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Stop Focusing on ROI and Concentrate on VOLUME (25)

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This post was inspired about an affiliate who complained about a 30% ROI. Just as a note with FlipSite Media I shoot for 20% ROI and will often ramp things up to be at that level even if I have a 100% ROI campaign.

Note I calculate ROI by if you spend $1 and make $1 in rev as 0 ROI and if you spend $1 and make $2 thats 100% ROI

Let me explain, which would you rather have.

CAMPAIGN A:
$200 spend @ 150% ROI

OR

CAMPAIGN B:
$1,000 spend @ 30% ROI

If you do the math you'll see that both options put the same amount of money back in your pocket $300 bucks, not too shabby, but here are the reasons why you would rather be running $1,000 campaign that most n00bs DON'T think about.

1. With volume = leverage With leverage comes higher payouts. So now that I'm pushing more volume I may get a 20% increase in my CPA which will have a much greater impact on bottom line when you have volume of leads. If you're doing 100 leads than even a dollar bump is an extra $100 in your pocket, instantly.

2. Bully Other Affiliates If you're doing volume you're able to play chicken with other affiliates and push any encroaching asshats out of your placements, keywords, urls, etc. Sometimes you find a campaign you try the same thing and it bombs, we'll thats the reason it bombed that affiliate is willing to take almost to a loss just to keep you out!

3. Credit Card Points I've literrally traveled the world on points earned on my credit card. When I run a $5k test and break even, I don't even care because I just earned me a free flight to ASE, or a new coffee maker. Speaking of points, more importantly you're building credit either personal or for your business, and no matter what anyone sais, your credit is a vital asset when its time to grow.

4. Better More Reliable Data Half of this forum is about testing this, AB that, headlines, design blah blah blah... well guess what if you're not pushing volume none of that shit matters. Your data is not reliable because its not statistically significant. Once you start doing volume ANY change you can see the impact in a day, and you know 95% the result of that change without having to question was it time of day or other nonsense. One campaign I'm running I've literally caught changes by the advertiser 3 times and was FIRST to report that CRs are dropping, and every time I was correct that something changed on their end, and got my loss credited.

5. Special Treatment This comes both from the affiliate and ad network sides. People like people who make them money. So if you're operating at higher levels you will soon reap the benefits including insider knowledge, heads up about upcoming changes, private offers, etc

So next time you bitch about 20% to 30% ROI think about it, can you scale at that level, if the answer is YES stop bitching and do it.

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LOL @ a new coffee maker...

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Volume FTW, great post Mr. TAR, again.

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You always make the best posts when I complain to you.....I should do that more often....

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Im going to add more to this, plus play devil's advocate to get people thinking about the flip side as well.

NOTE: I agree with everything said, I just want to add a flip side to it to inspire thought:

Actually, I would want BOTH. However, that is my mindset. I'll take both as thats $600 in my pocket and not just $300. . If I could not do both, I see advantages to both, however the volume advantages far out number the higher ROI one.

As someone that has ran HUGE numbers before, I found myself strapped to my desktop, laptop, blackberry, and even carrying a netbook to Fancy restaurants just to make sure my campaigns were up, hosting was up, LP was doing fine, etc. I have a special place for those campaigns where my ROI is 300% but the traffic is low just because of the stress. With that said though, nothing beats those campaigns where your doing 1000's of leads a day and getting all the perks you mention.

Also, with volume, you can add on a 2nd offer or an upsell or collect an email or do a backend sale and go from 500 leads orginally on your acai, to 500 leads on your acai with 300 leads to your colon offer and also 480 emails collected you can sell to them later on and JV with a partner to collect another 100 leads for a different product. You just went from 500 leads to 900 leads, almost doubling your payday. Having volume to do this ( even though you dont need volume to upsell and cross sell ) can mean the difference in doing $500k a year to almost doing 1MM. This is where scaling pays off.


Yep, with what I said above with #1, if you got volume and got your paybump, you can now pay a little more per click ( or impression ) to push out others. If you also added in another offer, upsell, cross sell, email collection and have almost doubled your payday, well you can pretty much over pay on top of any competition and crush them even more.


