Hey everyone,
I wanted to introduce myself. I'm Ariel Tolome, currently 27 years old living in New York City in a shoebox apartment LOL, My hometown was in Wayne, New Jersey living in a sub-urban lifestyle before I made enough money where I was able to move out of my parents house at 25 years old and live this amazing life at the city.
2010 to 2014 - PRE-AFFILIATE MARKETING ERA
I started affiliate marketing way back in 2010 when I was in 8th grade when I was going through mental deep depression. Most classmates noticed I was crying all the time because I didn't like the life I was living, it was really bad to the point teachers had to remove all of the kids, and the principal and school counselors would try to calm me down. I was broken down and this kept running until sophomore year in high school.
During senior year at high school, I attended this class called "Entrepreneurship, which is a half-semester, and that was the first taste of understanding how business works. I also informally joined a business club and that's when I first started selling chocolate for fundraising. I was pretty good at it that I asked him to give me 2 more chocolate boxes, raspberry chocolate bars sell like crazy.
It was the last 6 months of high school. I was very fortunate that a high school had offered coding classes in Visual Basic & C#, that was my first taste of programming. Then I learned other languages whichI learned was self-taught. HTML, CSS and Javascript. I also taught myself on running a server, and ran a private game server on Minecraft. It was averaging around 20-50 people a day that people wanted to work for me, and I got the taste of what it feels like to have "kids" to run the server for me.
Skills gained during this timeline:
Coding: Basic HTML, CSS, Javascript
IT: SSH Terminal, Running a Server
Management: Basic Entrepreneurship, Managing a team, basic marketing
2014 to 2016 - INTRODUCTION TO AFFILIATE MARKETING/FINANCIAL ADVISOR JOB
I was watching some YouTube videos when I had free time, then I saw "Google Clickbank Sniper", and "Wealthy Affiliate". That's when I started growing interest in testing affiliate offers, my first offers were doing Ecom and Biz Op Offers. I was a broke kid in college with only $20 allowance from my mom, so the one thing that I learned was SEO. I took the $20 and instead bought myself a shared hosting plan and learned Wordpress, and started making content posts about the product. Unfortunately I didn't pursue it long enough because I got distracted from doing stupid things in college like joining these frat parties instead of focusing.
I took a commission-based financial advisor job, you probably might heard of it "Primerica". I actually got my insurance license and then later gotten my series 6 and 63 license as well. I was attending Tuesday and Saturday trainings every single week to learn topics on being a financial advisor. The issue was that my spline wanted me to use my warm list and all of my family and friends are warning me that this was a pyramid scheme. So I then took the hard route and started emailing all of these clubs in college about doing a financial seminar, and then my upline would run the session. It was a pretty good run. Let's say out of 30 leads, 20 of them would be interested in getting a financial plan, and I was able to close deals on insurance and Roth IRAs that way.
Also during these training sessions, the upline was telling me to read these self-improvement books "Think and Grow Rich", "Magic of Thinking Big", and others. They had a huge library on hand and I can pull one out to read and learn.
Skills gained during this timeline:
Sales: Prospecting, Scheduling Appointments, Following up
Webmaster Route: Wordpress, Basic SEO, Business Listing SEO
Personal: Improving myself
2017 to 2018 - THE HARD LIFE / INTRODUCTION TO PAY PER CALL
I finished graduating college, and I was trying extremely hard to find a job. I was currently $35,000+ in credit card debt (Luckily I paid classes with my credit card, and not student loans.). My relationship with my parents was strained, they were wanting so bad to kick me out of the house. I had so many odd jobs. Everything from uber driver, delivery driver, fixing computers and doing website consulting. I had 300 resumes submitted. 6 companies requested interview, 4 of them ghosted me, and 2 of those jobs were scams. During this time I was learning affiliate marketing and trying to find ways to make money while I was this broke. 21 years old and having it rough.
While I was looking up CJ Affiliate offers, I noticed pay per call offers, and I was really interested in how it pays out. I started attempting to apply for National Debt Relief but unfortunately got declined because of my lack of experience. I then applied for other networks including Palo Media, Astoria, HyperTarget. I didn't do much because I didn't had the money to run those offers.
One thing I was good in was business development, I affiliated my first show at Affiliate Summit East 2017, and met with a ton of people in the CPA business side. I was working on blackout offers including dating, adult, mobile apps, sweepstakes and casinos. And I actually backed out on video streaming at 600% ROI on Thailand traffic, but the payout was so low I was making $2/day LOL.
