If scaling your affiliate program and business feels like a constant grind—long nights, weekends, and a shoestring budget—you’re in the right place. In this episode, I’m sharing how I’ve done it and how I coach others to scale smart without breaking the bank. If you’re tired of working harder and harder for the same results and you’re ready to grow without losing your sanity (or your wallet), grab a notebook and listen in. This episode might just change everything!
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Previous Episodes of The Affiliate Guy
How to Expand Your Affiliate Army by Recruiting Non-Traditional Affiliates
2025 Affiliate Marketing Predictions
5 Affiliate Recruiting Mistakes That Are Costing You BIG Time
Behind-the-Scenes on Our Affiliate Promotion for Product Launch Formula
How to Promote Virtual Summits as an Affiliate (If You Aren’t a Speaker)
Scaling Your Affiliate Program and Your Business Without Spending a Fortune
So if you’re like one of my listeners, you’ve been trying to scale your side hustle business with affiliate marketing. Whatever. You get most of your work done during nights and weekends and you’re trying to scale your business, but you’re doing it on a limited budget. If you’re tired of spinning your wheels and spending more and more time to get the same results, this episode is for you. Let’s get started. So I got an awesome question from a podcast listener recently, a guy named Todd Rich. He is trying to scale his side hustle business. He’s trying to scale it using affiliate marketing. He gets most of his work done during nights and weekends.
Maybe that sounds familiar to you, Maybe that is you, right? But he’s starting to scale. He’s starting to scale a little bit. He’s starting to delegate more, but he wants to get his business going. He wants to scale more, but he’s struggling to balance this scaling versus delegating side of things. So I’m going to cut to Todd’s question so you can hear his question straight from him. If you want to submit a question, just go to asktheaffiliateguide.com and you can submit your question there. And then I might answer it here on the podcast. So here’s Todd’s question.
Hi, good afternoon, Matt. sI just listened to your podcast, how to succeed in business without sacrificing your family, health or life. I do find that my website, I have an affiliate site into a lot of my time for nights and weekends and I am looking to delegate more tasks. But I also do want to scale my site with more content. So the issue I’m having is wouldn’t delegating also go against scaling because I don’t have the money then to pay for more content because I’m paying more people to delegate. At this point, my site is making low four figures per month. Spend a lot of time on content and on tech stuff. And right now I’ve hired an SEO firm, a few writers, and a programmer.
I may want to also add a VA because I do spend a lot of time editing the articles I get. So yeah, I was kind of just wanting to get your thoughts on that. How do I delegate and also scale at the same time when I only have a limited budget? I don’t know the answer to that. So the only other thing I can think of is instead of getting more content to scale, I guess I could try promoting more of it or building my email list with like a lead magnet. But really, I think the more content me is, is what scaling is. All right, thanks so much.
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So this scaling versus delegating kind of conundrum, right? It’s like the chicken or the egg, right? He knows he’s wasting time on non essential tasks. Okay. He acknowledges that he there are some things in his business, we all do this. I still do this. Now there are things I do in my business where I look back and go, golly, that was worth what I spent two hours and made what, $4 doing that? You know, if you think about as an entrepreneur, it’s easy to do that.
If you work for somebody and they pay you say $25 an hour and you spend two hours a day doing $4 an hour work or $2 an hour work, you’re stealing from them, like just effectively. If they’re paying you $25 an hour, you should better darn well be spending doing $26 an hour work or you’re not going to last very long. But as entrepreneurs, it’s really easy to do that because what has to be done, somebody has to do these things, right? So it’s like I said, it’s this chicken or the egg situation. You don’t have enough time to scale, but you don’t have enough money to delegate more. So what should Todd do and what should you do in order to scale your business on a limited budget? Well, that’s the question I want to answer today.
I’m going to walk you through step by step how I did it and how I coach others to do it today. Like I said at the top of the show, if you’re in a situation where you’re just spinning your wheels, right, you’re spending more and more time to get the same results. Because here’s the weird thing about business, but I found this to be true with every business I’ve ever had. This is my fourth business. The time will expand and the revenue doesn’t necessarily. We go through these phases. So I found that we go through these phases where I’m like, wait a minute, I spent three hours more on average a week last month. Our revenue was the same.