Man, I can't tell you how many things I have gotten for free for my home on this above. When we purchased our home, I cashed my points in for gift cards at local stores and got top of the line, new washer and dryer.. a riding lawn mower, fat ass gas&char grill, all new landscaping, new carpet and kitchen mods, etc. I even used them to pay contractors who redid my deck and shit. Also, a lot of these cards can give you cash back. So if you follow along with the above and your outbidding your competitors by 1-2% AND you get the cash back ( typically 1-2% ), your now spending no more money and outbidding your competitors at the same time.


Ive never been lucky to point out a flaw with an advertiser and get credited back ( maybe im with wrong networks ), but I have always been able to complain and threaten to take my traffic away to get credits though.


This for sure happens. FOR SURE.

Anyone bitching about making money, needs to go bankrupt in this biz a few times and get the shit smacked out of them.

The only thing I can say differently is, sometimes piece of mind is worth a lot. Running a lot of volume also means a lot of problems can come up and if your on lower margin then that means you can get wiped out pretty quick financially ( for that day ) if a lot of traffic you are paying for suddenly stops converting. If I would have not been on top of my FB and PPV shit before when doing high volume, I could have easily lost $30-60k in just 1 day ( my campaign budget I had set )

I like both examples, but I really love knowing I have some campaigns that I spend $5-$10 a day on, require no after thought, and make me $200-$250 a day.

However, nothing beats some of those benefits you get from watching a couple thousand leads come thru everyday for months making you 7/8 figs a years and all the leverage/perks you get from it.

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In mother Russia, Money makes YOU.

Good post my communist friend.

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Some awesome points being brought up here.

I love high ROI as much as anybody else recently had a very high ROI dating camp making $XXX per day while spending very little and that was nice, but as usual the shit burned down very quickly. (they usually do for one reason or another)

If you really want to build a business, grow big, and take over the world expanding your volume horizons is just a part of that. I know when I was starting out I always just looked purely at my profits, but like most newbs I was thinking in terms of ROI because my spending capital was practically zilch.

When you focus on trying to make the FUCKING RIDICULOUS ROI's that affiliate marketers look at as common (100%+) you really shoot yourself in the foot. (Most businesses would kill for stable growth at 20-30%) Suddenly your looking for tiny little demographics or promoting offers in verticals that have no real scalability. Going niche and taking an angle isn't a bad thing but even that requires volume via lots and lots of campaigns all of which somebody needs to manage and optimize.

Attended the A4D meetup this year (fucking great) one speaker really caught my attention when he brought up the point of how campaigns with say .08-.15 CTR on facebook for example are going to last and be much more stable than say something getting .6%+

That's not to say shoot for low CTR, but the concept is the same when exchanging ROI for volume.

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on that note

best camp I ever had on FB was .16 ctr lasted for almost 5 weeks....1 ad....

don't get me wrong high ctr is great.....but I will take that stable stuff like that any day of the week....

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Thanks for your input guys.

Of course there are down sides too to doing volume like stress, etc.

BUT the point of this was that too many affs are bitching about low ROI campaigns!!!!

Profit IS Profit

You'll never be up EVERY day, all that matter is are you up at the end of the week, month, year

There is no such thing as stable ESPECIALLY on the internet your business can get wiped out in an instant

Hit it and HIT IT HARD while you can everything will come to an end, so take risks when you find something and scale

What makes you money is not your skills but the people who help you get there so give thanks and pay it forward

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Some of my best campaigns on FB were literally .05 to .08 and lasted MONTHS at XXXX a day profit each ad. No joke

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Yep, too many affiliates dont grab it by the horns when they need to. I have been guilty of it too.

You have to make hay when the sun shines...

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my problem is getting that VOLUME... i keep on doing small campaigns, but a lot of them with like pop networks and in text serving ads... should do media buys since thats where its at huh

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Getting more volume in your argument about me "bitching" over 30% ROI is quite menial in nature. The fact is that I am used to getting closer to 100% ROI, and many of the methods being outlined on this forum are dated and don't produce anything greater results-wise than what I'm already doing. I guess I was just bitching about the methods being taught on this forum in hindsight, not at my own campaigns.. Perhaps you guys are marketing this forum more towards newer affiliates and those entering the game as opposed to seasoned marketers.

