GPWA Times Magazine - Issue 22 - October 2012

Howmuch SEOwere you doing in 1994? Introducing five of the most interesting men in the world – or at least in the GPWA. As a group, they’ve lived through just about every twist and turn that online gambling has taken in the last couple of decades. They hang their hats in Mexico, Croatia, England, Wales and Belgium, where they dine on favorite foods including tacos, fried rice, pizza and chocolate. Their taste in books and music runs the gamut from sophisticated to silly: one’s got James Joyce’s Ulysses on his “must read” list and another gives I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry as his favorite movie. Let’s raise a glass to these most interesting men – and make mine a Dos Equis. *Due to space constraints, we could not print the interviews in their entirety. The complete text will be posted at gpwa.org. GPWA AFFILIATE INTERVIEW SERIES DAVE DaveL Want Google to love you? Give them something unique When did you launch your sites? My first site, Playing Bingo, was launched in 2005, with Bingo Codes following in 2006. Bingo.vg launched in 2009 and Mobile Bingo this year. What is it about online bingo that has led you to launch four bingo-oriented sites? I was a bingo caller for a few years back in the ’80s and ’90s. I originally built the first site about the land- based game to help workmates who wanted me to take groups of them to go to their local bingo hall for the first time. Believe it or not, Playing Bingo spent a year without any affiliate links or men- tion of the online game. I’d originally built the site because I liked the retail game and its culture. All subsequent sites have been to either try new areas or replicate the success of the first site. How much of your traffic comes from mobile bingo and/or casino players? I would say about 10 percent of my traffic is mobile based and most of it is bingo related. I’ve haven’t really gone for casino traffic until recently, and that’s currently around 3 percent of my traffic, to the casino-featured sites. All of your sites are .uk sites. Do you have any plans to target traffic outside the U.K.? No, I know the U.K. market best. I do have some nice .comvariants though, somaybe one day when the USA gets the OK for online bingo, I might make an international-facing site. How did you become involved in the industry? I spent a few good years in my late teens working in a bingo hall in Cardiff. I lovedtheoldbuilding,thepeopleandthefunofthejob.Yearslater when I discovered how to make websites, it was easy to fall back into it and build a site about the stuff I loved to do with the land- based game. When that site was live, I started being approached by online bingo sites that suggested I should start featuring on- line sites, so eventually I did. The rest as they say is history. How long did it take for you to start earning money? I’d say about a year. It really took off thanks to some kind words from an online bingo operator I was in contact with as he wanted his site featured. His advice got me into Google AdWords, where I was running bingo ads long before it was allowed. I developed some great tricks at that time that allowed me to keep cam- paigns running for about a year without their ever being closed down by the AdWords staff. Without this period, I wouldn’t have made enough money to go full time and build the sites out and get them ranking well. As my organic placing picked up, I stopped using AdWords, and haven’t since as the returns from organic were much better for me, and the CPCs were get- ting silly. I remember getting top placement and sending good converting traffic to Gala and Mecca Bingo for 10p to 20p a click – happy days! You’ve said that a well-designed website homepage will be “simple and elegant.” What, in your opinion, constitutes sim- plicity and elegance? It’s not just the homepage; I believe ev- ery page should be. Nothing ticks me off more than a page with a dozen flashing gifs and tiny text featuring a hundred differ- ent offers. I can’t see what’s going on, and if I can’t, I’m sure your less savvy user is even more confused. My sites may look simple, but they’re highly designed and edited to make them