GPWA Times Magazine - Issue 46 - February 2020

Why did you choose football and horse racing in the U.K. as your pri- mary target audience/market? It was a simple case of these being the two most possible betting markets in the U.K., and of course, the U.K. market is where we are based and the market we have most the knowledge of. You also have sections for casino, poker and bingo. Tell us about the cross-section between these verti- cals and sports/race betting. To be honest, 95% of our conversions are sports. People come to our app/website for that market and that’s where they mostly stay. There is a small cross-over of traffic, but not as much as we would like. More casino traffic is something that we are looking at and definitely want and is something we are going to focus on very soon. How have the many recent regula- tions changes in the U.K. affected your business and how have you adapted? I think looking at what others have gone through we have been very lucky. Our developer designed our own custom backend so updating offers, changing text, banners, etc. is very simple. We don’t have thousands of pages and multiple websites like some affiliates, so this has also made things very simple. Like others, we have been affected by some program closures, but none of them had a major impact. We have focused on the major U.K. brands so apart from SkyBet we still have all our programs open and producing traffic. You have a strong following on so- cial media (30,000 Twitter followers, 15,000 Facebook followers, 13,000 Instagram followers) and you remain active with all three channels. How did you build this large following? As I mentioned earlier, before I was an affiliate I was active on social media. The above mentioned accounts are the betclev- er brands. We also own other social media accounts and have strong links to other major social media accounts that we have used to grow the betclever accounts in the last five years. Even though we launched our app in December 2016, the betclever brand has been active on Twitter since July 2014. Many affiliates we have interviewed in the past have stated that social media isn’t worth the time and ef- fort? Your thoughts on this opinion? Social media has changed a lot in the last few years, for sure, and is a lot more difficult now than it was. However, our business was launched purely on the back of social media. No SEO, PPC. 100% through social media. Roberto is one of the best poker players in the world and has been for 10 years, so this also has a major impact for us in terms of our social media presence. We have social media accounts totalling to over 750,000 followers so peo- ple may be familiar with some of these accounts, but have no idea that they are owned by us. How do the three channels differ from each other in terms of the au- dience and content you post? Twitter was and is our main focus. This is where we get the majority of our traffic. At the moment, with Facebook and Instagram, we are focusing on building our follow- ing. We rarely post any affiliate links or offers until we get them to a level we are satisfied with. Instagram is definitely a younger audi- ence. Videos and good quality pictures definitely get better interactions, whereas memes and jokes will get more response on Facebook and Twitter. Facebook also has become a lot more difficult the last year. They have made changes to their al- gorithm, which prioritizes personal posts over pages, so a normal post on Facebook normally gets half the interaction it would have gotten a year ago, despite us having more followers. What’s your approach to SEO and drawing traffic to your sites? SEO is something we are now looking into a lot more. As mentioned earlier, we have a website version of the betclever app and are now focusing on more content and getting pages listed on Google. We outsourced some SEO work last year and around the odds comparison terms we have gone from being non-existent in Google searches to being in the top 20. The next focus is de- veloping a strategy that gets us into the top 10 and then into the top 5. GPWA AFFILIATE INTERVIEW SERIES about A little bit more Jamie G. He is 38 years old His favorite food is Sunday roast His site is betclever.com His favorite book is The Wolf of Wall Street , by Jordan Belfort He is living in his hometown of Swansea, U.K. Swansea ph o to by Billy Stock/Shutterstock; roast photo by krivinis/Shutterstock G P W A t i m e s . o r g 56