Mihail Todorov is the driving force behind CasinoTopsOnline.com, and is rapidly becoming one of the top players in the casino affiliate business.
We sat down with Todorov recently to find out this thoughts on finding affiliate marketing success and what he has to share with his colleagues in the industry. His approach to affiliate marketing is refreshing straightforward and is full of some some pretty solid tips for new affiliates and old hands as well.
Getting Started or, ‘Do What You Know’
Like a lot of successful gambling affiliates, Todorov started out as a player during his college days. Though he hails from Bulgaria, back in 2006 Todorov was studying in the UK when school, and gambling, friends showed him how gambling and business intersect in the affiliate marketing world.
When he returned home, he was dissatisfied with his chosen career when he remembered what his UK friends had told him about affiliate marketing.
I didn’t know anything about affiliate marketing, but thanks to my friends in the UK I better understood the
process. Basically, I just wanted a nice looking site that would feature top online casino brands. I had all the knowledge related to online casinos and all I wanted was to share it with the world.
Though he didn’t really think affiliate marketing had full-time potential, Todorov stuck with it and was pleasantly surprised by the results:
After 6 months, I wanted to take this work to the next level, probably that is when I realized that casino affiliate marketing can be a big business if you play your cards right.
Keep It Simple
From early on, Todorov had a good idea that simplicity was the key to getting a successful affiliate business off the ground. Rather than spread his efforts across a constellation of sites in a number of markets, he’s focused on Casino Tops Online and, casino games in particular.
In his estimation, it all starts with a good domain name. He decided on CasinoTopOnline because it contained the words, casino and online.
Like most successful affiliates, Todorov learned the value of simplicity the tough way, through trial and error.
Initially our site featured online bingo and sports betting in addition to online casinos, but I decided that is very difficult to accommodate such big markets in a single website. This was the reason to remove bingo and sports betting from our site and concentrate only on online casinos.
Todorov doesn’t really have anything bad to say about other niches, he just realized that casino games were clearly his core competency.
I see online bingo as a very attractive market where players may deposit less compared to online casinos, but you get more
frequent depositors. Another attractive market for me is sports betting, but here I believe it takes a lot more effort and time to establish a good sports betting site.
And when it comes to site traffic, Todorov once again has grasped a fundamental affiliate marketing strategy that not everyone is able to put into practice:
The truth is about quality of traffic not quantity. Our site does not get high volume traffic but rather a traffic that converts.
These days, Casino Tops Online is chugging along very well with a conversion rate that ranges between 2%-7%, which is not too shabby.
Riding Out the Storm
Like all affiliate sites, Casino Tops Online has seen its share of ups and down thanks to regulatory, and SEO, volatility. Here again, Todorov comes at the situation with a simple, logical approach.
The case with UIGEA in the USA and many other countries where online gambling was legal at some point speaks that markets can be lost overnight and profits reduced. Regulations will keep changing in the gaming industry one with positive and other with negative effects.
Casino Tops Online had similar mixed bag of experiences with the Penguin update. In that that instance, some keywords dropped off the charts entirely, while others actually experienced an upward bump. Through it all, Todorov has adhered to a very straightforward, and effective content strategy.
Secrets of Great Content
While plenty of internet pundits pontificate on the secrets to producing quality content, Todorov cuts through the hype in a no-frills fashion.
Our strategy is not a secret and it’s available to read everywhere on the Internet. As stated, content is the King and it’s one of the most important factors to succeed in any online business. We’ve never used duplicate content or content generated for search engines stuffed with keywords etc. It takes more time and effort to produce unique and quality content, but at the end the search engines and we are happy with the results.
His site places a real emphasis on keeping a steady flow of content running, and making certain that content actually adds value to the reader’s experience. It’s really not complicated at all he says.
You should give an honest information to your website visitors if you want them to come back again on your site.
In short, he’s running his sites on the well-established foundations of white hat SEO.
Todorov’s Advice for New Affiliates
We asked Todorov what advice he’d give to new affiliates and he laid out a pretty clear, three-point plan.
- First, get to know the industry you’re targeting. If you have no experience in online gambling it is almost impossible to succeed.
- Second, get to know the affiliate programs that you’re going to work with. In order to be a successful affiliate you need not only to have awareness of the programs, but also understand how commission structures work.
- Third, choose the best website layout and design. While this can take a good portion of your time, it is a good rule of thumb to make your website user friendly and decide on the internal structure.
Affiliate marketing success doesn’t have to be built on dozens of websites and complicated SEO strategies. As Todorov proves every day, affiliates who master the fundamentals and stay on board with white hat practices can rise through the ranks to the super affiliate level.