Hello Everyone!
The idea of this post is to share some insights and experiences in my journey creating a Media Buying team. (Also for a request of @twinaxe ) To Know a little bit of how I started in the industry you can read my presentation here!
So, we all know that this industry can give us a great amount of money but we also know that if we stopped launching campaigns, testing new traffic sources, verticals… We are done. We can literally go from 5 figures to 0 in a couple of months.
The idea of creating a media buying team was "How can we still earn money if we stopped running campaigns?” (By the way, i haven't stopped yet, i love it Haha). If we could create a team we could have some “Passive income” and more ways to earn money. Also, if you are like me, you want to test everything out there but you realized that basically you can´t be running all the traffic sources successfully just by yourself, so the idea of the team was to win the ability to be present and launch in different traffic sources.
My Current team are: Media Buyers, Assistants, Account Manager, Designer, Web Programmer, Accountant- All of them are in house - and some freelancers when are needed
So, here are some experiences that i want to share
1. You need to write everything and create a process.
So, if you want a team, you need to teach them a lot of thing, you need to write down all of your knowledge. This could be a little bit difficult, because you know in your head how to spy, set up a campaign, launch it, optimize, scale, but writing all of that takes time.
We started to create a lot of internal documentation and write how we did everything. That helped us to review our process and also determine what kind of things could be done just by a freelancer and what things need to be done by our internal team.
2. Change your mentality of “Nobody can do this like me”
Ok, so maybe you had this thought once, but at the beginning i was like “I prefer to do this by myself, i am not confident if somebody else can do it like me''. I have learned that you don't need that somebody can do the job just like you do, you need them to do it at least 75% like you do it…What is the idea behind this? You can have more free time and spend it in the areas where you are more valuable. Also, sometimes you can have surprises and find that somebody can do it better than you!
When you change that mentality it's become easier to delegate tasks.
3. How to find media buyers?
I think this could be the most difficult task. So we decided to go the “hard way” but the result was a great one. So, we found people without experience, literally ZERO experience but they wanted to learn about affiliate marketing/Or any remote job. So, it is the hard way because you need to teach them everything. The best part? They are very LOYAL.
I think this is one of the main reasons why we don't work with a team, because we are afraid that somebody can steal our ideas/campaigns/methods. This is true, this could happen, but you need to take some risks. And doing it that way I have found that the people stay with you, they are grateful.
Over the years I had some media buyers that left, but almost all of them left because they were not making good numbers and decided to find a job in another industry. I just had one that left and he continues doing affiliate marketing, but I know he wasn't making enough money so he started a job in an agency.
That leads me to the next point
4. Create a great place to work
I think that the main reason why they don´t leave us is because we are trying to create a company where people love to work. We all worked remotely, but we try to be nice, give them incentives, create ideas with the team, projects, etc.
Also, I think they don´t leave because they see an infrastructure difficult to replicate to them
5. Cheap Workers
We are in LATAM, we speak spanish, so in USD we can find good people who don't need too much monthly to live well. So I think we have low fixed costs because of this. The media buyers earn by performance, the other part of the team we paid them a salary. In countries like Argentina or Venezuela, if you offer them a salary in USD, they will love it because of the inflation of those countries.
6. Discover, Learn it, Dominate it, Delegate it
I found that one of the best things that I can do is go and find how to work new traffic sources, learn from them, Launch campaigns, have profits, and create a team to operate that traffic source. This could take time, but I think it is worth it. After the team is operating like I want, I try to repeat the process.
This is it! Some experiences creating a team! Love to red your comments!
Solid information and very inspiring! Synergies can happen when you have a team instead of running solo. Thank you so much for sharing your expertise!
Amy