What was your "1 thing" to make you realize AM was the real deal? (15)
What was your "1 thing" to make you realize AM was the real deal?
During the past few days, I was browsing and exploring quite a few communities on reddit, reading ton's of quora threads and various forums etc... while doing a research for a project I'm working on and I realized one thing: whatever the vertical or niche is, everyone starts with a lot of doubt. Some people believe it's too late to start, some think they cannot really make it on their own and need a team, some believe it's all scams and nothing can work 
Then at some point, once the particular person experiences their "1 thing or a moment of truth", a complete turnover happens and all of a sudden they start focusing on how to scale whatever it is they are doing, instead of questioning the core functionality of the system.
When I look back at my own paid-traffic beginnings, I was the same... I had serious doubts, I think I started with the belief that paid traffic simply cannot work and my early campaigns pretty much just confirmed that belief.
For me, the 1 thing that opened my eyes, was to stop trying to reinvent the wheel. Somehow I thought that I can make better ads and better LPs than everyone else, so I was stubborn like a bull and refused to just rip a few creatives that were running out there already. At some point, when I was almost ready to give up, I decided to try that as the last resort. Surprisingly, the ripped creatives totally outperformed everything I was able to put together myself.
Conversions started to get in and soon enough I was close to the breakeven point, which turned me into a "believer" Few more tweaks later, I had my first profitable campaign and I started to believe that it really was possible to make money in AM.
From this point on, I started to focus on improving what I had. I stopped looking for excuses on why something doesn't work and focused on how to make it work. Took me a few months but I was able to scale to levels I didn't even think were possible.
To sum it up, the one thing that has changed it all for me was realizing that there are more skilled people out there and that I can achieve more by following and improving what they have been doing, instead of trying to "invent" something on my own.
And having my first profitable campaign closed the circle and made me an AM addict
How about you? What was your 1 thing or the breaking point?
Seeing how stupid dropshipping was killed doubts of aff. I was lucky to get on FB dropshipping wave pretty early and saw dumb 17 year olds make good money. I wasted time / was averse to outsourcing and scaling which I regretted when it became competitive. Looking through spy tools makes me realise I'm at ground floor of something big again and being lucid to fact it will not last forever means going all in before people start to catch on.
Plus it is good transition as it teaches you to focus on things that matter. Early on, I knew some kid that made $1m rev. dropshipping and had basic debut theme and powered by
When I made $2000-3000 everyday for a month investing only $600-700 a day in ads.
That's when I realized fuck, i am going to make millions in this industry. That was over 6 years ago, and I repeated this a few times... and continue to say the affiliate marketing industry is the best real online money making opportunity in the world.
BTW, what we say affiliate marketing isn't really affiliate marketing.. what we do is actually affiliate marketing with PPC promoting CPA offers...
affiliate marketing according to the 90% masses is when they sign up to amazon's partner program and get paid 1-2% commission by making these sites and ranking them and/or adding them on their blog or doing YT videos reviewing products and what not..
we do the 'big boys game' and most people can't even FATHOM WTF we do and how its even possible... that's why I wrote the book from Zero to Super Affiliate (on amazon here). ... it's like the best newbie guide to bring someone who has 0 clue about our 'big boys game' up to speed and understanding of what we really do!
Originally Posted by iAmAttila
Great thread
Let me add my story as well, it´s probably pretty different from all other stories 
I never even intended to start affiliate marketing, I somehow just stumbled into all that stuff and then realized that this is something where I am good at.
But let´s start from the beginning...
My whole life I was never interested in any computer stuff but eventually I still thought about getting a PC to download music.
So until few weeks before I started to make money online I didn´t even have a PC and also didn´t know anything about CPA networks, trafficsources or trackers or about computers in general.
Then one day in 2005 a friend called me and said he has a PC for me.
I went to him, grabbed the PC and a "huge" 21" screen that weighed just as much as a small car, went home with the stuff and set everything up.
Problem was that there were no sound drivers installed and I didn´t have internet yet to download the drivers (didn´t know how to do it anyway) so in the end I couldn´t do anything with the PC.
My next task then was to order internet so that I can use the PC, at this time it was a 6mbit line from Arcor for €60/month.
