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How I made 6 figures from torrents (19)

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In this thread I already posted about my €5k-€8€ day.

Now I posted my complete torrent story on my blog and will share it here as well.

Today I will tell you my little story how I made $XXX.XXX from free torrent traffic.

It all started in 2005 when my affiliate career began.

I just wanted to make money online and had absolutely no idea about all that stuff.
Then I did some brainstorming to check what is needed for it.

First thing that came to my mind was that I need visitors to my website so I need to find a way to get them.
Next thing was that I then of course also need a website.
Third thing was that I need something to promote.

At that time I was using torrents to download stuff anyway and saw that good torrents were downloaded by many people.
The traffic part was solved, I decided to upload torrents and drive the users to my website.

I didn´t know anything about HTML and so on and with didn´t know anything I mean exactly that 😀

The First Website

My websites looked like created by a little child, they were really bad.
But as a big friend of the KISS principle I didn´t care about it, only important thing was that they worked.
And they did.



Then there was the thing with stuff to promote.
I didn´t know about CPA networks or whatever so I just checked what other people are promoting.
Then I signed up for some adult programs and also added Layer Ads to my websites.
Layer Ads were pretty popular at this time and were good for some additional income.

Now I had all parts covered and started uploading torrents.
In the beginning I only uploaded folders with porn pics and put a link to my website in the folders.

On my website then there were banners for porn programs, the Layer Ads and links to my other torrents.
That already generated some money.

Some of my torrents had up to 15,000 downloads or even more so there definitely was enough traffic to work with.
But as you can imagine not all users who downloaded the torrents also visited my website.

Then I thought I need to force them to come to my website so I started to upload passworded archives.
In the folder with the archive was a link to my website and on the website the users then found the passwords for the downloaded torrents.

That helped alot to drive more traffic to my websites.
Additionally to the adult banners and Layer Ads I also added banners for a Usenet program to my website.

I was running that setup for about 3 years or so.
At that time I still had a normal 9-5 job and only uploaded torrents in the evening after work.

Spent about 30-40 minutes per day to upload and made few hundred Dollars per month.
Later I made low 4 figures because I also promoted adult communities on Rev share so the more users I got to sign up the more the income added up.

Up to this point I uploaded all torrents from my home PC and just used a VPN to encrypt my connection.

Taking It To A New Level

End of July or beginning of August 2008 then I wanted to test something else.
I had few ideas but thought that they maybe can make an additional hundred or so per month.

One of the things was to upload movies.
I didn´t expect much from it but that one day I will never forget.

“Chronicles of Narnia” was just in cinema and I decided to try it with that movie.

I took a roughly 700MB AVI file, packed it into an archive and set a very long uncrackable password.
Then I put the passworded archive into a folder together with a link to my website where the users should get the password.

The difference now was that the users didn´t get the password on the website.

Instead I told them that for security reasons they don´t get the password here.
They have to sign up for a Usenet account, search for the name of the torrent and then they will get the password from there.

Here you can see some versions of my websites.
I know it´s hard to believe when you see these ugly looking websites but it worked VERY good.











So I created the fake Torrent of “Chronicles of Narnia”, uploaded it and went out with my wife for lunch.

When I came back home few hours later I wanted to check the upload and I almost blacked out.

That upload made me around €5k profit from only few hours seeding.
Altogether that upload alone made more than €8k.

From only 1 1/2 hours work.

There I realised that I found something great.

But I never tried to exploit it too much.
Although I saw how much money that torrent made I ever thought uploading stuff each day.

Instead I uploaded only 2 or 3 fake torrents with new movies once a month.
That means I only worked 1-2 hours on it each month but had a nice net profit of €5k-€10k per month from it.

This is how I like to work.
Only for short time but for good income.

That gave me so much free time I could spend and enjoy with other stuff.
Just hanging around for example 😀

But even these 1-2 hours work per month were too much for me.
I didn´t want to work at all for that money.

So I did some brainstorming and thought about ways how to reduce the workload even more.

First thing was to automated the torrent process.

As you know from my other posts I don´t know much about coding and stuff.
But I can get extremely creative when I want to come up with stuff to support my lazyness.

When I started uploading the fake movies I got me a Windows VPS for seeding so I basically could run all programs there that I had on my home PC as well.

I installed Winautomation on the VPS and started working on the automation part.

For the movies I used a file pumper.
This is a small software where you can create fake files with a size that you set.

For the movie names I had one file with names of movie release crews and one file with names of the movies I wanted to use.

To create the torrents I found a Pythin script so I also installed Python on the VPS.

Then I created a “Bot” in Winautomation that generated a random number between 700 and 770 or so.
This number then was used to run a commandline script to create a 7xxMB file with the file pumper.

The bot then grabbed the first entry from the moviename file and deleted the line.
It also grabbed a random line from the release group file and renamed the fake file to MOVIENAME-RELEASEGROUP.avi

Now the Winautomation bot generated a random and uncrackable few hundred character long password.
To create the passworded archive it used the commandline version of WinRAR.

When the archive was created the bot put a link to my website with name “Get the password” into the folder and created another archive from the folder that was not passworded.

This archive then was used to run a commandline for the Python script to create a torrent from it.

After torrent creation has finished the bot moved the archive together with the torrent file to my seed folder.

Additionally it created a new text file with the exact name of the “release” that I can copy/paste it later to upload the torrents on the websites.

