GPWA Times Magazine - Issue 48 - December 2020

For the newest edition of the GPWA affiliate interview series, we sat down with a former weatherman, a life-long writer and a professional poker player. Three completely different careers that ultimately led Thomas, Nemanja and Narciso to plying their skills as affiliates. In the following pages, they explain how their past professions have helped them as webmasters, what they’ve done to adapt to life during a pandemic, and what keeps them busy when they aren’t wearing their iGaming affiliate hats. GPWA AFFILIATE INTERVIEW SERIES Nemanja L. - Juan Roman You have been a professional writ- er for over a decade. How did that lead you to the iGaming industry? Actually, my first job after University was as a content writer and translator for a local sports betting affiliate. Their sports betting sites were pretty big at the time, and I spent a couple of years there before the owners were arrested and the company fell apart. They had done nothing wrong and were cleared of all charges five years later, but the situation forced me to look for other freelance gigs. I found quite a few of those and slowly got acquainted with casino, pok- er and other iGaming verticals. When one of my clients offered me a full-time position, I didn’t want all the other freelance gigs to go to waste, so I delegated some of those to a friend of mine. As the workload kept increasing, I started hiring more people to help out and that is how Teamwork was born as a content writing agency. Teamwork’s primary area of exper- tise is generating localized casino content and creating and translating content in over 25 languages. What is your client base like and why did your company decide to take this path? I decided to focus on casino rath- er than sports betting after my first sports betting website proved to be a failure. Ac- tually, the site got a staggering number of natural backlinks (some from Wikipedia) and ranked pretty well in Google, but I didn’t know the value of backlinks at the time. That was some six or seven years ago. Having spent a lot of money on the writers creating match previews, I decided to call it quits and focus on the casino vertical. Our client base mostly consists of casino affiliates, we also work with some online casinos and sports betting affiliates. Until a couple of years ago, we were only pro- ducing content in English, but I noticed the demand for other languages and act- ed accordingly. We spent a lot of money and effort towards finding good writers for each of the languages currently in our portfolio, only accepting writers vetted by three independent native speakers. The decision proved a very good one. We have mostly been getting orders from long-term clients for other languages, we have yet to properly promote our localization services to a wider audience. An iGaming veteran of well over a decade, “JuanRoman” has taken the “content is king” mantra to a whole new level, while continuing to evolve in other sectors of the industry Poker photo by Kaspars Grinvalds/Shutterstock G P W A t i m e s . o r g 48