GPWA Times Magazine - Issue 38 - July 2017

COVER STORY Image by Alexey Boldin/Shutterstock The essence of content marketing Let’s get to the very essence of what drives content marketing, from an engagement point of view: “I need information to help me.” For example, you’re reading this, possibly because you want to improve your marketing. • You have a business need: Marketing. • I might have answers for you: Stuff about marketing. Reality check You’re just a salesman. As an affiliate, you are a commission-only salesman. You live by your sword (and as a result, you have my deepest respect). If you live by your sword, you live in the now. Of course, you will need to invest, but you probably won’t have the financial weight of big operators to build out your brand, like AskGamblers has. For a typical affiliate, life is about employing every dollar as efficiently as you can. To me, content marketing for iGaming is very inefficient spend. What do customers need from you? Let’s turn this around a little and think about what a prospec- tive customer within iGaming needs from you as an affiliate. Reiterating: “I need information to help me.” So, accepting that you are just a middleman, what content marketing strategy could work? • Sports betting: How can I win money on this event? • Casino: What are interesting new games? Are there any good gambling strategies? • Poker: How do I play better? • And then everything else in iGaming, which I won’t go into… Inmy view, none of these are going to help youmuch. You’re not an operator, youdon’t have the incentive to build a brand like they do. Your job is to help people decidewhere theywill gamble next. In conclusion, I’m saying content marketing is (usually) next to useless if you’re an iGaming affiliate. Wait! There’s more! You might think, that’s great . . . Nick said content marketing sucks, the rationale is pretty tight. Now what?! Since this article should leave you on a positive note and give you something actionable, please read on and hopefully I can help you. While I don’t want to turn this article into an SEO piece, I do want to talk about the biggest driver that both content marketing and SEO share: engagement. Every affiliate website will be slightly different in content, target audience, messaging, colors, languages . . . There’s an infinity of what is engaging to whom. So it makes no sense to try to prescribe an infinity of choices. The best way I can help you is with a simple framework that you can apply to your affiliate project. Google As you probably know, rankings on Google happen because of a combination of four things: • PageRank. • Relevant content to the search phrase. • TrustRank. • Engagement. As you may also know, Google use artificial intelligence in a huge number of ways across its technology stack. As the term “artificial intelligence” suggests, there is a learning component to the software. It needs to knowwhat “good” looks like, and from there, it works out what patterns correlate with “good.” Google has been training algorithms for years, and one of the major tell-tale indicators of artificial intelligence usage was the leaking of the Google search quality rater guidelines back in 2012. These guidelines are used for training peoplewho ratewebsites for quality.After years of the guidelines being leaked on each iteration, Google finally officially released their search quality rater guide- lines in 2016 and has been officially releasing updates ever since. These guidelines are the definition of what Google say is a good website. This definition of “good” is worth billions of dollars to Google, because if they train their algorithms to look for “mediocre,” Google will rank the wrong websites, and will lose users and therefore money. Every affiliate website will be different in content , target audience , messaging , colors , languages . . . There’s an infinity of what is engaging to whom. 24 w w w . g p w a t i m e s . o r g