Greetings to everyone! At the end of the summer, we got around to talking about affiliate marketing with the owner of the Toxic Kings affiliate network, and part-time blogger of the same-name YouTube channel, the owner of various same-brand services – Victor.

Our conversation revolved around how the “Toxic Kings” Telegram channels developed and how much they spent on it, how to work for months if you sleep for 2.5-4 hours a day, what the top 3 Toxic Kings offers look like, freelance platform for affiliate traders called “Zaley trafa” (“Drive traffic” from Russian lang.) and so much more! Let’s see!

1. Welcome, Victor! Your brand Toxic Kings (as well as yourself) are well known in the world of affiliate marketing, but not everyone has read your interviews and therefore it makes sense to briefly talk about how you came to affiliate marketing and how long ago.

   I came to affiliate marketing back in 2018, I was introduced to this area by one of my old acquaintances, at that time a blogger (he was also selling learning courses on affiliate marketing back then). He told me what affiliate marketing was and what it was used for. Naturally, my friend suggested that I buy his course, but I didn’t do that. I already had an advertising agency and I had already tried to upload advertisements to Vkontakte, Yandex Direct, etc. I understood that affiliate marketing would help me develop, first of all, my Yandex Taxi company. At that moment I needed a lot of drivers, and for that purpose, I plunged into affiliate marketing, so that I could look for bypasses on Avito, upload targeted advertising, buy posts in order to get more and more drivers to my company.

2. Before joining affiliate marketing, you were the owner of an advertising agency called “DA” (“YES” from Russian lang.). It would be interesting to learn more about this particular experience: what types of advertising did the agency do, what was the staff, how long did it last, and why was it closed?

An advertising agency was one of my areas of business. Actually, when I was looking for drivers, I met good coder guys who helped me develop a referral system for Yandex Taxi, in my taxi fleet directly. So, we created a Viber bot, connected to the taxi fleet through the API, and each driver could connect other drivers and receive money for new taxi drivers. The money came in, I started leasing cars and invested the money in an agency. Agency “DA” dealt with advertising banners, printed materials and printing. The staff was small – 17 people. It existed for 2.5 years, but was closed due to the fact that I had a dishonest co-founder who collected all the money and ran away. I had to sell all my equipment to get out of debt.

3. Victor, as we understand, Log365 is a consumables store owned by you, right? You wrote that it offers the possibility of cooperation on exclusive terms. Does this exclusivity apply only to teams or to solo affiliates?

Log365 is a shop for trending accounts, it’s not our store, but it is a store that we advertise. It is specifically narrowly focused – it’s a shop that only sells trending accounts. The store is good, one of the tops in its segment. There are many exclusive opportunities – you need to text the administrator or support of this store and they will select conditions for any solo affiliate or team.

Be careful, they have a lot of fakes.

4. How is the expansion of your franchise of an affiliate marketing supplies store and proxy rental service going now?

First of all, this is something new for the audience of affiliate marketing specialists and guys working in the affiliate marketing sphere. We developed the feature set together with the AnyShop platform – it allows you to open a store using its builder software. At some point, we did get a lot of competition, but we don’t really see it now.

We essentially had one of the first stores that was a symbiosis of a website and a Telegram bot: if a person bought something on the website, their purchase would be displayed in the bot, and if they bought something in the bot, the order would be displayed on the website.

Of course, it was initially very difficult to develop the shop’s website. It was necessary to launch targeted ads, which is very expensive. Affiliates who run channels with more than 3K subscribers are used to charging almost $500-700 for ad posts. But at best, those ads just generate about 100 subscribers, and out of those 100, even 10 people don’t make a purchase. That’s why we made a Telegram bot and a website and started sending out mailings and inviting people to our chats – we were just making people annoyed with it, basically. Our precedent, of course, attracted competition – we talked about our case in an interview, and other colleagues thought if Toxic Kings succeeded, why couldn’t they? And so, it happened – a lot of other guys created their own stores and developed them according to our pattern. We came up with a franchise that has become interesting to those who do not want to bother with suppliers, goods, payments, and organizing a help and support department. This became very interesting for a large segment of people – those who had some kind of YouTube channels or large Telegram chats (starting at 5K subscribers) or even affiliate networks, joined the franchise and are working now. They find the correct monetization of their audience to be a huge plus. And the main advantage for us from this is that we can control the price of suppliers on the market and increase sales volume.

Now about the proxy rental service – it’s very profitable to open one not only for affiliate marketers, but also for those who work with spam, etc. When connecting to our proxy rental franchise, we have all our own equipment: we install our servers, modems, and taplinks all over the world. When connecting to the service, we pay 50% of net sales profit. The average cost of a proxy is 2500 rubles, and the guys get 1250 from each sale. Sounds great, right?