I set the torrent client that way to automatically check my seed folder for new torrents and add them automatically to the client.

These steps where looped for all lines in the moviename file.

After it was done all I had to do was to upload the torrents to the torrent websites so that seeding started.

To upload the torrents I only used very few websites to keep the workload there also as low as possible.
From these few websites the torrents were grabbed from other websites anyway and got spread even more.

For some time I even had a guy who sold me The Pirate Bay trusted and VIP accounts, once I even got a TPB mod account.
This was extremely helpful because when you could get your fake stuff to stick on TPB for only few hours you already had a huge traffic boost and many other torrent sites grabbed the files from there.

So when the users downloaded my torrents and wanted to watch the “movie” they unpacked the first archive and had a folder there with the passworded archive and a link to the website with the password.

When they clicked the link they went to my website, here are some versions of it.

I kept this stuff running till 2012, then the whole torrent stuff stopped working that good, websites went down and so on.
In all the time I never uploaded real movies to don´t get into trouble.

But from 2008-2012 I worked only 1-2 hours per month, had lots of free time and altogether the torrent stuff made me 6 figures pure profit.

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It's really amazing how a bit of creativity and out-of-the-box thinking can really pay off.

I'm also noticing a trend in your "methods": You would get an idea, set up a simple test to test it out, and then if it works, build on improving and automating the process.

You didn't try to figure out the whole thing before taking action. You just got something started and then built on it, figuring out the next step as you went.

This is something a lot of people can learn from, including myself. I'm sure a lot of people have great ideas that never took off due to inaction because people feel they need to flesh them out before actually implementing anything.

Of course, for bigger projects that would require a ton of money to test, it would be good to put more planning into it before making the investment. But where possible, designing a small test involving the least amount of effort and money first and THEN building on them further can be the best approach.

That would be my takeaway from this and your other posts. Not necessarily copy what you did, but learn from the approach.

Thanks so much for sharing! Very helpful.


Amy

Sent from my SM-G930W8 using STM Forums mobile app

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Your stories are always amazing to read. I saw a lot of these password protected torrents back in a time. I guess that some of them was also yours

Sent from my SM-G965F using STM Forums mobile app

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Awesome journey man!

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I'm pretty sure I've actually downloaded one of your fake torrents back in the days, or someone who was using your method. The game was Warhammer 40K : Dawn of War

Have you actually tried doing this nowadays? There's still a ton of people using torrents, I even still use them sometimes when there's shows that I can't access legally (I got HBO and Netflix)

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Nice story and leaned a lot from you!
Thanks!

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Haha, what a great story!

Love your process, how you started in small, and then automated the whole stuff.

Plus how you could potentially make even more, but you were just lazy, hahaha.

Good stuff, thanks for sharing this story with us!

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Recently I posted an article about such stuff HERE

I tend to get lost in details so for me the best way to do something is to just do it so that I don´t procrastinate with non important stuff.

Btw Amy, thanks for your tipps for writing.
I really take care of better formatting and better readability now.

Who knows, check the porn archive names on the screenshot.
Maybe one of them sounds familiar

Was not mine, I ONLY uploaded "movies"

No, didn´t run it for some time.
I also didn´t expect that still many people are using torrents.

Maybe worth to try it again.

Can you recommend good and big torrent websites nowadays?

I guess TPB is still number one?

Will post some more stuff in future.

But my absolutely best stories will probably never be published online.

It´s real borderline stuff and rather for private talk.

But feel free to ask me for it should we ever meet on a conference or so

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HAHA what an awesome line!

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Haha you definitely keep it interesting @twinaxe!

Haha, beer on me at AWE? :P

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You don´t know what you´re talking about man, one beer won´t be enough

But most probably I won´t be at the AWE as much as I would like.

No money for the trip, it´s time to take care of my wife´s business a bit.

She needs a new horse for teaching (she´s riding teacher and horse trainer) and also would like to open a small riding school.
My wife supported me so much the last years so now it´s time to give her back support her as much as I can

Additionally she´s away from 05.07.-08.07. so that I have to take of our house and our little zoo.
In worst case my parents in law would come to house so I guess if I will make it to AWE will probably be pretty spontaneous.

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I love how honest laziness can spark such creativity, we tend to complicate too much sometimes and things like this show a real thinking out of the box. Congrats man, and good luck with the zoo

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Too bad!! Otherwise I would LOVE to have a drink with you both! We already talk on skype but never get a chance to just chat for hours. Need to find a chance to do that in the future - you two are some of my very favorite people.


Oh you're welcome - your posts are super-easy to read now!

Just read that article - it's amazing and should be a must-read for every newbie marketer.

If you could write an article on how to "cut corners" when setting up a campaign, that would be even more amazing!





Amy

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Lazyness and pressure is my fuel

Thanks man, 1 horse, 2 dogs, 3 cats and 4 ducks.
Lots of fun with the bunch.

Let´s wait, maybe I will go last minute.
My parents in law already said that they would stay in our house for that time.

Would also enjoy to get some drinks with you

Enough now or I go red in my face.

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Your story is very unique and awasome

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Thanks man, didn´t expect to see that thread again after all the time

Unluckily the whole torrent stuff went down few years ago.

It´s a pity, was really a funny time.

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Can this method be used now?

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Hey. Look at the post just before yours. Twinaxe is saying it is not working anymore.

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Technically it´s still possible but the landscape changed so much that it won´t work anymore.

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