GPWA Times Magazine - Issue 22 - October 2012

GPWA AFFILIATE INTERVIEW SERIES When did you launch your websites? Lowriskwinner.com launched in July 2010. I then launched betting-bonuses.co.uk and bingobonusesonline.com in March 2012, and began working on bestblackjackcasinos.co.uk in April 2012. I also had a sports tipping site as well which I created in March 2012, but I sold it in July due to time constraints. Most of your sites are focused on sports betting, with other sites devoted to bingo and blackjack.Which of these sites is the most profitable for you? And why did you choose these gaming verticals instead of slots or poker? Low Risk Winner, which is focused on everything, really, is the better earner. However, the sportsbook section of it gets the most traffic and conversions. The others aren’t as well established yet, but I’m building them up gradually. I have some future poker and casino and slots projects in the pipeline – but can’t say much on that yet. However, I knew black- jack and bingo are both popular and managed to acquire some good domains, so I thought why not give them a go and see what comes of it? You used to own a site that offered tips on which games to bet on. This seems a bit counterintuitive – if your picks are correct, you stand to lose (because your players will win), but if you’re wrong your players will lose confidence in you. What’s the thinking behind having a site that gives out free picks? I spotted a bit of an opportunity, or so I thought. I knew that Betfred Goals Galore bets were very popular, and I did a check via Google as to how often people searched for tips. I managed to register a top-level domain that contained an exact- match keyword. So I created a site, and began offering the goals galore tips. The idea was, I would get Betfred customers to the site, and they would then hopefully sign up with other bookmak- ers on the site, who offered a similar style of bet. I do agree it seemed counterintuitive, because if I was accurate, I’d be shooting myself in the foot, but fortunately I wasn’t that accurate most of the time. Also, people used to sometimes only take two of my selections in a treble, and add one of their own. So that sometimes swung it in my favor. Also, from tipping site reg- istrations, I often got a lot of cross-product players, which paid off quite well sometimes, or leveled things out a bit. You’ve since sold the site. Do you plan on opening up an- other betting tips site in the future? I don’t think so, no. To be honest, it took up too much time for too little a return. The traffic was very high, but the conversions were hard to obtain, and a lot of my time was spent researching fixtures, etc., and my time was needed for other things, really. I launched the site in March 2012, and by the end of April 2012 I had lost interest, so I decided to let it go. I was very happy though, as I made a very good cash return for my short time setting it up, and the cost of registering the domains. This cash could then be invested into my other sites and upcoming projects. What seems to be themost important factor for blackjack play- ers when choosing a site? Is it live dealer software? Bonus offers? I think if they’re playing a live dealer game, and choosing between one site and another, it’s usually dependent on the quality of the software and the video and audio streaming. Some provid- ers are better than others; also some dealers are far friendlier than others. I would rather have a good gaming experience and a lower bonus, but that’s just my personal opinion. You recently designed a .co.uk gaming domain, which initial- ly had U.S. hosting and was ranking very, very well.Then you moved it to a U.K. host, which you thought would be better for SEO purposes, but instead saw your ranks almost com- pletely disappear.What do you think caused this to happen? I created my betting-bonuses.co.uk site and had it hosted in the U.S. for the first two months. I managed to organically build it up to a very good level in the ranks, and thought I could boost it further by moving the hosting to the U.K. I created a new MySQL database on the U.K. host, and put all the sites files onto the U.K. host. I then imported the old MySQL database tables into the new database. However, I forgot to edit the sites configuration file and replace the old database name and username/password, etc., with the details of the new one. So once the domain had propagated, and the site was live from the U.K. host, I had a database error for a full day without realizing. I suspect that Google had re-crawled my site during this time, and indexed me accordingly. I lost all my ranks for about three or four weeks, so it was a costly error. There I was thinking U.K. hosting would help, and it ruined my positions. Safe to say, they returned better than they were after a few weeks. They say you learn by your mistakes, and I definitely made sure I learned how to avoid this in the future. How did you become involved in the industry? I was play- ing poker a lot online and betting on sports quite regularly, and just happened to see the affiliates link at the bottom of a site, and looked into what they offered and what you could earn, and thought, “Well, let’s give it a go.” I contacted a friend of mine and asked if he wanted to partner with me in this idea I had, which was to create a site and try to target online gamers, etc. We had already done general affiliation via a Yahoo product at the age of 15 while still at school, and did very well, so we had an idea of what it involved. A couple of months later lowriskwinner.com was born. You can never have too much traffic – unless it’s from Belgium! RYAN Lowrisk GPWA Affiliate Interview Series