GPWA Times Magazine - Issue 49 - April 2021

about A little bit more Jason D. He is 50 years old His favorite food is Chocolate brownies His site is loquax.co.uk His favorite book is Can’t Hurt Me: Master Your Mind and Defy the Odds by David Goggins He is living in Llanelli, Wales His hometown is Emsworth, Hampshire, U.K. loquax so that you build respect and reputation. Not every site review deserves five stars! It’s also not going to be an easy ride. It has become a lot harder for a lot of affiliates due to compliance, social media restric- tions, limits what you can/can’t do, but there’s still room for those who want to try whether they’re going solo or a bigger company. A good example is Wayne Howe (ex-Which Bingo) has just launched his first site (howaboutbingo.com) and it looks great. Yes, it has the usual reviews etc., but also a unique style which hopefully will pay off for him. Your blog at Loquax is updated reg- ularly. Is the motto “content is king” still true? I’m not sure content is king for the user, it’s more for Google. People like snippets of information in 140 characters or less and that’s the worldwe live in now. Sound bites of informationwhich hopefully interests someone enough to readmore. Unfortunate- ly, as a gambling affiliate, using social media is either not allowed or an egg-shell-walking process that’s often best avoided. However, I do like writing and if nothing else creating the blog content keeps me interested and entertained. A lot of our blog content currently surrounds “win a house raffles/competitions.” People put their homes up for sale via a competition and people buy tickets to enter. It’s an in- teresting sub-category of our site and also one of the most popular. It’s helped get us noticed by the press, which gets us a link here and there, which I guess all helps in the grand scheme of things. Tell us about the name Loquax. We established the site in 1998 and back then it was on an ISP’s hosting (Demon Internet if anyone in the U.K. remembers them). We chose “Loquax” as it sounded distinctive and more importantly could be anything we wanted it to be. Originally, we started build- ing a shopping site but that lasted about two hours when we realized how boring it was. Who knew that voucher codes would be a big part of affiliate marketing, eh? As the original site grew we had to move to proper hosting. We had limited funds so we stuck with the same people we knew when we bought our first .co.uk address. I think it cost around £100, which was a sizable chunk of our savings at the time. I don’t even know if a keyword domain like “competitions” or “bingo” was available back then. I didn’t know that they’d have been good acquisitions, so never looked. In many respects it’s been a good asset for us. We added a duck character into the logo around 2010, I think, which knitted things together really well. However, thanks to the good old UKGC we had to drop it because an operator wouldn’t work with us as the duck in the logo was too “child appealing.” Before starting an affiliate business you were a Geochemistry PhD. Is that something you always wanted to be? Did your experience in that field help you in run and successfully become an iGaming affiliate in any way? I did enjoy chemistry at school and started working at SmithKline as a Lab Tech. I then left there to do a degree but Whenwe started, Googledidn’t exist , no one had an iPhone, socialmedia was unheard of and noonewas gambling online. So, we’ve pretty much seeneverything change .When affiliate marketing started to develop in theU.K. itwas mainly bedroomaffiliates creatingwebsites . Now it’s companies and folks halfmy age! Emsworth photo by AVM Images/Shutterstock; Llanelli photo by Colin Burdett/Shutterstock; Chocolate brownies photo by Africa Studio/Shutterstock 47 G P W A t i m e s . o r g