With that said you certainly bring up some valid points angry russian and most certainly eliquid is on point as usual... Building credit and bullying affiliates are great business tools and scaling is essential for any long term profitable strategy. My thinking is that I don't care about anything but positive ROI, I have had platform-a campaign's with 100k+ ad spend and 5-6% ROI and I'm certainly not complaining.

P.S. Thanks for the grade 2 ROI calculator. Next time try ROI = [(Payback - Investment)/Investment)]*100

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I was thinking this exact thing. Most businesses dream of 30%. Heck in mutual funds, you are happy when you are pulling 12-15%.

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hahah

Good post, and it's VERY true. The best point is when you run a campaign that has a lot of volume, it means it has even MORE scaling ability! Niches with a lot of volume though, usually have more competition (1 thing to keep in mind).

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@ Pacman thanks for the ROI calculations but like I said its how "I" calculate it because the nature of our business. Ad spend is not an "investment" per say so the whole thing is flawed. I just wanted to be clear how I calculate it because I heard people say 100% ROI but they were only breaking even.

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another great post by the very angry russian ! if you dont want a free coffee maker, then do what i do, get a amex plum card and get 1.5% cash back, shit depending on your ad spend you can make some good extra cash for misc bills or buy yourself some toys every month. points or cash back is def. a good perk in this game along with building your credit.

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http://www.mrgreen.am/affiliate-mark...month-so-what/

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@sntr

That blog post me and Green wrote still applies. Typically with higher volume you will have lower ROI but your overall take home will be higher. In some cases though its better to take a little less money home but enjoy the benefits we listed in this thread, especially if its a long term campaign.

Thanks for digging that up I always thought once I write something it gets read and forgot.

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Back then when I read your post at Mr Green's, when I was new to this business, I really liked the idea of making significant ROI on lower volume.. mainly b/c it was more secure. Also for noobs it's often a cashflow thing.

These days, when I have much more experience, when I finally have AMs that actually can help me and work with me on a campaign, and I know I can be transparent with them, I prefer to hit it hard, just like you said. But now, because I made some history with some of these people, I can be quite sure that I won't get charged back if things go all wrong, because they will stand after me.

It doesn't mean I don't run low volume/high ROI camps, because I run.. but those are just "background" camps.

I just thought I'll post a link to that post because it's also true, and because it also shows how some things change over time.

Anyways, it's always frustrating when someone is all wet because he makes 5000% ROI but at the end of the day he was talking about $10.. Just better say you have a camp that prints you $10 a day, than that you have a 5000% ROI. Mathematically it may mean the same, but in real life it just doesn't.

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That was me! =) glad it stuck with someone.

Something that is very important to this conversation that I have not seen brought up is payment terms. If you are on daily net 0 terms scaling huge at 25% ROI is a fine idea. If you are on a monthly net 15 schedule you've got some capital risk management to do at a 25% ROI and consider exactly how big of loan are you willing to extend the advertiser/network in terms of traffic/leads. Of course high volume helps in negotiating how fast you get paid.

The point is just looking at spend versus revenue is a limited view of the entire picture. How long it takes for that revenue to end up in your bank account is a very key factor and something many affiliates are not properly prepared to deal with as they scale and start going direct with advertisers on slower payment terms. If you want to negotiate the highest payouts direct on the best offers it's not a matter if you will ever get stiffed a payment it's WHEN.

This point is more important though for affiliates getting to the "next level" - if you are new I'm not trying to scare you. The reputable CPA networks here will all pay you and pay you quickly - they just take a cut for doing so. Just do not count on turning the cut into pure profit for yourself by cutting them out as you have to deal with the increased payment risk as well.

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Had the exact same situation but with volume i was able to get special payment terms which made my life easier. I can ask my network for all of my balance laterally ANYTIME !

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There are some really amazing posts from the STM "archives"

This post almost 2 years old, but it is just a relevant today (or even more so) as it was back then.

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^^ Yes there are! Volume will always be king.

You learn that once you make some money. The trend typically is work hard for high ROI campaigns, because you don't have the cash flow. As soon as you do, focus on volume and campaigns that have big reach.

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This!

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