GPWA Times Magazine - Issue 2 - October 2007

12 INTERVIEWWITH Charlie Hyde | chalkoutline Current Hometown: Sheffield, England Age: 28 Favourite food: Mexican food. Fajitas, Quesadillas, Burritos. I can’t get enough of them! One book everyone must read: Bill Bryson’s book ‘A Short History of Nearly Everything’. Site: casinotoday.co.uk (among others) GPWA TIMES | GPWA affiliate interview series GPWA veteran chalks it up to experience Y ou’re a true veteran of the online gaming industry. How did you get started? I put together my first gambling portal website back in late 2001. I had just finished University and had been doing freelance web design and development work for several years. I was looking for a project to hone some new skills and decided to set up a casino portal (www.casinotoday.co.uk). It seemed like the perfect business. The market was growing rapidly and there was no need to worry about mailing out products, storing stock and taking credit card payments. I was very naive and expected hordes of people to arrive overnight. Unfortunately the ‘if you build it, they will come’ phrase doesn’t work for websites! I joined a number of small gambling webmaster forums, eventually finding my way to the GPWA. I haven’t looked back since. Both your screen name and your consulting firm are named ChalkOutline. How did you come up with the name? In 1999, I was doing Web design for a number of different clients and I felt that I needed a memorable title under which to market my services. It also needed to be something a little bit different for a reasonable domain to still be available (even then it was hard to find a good domain name!). ChalkOutline Web Design had a ring to it and a natural logo to go with it. The name has just stuck with me. Whose chalk outline is the logo? The logo is the outline of a good friend of mine. When I needed a suitable body outline he was happy enough to act as the model. The outline has been touched up and styled a little over the years, but it is still recognisable as the outline of my friend. What lessons from your consulting firm have you been able to apply to your work as an affiliate? The Web consulting work that I’ve done has been in a variety of marketing areas, such as healthcare, engineering products and jewellery. Each of these areas needed a different approach. When I first started, I guessed that what worked for one business would surely work for any other business. This is obviously not the case. Learning how to work in these different business areas has been an excellent experience and a real help in figuring out how to market to different demographics in the affiliate business. How has the industry changed from when you started to now? The number of people online has increased dramatically, so the appetite for online gambling has also grown along with that increase. The last five years have seen Web users become a lot more trusting of the Internet; people are much happier spending money online than they were. The market has diversified from revolving around online casino games to include online poker, bingo, backgammon and other forms of online gaming. What is currently the most difficult part of your work? I think that I find the organic search engine optimisation work in affiliate marketing to be the hardest thing. There is so much conflicting information circulating on the Web all the time that it is very tough to know what you should be doing. How did you grow your business? I started out specifically targeting online casino players and stuck to that area for the first few years. In 2002 and 2003, the online casino business was really taking off and online poker had not yet really arrived on the scene. I did my best to source traffic from CONTINUED ON PAGE 44 >>