As for me, I only know search scale, and the only immediate way to scale it in seconds (now that Altavista is 7 years out of importance) is via PPC on AdWords, Yahoo SM, and MS AdCenter.

The coolest thing about scale is how addicting it is…refreshing stats and seeing them go up by $100 in a few minutes/hours, not wanting to sleep as you want to continue the grow, waking up just to see how much it scaled, the imminent death/slowing that can happen immediately or in a while, the chance to still double again tomorrow…it is like trying to sleep after 6 RedBull Vodkas…you need to sleep, you want to be awake. Once you scale, you are always looking for scale.

A real example right now I am continuing to try to scale (sorry no specifics on the merchant) went from $ rev to $200 then $300 and then $400 in rev in 3 days. I believe it should be a $3000 daily market with 50% margins. I cannot get it there. I have topped at $500 some days but then margins erode. I have pushed a couple days to $800 and margins drop to 20%…So I actually make more at $400 rev than at $800 revenue (oh yeah, the number we really care about is profit)…revenue is easy to get…millions are available at break even. So now I have to decide, does this thing actually have the scale I am looking for? Ideally, I can get it to atleast $330 daily profit on autopilot, but then it is just a cow. We look at cows weekly, we watch stars hourly sometimes. Don’t get me wrong, cows are great, but stars keep you up at night. Dang I want this one to work out! I will spend another 3 days looking for that twinkle…please become a star…sleep is overratted.

@Chris – I’m interested in the same (social media influence.) My “area of expertise” is not in the ppc realm, but the audience factors are the same. Digg scares me. Reddit and StumbleUpon are more my speed. All these tools are readily available – makes me feel dumb not leveraging them more effectively.

Sorry I cannot share more…I am not a Squidoo pro.

a. 75% of our total revenue comes through performance based marketing…we need people to take a desired action (buy, fill in a form, click, something). As a result, we must know the following metrics/elements (since this is paid search): 1) action needed to be taken, 2) number of clicks to make that action occur (conversion rate) 3) payout for that action (commission), 4) quickly calculate max bid (commission x conversion rate). Now we are ready to start, atleast phase 1.

b. Build out ad campaigns (lets say on AdWords) with individual tracking by ad group, or atleast by campaign at a minimum. Should I track by specific keyword; too micro for us, but if you have time for just stats in a day, go ahead. Make sure to organize your AdWords acct based on a strategy, use geo-targetting when needed, etc.

c. Set initial bids all at the max bid. Why? You should atleast break even (assuming you get traffic) and Google will make the profit (if any for you). Key here is you are still testing what the clicks are actually worth.

d. After 500 clicks or so, you will know what traffic is worth. Now, is it profitable? If not, bid less. If so, where can I get scale to expand.

e. Ad more ad groups, expand to yahoo and msn, try out content, alter underperforming ads. Turn off money losers and turn up winners. Every brand that you can market, you can make some profit, if even just $10 if you know your economics and track.

f. Create next campaign while this one works for a week. We will revisit what to do next shortly…

I’m trying to break the link between scaling and sprawl. Doing more shouldn’t have to require more people, more space, more expense, etc. regardless of industry (development, sem, whatever.) We went from 8 employees to 11 this past year, so we’re in the midst of a mid-life (mid-size?) crisis. There’s a lot self-examination going on.

Oh yeah, this article was about scale, not necessarily ringtones. One of our clients only nets about $.015 (yes 1.5 cents per click) we just scale the heck out of it. $.015 a million times ends up a nice $15k monthly profit. Yet, we are always trying to scale everything…some things just do not scale well. Rather than always scale, we do old school economics oftentimes with simple profit maximization, unless we can get a volume bonus :)

More to come if other comments on scale follow. This could be a great “how do you scale, tactics and strategies” post.