When to Kill a Profitable Campaign
I like to call this starting with the end in mind. Good planning on the frontend should make sure you're…
Campaign A makes you $50/day. Campaign B makes you $10/day.
Which one should you work on?
Most people would say Campaign A.
There isn’t a correct answer.
What if Campaign A can be scaled to $100/day, but Campaign B can reach $1000/day?
Often we fail to compute one of the most important metrics of all:
The value of our time.
You only have 24 hours in a day.
A third of those are spent sleeping (and the rest are too often spent daydreaming).
If you are a one man team — like many affiliates — you need to pick the campaigns that have the biggest possible upside relative to your desired income.
It sounds so simple.
And yet you wouldn’t believe how many affiliates I see with big hopes and penny pinching campaigns.
On a typical day, how many hours do you spend ‘in the zone’ with your creative juices flowing? 2? 3?
Is it smart to waste those precious hours on a campaign that *even if it succeeds* will net you the same wage as a guy flipping burgers for The Man?
No offence, but I don’t think so.
There are exceptions.
If you can learn the craft whilst making a small profit, you are being paid for an extremely lucrative education.
That’s smart.
If you spend your time launching tiny campaigns on the assumption that lots of small wins will add up to one big success, you’ve got it tits up. The churn will beat you.
Get positioned where the economies of scale work in your favour.
Yes, even if it means giving up your profits.
It is much easier to hit success with one big campaign and dozens of losers. The alternative is lots of small winners that all need management to stay profitable.
Once you start managing small campaigns, its difficult to stop. You become emotionally invested in retaining small profits, putting out small fires rather than blazing a path to the bonanza.
On many occasions I have surveyed the carnage of my CPVLabs and made the tough decision to delete campaigns that were making me money.
Why?
Because time is money, and I was losing too much of it.
There’s a famous saying that goes:
“Take care of the pennies and the pounds will take care of themselves”
Bullshit.
Not in this industry.
If you start managing pennies, you can forget about the pounds.
They belong to somebody with bigger balls and a bigger wallet.
Hello,
I agree with everything on the article but I’m slightly confused so does that mean I should invest big money in a field i am passionate about then gain knowledge as I go or simply pick whats trending? I wouldn’t know where to start. I’m 22 and own 4 houses HOMs and SOHs so that’s rolling, occasionally stumbling but that’s part of the job. I can invest in other houses (not my passion) or venture into a world that excites me and can potentially give me a higher profit, the only issue is I haven’t a clue where to start. I don’t know anyone within the industry nor am I one of those gifted people that can read pages of tedious crap and retain it for life so it gets overwhelming trying to figure out what door my 6inch heel should go it. Any thoughts? I’d LOVE to invest in lots of peoples dreams and do something to help whist taking a honest cut but how can you know for sure it’s the right wrought. Truly enjoyed your articles and I never write to people asking for help so you must have caught my attention. Hopefully you don’t read this and think I’m slightly slow, I just don’t want to fuck up at the starting line, drag behind, embarrass myself and finish with nothing but a ‘don’t worry at least you tried’.
Kind Regards
Hannah Averley
UK
I like to call this starting with the end in mind. Good planning on the frontend should make sure you’re not working on limited potential campaigns. People often say well I spend 2x’s the CPA.
If I really believe in something we’ll spend 5k to 100’s of thousands in testing a campaign and/or building a product. But this is all about the long play. Remember the things others won’t do often will secure your place and remove a lot of the uncertainty that comes with following the latest trend.