ence. Your competitor, who inspired you to get started in affiliate marketing might have the funds to secure this license. If, however, you do not, and you have no Plan B, your whole business can crumble. Such unexpected situations can happen — remember when COVID-19 hit and resulted in the cancellation of all sporting events across the globe? The revenues of the affiliates who focused solely on sports betting shrunk, while the ones who also promoted casino products managed to stay afloat. Having a Plan B is essential if you want to increase the chances of survival for your business. On the operator side, on the other hand, if you keep insisting on sticking with a few affiliates that have been consistently delivering good results, you might face the risk of seeing progressively lower conversion rates. Why? Because you keep targeting the very same audience. Your top affiliates might start pressuring you to get bigger commissions and you end up having less return with a higher cost. Moreover, the biggest affiliates will also typically work with most of your competitors and use both of you to get more money — this is simply the way this business works. The winner here is the affiliate. Or, finally, your top affiliates could suddenly engage in an exclusive deal with a competitor and leave you and your brands hanging. This is why it is extremely important to diversify the list of the affiliate partners you work with to ensure consistency in your business’s growth. Final thoughts Certainly, you can choose a niche, stick with it, and hope to become successful. There’s essentially nothing wrong with this strategy, but one needs to understand that in times of uncertainty, not taking the time to develop in other areas can be detrimental to your business. It is the over-reliance on a certain idea that can make it hard for you to succeed. The logic is simple. If you put all your eggs into one basket, and your idea fails, this will destroy your entire company if things do not go as planned. You start to panic, you have difficulties in generating income and you are forced to look into desperate measures to save the day. On the other hand, a balanced portfolio can help your business to survive if one or some of your projects fail. Having a Plan B is essentially an acknowledgment of the uncertainty. This strategy goes beyond the romantic notion of a single idea that is destined to either be successful or fail. This acknowledgment of the uncertainty is what makes your company more resilient and less fragile in the modern competitive environment. We all grow up with an undeniable intrinsic loyalty to Plan A and to the way we expect our lives to turn out if we stick to following the goal. But what if you have to give up on this plan? In such moments, we should focus on embracing one of the most important skills in life — that of developing a Plan B. Maria Tsnompilantze has been working in iGaming for the past four years. She’s a marketing enthusiast with a strong passion for content. We are trained to believe that the most successful companies are the ones who chose a niche, took a risk, and dedicated all their efforts, resources, and money to the one idea that was bound to make them successful. ESSENTIALS OF HAVING A PLAN B G P W A t i m e s . o r g 28
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