My name is Carl Mansson (Månsson in Swedish), and for the last eight years, I have been working as a digital marketer, making a living from my online business.
This is my story.
I grew up in a small town in Sweden called Ängelholm in a typical Swedish family. Mom and Dad were together, and we didn’t move house once.
I wasn’t really into sports but rather went skateboarding with my friends, playing in a band, etc.
I have always played games on my computer but never explored the possibilities of making money online.
When I graduated from high school, I wasn’t sure what to do, so I picked a broad education that would let me have various other possibilities to choose from once it was time for university.
I went to a private college in Sweden, and to say the least, It was chill as hell.
I selected this school because students there got a free MacBook (this was super unusual in 2008, and probably still is).
(In one course I had in psychology, we literally had one verbal test for the six months course, I only gave wrong answers on this test and still ended up with 4/5 as a grade for the course.)
Yea, as you may not be surprised to learn, the school no longer exists.
I finished my gymnasium with above-average grades but didn’t know what I wanted to do in life.
I did what most people do; I got into some small-time jobs to get a feeling of what working was.
Fortunately, I did have some previous experience from summertime work.
My First Jobs
My first job after school was helping my Dad with his business for a few months.
He is a painter, so I helped him with some of the easy parts of that business.
I did not want to be a painter, so the family heritage business was out of the question.
After that, I continued to work at some basic employers that many of your probably have tried.
Here is a list of my employers during the first two years after school.
- Painter (Dad’s company)
- McDonald’s – I worked there for about 28 days. (Yea, I wouldn’t say I liked it very much.)
- Bring City Mail – Nordic private postal service. I worked here as a mailman, but scooting around on a bicycle on ice with four heavy ass boxes full of letters didn’t work for me more than the 11 months I worked there. It ended up with me berserk and throwing the bike into a trench. (It must’ve been a fun sight).
- Postnord – The government-owned postal service in Sweden. I drove packages to companies which I honestly enjoyed doing a lot. It was cool, and everybody was happy to get large packages delivered. Worked here for about one year.
- Men’s clothing store – A opportunity appeared when I was delivering packages with one of the receivers to start work at her men’s store that she had just opened. I seized it. It wasn’t my thing, so after three months, I went back to Postnord.
However, this is when things got a little bit more interesting for me,
The Turning Point
A very good friend of mine and I were working DJing around the local areas at various parties and clubs.
One day he told me he wanted to go to Malta and try that out.
His brother, whom I also know, had been there and talked about the sweet life there.
I immediately said to him, are you nuts?
We have to think about the future, get a higher education, grow a family, and do other average life things.
When I said this to him, I listened to myself and thought this sounded pretty damn stupid.
I was 20 years old at this time.
We both left our girlfriends to pursue a new life in the Mediterranean island country of Malta.
From that night we had this chat, we had about three months left in Sweden to prepare for departure and a new life.
At this time in Malta, many gaming companies were being started. It was not remotely as many as there is today, though.
I was lucky and got employment with one of the biggest gaming companies before I got there.
To me, just working for a “website” was super cool, especially after working with very hands-on jobs since I left school.
Malta Life
I got to Malta in May 2013.
Suddenly even though I got a job as a customer service agent, it was like living what I saw as a rockstar life from day one compared to living and working in Sweden.
IGaming companies make shit loads of money and share quite a lot of it with their employees.
Having company events and parties at least once every other month was normal, and that could mean going to Las Vegas with the entire company and stuff like that which was obviously insane!
(I got a metal water bottle for Christmas from City Mail, so that’s a nice little comparison.)
We also started to party hard on our off days (and work days, to be fair).
It was like the Ibiza lifestyle but also being able to pursue a career and climb to job positions not possible in Sweden due to swedish degree requirements.
In other words, this was also a great opportunity to grow career-wise.
As customer service agents, we were judged by the happiness of the clients as well as gross sales in the chats.
I thought I would just overdo it, be nicer than nice to the customers, and see what happens.
It paid off, and I got promoted to VIP customer agent, only dealing with the company’s most important and valuable customers.
Moving Up
Since this was when many Swedish entrepreneurs went to Malta to pursue the “Maltese dream” lol and make a successful iGaming company, I managed to contact a startup that I thought looked very promising.
They were interested, and in July 2014, I started my employment there. It was a small company with about six people.
When I first wrote this article in 2017, there were about 200 people at that company which was three years later.
I managed to get a position as a VIP manager.
Doing outbound calls to VIP customers for retention.
We noticed that it was early to do this kind of work due to a lack of customers in those early stages, so that’s really when I got offered another job within the same company working as an affiliate assistant.
That was when I was first exposed to the digital marketing industry and found out what an affiliate was.
Learning Digital/Affiliate Marketing
This job gave me a better understanding of how affiliate marketing works, and I could also see that some affiliates were making a great deal of money from even shitty websites.
I thought that if a shitty website could make shit loads of cash, I could build one too.
I started to read a lot about SEO, and I started looking up how to do things and how to get started.
Another friend, Sebastian, I was hanging out with, had his own business as a media buyer for dating affiliate networks and was making a really good living from it.
I arranged a meeting with him where I convinced him that I knew what I had to do to get started with affiliate marketing.
The problem was that I could not work with it as employed with the gaming company I was working for, and I couldn’t afford to leave my employment to pursue a career as an affiliate.
Building this sort of business takes time before the money starts rolling in.
We made a deal that he would provide me with the same salary as I had per month with the company in exchange for 50% of my affiliate business for as long as we kept paying me this “salary investment.”
This was an awesome deal because I could get started as a casino affiliate without having a full-time job, and he got a chance to take a major shareholding in a promising affiliate business.
I quit work and started to build websites.
I had the fortunate luck to get a close relationship with a high-profile affiliate in my area that taught me a lot of details about web development and SEO.
I have the world to thank him for that.
Today we are friends, and his name is Ermin.
The journey me and Sebastian started began on the 1st of September, 2015.
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Where I Am Today
2023 update:
Sebastian and I still run our companies together, Dreamlead Ltd and Dreamflats Ltd. We currently have 15 full-time employees.
We are still mainly working in the iGaming industry even though we have now moved on to investing in real estate, crypto, and stocks.
We are also rapidly expanding into new markets with our iGaming efforts. One of the more recent is Gambla.com for the US market.
If you want to get in touch with me, just hit me up on Instagram or Twitter.