What the heck was that? And you know, there are seasons to that. Of course, you know when. I’ll give you an example, when we about this time of year, in fact, I’ve got to get it to them like now our accountant asks for, we’re running some estimates to make sure that we haven’t underpaid or overpaid on taxes. Because we don’t want to. I’m not going to get into that, but we don’t want to overpay on taxes. I’m not one of those people who celebrates getting a tax refund. I think it’s just, I think it’s dumb. You really, if you study it, you just gave an interest free loan to the US Government for a year. I mean, like, congratulations, you got a tax refund. You could have just kept, you got a $5,000 tax refund.
That’s awesome. You could have kept $425 a month, every month and spent it better than the government did. But, you know, anyway, that’s not the point. But the point of that is when I do that tax estimate, I’m going to do that tax estimate sometime this week. I’m going to sit down with my wife Tara, who’s our cfo, and we’re going to sit down with him and we’re going to spend about two hours putting together that estimate. Technically, there’s no revenue that comes from that. Now if he looks at that and goes, yeah, we’re, you know, we’re $27,000 over on taxes, so we can basically not withhold anything for the next couple of months then. Yeah, we save some money in those two months.
That’s awesome. But we run those numbers and it’s like we have to do them and it doesn’t have a revenue event tied to it. So there are times like that. There are times where it’s like, man, I spent 20 hours to build that thing and didn’t see anything from it this month, but I’ll see it in June. I spent 4 hours ish on the phone last week with prospective affiliates for our launch. Not till February, February into March. I’m not going to see anything from that right now. So that’s normal.
That’s ebb and flow. Right. But we want to learn how to consistently not do that. And we want to scale unlimited budget. And so what I would tell Todd, Todd, this is for you. I told you I would record this episode is what I would do is I would hire a VA and you may already have a VA. So then what we’re going to do is we’re gonna, we’re gonna bump them up five hours a week. That’s your next step at, you know, $10 or less an hour.
If you hire someone from overseas, it’s gonna be $10 or less an hour. That frees you up to do work that pays you $20 an hour, not $100 an hour. You know, it’s not like that. We’re just freeing up five hours a week to do $20 an hour of work. So you do the math on that. That first week, you’ll probably just lose the 50 bucks. That’s how I look at it. The first week is all training. The second week, you’re gonna. You’re still gonna spend a little bit of time. You’re gonna spend two hours instead of five. Well, the cool thing is you spend those three doing $20 hour work. And you paid 50 bucks, so now you’ve paid 150 plus 50. You’re. You’ve made 60. You’re only $40 in the hole.
The next week you pay another 50. But you have the full five hours, effectively to make $20 an hour. You’re now at about break even. That’s the cool thing. And now going forward, you’re profitable. And so typically, I just say for the first month, you’re going to break even. When you do this may even be for the first two or three weeks, whatever. You may even go five weeks.
Just kind of depends. You’re going to be about break even, and then you hire someone for that $20 an hour work. And that could be the same VA and it just requires more training and more trust and a lot more handholding. Early on, we just did this with something on our team. There’s a particular. I’ll just say where it is. I’ve always enjoyed doing our social media posts. I love it. It’s actually fun for me creating the videos from these podcasts and turning it into social media content. It’s really easy for me to do. It only takes me maybe five minutes. Five minutes on the high end.
But I was like, you know, two episodes a week, five minutes, that’s 10 minutes a week. Is that the best use of my time? No, I can’t hire anybody full time for those 10 minutes a week. There’s really not a whole lot else in our company that I can add on to that that would fit a skill set that would allow me to be able to hire somebody for, say, two hours a week, you know, like a contractor. So I’m like, well, why don’t I just take my assistant, Kevin? I recorded a 45 minute video of me doing like six examples to walk him through everything. He then like asked for feedback on the first five and I gave him feedback and he asked for feedback on the next five and I gave him feedback and then on the next He’s good to go now. Total, I invested about 90 minutes, so about nine weeks worth of, of effort.