Skills gained during this timeline:
Affiliate Marketing: Ad Tracking (Volumm), Business Development, Media buying offers on Pop, Push, Native
PRE-2019 - WORKING AT A CALL CENTER
I looked through my business cards and found that they were hiring a telemarketer. I was getting paid at $8.25/hour in my hometown, but I was desperately needed the job. My whole coworkers were people who are on social security and over 50 years old. I was that 1 guy that I was the most hated on. In less than 1 month, I was promoted to being a verifier, and processing credit card applications, and 1 month later I became the call center assistant manager. All of those 17 coworkers that hated me are now begging me to run "Breast Cancer Awareness campaign". I also gotten the first taste of understanding how to operate the dialer.
This is the part where I fully became part of affiliate marketing full-time
POST-2019 - HIRED AS A MEDIA BUYER
I started working as a google ads media buyer for Axad Capital, a Pay Per Call network. I was running multiple leadgen offers including auto warranty, auto insurance, and health insurance on Call Only Ads. The difficult part was that I was getting customer service calls. It was short-lived, After 3 months, I lost the company $8k. Instead of firing me, they decided to make me an account manager instead, finding affiliates and buyers.
I also found out they were gonna fire me on Jan 2020. But the CEO John K decided to keep me around.
JAN 2020 to AUGUST 2020 - ACCOUNT MANAGER LIFE
I'm going to be straight up honest. I didn't really like being in this job role. I actually hated it. I tried my best to get deals going but for over 6 months I brought in $0 to the company until I finally was able to hit my numbers on August 2020 and make my first commission check.
OCTOBER 2020 to SEPTEMBER 2021 - FROM ENTRY LEVEL TO OPERATIONS MANAGER
In September 2020, the COO of the company resigned to now work for a call tracking platform "Retreaver". And the senior account manager decided to leave to "Transact" Insurance Agency. Basically the team was now, John, me, Joe and a girl named Alina until she left to Aragon Advertising next year.
The opportunity came in October when John said to me, "You know operations right?"
I wasn't that confident in my voice but after a few minutes. "Lets do it".
And then 5 minutes later John K started sending in all of these affiliates and buyers. "Set this publisher up, get this buyer setup right now.", "Talk to this guy and get him up and running".
I was getting backlogged like crazy but I confidently was able to setup these publishers and buyers easily.
During October to December 2020, I quadrupled the company's revenue. I was then getting burnt out, but I had a huge mental capacity. I hired my first Filipino virtual assistant and gotten a web developer and learned to outsource to other people to do things for me.
I then started going after my life insurance license and successfully passed, then in September 2021, I successfully gotten my health insurance license as well.
By the end of 2021, the company had done $6 million in revenue with a small team of 5 people.
EDIT: I'm adding more on here
I wanted to introduce myself. I'm Ariel Tolome, currently 27 years old living in New York City in a shoebox apartment LOL, My hometown was in Wayne, New Jersey living in a sub-urban lifestyle before I made enough money where I was able to move out of my parents house at 25 years old and live this amazing life at the city.
2010 to 2014 - PRE-AFFILIATE MARKETING ERA
I started affiliate marketing way back in 2010 when I was in 8th grade when I was going through mental deep depression. Most classmates noticed I was crying all the time because I didn't like the life I was living, it was really bad to the point teachers had to remove all of the kids, and the principal and school counselors would try to calm me down. I was broken down and this kept running until sophomore year in high school.
During senior year at high school, I attended this class called "Entrepreneurship, which is a half-semester, and that was the first taste of understanding how business works. I also informally joined a business club and that's when I first started selling chocolate for fundraising. I was pretty good at it that I asked him to give me 2 more chocolate boxes, raspberry chocolate bars sell like crazy.
It was the last 6 months of high school. I was very fortunate that a high school had offered coding classes in Visual Basic & C#, that was my first taste of programming. Then I learned other languages whichI learned was self-taught. HTML, CSS and Javascript. I also taught myself on running a server, and ran a private game server on Minecraft. It was averaging around 20-50 people a day that people wanted to work for me, and I got the taste of what it feels like to have "kids" to run the server for me.
Skills gained during this timeline:
Coding: Basic HTML, CSS, Javascript
IT: SSH Terminal, Running a Server
Management: Basic Entrepreneurship, Managing a team, basic marketing
2014 to 2016 - INTRODUCTION TO AFFILIATE MARKETING/FINANCIAL ADVISOR JOB
I was watching some YouTube videos when I had free time, then I saw "Google Clickbank Sniper", and "Wealthy Affiliate". That's when I started growing interest in testing affiliate offers, my first offers were doing Ecom and Biz Op Offers. I was a broke kid in college with only $20 allowance from my mom, so the one thing that I learned was SEO. I took the $20 and instead bought myself a shared hosting plan and learned Wordpress, and started making content posts about the product. Unfortunately I didn't pursue it long enough because I got distracted from doing stupid things in college like joining these frat parties instead of focusing.
