GPWA Times Magazine - Issue 48 - December 2020

We often hear that “content is king” when it comes to building an affiliate website. What tips would you give to someone just starting out and may not be familiar with creating content? I do believe that content still has a very im- portant role to play in developing affiliate websites, but finding a proper niche market and right content strategy are probably even more important. As we all know, the compe- tition in the online casino business is quite fierce, but there are still more than enough opportunities for new guys to succeed. There is no easy money in this business, at least not anymore, and they need to spend endless hours on research, formulating and execut- ing content strategy, testing various SEO strategies and seeing what works for them. As for the content itself, my advice would be to think long and hard about what the potential site visitors are searching for. You obviously need to have inmind latest SEO guidelines, but don’t obsess over keyword density, don’t cram the keywords into your content. Simply create well-structured articles, ideally with custom images, that correspond to the main subject and answer the user query as best as you can. If you are writing in English, don’t forget that the majority of readers will not be native English speakers, so use simple phrases and shorter sentences. Please tell us about your Casino- Bloke site. When did it launch and what has its progression been like? CasinoBloke launched in April 2017 and it was my first casino affiliate site. It started as a side project as I had still worked close to full-time for a big affiliate company, man- aging their sports and casino sites, while also managing my own content writing agency. My plan was to create some content whenever we had fewer orders from our regular clients, but that hasn’t happened yet. Once it was up, I couldn’t resist working on it constantly, adding new pages, cover- ing news stories before everyone else, and such an approach helped the site grow and earn a decent number of natural backlinks. Obviously, with a big help from my team of writers. There were virtually no earnings within the first year, but the traffic was decent and there were some sign-ups, so it was just a matter of time. Then in June 2018, the affiliate I had worked for full-time since 2013 offered to buy a majority share in the site and it has been a joint project ever since. My team has continued to manage the site and in July this year we launched a new and vastly improved version. Teamwork has seven full-time employees, a dozen freelance writers that we work with on regular basis, and around 100 writers/trans- lators that we use for these other languages when we receive an order. We have six to sev- en people currently working onCasinoBloke, and there were even more hands on deck when the new version was about to go live. The content on CasinoBloke is quite extensive and detailed with every- thing from casino reviews, bonus offers and software providers to strategy articles, news and game reviews. How did you go about cre- ating such a comprehensive content strategy and how do you go about keeping it updated? The content we now have was a natural progression as we wanted to give our visitors everything they I do believe that content still has a very important role to play in developing affiliate websites , but finding a proper niche market and right content strategy are probably even more important. 49 G P W A t i m e s . o r g