It’s nine weeks before I break even in terms of, you know, the financial investment. So infinitesimal. But nine weeks in terms of breaking even in terms of time. But. And I hope he’s with us for a long time and I think he will be. He’s been with us for at least. Gosh. How long has Kevin been with us? Three or four years now. Feels like, feels like he’s been with us for a long, long time. And Kevin, I know you listen, you’re amazing. You’re absolutely a rock star. Remind me how long you’ve been with this. I’m have to look it up. I don’t know. But I feel like you’ve been with us for like three or four years.
And the cool thing is he’s now taking over that task and what we did was we actually added more to it. So instead of just me spending 10 minutes a week and him saving me those 10 minutes, he’s now getting more done and actually doing more post. And so we’re getting more results, two to three times more results for none of my time. But even if I just look at it at the same results, after nine weeks I get to save the next 43, plus the next 52, plus the next 52 for the next 150 plus weeks.
I don’t have to do that. That’s a win. That’s a win right there. And then what we do is we find that next thing that’s worth this much money. So you go from $20 per hour and you go to, okay, now we hire somebody who’s doing the $30 an hour work and maybe I’m paying them instead of, you know, 10 bucks an hour to start the person to start off with, or seven bucks an hour, whatever it is, I’m going to pay the $30 stuff that I was doing worth $30 an hour. I’m going to pay somebody 20, you know, 15 or $20 an hour to do that. And you just keep scaling up what you’re paying to be able to scale up your revenue.
Now the cool thing is eventually you start hitting numbers where people are doing work that you’re paying 40 or $50 an hour for, but they’re making you 400 or $500 initially. You’re, you’re having them do the kind of the grunt work that actually, truth be told, might not even like they might be doing work that’s you pay 7,50 an hour for, and it’s only bringing in $5 an hour, but it frees you up to do $20 an hour work, especially when you have a limited time, as we all do.
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We all, you know, you go full time, you’re like, I have unlimited time now. No you don’t. You gotta sleep, you gotta eat, you gotta do some stuff. You gotta have some sort of a life outside of work. But even if you don’t, okay, you still only have 90 hours a week, 100 hours a week. Like that’s not unlimited. That’s still very finite. And so you keep hiring up and you just, you take that money and you reinvest so you can scale and delegate simultaneously. And so what we recommend, this is just kind of a basic formula, is when we think about this initially as we’re adding our first roughly halftime person. So if you have, if you start a VA at five hours a week until you get to the point where they’re about 20 hours per week, which could happen very fast. Typically we see that happen within two to four months of somebody starting to work with a virtual assistant. All the money goes to reinvesting into the business.
At that point, we’re not going to increase our profit really or increase our income. And what I mean by that is if you’re paying say 7:50 an hour, let’s go with 10 bucks. That’s easier for me to do math. You’re paying somebody 10 bucks an hour, five hours a week, that and you now free yourself up to do 20 an hour work and you’re making a hundred, you’re paying You take that 50 and immediately reinvest it into upping their hours. Immediately you turn that money around like it never even hits you. You just give it right back in to the assistant. And then we’re now we’re going to pay them 100 while we work on bringing in, you know, 2, 300, you take that money, reinvest it up.
Now once they’re at half, once you have one person at halftime, from that point until you have about two full time employees, we’re going to take about a quarter of that money and it’s going to be pure like income. You get to increase your income, you get to take Home more money. So let’s say you’re now netting $300 a week from that.
Great. You’re going to take home $75 more. That’s important for you psychologically. It’s important if you have a spouse for them to see some of that money because they see the money going back into the business and they’re like, yeah, but I, I didn’t get to go out for a nice dinner this week. We still struggling to pay the kids, you know, baseball. Like we couldn’t, we didn’t get to do what we know what’s going on here. So we want to see some of that, we want to take some of that and put it into, you know, investing back in ourselves.
