GPWA Times Magazine - Issue 24 - April 2013

actually. I started MonkeyGambling with a friend who invited me to help him out of the blue. BigFreeBet.com, which I started the following year, got going after I used some similar affiliate sites to claim free bets for myself. How long did it take for you to start earning money? Ages! Haha. MonkeyGambling never really made anything, mostly because I started concentrating on my other project, BigFreeBet.com. I made several versions of the site and it took nearly two years to start making any regular income. I can’t remember when I acquired my first customer, but it really helped motivate me. To be honest I nearly gave up, but now I live by the quote, “Never give up five minutes before the miracle happens.” What traits do you look for in an affiliate manager? How about in an affiliate program? This is something that I think about a lot, actually. Being in the marketing business, I think about and analyze things a lot, especially when someone does something badly. I think about the sale that they have just lost. So to answer the question, for me the fundamental thing for an affiliate manager is contact with the affiliate. All the sportsbooks/ bookmakers I promote the most are ones that contact me the most. The feeling of being a valued affiliate is very important, as is getting quick answers to any questions. You get some low- quality sportsbooks that contact you every other day when they are trying to get you to join their program. However, once you are in you never hear from them again. To me that’s just stupid. They haven’t gained anything from their work if you then don’t decide to promote them because another affiliate manager has built a rapport with you and asked you to take their position. Now, affiliate programs — this to me is just as important as the affiliate manager. I like an easy-to-use system which has quick-to-view stats, etc.… It also has to have a good detail of stats; for example, signup to deposit ratio is an important one for me. I like the Income Access software because it fits most of my requirements and it is a familiar system, so it is easy on the eyes. And because a lot of affiliate programs use it, I don’t need to learn how to use a different system for each program. Of course payments are very important for affiliates, so they must be on time and not have high payment thresholds. One note about payments at the moment that I don’t like is the use of Envoy by so many affiliate programs. I have nothing against Envoy, but when I receive a payment to my bank account I have no idea who it is from so I have to ask them every time! I never sign up for affiliate programs that offer things like 50- 40-30 percent rev share for the first three months, as from ex- perience these are low quality. I would much rather have a flat 35 percent rev share with a quality program, because what is 50 percent rev share when you are earning nothing! One final note about affiliate programs is that – like everyone, I guess – I like the ones that don’t carry over negative revenue to the next month. If you had to pick four keys to success as an affiliate, what would they be, and why? 1. Without a doubt, patience. I had to be very patient when I started my site before I started earning money. I nearly gave up, but my patience really paid off. Put the time in. Effort put in is proportional to the results you get. The more effort you put in, the better results and more money you will make. 2. Basic Web skills. I’m not a programmer and I don’t know how to write any code, but I’ve learned basic HTML and can use Photoshop to produce nice images and this allows me to edit and manage my sites. Without this I would pay huge amounts of money to contract out work. 3. To start as an affiliate you only need to pay for the domain and hosting. Like I said in the last point, learn to do stuff yourself and you will have no outgoings. Of course if your site takes off you can put some of the money back into the business, but when you start out there isn’t really any need to pay people to do the work for you. If you are really interested in what you are doing, you will learn. 4. Don’t keep looking at your stats. If you look at your stats more it doesn’t mean that you will make more money. A lot of new affiliates keep looking at their stats every five minutes to see how much money they have made. This just wastes time that could be spent getting more visitors. It’s fine, if you are actual- ly doing some testing that involves stats, but only if it’s useful! 55 GPWA Affiliate Interview Series