What’s the best way to stand out in the crowd? How can you have your voice heard when it seems like your competition has a megaphone that drowns out your message?
Getting content to engage readers can seem daunting for smaller affiliates in the sports betting industry. In this article, we identify a few excellent strategies that smaller affiliates can employ to compete with bigger sites when it comes to generating sports betting content.
Affiliates in established markets such as the UK have used odds comparisons and reviews of sportsbooks to engage users and drive them to the sites and the brands that they have partnered with.
But a different approach might be required in the US. If you look at the headline acquisitions made by the likes of XL Media, Catena Media, and Better Collective, it seems the affiliate giants are betting on sports media as being the most successful model.
Should You Produce Sports Content or Sports Betting Content?
Your affiliate site could do a blend of mobile sports app or retail sportsbook reviews, or it could produce mostly sports content that keeps sports fans up to date with the latest news, previews, reviews, and analysis. Of course, you can also choose a blend of both.
Sportsbook review content is finite and very competitive. Ranking near the top of page 1 of a search engine for an app review is going to be hard. It’s not impossible, but it’s difficult.
But if you can regularly produce interesting and helpful sports content, there are many topic ideas you can select and potentially rank for. Those pages can earn you organic search traffic and potential revenue through your affiliate partnerships.
Here are a few strategies to assist you in forming a content plan:
Research Keyword Opportunities
Often, affiliates just push out content at a feverish pace without examining whether it will be successful. Before pushing PUBLISH, do your homework by diving into Google Search Console to locate content opportunities.
Google Search Console is a free tool from the world’s largest search engine that allows you to see search engine traffic estimates for particular keywords, phrases, and even article titles. You can also compare content that your competition creates to see whether it performs well. If it does, can you create a piece of content about that topic that’s even better?
Make Your Content Different
What’s the point of producing content that’s almost identical to everyone else?
Say you’re going to create sportsbook app reviews: is there something about your reviews that stand out from the reviews on other sites? Can you get quotes from the sportsbooks themselves? How about producing graphics or videos that illustrate the sportsbook apps?
Don’t publish the same stuff everyone else is, unless your content is much, much better. Otherwise, you’re fighting over the scraps left over from the other websites that will rank higher for that topic.
Consider Longtail Evergreen Content
Every piece of content you create should either educate or entertain your audience. Ask yourself if the content you assign to a writer or content creator does one or both of those things. If it does not, don’t create it.
When you’re creating news style content about sports in the U.S., can you make it useful and different than what everyone else is doing? If it’s just a paragraph of odds and an expert pick, that might be useful to a few readers, but will that piece of content earn you traffic next week, next month?
Build pages with content that doesn’t expire, or that can be updated easily. Aim to have those pages rank on Google or Bing so you can attract thousands of page views each month.
Lastly, consult with or hire a digital marketing company that specializes in content marketing. A seasoned content marketer will know how to prepare your affiliate site to publish content that delivers results.
Ultimately, sports betting affiliates should produce a wide range of content types, including sports news as well as the odds comparisons and reviews that have become staples in other markets around the world.