GPWA Times Magazine - Issue 19 - February 2012

There are a lot of sites in your online gaming portfolio. What is the business strategy behind operating so many sites? Initially the strategy was to build up a network of sites for SEO purposes. Then there would be many sites on many different IP addresses that could all cross- link each other so that in effect I could own my own backlink network. Eventually this strategy took more of a back seat as busi- ness moved forward and really that was a short-term strategy aimed to “game” the system. We moved towards more value- driven, long-term strategies that revolve around good quality content and building a solid brand that could last the years. In terms of Alexa traffic, CasinoMan. net is one of the larger affiliate sites. What were the keys to building up that traffic?What did you do really well that others didn’t? Quite early on, we made a decision to concentrate on branding over SEO because we felt that SEO was an on- going short-term strategy that put the site at risk whenever the search engines de- cided to change their algorithm. I looked at other industries and modeled success- ful retail sites and service-based sites and realized that the long-term business game is always won by brands and not by forget- table domain names! This switch was a major change and it meant that we would now be concentrat- ing on retaining our visitors. To this date, a vast majority of our visitors are repeat customers loyal to the brand, and our stats show that some visitors will come by over 20 times a month. That’s brand- ing at work. We also drove traffic using lots of other diverse methods so that our overall reliance on SEO would keep reduc- ing. Thinking outside the box, we noticed that there were huge amounts of searches and traffic in the desktop wallpaper sites, so we started to create ranges of desktop wallpapers and uploaded them there. We were the first to create game videos and now our YouTube channel has over 1,000 game videos – the largest channel of slot games. We took social media on board as soon as we figured out how to use it. Driving long-term, sustainable traffic is about looking all around and seeing what opportunities there are outside SEO. You posted last May that you were pre- paring to sell all of your online gaming sites. Is that still your plan? Do you work with any other industries? Yes, this is still the plan. We are now heav- ily involved with other industries and my personal mission to create a world with- out offices. I’m selling our projects in this industry so that I can fully focus on the new opportunities ahead. How long have you been involved in the industry? What drew you to the business? I started in 2001 and it was an article I read in Yahoo News about the potential of the online gambling industry that attracted me towards it. After reading that article I did some market research and noticed that it was a small market with little competition. I saw it as a busi- ness opportunity and started to work on the CasinoMan project from then. Are you a full-time online gambling affiliate, or do you hold down another job as well? I am a full-time entrepre- neur with multiple businesses. My team takes care of the gambling affiliate side with me directing. You have affiliate sites in a variety of different online gaming verticals – ca- sinos, poker, sportsbooks, bingo and backgammon. How does attracting and converting players in the different ver- ticals differ? How are casino players different from poker players and bingo players? And how do you take those differences into account as you create your sites? To be perfectly honest, our core skill is in understanding casino play- ers and slots players. The other sites we created were, as I mentioned earlier, sim- ply a mechanism for SEO and we never re- ally concentrated on marketing them or at- tracting players via those sites. Invariably they still did attract players; however, it was never important for us that they did because it was not our primary purpose. I think if you want to understand the differ- ences of each vertical in the industry, you must first understand one of them as much as you can and then translate that knowl- edge into the others. There are of course similarities in players because their overall agenda is gambling and that is a question GPWA AFFILIATE INTERVIEW SERIES GPWA Affiliate Interview Series