That’s important. We’re going to take about half of it and reinvest it into spending, into the business and then we’re going to set the other quarter aside in the business. So if you’re bringing in, you know, $500 a week now extra money that you weren’t, it’s 125 that goes to you. You get to spend this money. You get to take your wife out, your husband out, you know, you get to go out to a nice dinner maybe every other week instead of like never. You get to go buy something that you’ve been wanting to buy, fix something and you know, save it up for a month and, and you know, like fix the thing that’s been annoying you in your house. I know what that’s like.
You know, you get that thing, you just eventually learn to live with it and finally you’re like, wait a minute, we have the money to fix that. Why don’t we just do it? Oh yeah, you know, I forgot we had that money. So fix the thing, do whatever and then you’re going to take another quarter and you’re going to save that. So in this example, another 125 and it’s just going to sit there in your business bank account and then you’re going to reinvest 250 pretty rapidly into, you know, to scaling more, to hiring other people, to being able to delegate other things. Again, that’s a general rule of thumb. If you wanted to save a little bit more, that’s fine.
I mean, I’m not going to argue with you. I’m just giving you general rules of thumbs. If you want to take a little bit more, that’s totally fine too. Then once you get up to two full time people, then you can take those percentages and begin to change them. And so you want to start taking home a little bit more. So from basically from your third person, you know, until about your fifth or sixth or seventh person, just somewhere in there, it’s up to you. We now take home a third, we save a third because our expenses are going up and we reinvest a third. Then once we hit about, you know, that six person or so, now we’re going to save even more.
We’re going to reinvest less. There’s a lot less to reinvest because the numbers are getting higher and we’re going to take home a little bit more. And then eventually over time, it just becomes a matter of, you know, you get to decide how much do you want, how much do you want to make and how much do you want to reinvest and how much do you want to save. And typically what we’ll see, you know, once somebody hits a certain number of employees, and again, it varies, is the owner of the business will take home somewhere between 35 and 50%, about a third to 40% will be saved and about 10, 15% will be reinvested. Now eventually you hit the point where you’ve saved enough and you can begin to either reinvest more or, you know, take home more. Those are your choices.
We recommend, and we’ve, I mean, numerous people preach very similar things. We recommend having minimum of three months expenses in the bank. When you’re starting off as a business, you have a VA at $50 you know, a week and maybe you have a, let’s say you have a Click Funnels account. So we’ll just say $200 a month for your, for your virtual assistant, a Click Funnels account, a ConvertKit account, a plugin that you pay for on WordPress, your domain name, and maybe like two other things. And you know, you, I don’t know, 600 bucks a month, we’ll just, we’ll go 700 bucks a month, right? So initially, you know, with that and you don’t have a huge, like you don’t have payroll and stuff and your va, you know, you pretty much cash flow it. If you keep $1,000 in the bank, that’s fine.
But again, if you’re adding a hundred dollars a week or $200 a week or even $50 a week, eventually you got, you know, two, $3,000 there. That’s more than enough, you know, in saved up expenses as those numbers increase when you hire that person. So here’s another, going back to this example, you know, you’re getting ready to increase from a 20 hour a week virtual assistant to. Now you’re adding another halftime person.
So you’re going to increase from. Do some quick math. So $1,000 a week. I think it’s. No, that’s not bad. $200 a week. So $800 a month. You’re going to increase to $1,600 a month just in staff expenses. So you’re like doubling your expenses overall? Well, I would recommend for at least two months before that that you start increasing that savings percentage. Typically, I would just take away from both the profit and immediate reinvesting.
You know, I would just go hoard cash for a couple of months, as our accountant would say, we’re just gonna hoard cash so that when you hire that person and suddenly your expenses go from, you know, overall, they go from a 1000 to like $2,000 a month. Then instead of only having $3,000 in bank, you got, you know, five or six thousand dollars in the bank. And then for the next couple of months after you hire them, you know, same kind of thing, you’re increasing that savings percentage to, you know, to be able to account for that.
