GPWA Times Magazine - Issue 25 - June 2013

GPWA AFFILIATE INTERVIEW SERIES talking from the perspective of someone fresh out of university at the time who had only ever earned a few hundred dollars a week. So it wasn’t a huge sum of money, but it was enough for me to reinvest it to develop a better version of the web- site, and focus on building a much bigger and better website on the hope that more payments like it would keep coming in! I think I was lucky to find a small, spe- cific niche which had very little competi- tion at the time and yet had a large spike of interest in it. I discovered it because of a company which was selling arbitrage through MLM principles at the time, and it garnered a lot of attention. So when I made the website, there were a lot of other people already looking for the information who immediately started using the infor- mation I had compiled. What traits do you look for in an affili- ate manager? How about in an affiliate program? In the past I have never re- ally thought about affiliate managers too much. Because arbitrage traders will use whatever sportsbooks best suit their trad- ing needs, I have had virtually no control over what they choose, so trying to get them to sign up to my best affiliate book was pointless. However, the game always changes and I realize that having good relationships with affiliate managers can be very useful. For me, though, my relationship requirements are usually pretty simple: The manager has to understand that I operate an arbitrage website, and I will be sending them arbi- trage traders, and the only thing which can help is to offer them bigger bonuses, bigger betting limits and/or guarantee no limita- tions on their accounts. Nothing else really matters to arb traders, and so as an affili- ate, nothing else matters to me. If you had to pick five keys to success as an affiliate, what would they be? Great quality content, because it is what visitors and potential referrals want. If you don’t provide it, you have nothing. Product relevancy to your content. If you write articles about your cats, then put in a link to casinos, you probably won’t get many conversions. Internet marketing knowledge. You need to know how to drive traffic to your pages. SEO basics. I don’t think you need to be a master at SEO once you have great content and some knowledge of Internet market- ing. Great quality content and a constant flow of traffic will build SEO the way that Google wants it to be built, through genu- ine back links made by real people recom- mending your website. But you need to get the basics right, too – title tags, H1, real language keywords, etc. Focus. I think you really need to spend a lot of your time and energy developing your affiliate website. You need to keep up with your industry to make sure you are writing great content. You can’t just fake great content. It requires genuine insight. You need to know where to go to market it. You need to keep up with your competi- tion. You need to stay in contact with your affiliate managers and make sure you are offering the best deals you can get, and are promoting them in the most effective ways possible. What prompted you to join the GPWA? How has it helped you? I liked the idea of verifying myself as a trusted webmaster in an industry too often associated with dodgy dealings and manipulation. I do my best to fight against scams and rip-offs, but when someone lands on my website for the first time, they have no way of real- ly knowing who I am or what I do. GPWA approval is a small, easy step to take to help combat that. What do you like about the industry? I love affiliate marketing as a business because your income isn’t tied to how much work you do. Your work can pay itself off thousands of times over. It can also pay you nothing, but I love that sort of risk! Affiliate marketing within the gambling industry is quite interesting be- cause the income potential is quite large. Particularly with arbitrage traders, there are people playing with over £100,000, and they place tens of thousands in bets every day. So small victories can mean quite a lot sometimes. If you could change one thing about the industry, what would it be? Haha! An impossibility, but my wish would be for the industry to stop limiting players who win. It is really hard as an affiliate when so many of my referrals end up being limited to tiny bet limits. What surprised you most about the in- dustry? That people are still able to start websites in the industry and make it. The idea that it is full, saturated, etc., is just wrong. What do your family and friends think of your work as an affiliate? They’re mostly just envious of the fact that I can travel and work anywhere. More often than not, though, they don’t really understand what I do. How long do you give yourself for an- swering e-mail? What e-mail tips can you offer? I try to answer as soon as pos- sible just to keep on top of everything. As soon as I start delaying my responses, I find it easier to delay on newer e-mails, and then they build up, and then when I finally get around to “working through them all,” I’ll find some important e-mail amongst them all which had a timely re- sponse required and I will have missed it. So I answer them whenever I can, but also don’t stress about them if I can’t answer them. I’m very Zen about it all! How do you manage your “to-do” lists? Do you use any special software to help you out? I’ve tried just about everything, and failed to stick with anything. I’ve used software, I’ve used apps in my phones, I’ve used the To Do list in Gmail, lists in Notepad on my desktop and pen and pa- per lists on my desk. Actually, I probably have one of each of those last three in ac- tion right now. I don’t have any strict sys- tem. I just try to act on jobs as they come through, and a bigger job which requires activity just gets written somewhere that I will look repeatedly, and so I will keep being reminded that it needs doing. Actually, my most common method is to keep e-mail which tell me I have jobs to do as “unread,” so whenever I have unread e- mail, I know I have jobs to get done. How much time does it take to keep your sites updated? Unfortunately, more time than I have put into them for the last few years. I have a lot of work which I need to do to bring SBB back up to date, and a lot of work to do to tidy SAG up a bit. Luckily, mostoftheinformationinSAGiseternaland doesn’t need updating. When everything is brought up to date, though, I think just a couple of hours a day, or maybe one full day a week would be enough to maintain them. GPWA Affiliate Interview Series