GPWA Times Magazine - Issue 42 - October 2018

COVER STORY 17 The Law of Predictability Unless you write your competitors’ plans, you can’t predict the future. It makes sense to look at overall trends and where they might go, but even trend-watching isn’t a great predictor of the future. If you think about it, it’s the unpredict- ability of the future that means some people win and others lose. This is why I’m a huge advocate of “ag- ile” business planning. This means you have an overall objective, which might be related to a trend you’re seeing, and then you take an agile approach to get- ting there. For example, thinking agile would be to hire freelancers who are specialists in certain types of content, rather than a full-time writer. If your content has to change because trends change, then that full-time employee is not going to deliver. 18 The Law of Success Success often leads to arrogance, and arrogance to failure. By the law of averages, any successful affiliate is lucky. For every thousand af- filiates, probably 20 make decent money and five could retire soon. If you are making good money, don’t be- lieve you’ve got the Midas touch. Once you get carried away with your perceived abilities, you then start to diversify, thin out your resources and lose track of why you became successful in the first place. Keep it real and on point. 19 The Law of Failure Failure is to be expected and accepted. It easy to live in hope. After all, hope is a huge motivator. However, good busi- nesspeople never live in hope. They ob- jectively assess things, and if something isn’t working, they pull the plug. Unless you’re extraordinarily lucky, you will never get a 100% hit rate on ev- erything you do. With that in mind, a smart affiliate will always take a portfolio approach, knowing that a small number of sites are going to deliver the vast ma- jority of results. Once you accept failure, you mitigate risk and stop gambling on your future. 20 The Law of Hype The amount of hype isn’t proportional to success. Hype is the promise of something. When brands overpromise and under-deliver, it’s a recipe for rapid failure. Just because some operator is doing a ton of advertising, it doesn’t mean they’re going to convert for you. You might come across an affiliate doing a huge amount of PR in the iGaming press. That doesn’t mean massive suc- cess. It just means they’re doing a load of PR for some reason. G P W A t i m e s . o r g 28