GPWA Times Magazine - Issue 34 - February 2016

This serial entrepreneur started his first business at 19 and continues to set the bar high Which of your sites was the first to launch? When did it go live, and how long did it take before you received your first payment? My first website launched in 2007. It was a blog that no longer exists. I launched asmelhoresapostasonline.com in 2008, and it is our biggest website to date. My first payment arrived almost 30 days after I started work on my first blog. I can’t remember the exact value, but I think it was something like €30. Are you a full-time affiliate? If so, how long has it been your primary source of income? I’ve been doing full-time affiliate work since 2009. I’ve worked with affiliate programs in several industries, not just gambling. But gambling quickly became my main source of income. Before that, I did some WordPress websites and design for a few clients. What is it about starting a business from scratch that gets your juices flowing? I started my first company at age 19. I can’t understand the patterns and ways of thinking of some entrepreneurs who have huge companies but can’t recognize and value their employees. I thought it would be easier to build my own company, so I risked everything on that. My motiva- tion in building companies is always re- lated to my goals and my desire to make people’s lives better. I started with a blog network, called Escolas+, that includes escoladinheiro.com , escolapsicologia.com , escolafreelancer.com and some other projects. Our content has been read by over 50 million people all over the world. After that, I co-founded a digital market- ing agency, and after that I built a shoe company with some partners, co-found- ed the biggest digital marketing confer- ence in Brazil, and opened an alternative therapies business with my wife, who is my partner in all my businesses. The main goals for every single business are the same: do my best, take on some risks and big challenges, learn new things and make people’s lives better. You primarily promote sportsbooks, and also have one site dedicated to online casinos. Why did you decided to devote most of your attention to sportsbooks? I started in the gambling scene in 2004 as a gambler. I really enjoy watching football matches, and I think the passion came from that. As I know a lot about football, players, games and all that stuff, I natural- ly started with sportsbooks. I was fortu- nate to find some very nice writers to help me to build what we have today. Casinos are my wife’s passion. She loves the ca- sino games, especially blackjack and slots, so I thought it would be great to make something for that also. In the future we are planning to do some things in bingo, binary options and live casino. What search terms do your sites rank highest for? How much time do you spend on SEO? My websites rank re- ally well for Portuguese keywords like “online betting,” “betting” and “betting previews.” As my background is digital marketing, I’ve studied SEO a lot over the last six or seven years, not only online, but through conversations with some Portuguese people from Google Search and Quality Team, and also at confer- ences. Now I really don’t spend too much time on SEO, as the main foundations are built. Our focus is to produce really good content and a huge database with all the information a punter needs. You’re based in Portugal and most of your sites are in Portuguese. Do you have experience running a site in a non- native language? We have some web- sites in Spanish, Polish, German, Dutch, Russian and Romanian. I really don’t know other languages except English and Spanish. For those other sites, I rely on the expertise of Kobalt Languages, which fxdiamond Paulo Faustino GPWA AFFILIATE INTERVIEW SERIES The best-laid plans . . . We have a very diverse cross-section of the iGaming affiliate industry in this edition of our Affiliate Interview Series, with affiliates from the U.K., Poland, Portugal and Malta (by way of Russia). Their sites focus on sports betting, casino games, bingo and poker. So what’s the one thing that binds them all together, besides their work as affiliates? They all started out doing something else and found their way to online gambling. In this issue, we talk to a serial entrepreneur, an SEO specialist, an affiliate who planned to be an operator, a psychologist and an archaeologist. Oh, and they just so happen to be very successful affiliates, too! *Due to space constraints, we could not print the interviews in their entirety. Read the complete text at GPWAtimes.org . GPWA Affiliate Interview Series