CAP Community Member of the Month Spotlight: jopaa

We are excited to spotlight CAP’s Community Member of the Month for October 2012… Congratulations jopaa! jopaa has not only been incredibly active this past month, but he’s always shared excellent info., posted great questions that end up helping the community tremendously and is just an all-star member. Thanks for all that you do, jopaa!
We caught up with him to learn more about the community member of the month!
1. How did you get started as being an affiliate in iGaming?
I’m a casino player myself, and back in 2008 I’ve started to understand how the whole iGaming affiliate industry works. So, I decided to give it a try and see if I could get some extra income. Now, after almost four years in this industry, I’m doing quite well and being an affiliate is my only job.
2. What are your top traffic drivers, and how did you learn them? 
I’m still struggling to understand this SEO thing. I read a lot about this topic, but I think it will take a lot of time to start doing all the SEO stuff by myself. I’m doing the basics and outsourcing the rest of it.
Still all my traffic comes from search engines (mostly Google), I will surely invest some time and money in SEO optimization for all of my websites.
I’m still a newb in social media but I saw that a lot of people are doing great and bring a lot of traffic so this is on my “to do” list.
3. What factors do you look at when deciding on an operator?
The most important thing is TO BE PAID ON TIME. If this rule fails, there is nothing else that counts for me. I work with some great programs that have negative carryover but pay regularly. So let’s say that this is what I want the first time from an affiliate program.
Anyway, all the programs that I list on my websites must be trusted and their casinos must have a good reputation among the players. I do not list any casino that has lots of complains around the forums, even if some of the rogued programs have contacted me and given me “some” money to list them.
4. What are your thoughts on legal standing of the online gambling industry?
We can already see that a lot of European countries try to legalize online gambling (Spain, Italy, Denmark), but I think this is bad for the affiliates because you cannot have a “global website” anymore do to the diversity of the single jurisdictions. For example: I’m facing problems proposing online casinos on the Italian market because there are no slot machines in these casinos and most of the players do not play there, even if they have Italian license and can be considered “safer” than other online casinos.
This being said, since I don’t know how gambling is going to be in the next couple of years, I’m trying to diversify my income. Adsense websites are my second source of income but I have other types of website that bring me some money.
5. What was the biggest lesson you learned in your years of being in this business?
The biggest lesson has been, “Don’t put all your eggs in the same basket.” No matter how trustful an affiliate program is at the moment and no matter for how long it is in the industry, sooner or later they may become rogue and in a way or another will break their agreement with the affiliates. For 90% of the affiliate programs around it is only a matter of time before they will do such things.
We must keep reading the CAP forums and other affiliate forums and keep our eyes open for all the negative changes.