industry. Our company was really well positioned to capitalize on the growth of the U.S. market, and we continue to build our footprint year after year. So, what do your family and friends think of your profession now? When I first went full time into this industry, I think my family thought I was crazy. I left a nice paying job at a Fortune 100 company to pursue my passion in this industry. Now, fast forward to today, I think my family understands, supports, and loves what I do. My parents still probably don’t quiteGET the magnitude of what I do, but they support it. My brother works for me as my right-hand man and content manager. My wife is fully supportive as long as the money is still coming in (Laughs).My kids love that I can work anytime from anywhere, and that I’m doing things around sports! My oldest works parttime for me and seems to have interest in doingmore, so that’s all very rewarding forme. How do you think the US sports betting market will change in the next five years? Obviously more and more states will become legal. I think the elephant in the room is the question of when California, Texas and Florida will become legal. These states make up a massive population of the U.S. and will clearly be huge for sports betting activity. We’ve also seen a ton of money come into this space, almost a Gold Rush of sorts, being poured into sports betting startups and acquisitions. I do believe this will settle down and the money will dry up a bit as the market matures. What advice would you have for a fellow iGaming affiliate looking to break into the U.S. market? Don’t try to do everything yourself. Back in the day, successful affiliates could just be an individual that built a site, slapped some content up, threw some ads on it, and boom— signups! Nowadays, there are major affiliate companies that are dominating this industry. If you want to get into this space, make sure you have partnered with the right team. Get the right content team to help you deliver SEO articles at scale. Get the right conversion people to help work on the site CPAs and ads. Take time, get your licenses, and create deals with the operators. My best advice would be to NOT try and tackle this alone; work with partners, teams and agencies that can help speed things up for you. Your company generates a large volume of content on a daily basis. How many full-time employees and freelancers do you currently employ and how have those numbers changed in the past three years? We do. We are writing somewhere around 2,500,000 words per month so far in 2022. That’s a lot of content, coming close to 85,000 words per day. We have a team of six full-time employees that focus on content management, editing, SEO, sales and writing. We then have another 80+ freelancers that work for us. Over the last three years, our team has doubled in growth to keep up with the demand for U.S.-facing sports content. Is it still true that “content is king”? What are some of the other key elements to attracting organic traffic? I’m a bit biased here as I own a successful content agency. But YES, YES, YES. Content is still king. Without it, affiliates can’t get traffic. Without traffic, no one is able to sign up for your offers. Without people signing up for offers, you aren’t an affiliate. So it all begins with GREAT CONTENT. From there, you have to be able to put the right SEO in place to get that content to rank well for the keywords you are targeting. Lastly, the on-page experience needs to be amazing for readers to convert into signups. What about SEO? How much time do you specifically spend on SEO for your sites on weekly basis? Our teamof managers, writers and editors are all trained and educated in SEO. That’s a huge part of the equation for us to deliver great content to affiliates. That said, we don’t focus any time at all on SEO across the Sports 2.0 Network. This goes back to me treating the affiliate marketing side of my business as secondary. The network is a playground for my writers, and gets organic traffic. Maybe someday I’ll make that shift and focus on putting some true SEO effort into the network -- any volunteers to help? (Laughs). GPWA AFFILIATE INTERVIEW SERIES about A little bit more Ryan K. He is 43 years old His favorite food is Pizza His favorite book is Expert Secrets by Russell Brunson He is from Central Illinois, USA He is living in Orlando, Florida, USA His sites are KnupSolutions.com KnupSports.com USAWager.com Sports20.com Images by BestStockFoto/Shutterstock, ESB Professional/Shutterstock, V. Matthiesen/Shutterstock G P W A t i m e s . o r g 50
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