Hi,
My name is Sebastian, I am 38 years old.
I started affiliate marketing in 2005 as a sideline and already made good money with it.
Since January 2009 I am doing afiliate marketing fulltime as my only source of income.
My story is maybe somewhat different from what you read about other successful affiliates.
I don´t do affiliate marketing to earn tons of money so that I can buy me whatever useless stuff I want.
I do affiliate marketing because it gives me the chance to have control over my whole life.
I can work where I want, when I want, as much or as less as I want.
I can run campaigns in all countries I want, promote whatever offers I want.
In the end I can be 100% my own boss and this is why I do affiliate marketing – for maximum personal freedom.
When you read about being successful in affiliate marketing you mostly read about super affiliates making high 5-figures a month, you can read about people running own media buying teams, you can see pictures from expensive cars and big houses or expensive appartments in trendy cities.
All these things are not interesting for me.
For me personally success is more than just making much money and owning expensive stuff or showing off what you have.
To be honest, I don´t even like expensive jewelry, I try to avoid crowded cities whenever I can no matter how cool the city is, I absolutely prefer my tracksuits over expensive designer clothers.
It´s not because I can´t afford all these things, it´s just that I don´t like it.
I am a pretty down-to-earth guy and for me other things are more important.
I love things like nature, animals, talking a walk with my dogs in the forest or just relaxing and having the freedom to enjoy the day doing nothing.
I have diagnosed ADHD so sometimes I am also not the best in social interactions and stuff, that´s why I live together with my wife in a very small village in a nice house with a big garden.
We live there together with our two dogs, 3 cats and 4 Indian runner ducks.
This is for me perfect life I want to live, I have everything I need to be happy so why should I strive for more?
I rather try to be happy with what I have instead of trying to always get more and in return maybe never be really happy.
For me important is that I can pay my bills and to earn enough money to have a relaxed life.
Instead of trying to earn more money I rather try to earn the same money in less time.
Money is something you can always get back, when time is gone it´s gone forever.
$3k-$5k profit per month are enough to allow me that life and are not that hard to earn so I see no reason to spend more of my precious lifetime just to earn more.
Making $20k per month wouldn´t make my life better and wouldn´t make me happier, earning $5k with less work than before would do so.
Don´t get me wrong, that doesn´t mean that I don´t like making much money at all and I also had campaigns running with $800-$1k profit per day.
But these campaigns were 100% automated and I had absolutely no work with it.
I had other stuff running for years that made me on average $5-$6k/month.
Workload was about 1-1.5 hours per month.
Could I have made much more money from it? – Sure
Would I have to work more for it? – Sure
Did I decide to work more to earn more? – No
What I did is to automated even that lousy 1.5 hours per month to work even less for that money.
Even when I would like to work more or on bigger or more complicated campaigns my weird ADHD brain probably wouldn´t let me do so.
Over the years I developed the perfect workstyle for me.
Simple, fast, effective.
No wasted time or thoughts, just straight actions that bring fast results.
When I have to focus for longer time on something or have to build a campaign slowly over time I lose my concentration and consequently I also lose my interest in it.
Some people will call me lazy, I would say I am just smart enough to find the best way for me how to run my stuff.
In January 2019 I was in St Petersburg for an interview about me and my affiliate life so if you want to know little bit more about my philosophy watch The Interview
When I started affiliate marketing in 2005 I used torrent traffic to get users to my websites.
I had no idea what I am doing so I just did some brainstorming and signed up for some adult dating partner programs and added Layer Ads to my websites.
Because I used free traffic I was profitable from the very beginning.
At this time I had a normal job and uploaded few torrents each evening.
That got me few hundred Dollars a month with only 30 minutes work or so.
When I got more used to it I uploaded more stuff and revenue increased.
I also promoted some adult communities on Rev Share so the longer I ran them the more revenue I made.
In 2008 then I tested some other things with torrents and found something pretty cool.
1 hour work, 1 upload made me more than $8k that day.
That stuff I then continued for several years.
I never wanted to scale it because I was happy to make good money with almost no work so I had more time to enjoy my life.
I worked only 1-1 1/2 hours on one day per month and made on average $5k-$7k from it.
At this time I also didn´t even know that it´s called “Affiliate Marketing” what I am doing.
I never visited a forum about affiliate marketing, I didn´t know what a trafficsource is or a CPA network or a tracker.
End of 2008 then I signed up to my first afiiliate forums and saw many new possibilities for me and instantly had many new ideas for things to test.
Then I discovered CPV traffic for me.
This was besides torrents my main traffic till 2017.
There I also came up with own ideas and ran campaigns in a very own way.
I never had to work much on my campaigns, many of them were more or less set and forget.
I even would say I broight CPV to a new level, not in terms of revenue but rather in terms of automation and running campaigns handsfree.
There were times where I didn´t work at all for several months and still made on average $800-$1k profit per day.
I ran campaigns for several years with next to no work and maintenance that made me $5k-$10k per month.
Beginning of 2017 then I started with Pop traffic and this is still my main traffic.
Of course I also test some Push here and there but didn´t run bigger campaigns yet.
In all the years I also ran some other traffic like banners, classifieds, Facebook, Twitter and more.
Some was very successful for some time, some failed completely.
Will write some separate posts about some interesting or entertaining things I did.
