credit limit on it, and I just kept pushed them, I needed higher credit limit – because I wanted to spend more on my Facebook campaigns.
The Capital One system was mostly automated, they’re like, “well, just fill out our automated system online, and it will tell you if you can get a credit raise.” I did it, and it told me I couldn’t; and I did it again. I finally called them, I said, “Listen. I want to speak to your manager” – I was just talking to a rep on the phone – “I want to talk to your manager, because I’m running a business here, we spend millions a year right now on advertising; I’m spending over $300,000 a month on these ads with other credit cards and institutions, there’s no reason why my credit limit should be $20,000!”
And the guy, again, was like “just fill out the online application and see if you can get a credit raise,” and I said, “listen I’ve done that a bunch of times, can you please just transfer me to either your manager or someone directly in the credit card approval department?”
And the guy did, I got transferred to a lady that actually works in Capital One for the credit card approval department, and I just had a conversation with her, I said, “Listen, I know I’m new to Capital One & that I have this low credit limit, but I want to spend ~$5,000 a day on my Facebook advertising for my business, and that’s not going to really work if your credit card only has $20,000 of limit, because I’m just going to be tapped out in four days!”
The lady was able to work with me in a custom credit application, manually through the phone, and she was able to raise my credit limit right up to $95,000 on this Capital One card.
These are the type of things we’ve done in the business to be a little bit more persistent – think outside of the box!
b) Lines of credit are a little bit different than credit cards. They’re basically just access to cash, of course, you must pay fees and interest rates, but the interest rate hasn’t been astronomical – about 5% or 8% a year. If your affiliate marketing campaign is making a 20% per day of profit, it would serve you well to pay a 5% annual interest if the campaign can make 20% daily profit.
To scale this big, you have to be creative with your financing: so, have cash, have credit cards, lines of credit, perhaps loans from friends or family.
Disclaimer: I’m not telling you to do any of this stuff, I’m just sharing what we’ve done in our experience. But having a lot of capital is important to be able to do this.
You want to get your networks to pay you as fast as possible. For example, if you’re scaling that large, you should ask your networks to pay you weekly as a minimum. But, honestly, we’ve started to ask our networks to start paying us twice a week if we’re scaling this hard.
A lot of networks are floating you money regardless with weekly pays, and often, they’re just floating you the money before they’ve collected it from the advertiser. So, asking the networks to start paying you twice a week at this type of volume is not that much more risk for them, because they’re usually floating the money to you on weekly pay.
#3: Ask Facebook to raise the daily spending limit
Facebook accounts right now are limited to $5,000 a day of spend.
If you want to spend $10,000 a day, that won’t fly using a single Facebook account. So, we’ve contacted Facebook support over Live Chat, and we’ve gotten Facebook accounts approved to spend up to $10-20,000 in a day.
Take your existing Facebook accounts that are successful, submit a support ticket through Facebook Live Chat, and if it’s already spending $4,000+ a day, they will likely approve you for the next limit, which is around $10-15,000 a day of spend.
You can then take that account and campaign at the next level.
#4: Having uncapped offers
If you’re pushing some affiliate marketing offers that are known to have a cap of 50 leads a day, that’s not going to work with $10,000+ a day of scaling, depending on the payout – your offers have to be relatively uncapped.
#5: Avoid strict caps
If the network is like, “we don’t have much budget for this offer” or “your cap is small”, then forget scaling $10,000+ a day on that offer – just accept that it’s going to be a lower volume & higher margin campaign, look for other affiliate marketing campaigns that are going to do large figures for you.
If you can make money on lower volume campaigns, that’s fine, you never want to give up campaigns that work. Even if you have a handful of small campaigns, adding them up is really helpful for your income.
#6: Get a quality check on your offers before scaling
Before getting on an offer and scaling it to the moon, make sure you’re really hands-on with your network or advertiser. “Does my quality look pretty good? Would you guys be OK if I scale this to $12,000 a day?” – be transparent with them, so you don’t jack up the volume and potentially run into some issues, if, for some reason, the quality turns out to be bad.
Be hands-on and communicative about the quality checks as you scale, and ask the advertiser’s or network’s permission to scale to $10-15,000 a day, so you don’t just blow their offers out of the water.
You might not know if there’s is a soft cap behind the scenes that they didn’t inform you of.
#7: Avoid cash flow issues
If you’re using credit cards, make sure you start paying off those cards, preferably quicker than necessary to avoid the cards maxing out.
Part of avoiding potential cash flow issues is making sure that you have your hands on a lot of different diverse capital options (see point #2), like credit cards and lines of credits or cash.
Also, avoid bad advertisers or networks – any networks or advertisers that are notorious for not paying people or paying late. Just avoid them completely, don’t even work with those people, avoid any sketchy advertiser or network, so you have no risk of not getting paid.
If you’re going to start spending and scaling to over $10,000 a day, you have to be really confident that you’re going to get paid on time, or paid at all.
If the network has a bad reputation, I would avoid it completely, especially if you’re trying to scale to that extent.
I hope these tips helped!