GPWA Times Magazine - Issue 22 - October 2012

When did you launch your sites? Oklade.net was launched in 2007 and went through many redesigns and upgrades until I finally realized I’d reached the limit. Most affiliate sites, including mine, are just a mixture of different widgets, feeds and links, designed better or worse, and most of those sites look alike and offer very little original content. I call such sites fan sites, as they don’t deliver the core product at all but instead rely on other services to do that. Embedding a live score widget someone else coded just doesn’t cut it. There’s no substance there. I chose to develop an odds comparison site. OddsNavigator kicked off on January 1, 2012 and exited beta on June 1. Superbet.info is coming up; it will be an English version of Oklade.net. Your sites are focused only on sports betting. Which site takes up more of your time on a day-to-day basis, and which site currently is bringing in more revenue? OddsNavigator is much more demanding as I’m writing PHP/MySQL code for it myself, and Oklade.net is in Joomla so it’s easier to add stuff. I’m more involved with the odds comparison website as it’s a much more serious contender, and in terms of revenue it has already caught up with the other site, which is a good thing as it’s only a couple of months old. Any plans to launch additional sites or move into other gaming verticals (casino, poker, etc.)? I always have new ideas but they won’t include a new site anytime soon, other than the international version of my Croatian site, which will basically be just a translation on a different domain. I’ve reached a stage where my time is better spent on promoting and developing existing sites than on starting from scratch with a new product, as it’s easier to get another thousand monthly visitors on an existing site than it is to get the first thousand on a new one. For example, I’m currently developing a module with a live streaming schedule and I’ll use it on all my sites, but it probably won’t spin off into a stand-alone site. In the future, I’d like to design a site about roulette, horse racing or forex, as I’ve heard sports betting is the least profitable of all gaming products, but still, it’s my thing and I’ll stick with it. How did you become involved in the industry? I started out around 2003 as a tipster – and a very good one if I may say so. For example, in 2007 I picked Golden State to knock out Dallas in the NBA playoffs. Everyone was laughing at me until “Nellie ball” actually made it happen. After some time my reputation was such that several companies contacted me first when they were spreading their business into Croatia. One thing led to another, and here I am. You used to be on the operator side of the business as a marketing manager for Unibet. What did you learn during your time working on the operator side that has helped you succeed as an affiliate? I first got introduced to this business on the operator side, and only then did I find out that there’s money to be made as an affiliate. I’d learned a lot about the game and made a lot of contacts, so I already had all the information before I became an affiliate myself. I already knew how it all works for other affiliates, so it was just a matter of reproducing the same business model with my own site and adding something new. How long did it take for your sites to start earning money? I earned some money pretty quickly, but it took quite some time for me to realize all this could be a profession instead of a side activity. That’s when I redesigned my site and started thinking big. The sporadic payments became steady income when I reached some 300 signups at the same bookmaker on a revenue share deal, though the biggest challenge I faced was stabilizing that income. On revenue share sports betting deals, you can earn nice money for three months and then earn absolutely nothing for the next three. The key is to mix CPA and revenue share deals. CPA is the base of my business; revenue share is the free lunch. I don’t want to depend on Wigan beating Manchester United, but if they do, I’m getting some extra money. What traits do you look for in an affiliate manager? How about in an affiliate program? Flexibility, in both cases. Affiliate programs should have a lot of good banners in many different sizes, XML feeds, and should allow me to point to a specific page on their site or even a specific match. Affiliate managers should be there – and fortunately most are – to help with that entire process, to help me connect the two websites properly, instead of just trying to persuade me to place a 468x60 banner on the top of the page. I can do that on my own. If you had to pick five keys to success as an affiliate, what would they be? It’s very hard being your own boss and navigating through such a wide market with so many opportunities and distractions. Basically, you need to be both a good leader and the best worker a leader may hire. Being your own boss is not as easy as it sounds, as there’s no one to rely on except for yourself. When things go wrong, you can’t blame the boss or the worker, you can only blame yourself. That scares the life out of most people. So, all five keys to success are inside you. You’ve got to have the courage to set sail to uncharted waters, the vision to create something new, a set of business skills to be able to communicate with partners for maximum benefit, an understanding of finances to make the best decisions for your business – and computer skills (programming, design, SEO) don’t hurt either. Sounds difficult, but creating a CMS website offers a low barrier to entry so you may start from there almost for free, learn as you go and leave your job to be a full-time affiliate only when you feel the time is right. GPWA AFFILIATE INTERVIEW SERIES DAN DanHorvat Note to self: Earnmoney, buy a yacht GPWA Affiliate Interview Series