Our bot for connecting to #TK franchises | Toxic Kings franchise

Everyone’s welcome to be our partners!

5. You identified Denis Denisenko, the author of a channel about “bad trips in affiliate marketing”, as literally “your good friend” and recently went to visit him in Rostov-on-Don. It’d be interesting to know more about what specifically connects you with him; is there a promising collab coming or is it just an exchange of experience and communication between colleagues?

I didn’t know Denis Denisenko at all. At the moment when I just noticed him in the media space, he was the team leader of the internal media buying at TrafficLight (it seems so, I could be wrong). I have a good friend, Denis Sokrobotik, a developer, he has now created a service for developing stores on Wildberries. It was Sokrobotik who told me about Denisenko, said that Denisenko was his good friend. In parallel with this, I told my friend that I was going to start uploading YouTube videos about affiliate marketing and he recommended I took a closer look at Denis Denisenko’s YouTube content, saying that I should shoot like he did. On the same day, I texted Denisenko and agreed on a personal meeting. He greeted me very warmly, even though I was only at his house for a day. Yes, it was an exchange of experience and communication on running a YouTube channel. Now, our communication is slowly growing into friendship. Denis Denisenko is a good person and an excellent creator.

6. At the end of July, you said that these days, you have to sleep for 2.5-4 hours, “routine and sleep are going down the drain,” but nevertheless, according to you, then it’s all worth it. How long can you maintain this extreme operating mode? And what else was eating up your time so much besides the shop, your proxy project, auto guarantor, and affiliate program?

  Sleep is a problem for many people who work online. Yes, sleep is going down the drain. So, you go to bed and you start immediately getting new thoughts come to your mind. And these aren’t only some good ideas, but also some thoughts about whether or not you did that thing during the day, etc. So, you sleep, then boom, and you’re up just an hour later. I normally fall asleep at 9 am, but I still need to wake up during the day. So, in essence, you sleep 3-4 hours, and get stuck in this circle from month to month. Now, I’m setting up a routine: I wake up at 6-7 in the morning, try not to sleep until 12 at night and it seems to me  that I live a lot 🙂

It is these projects: the shop, proxies, auto guarantor, freelance platform, YouTube and affiliate network that eat up most of the time, communication with people, the team, thoughts about what else can be done, etc. Sleep, of course, pokes sticks into spokes, in this sense.

7. Toxic Kings affiliate network also has nutra offers. Could you name the top 3 of your offers?

Our network was started in order to “loop back” some of our services. We first opened an affiliate marketing supply store – and got about 10 thousand affiliate marketing users there. Toxic Kings were driving nutra traffic even back then – the “W – Loss” offer to Romania and Bulgaria (it’s weight loss tea). We were inviting a lot of people and buying a lot of chats, people had a lot of questions in terms of what kind of traffic we were driving, how we did it, people were asking for our campaign approaches. We started giving some inside information and immediately realized that we could just give them a ready-made link and receive the difference between our rate and what we pay them. Thus, we came to the conclusion that we needed to open an affiliate network and so we opened one; our supply store and proxy rental service joined in. However, our affiliate network started to work well only in the niche of gambling.

Soon we made our own nutra product – hemp tea. This was the very first top product for us, because the cap is super high, we can give an amazing payout rate on it. If we talk about offers from other advertisers that we provide, then the top 3 will be these:

Maximizer [MX]

Vigamax [ID]

Diamin [MX]

So, see our affiliate program, contact the manager, and they will definitely tell you how to use our offers!

8. Do you plan to post your cases and manuals on affiliate marketing for each of your verticals in the Toxic Kings Telegram communities?

Yes, in the Toxic Kings Telegram community, we will get to posting cases and manuals, but these will mostly be videos. It’s all because we’re currently working on content for our YouTube channel.

9. We also know that at the beginning of 2023 you were developing a freelance platform for affiliate marketers called “Zaley trafa” (“Drive traffic” from Russian lang.), a marketplace for marketing supplies, and a payment system. How are things going with this now?

Yes, we developed a freelance exchange for the CPA market. Can you imagine how big is the sea of affiliate marketing channels and chats? The guys are already making copies, copies of copies, and so on. Everyone re-invites each other’s audience, but in fact, most of all this is the same audience. Spam chats groups aside, of course. As a guarantor, I get 20 or more people contacting me every day about a possibility to carry out a transaction through me, since there’s so much scam. Scammers change Telegram accounts and everything goes in circles again. So, we had the idea of a freelance exchange like Kwork with a full guarantee of transactions, only for the CPA market. We started making this exchange even before the Ukraine-Russia situation. My developer is from Donetsk, and my designer is from Kyiv, and at the beginning of all events, they began to literally quarrel with each other. As a result, I was unable to reconcile them and I simply switched my attention to the supply marketplace with the Anyshop service and the Payok payment system – a convenient service for Internet acquiring, it can be connected to any Telegram bot and any project.