So again, the objective here, the same rules apply to hiring anyone, whether it’s a virtual assistant or anyone you want to hire them to do work that is lower than either what they’re making. Okay, so you’re paying $20 an hour for them to make you 30. Or that frees you up. Maybe they’re doing. Maybe you’re paying them $15 an hour to do $15 an hour work. That’s fine.
If it frees you up to do $40, $40 an hour work, you could pay somebody. You could pay somebody $100,000 a year to make you $100,000 if it frees you up to make a million. So if it frees you up, that’s fine. They either need to free you up to do work that pays more than you are paying them, or you need to. You need to, you know, hire for a few new projects that make you more than you pay on, if that makes sense. You want to pay them less than they’re bringing in for you or pay them less than what you’re able to bring in on your own by freeing you up. So if you’re looking for some good virtual assistant services, I highly recommend my two favorite. The first is called Get Friday.
It’s a service I’ve used since 2005, I believe. And they’re absolutely amazing. You find them at mattmcwilliams.com Get Friday yet Friday. They’re all based over in India, but they. They. I mean, they speak better English than I do. I mean, absolutely. Like, their English is better than mine. No doubt about it. And so they work our hours, too. So my. My VA works basically the same. Same schedule that I do. Yeah, I think.
I think he starts like me on a half hour later and ends about a half hour later. But otherwise we’re pretty much overlapping, and they’re absolutely amazing. The other one, if you’re looking for someone who is more focused, who knows the marketing stuff better, especially product launches, virtual staff on Demand, you know, I cannot reckon enough, but my friend Tim be Becca. I mean, these are like highly trained launch and funnel experts, okay? So if you’ve got. They’re specifically trained for online businesses and people who are doing, you know, product launches or you’ve got some sort of an evergreen offer, you’ve got a course, you know, things like that, they’re absolutely amazing.
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So if you just go to mattmcwilliams.com vsd for virtual staff. I guess I technically should have put an O in there, but go to mattmcwaims.com vsd virtual staff on demand. Check out Timby’s service. I mean, it’s really cool. The other cool thing, all of her, all of her virtual assistants, again, these are, they’re, they’re highly trained in product launch and Internet marketing world. Okay. And I’ve actually, I’ll say this, I’ve not used their service, but I worked with one of them and she was absolutely amazing. Absolutely. She asked. She was a student. He was a student of ours in our find affiliates now course, she asked better questions than anybody else did. And like just, I mean, she was just amazing.
Right? They’re all from Zimbabwe. You know, it’s a country that, it’s a third world country and there’s no other way to put it. The unemployment rate is north of 90% there. And you know, we’re talking like it’s a country that’s very abusive towards women and yet they’re able to do the work that they’re doing because of Timby. So I’m not, I’m not suggesting, you know, I don’t run my business as a charity. I don’t. I donate very generously to charities personally, but my business is not a charity.
We run a business. Our goal is to be profitable so that we can support organizations. But all things being equal, if you need somebody who’s trained in product launch world and Internet marketing world, give virtual staff on demand a try because you’ll be helping some amazing people who, you know, who need the help. Very affordable, awesome business. Timbi is. I mean, she comes from, you know, Jeff Walker’s world. That’s how we got to know each other. So she’s absolutely amazing. She was actually the spokesperson for his mastermind for, you know, a couple of years ago. So she knows that world and she trained her people that way. So if you need somebody more general, you know, somebody take over your calendar, take over some of that stuff.
Get Friday is who we recommend. Again, mattmcwilliams.com get Friday if you need help with your launches, check out Virtual staff on demand. Mattmcwilliams.com vsd Take what you’ve learned in this episode and apply it to working with them. You know, start off with five hours a week to free yourself up. Add another five in a month or two, add another five. Just keep scaling up from there you get. Just keep reinvesting, keep enjoying some of your profits. Keep saving. That’s the secret. So that is how you scale your business on a limited budget. Todd, I hope that answers your question and for those of you wondering out there, hope that answered yours. I’ll see you in the next episode.
See you soon.