Recently, an interview with media buyer Roman Bobelyuk was released on the YouTube channel "Crypto Temschik." He shared his journey into affiliate marketing from the IT field, exploring competitors' pre-landings and how to avoid burning out by draining budgets into negatives.
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Our editorial team watched the interview for you and compiled a transcript with the most important moments. Read on in the article.
How He Entered the IT Sphere
The story of the protagonist's entry into affiliate marketing begins with his introduction to iOS programming. Eight years ago, while working as a criminal investigator in the police, he became interested in how applications were created for his iPhone 5s. It turned out that this was done using the Objective C programming language. Roman found a free course on YouTube, studied it, and, hoping to get his first offer from an employer, went for an interview, which he did not pass. After five more similar failed interviews, Roman finally got lucky and landed a position as an iOS developer in a small office.
As the speaker recalls, he was paid $400 per month for developing VK players for the AppStore on his first IT job. Besides the team leader and Roman himself, there were two more programmers in that office.
After gaining experience over the years and finding new employers abroad, Roman reached the $8 000 per month mark. Later, this experience would help him start in affiliate marketing.
How to Find International Contracts in IT
Today, the speaker successfully combines affiliate marketing with programming work. Therefore, people were interested in how an IT specialist could secure a contract from a foreign employer.
According to Roman, one must first understand that most vacancies in the West are not suitable for the average IT specialist from the CIS countries. This is because they lack American or any other Western documents or visas.
If residents of CIS countries plan to work with the USA, they need to look for C2C contracts. Roman mostly looked for work in London, where vacancies with the label "outside IR35 contract" often appeared. These are offers that are willing to hire "remote workers" from other countries. He then sent his resume to such offers in the hope of getting a response.
Another option for job hunting, as the speaker described:
- Type the phrase "frontend developer contract London" into Google.
- Visit each of the first 10 sites in the search results and examine vacancies to find recruiting companies that listed them.
- Finally, visit each company's site and submit your resume through the form or by email.
According to Roman, this somewhat unconventional "spam" will eventually yield results in the form of emails from potential employers.
How He Entered Affiliate Marketing
The protagonist entered media buying after watching a video on the "IT Beard" channel, where an invited speaker talked about affiliate marketing:
"I just opened this video, watched it to the end, and couldn't understand why I hadn't seen anything like this before and why no one around me was doing it," Roman describes his impression of the video.
The next week was spent studying materials on affiliate marketing and the gambling vertical.
As the speaker confesses, he never bought paid courses and obtained all the information from either "leaked" sites or thematic media, forums, and Telegram channels:
For those somewhat theoretically equipped in affiliate marketing and wanting to make their first deposits, Roman suggests this starting point:
- Choose a traffic source: Facebook, TikTok, native, or any other.
- Then choose a suitable vertical.
- The third stage is searching for cases based on the second point. As Roman says, just enter the query "cases in nutra" on Google, and you will immediately find several thematic media projects, such as Partnerkin with cases in the chosen vertical.
- After studying cases, it will become clear how people made money in affiliate marketing — what accounts, pre-lands, and creatives they used.
If you don't have money for paid spy services, you can use the same Facebook* Ad Library. To find creatives for the gambling vertical, Roman advises typing the word "bonus" in the search bar and seeing which creatives are circulating in the world.
Don't know which offer to start with? Roman suggests consulting a partner manager to get advice on which offer and on which geo is converting well at the moment.
How to Find a Competitor's Pre-Landing Page
A crucial element for earning income in affiliate marketing is the combination of creative, pre-landing, and offer. If the affiliate program provides the offer, and you can find creative on Facebook Ad Library by simply finding the newest ones in your desired geo, searching for a good pre-land is not that simple. Top affiliate marketing teams will try to hide a well-converting pre-land to prevent others from copying it into their setups.
Here's how Roman searches for effective pre-lands:
- Take your phone and set it up for your desired geo, for example, for Singapore, without forgetting about residential proxies.
- Create a Facebook account there as a potential nutra buyer, for example, a 40-year-old woman.
- Subscribe to and study weight loss groups on Facebook, simultaneously looking for the same info on Google.
- At some point, thanks to proxies on Facebook and Instagram, ads related to nutra topics will start appearing.
Now, just click on a few ads, and you will see the pre-land you were looking for along with the product. This is how you can find a converting pre-land.
Why Roman Does Solo Affiliate Marketing?
Although affiliate marketing is often a team effort, the hero of our material has worked solo throughout his affiliate marketing career and only uses the services of account sellers and proxies as needed. He explains it this way:
"A team can give you great experience, but in my case, I don't see what they can give me that I don't already have."
In his experience, teams often don't provide the affiliate marketer with a ready-made setup, and they have to find it themselves. Yes, you can get supplies there, and the team leader can negotiate conditions with partners, but you still have to put together the setup yourself.
By the way, this solo affiliate marketing approach bore fruit in the form of two personal records:
- The first is the highest monthly income at $18 000. The speaker managed to reach this mark in the second month of deposits. According to him, the first month was negative, and a lot of money went into finding a working setup.
- The second is the maximum daily earnings at $2 437. As Roman says, this setup lasted for a week and a half, and its average ROI was 150%.
Countries the Speaker Targets
While many experienced affiliate marketers target tier-2 and tier-3 countries, the speaker prefers tier-1. This is because he tries to focus on offers where the buyer needs to enter their card number directly on the site:
"Driving nutra traffic into tier-2 and tier-3 is very sad because they are not used to making online purchases. They are used to calling and ordering. It's much easier with wealthy countries."
As Roman says, he works with nutra, having switched to it after not-so-successful experiments in the gambling vertical.
On Disappointment in Affiliate Marketing
Despite the fact that traffic affiliate marketing brings Roman substantial money today, he has no plans to leave the IT field. The speaker considers affiliate marketing an unstable way of earning due to Facebook's random nature, which, for two identical setups, can yield different results:
"There is such a thing as a 'hook.' It's a mythical thing, unexplained by anyone. It's just Facebook's randomness. This campaign will go for you and spin for a week with a 100% ROI, and another one will give a -50% ROI, and they rotate the same setup."
According to the speaker, it's because the social network's algorithm learns from bad examples of the target audience and then shows the webmaster's ads to that audience.
Burnout and Self-Discipline
Every second affiliate marketer has faced emotional burnout due to negative deposits. Roman advises combating burnout by simply tightening budgets to lose less. If tackling the purely psychological side, give yourself a day or two to rest, and then, through motivation, continue driving traffic.
As for combating procrastination, one of the factors of his organization in IT and affiliate marketing, Roman mentions proper sleep. As he admits, he started going to bed at 22:30 primarily so that the brain could rest, and the frontal cortex, responsible for rationality and planning, would not suffer. He uses a smart ring to track his sleep.
