At its core, affiliate marketing in the gaming industry seems easy enough—potential players come to your site, hopefully for stellar content, and leave as paying depositors. It’s easy, right? Wrong. Converting visitors into players requires a great deal of advance planning well before your site ever goes live.
Your chances of converting players can skyrocket if you focus in the just a few key areas like:
- Quality Content
- Value Proposition
- Site Usability
- Credibility
- Good Customer Service
Remember, unless you’re working under a CPA model, you only earn revenue on players who actually wind up depositing with your affiliated casinos or performing some other action like registering on the site. So keeping visitors engaged in your site and coming back for more is absolutely essential.
In this guide, we’ll take a look at some best practices for building a high quality site that serves one purpose; building sky high conversion rates.
CHAPTER 1: Importance of Converting Players
If you ask a dozen experienced affiliate marketing veterans what’s a good conversion rate, you’ll probably get a dozen different answers; and they’ll all be right. That’s because conversions rates only tell part of the story. If you’re marketing towards whales (free spending, high rollers) you can be very successful with a very small conversion rate. But if you’re chasing after more budget conscious bingo players, you’ll need to convert a lot more players if you want to see a profit.
There’s nothing wrong with chasing after either market, so long as you’re really focused on providing those players with something of value.
Determine the Purpose of Your Website
Casino affiliate marketing is a great way of building residual income and that is, understandably, pretty exciting for most folks. Unfortunately, that same enthusiasm for getting into the game causes many new web masters to rush into building a site before they really have an idea of what they’re doing, or which market they’re targeting. So before you start building that first really great WordPress site, you need to narrow your goals a bit.
Determining the purpose of your site may sound simple, but once you start pulling on a few little strings, your whole sweater may quickly pull apart. You may find it worthwhile to sit down with a pen and paper (remember those?) and jot down the answers to a few simple questions like:
- Who do you want to visit your site? Be as specific as possible. There are about as many niches in the gambling market as there are actual gamblers. But the more focused you make your marketing efforts and content, the better chance you’ll have of converting players.
- What do you want visitors to do once they’ve arrived at your site? Do you want them there to read stellar sports content before heading off to their favorite sports book to spend some money? Do you want them to compare various bonus offers before moving on to another site?
- Think hard about what features you really like, and dislike, in the sites that you visit. Be as specific as possible, because details really matter on the Internet. You only have a limited window of opportunity to keep your site visitors interested in taking the next step before they move on.
Unless you’ve really focused your content and site design and exactly for the kind of players you’re hoping to convert, all your efforts to get them there in the first place will have been for nothing. At the end of the day, you’re probably better off running several sites with very specific target markets, rather than one site that isn’t focused at all.
Conversion Stats
Converting site visitors is really just another form of sales and sales is nothing more than a numbers game. Successful sales people know that they’ll go through a lot of leads before landing a sale. That same dynamic applies to converting players, too. If you’re converting 3-5 percent of your site visitors into depositing players, you’re doing pretty well.
No matter how many players you’re converting, you’ll definitely want to keep a very close eye on your site metrics. Understanding exactly who is coming to your site; where they’re coming from; and when they’re leaving is essential for building affiliate income. It also gives you a very good idea of which features on your site are working and which ones should be trashed. (We’ll talk a lot more about this in Chapter 6)
What’s Next? Chapter 2: Create A Value Proposition