I took a commission-based financial advisor job, you probably might heard of it "Primerica". I actually got my insurance license and then later gotten my series 6 and 63 license as well. I was attending Tuesday and Saturday trainings every single week to learn topics on being a financial advisor. The issue was that my spline wanted me to use my warm list and all of my family and friends are warning me that this was a pyramid scheme. So I then took the hard route and started emailing all of these clubs in college about doing a financial seminar, and then my upline would run the session. It was a pretty good run. Let's say out of 30 leads, 20 of them would be interested in getting a financial plan, and I was able to close deals on insurance and Roth IRAs that way.
Also during these training sessions, the upline was telling me to read these self-improvement books "Think and Grow Rich", "Magic of Thinking Big", and others. They had a huge library on hand and I can pull one out to read and learn.
Skills gained during this timeline:
Sales: Prospecting, Scheduling Appointments, Following up
Webmaster Route: Wordpress, Basic SEO, Business Listing SEO
Personal: Improving myself
2017 to 2018 - THE HARD LIFE / INTRODUCTION TO PAY PER CALL
I finished graduating college, and I was trying extremely hard to find a job. I was currently $35,000+ in credit card debt (Luckily I paid classes with my credit card, and not student loans.). My relationship with my parents was strained, they were wanting so bad to kick me out of the house. I had so many odd jobs. Everything from uber driver, delivery driver, fixing computers and doing website consulting. I had 300 resumes submitted. 6 companies requested interview, 4 of them ghosted me, and 2 of those jobs were scams. During this time I was learning affiliate marketing and trying to find ways to make money while I was this broke. 21 years old and having it rough.
While I was looking up CJ Affiliate offers, I noticed pay per call offers, and I was really interested in how it pays out. I started attempting to apply for National Debt Relief but unfortunately got declined because of my lack of experience. I then applied for other networks including Palo Media, Astoria, HyperTarget. I didn't do much because I didn't had the money to run those offers.
One thing I was good in was business development, I affiliated my first show at Affiliate Summit East 2017, and met with a ton of people in the CPA business side. I was working on blackout offers including dating, adult, mobile apps, sweepstakes and casinos. And I actually backed out on video streaming at 600% ROI on Thailand traffic, but the payout was so low I was making $2/day LOL.
Skills gained during this timeline:
Affiliate Marketing: Ad Tracking (Volumm), Business Development, Media buying offers on Pop, Push, Native
PRE-2019 - WORKING AT A CALL CENTER
I looked through my business cards and found that they were hiring a telemarketer. I was getting paid at $8.25/hour in my hometown, but I was desperately needed the job. My whole coworkers were people who are on social security and over 50 years old. I was that 1 guy that I was the most hated on. In less than 1 month, I was promoted to being a verifier, and processing credit card applications, and 1 month later I became the call center assistant manager. All of those 17 coworkers that hated me are now begging me to run "Breast Cancer Awareness campaign". I also gotten the first taste of understanding how to operate the dialer.
This is the part where I fully became part of affiliate marketing full-time
POST-2019 - HIRED AS A MEDIA BUYER
I started working as a google ads media buyer for Axad Capital, a Pay Per Call network. I was running multiple leadgen offers including auto warranty, auto insurance, and health insurance on Call Only Ads. The difficult part was that I was getting customer service calls. It was short-lived, After 3 months, I lost the company $8k. Instead of firing me, they decided to make me an account manager instead, finding affiliates and buyers.
I also found out they were gonna fire me on Jan 2020. But the CEO John K decided to keep me around.
JAN 2020 to AUGUST 2020 - ACCOUNT MANAGER LIFE
I'm going to be straight up honest. I didn't really like being in this job role. I actually hated it. I tried my best to get deals going but for over 6 months I brought in $0 to the company until I finally was able to hit my numbers on August 2020 and make my first commission check.
OCTOBER 2020 to SEPTEMBER 2021 - FROM ENTRY LEVEL TO OPERATIONS MANAGER
In September 2020, the COO of the company resigned to now work for a call tracking platform "Retreaver". And the senior account manager decided to leave to "Transact" Insurance Agency. Basically the team was now, John, me, Joe and a girl named Alina until she left to Aragon Advertising next year.
The opportunity came in October when John said to me, "You know operations right?"
I wasn't that confident in my voice but after a few minutes. "Lets do it".
And then 5 minutes later John K started sending in all of these affiliates and buyers. "Set this publisher up, get this buyer setup right now.", "Talk to this guy and get him up and running".
I was getting backlogged like crazy but I confidently was able to setup these publishers and buyers easily.
During October to December 2020, I quadrupled the company's revenue. I was then getting burnt out, but I had a huge mental capacity. I hired my first Filipino virtual assistant and gotten a web developer and learned to outsource to other people to do things for me.
I then started going after my life insurance license and successfully passed, then in September 2021, I successfully gotten my health insurance license as well.
By the end of 2021, the company had done $6 million in revenue with a small team of 5 people.
EDIT: I'm adding more on here