Affiliate Marketing Arbitrage Million

Greg shares how he first started making money through affiliate marketing as a teenager.

"I started making money as a teenager doing affiliate marketing in the underbelly of the internet. In 2008, on my 18th birthday, I was doing deals with companies like eHarmony, Match.com, and Zynga. They were willing to pay $3-6 for every install generated for them.

There was this arbitrage opportunity where if you could create a landing page and it cost you $1 to get someone to install that game or get that lead to eHarmony, they would pay you $5. I figured out innovative ways to do it - I actually invented the auto-playing video pop-under ad, which ruined the internet. We did it for a poker company and got 1-2% conversions on it. This was a pop-under ad that cost a fraction of a penny.

From that whole experience as a teenager working in affiliate marketing, it taught me what people want. My parents weren't giving me money to buy the things I wanted, so I had to figure it out myself. I started with $100 a month on landing pages, then $1,000, and it grew from there. You really pay attention when it's your own money. The difference between a 1% conversion rate and 0.2% conversion rate is making $100 a day versus losing $100 a day - or at bigger scales, losing $100,000 a day versus gaining $100,000 a day. It all came down to subtle details like having a woman with red hair, having the eyes look at you in the landing page, or certain copy - all these little nuanced things add up to getting people to do things on the internet."