Advice For New Affiliates, As Offered By The CAP Community

We recently asked our CAP community’s own affiliates for their advice on how to succeed in the affiliate marketing business. The answers they gave may, or may not, surprise you, depending on how much effort you’re really putting into your sites. Check out some of the top tips below, and visit the thread to weigh in on your own advice.
Do Your Homework
“A mistake I see a lot of new webmasters doing is going live before the site is finished. Build the site first, then go over every page and analyze everything to make sure you didn’t miss anything or make a critical error. There are tons of free tools you can use that will help you optimize your site. Then go live and wait.” – fonzi
Gaming affiliate success is no accident and you can avoid a lot of headaches by simply doing your homework before you start building sites and partnering up. Almost every answer we got from Super Affiliates included some variation of, “Research, research, research,” and that’s great advice.
There are dozens, even hundreds, of affiliate programs to choose from and they’re not all created equally. Finding a few that are a good fit for your content; that are also going to pay out honestly is going to be take some time. You’ll need to pour over lengthy Terms & Conditions to make certain you understand exactly what you’re getting into. It’s not going to be easy, but if converting players was easy, no one would be paying you to do it for them.
Exercise Patience
“It’s an obvious one, but be patient. Good SEO rankings in this vertical take at least 18 months so you have to be patient unless you have a bunch of cash to invest in paid media right off the bat, which also will take time to tune and make a profit on.” – Warren
The Internet offers instant everything-you-can-think-of, but true overnight success stories are rare. That means building up an affiliate empire is going to take a lot of time and a lot of patience.
Building up traffic and grabbing those top page rankings is going to take time. One forum poster suggests that new affiliate should expect to wait as much as 18 months before they really see much in the way of page rankings. We’ll leave the debate on exactly how long it takes for another time, but the fact is, it’s not going to happen overnight.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a complex practice that’s constantly changing. And while there are plenty of software applications out there that make some pretty big promises about increasing page rankings overnight. These products may offer some short term help, but there’s no substitute for getting out there and doing the hard work of researching keywords and building traffic.
Some of the best advice the super affiliates gave on this subject was to roll out your sites slowly. Don’t go big all at once, just focus on a few keywords on a few well designed pages and move forward from there.
Diversify
“My piece of advice for affiliates would be to try new things, sometimes the less obvious things can have a lot of impact on the end result. Also with me its just as much about looking at what my competitors are not doing, as it is about looking at what they are doing. – Be bold and try new things.” – Play
Putting all your eggs in one basket isn’t a good idea in any business, but it’s an especially bad idea when you’re in a business that could be shut down completely by the Department of Justice. Once you’ve got a few good gaming affiliate sites going, try repeating the process in another affiliate sector.
Forex Trading and Binary Options sites are a great fit for gaming affiliates looking to diversify their portfolios. These two financial tools are quite complimentary to gaming and are growing quickly. They also have the added benefit of being perfectly legal in the eyes of the Federal Government.
Focus
“Explore a niche that really interests you. Before you get a domain name or start promoting, check out SEOmoz’s free online “Beginner’s Guide To SEO“. Then start learning & exploring more on SEO at google keywords tool and everyplace else you can find. But don’t ‘fall for’ anyone’s get rich quick ‘pitch’. If you are from the USA, you’ll also rest easier if you promote to the NON-USA market.” – rmeeuwsen

Though you’ll definitely want to diversify your overall portfolio, you’ll want to focus your efforts very carefully within each specific sector.  Take a look at the gaming sites out there and see sites focused on niches like roulette, baccarat and other very specific areas.
Affiliates advise newcomers to avoid trying to be everything to everybody all at once. Gamblers know what they want and focusing your content on narrow pathways can yield broad successes.
Utilize Affiliate Communities
“I have to say ask questions about the programs you promote and when I say ask I mean ask other affiliates. While no one can say a certain program is 100% safe, will always pay you and will always take care of your players, we can tell you with 100% accuracy who will not pay you and who will not take care of your players.” – bud 405n
The fact that the affiliates are willing to share their tips with newbies at all tells you a lot about the affiliate marketing community. Community sites like CAP and CasinoMeister are a treasure trove of information for new web masters.
Spend some time digging around on these sites and you’ll find the collected wisdom of decades of affiliate knowledge. You’ll also find that these communities are very welcoming to newcomers and happily answer almost any questions you’ve got.
Whether you consider yourself a super affiliate or not, you’ve probably got one or two pearls of wisdom to share with new affiliates. We’d love to hear from you on our Best Piece of Advice Thread.