But my team and I will definitely return to this “Zaley trafa” (“Drive traffic” from Russian lang.) service, we do have all the source codes…

10. You recently recommended an affiliate marketing course from go rush Airbitrazh saying that it was “the best affiliate marketing course.” Was this a serious statement? 🙂

Guys, this whole course is made in play 🙂 Made by our friend, a former business developer of M1 Shop. He runs his own channel and this website and course were created to attract attention. These days, everyone who launches any course immediately gets crushed by a wave of negativity.

In general, in the current situation, I believe that this is the best course on affiliate marketing. And it is only good because it’s honest 🙂

11. You said that with your team members you “have long since passed the stage of arguments and resentment” and today you’re “simply focused on work and results.” So, this stage is inevitable for any team, and this is confirmed by your personal experience and the experience of your colleagues?

I initially started recruiting staff from my relatives: my brother, my wife, etc. At first, there were big clues to conflicts: I already knew a lot about my online and offline businesses, but they didn’t, so I taught them. And on this basis, we had a lot of arguments and insults, etc. Then I hired some guys I just met somewhere in the work environment.

Any team out there will have specific times full of arguments and resentment; and it’s not just between hired employees, but when each person, like in our situation, leads their own separate project. And we have enough projects: a supply store, a proxy rental service, an affiliate program, an exchange, an online games farm. Each of these projects has its own project manager and they lead and develop their specific project. And I have long since moved away from many projects as a manager; I work with project managers and top managers.

Now, each of us is simply focused on results and everyone receives the salary that generally suits them. The stage of arguments and insults is naturally inevitable. But if this is some kind of holding company where people are all hired and everyone has KPIs, and if there are any complaints, then you can talk to higher authorities, so if you don’t meet your KPI, just pack your things and goodbye. If you develop a business the way my colleagues and I do – we develop it on friendly terms – there will be times of arguments and insults, but you just need to go through them. But you must admit, there’s also a downside – it’s easier to find a common language with your godfather or brother, your friend. In general, it just wastes time when people argue and get offended.

12. The Toxic Kings Telegram chat and channel are impressive, active, and visually well done. Could you tell us about how they were developed, what promotion tools were used, and do you still use any promotional methods now or can the chat and channel already hold up without any promo?

I can’t call Toxic King’s chat and channel impressive. Impressive would be 100K subscribers. Active – yes. Naturally, the larger the channel becomes, the more haters it instantly gets. I developed the channel using spam and invitations. I had a store, and until people subscribed to my Telegram channel and Toxic King Telegram chat, they had no right to use our store. I don’t employ this technique anymore. For promotion, we used proxies and Telegram accounts, we just did it in very large quantities – we spent tens and hundreds of thousands of money on promotion. In total, how much was spent on promotion? Around $5000 to develop a store, Telegram chat and channel. At the moment, our Telegram platforms are growing only due to word of mouth, and sometimes we do reposts to other channels and chats. Much depends on how “viral” the content topics are.

13. Has the Toxic Kings team staff changed for the fall of 2023? Has it expanded or, on the contrary, shrunk, and how stable is your team now?

Today, everything is very stable and the staff has expanded greatly – now, we have more than 25 people in the team. We do not have internal media buying, we do not have our own farming department. In fact, we have 4 top managers, helping managers for their projects, and a support department. Our largest departments are the support department and the development department.

14. We also know that the Toxic Kings team has a tradition of giving gifts to team members. In 2023, has anyone from the team already earned something for which they can receive gifts from you? What have you already given to your wards and will this tradition continue?

This is an awesome tradition in our team. Ekaterina from the financial department has already received a second car (previously, we bought her a BMW X6 for 1.5 million + there was a lot more invested in it). Ilya, a top store and franchise manager, received a Mercedes E-Class from us. And so usually these are iPhones and, accordingly, Apple equipment for the iPhone. This, of course, is financial support, but I still try to buy something tangible – because not everyone will save their money, more often people tend to simply spend it.

15. What advice do you have for those who read the interview to the end?

  To the guys who work with Facebook today – I wish you have a strong nervous system, more profit and more money. Guys who want to get into affiliate marketing should not fall for scammers, but read and watch influencers, go to their Telegram channels, their chats, and get out the most valuable information there!