“Hello, my name is Guillaume van de Laar” and I’m addicted to affiliate marketing.

I was born some 30 years ago in the beautiful village of Someren in the Netherlands, population 18.000 people. Went to school there, did highschool in a neighbour village and then studied economics and I finished with an education to run your own business.

After that I was about 23 years old and crazy about music (still am). I was already DJ’ing for about 8 years and loved it. I also had my own studio were I produced house tracks. Some did pretty well, but most didn’t reach the Billboard 100.

I really enjoyed working in the clubs as a DJ in the weekends and producing music during the week, but then suddenly things went wrong. I was starting to hear a beep in my ears, worse and worse. It got that bad that I quit everything I did in music and went doctoring. 7 years later I still have the same ringing ears and I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemies. I have good hopes in stemcel research and I’m positive the scientists will come with a remedy somewhere in the next couple of years.

But enough about that. When I stopped doing music I wanted do something with my second biggest passion: computers. Ever since I was a little kid I was already playing with them or writing my own little basic programs, so I really grew up with them. On age 12 I ran my own 2 ‘node’ bulletin board system. See it as a predecessor of the current internet. I never stopped being fashionated by the magic online world, so when the music was done I focussed my attention there.

I started a blog with all the latest funny movies and other stuff, much like Break.com. Unfortunately after a year me and my partners had to conclude that it was too much work for way too little income, so we quit. So, however it was a waste of time, it did get me very curious to the marketing side of it. Affiliates were asking us to put on banners on the site all the time, so basicly I knew that there was something to get there. This was back in 2006.

Then I opened my first Google Adwords account and tried some affiliate programs myself. And behold, my very first campaign was a success! (and it’s still running strong today!). I made a few bucks that day, doubled that the second day and more than trippled it the 3th day. Within 2 months I was making way over $10.000,- with a single simple campaign. And then I got hooked!!!

I started doing more and more campaigns and my income kept growing rapidly. Then last year some campaigns started losing traffic or converions were going down so I decided to enter some new markets. I started doing social media campaigns and media buys. Both very interesting ways to get loads of traffic, but you have to know what you are doing because money goes down the drain very easily there.

So now I basicly do a bit of all. PPC, social media, media buys and offcourse on jan 1 of 2010 I started this blog. And with this blog I want to help people become just as succesfull as I am.

I hope you will join my community and find this a very informative place to hang out once in a while. And be sure to let yourself hear in the comments!

Enjoy!!!