I then told a friend at my day job about it and then we had the idea to make an online forum, it was mostly about music, splatter movies and random bullshit and it was only just for fun, no financial intentions at all.
I also ordered a webspace for additional €10/month and wanted to setup the forum with Woltlab Burning Board.
Remember, at this time I had my PC only for few weeks, never had anything to do with computers or internet before and so of course I wasn´t able to get the forum running...
With a little help from my friend we got it running and so we were proud owners or a forum, yay
Well, it didn´t take long for me to realize that I basically pay €70 per month (€60 internet + €10 webspace) only to have a forum running just for fun and to download some music here and there.
I was unwilling to accept that situation and decided to make money online to get at least that €70 per month back.
And so I did 
I quickly understood that somehow I need to get users and send them somewhere to make something that eventually results in money for me.
At this time I was downloading all my stuff through torrents and when I saw how many leechers some torrents had I knew that the first problem was solved.
To get users I just have to upload torrents.
Now I had to find out what I could do with these users, where can I send them and how can they make money for me.
I somehow created a very shitty looking website to send the users to and put a code for layer ads there because I saw these ads on basically all torrent websites and what works for them should also work for me.
It took me 30-45 minutes or so each day after work to prepare torrents and upload them but pretty soon I already made few hundred € per month.
But I still didn´t think about making real money online, I even let it slide a bit after some time because it got boring for me.
Nonetheless I always kept some some stuff running and also tested few more things from time to time.
Then in August 2008 there was THAT one day that I probably will never forget.
From 2005-2008 I bascially only uploaded porn torrents.
Then in August 2008 I wanted to test few other things and also played a bit with uploading fake movies in passworded archives and then sent the users to my website with an info that "for security reasons" they have to sign up to a usenet service (an affiliate program I promoted) to get the password.
THAT one day I uploaded "Chronicles of Narnia", went out with my wife for lunch and when we came back home few hours later I already made few thousand Euros from that one upload.
All in all that one upload made me more than €8k.
I guess that was THAT "1 thing" to make me realize AM was the real deal.
At this time I still had no idea what an affiliate or CPA network is, what a trafficsource is or what a tracker is.
But I knew that I can make serious money online and that was all I needed to know
For anyone interested, you can find the full thread about my torrent story HERE
Great thread.
Two things I remember that really opened up my mind to the possibilities:
1) The first time I went on Clickbank and saw the top vsl's... I remember being amazed that such a simple vsl could be doing tens of millions of dollars a year.
2) Geeking out on Flippa (this was after I had already had success on natives though) and seeing how many online businesses there were that were really flawed and/or not that good that were still making serious money. There would be websites from random people that had really bad writing and lots of deficiencies seo-wise that were still making thousands of dollars a month. Really showed that 90% of the battle is just grinding and doing the work.
I think at every point in life its very easy to overestimate the skill of the people succeeding at things you want to try... and think that the only way to succeed in x/y/z rarified endeavor is to execute with absolute perfection, but once you eventually find success in that endeavor you realize that that wasn't the case, and that really their success (and now yours) was the result of just doing the work.
To paraphrase Alex Becker, "Play your life like your body and monkey mind are a character in a video game and the real you is the controller".
Originally Posted by jack_l
Originally Posted by fastaj
In my opinion Clickbank in general is a much underrated platform that is often overseen when we think about offers to promote.
I think at every point in life its very easy to overestimate the skill of the people succeeding at things you want to try... and think that the only way to succeed in x/y/z rarified endeavor is to execute with absolute perfection, but once you eventually find success in that endeavor you realize that that wasn't the case, and that really their success (and now yours) was the result of just doing the work.
You can be the biggest genius on earth, when you don´t get your shit done you won´t succeed.
This thread really took off nicely! Keep the replies coming guys, some really great stories in already
affiliate marketing according to the 90% masses is when they sign up to amazon's partner program and get paid 1-2% commission by making these sites and ranking them and/or adding them on their blog or doing YT videos reviewing products and what not..
But somehow I'm tempted to get back into organic traffic again, I miss having some sites running on autopilot
It's funny how many thigs in the tech world were driven by the huge demand for adult content.
Originally Posted by matuloo
Originally Posted by jaybot
It always did, it´s doing now and probably it will do forever
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