Affiliate Interview: Brian Buckley, Zero to $100k

Warren: All right. Hello, everyone. You’re watching another CasinoAffiliatePrograms.com video interview where we profile some of the most influential people in the gaming industry. Today we’re going to talk with Brian Buckley, CEO of Winley Marketing, about becoming a successful PPC affiliate in the online gaming industry. We’re going to uncover how Brian went from installing countertops to becoming one of the few affiliates who’ve surpassed $100K a month in earnings in less than 12 months of being in the business. Brian, thanks for your time today.

Brian: Hey.

Warren: If you could please take a minute or two and give us a quick biography of yourself, that would be great.

Brian: Yeah, it’s no problem. Warren, thank you very much. Basically, I’ve been in the affiliate marketing industry since November of 2009, when a high school friend of mine, Ed Zimbardi, helped me get into the business after the construction industry failed. Since then, I started out doing other niches, and finally ended up in the casino space probably about nine months ago. Just really focused our energy on it to get to the level where we are right now.

Warren: Great. Can you tell us how you landed in the casino industry specifically?

Brian: Yes. My college roommate supplies all the apparel for Bodog. Made an introduction there. Actually, that week was the first conference in Prague. I flew to Prague not knowing anyone. I was introduced to you and Brooke Cole, and with your guidance and CAP’s guidance, it helped pave the path to where I’m at today.

Warren: Great. What verticals do you currently promote?

Brian: Mostly slots, slots and bingo are two main focuses at the present time. We’re looking to expand out and broaden a little further in the future, with your guidance and CAP and Brooke on what direction we’re heading. That’s been our main focus at the present, and just last May we took on horse racing, the Kentucky Derby.

Warren: Great. You’re one of the most prominent PPC affiliates in the space. Why did you choose PPC, and what makes you different than the rest of affiliates who attempt PPC marketing?

Brian: PPC is something that we were good at on the other end. Some of our financial sector, premium SMS, so we really understood pay per click advertising. I think one of the things that might make us stand out a little more is that I like to focus on a specific demographic. It’s not necessarily the product that I’m pushing, but it’s more the demographic of who likes that product. I often say if I was going to throw a barbeque and wanted it to be successful, I wouldn’t invite 1,000 vegetarians. I would prefer to invite 1,000 football players. You have to find targeted niche traffic. No matter what it is, you have to understand the demographic of that person and their wants and needs.

Another friend of mine, when I first got in the business, told me – Warren Whitlock, he’s written several books – that, “You must listen and love. You have to listen and understand what your market wants, no matter what the niche is, and give it to them.” I’m not trying to sell you anything. I want to hear what you need from me. My goal in life is to help you and to help whoever’s out there on the Internet get what they want and help them achieve that. I don’t need to shove a hamburger down a vegetarian’s throat. It’s just not going to happen.

Warren: Yeah. So why did you choose PPC over SEO or email marketing, where you could have done a similar type of targeting, although slightly different?

Brian: Yes. One, we had some of the funds behind us and the ability to do that. I felt like it wasn’t such a long haul trail. I respect highly what the SEO guys do and some of the other ways to drive traffic. I just felt our quickest, with least barrier to entry, was PPC. It’s what we were good at. We understand how to get good click pricing across all platforms. It was kind of our core competency, which is one of those things I say you need to be focused. Do what you do and do it very well.

SEO is not what I do. It’s not my cup of tea. My ability to be successful in that I found to be less likely than something that I know that we’re very good at. I can drive massive amounts of traffic across any pay per click platform, so that’s ideally why we chose it.

Warren: Okay. Great. How long did it take for you to start making a profit?

Brian: To be honest, the first few months were kind of a trial and error, figuring it out. I would say by month four or five is when we became profitable to maybe where you could eat. Then after that, it just rolled on. The real registrations and everything, it just started to compound and pile on. Now it’s just doing its thing.

It took a little bit. It took some long days, focus to really discover what it is and the values of different words. Different words, different positions, they have different values. You’ve got to evaluate what that cost is to acquire that click, and does it back out to a correct or lie on the back end?

Warren: Most of your business is on a revenue share rather than a CPA, so when you say value, you’re talking about player values, correct?

Brian: Correct, yes. We do it in different ways. So we do some CPAs. It’s also what is the cost to acquire whatever model it is that we’re performing under. At the end of the day, you’ve got to look at all that data and decide what way is backing out best for you, and is it profitable?

Warren: Okay. From starting out until now, what was the biggest mistake you made along the way?

Brian: Biggest mistake is that I probably just went gung-ho without that focused attitude that I had. Just throw it to the wall and see what sticks. An expensive hindsight taught us that whoa, this is the wrong approach. We blew through some big money in the first few months. It took a little while to recoup it. So that was probably the biggest mistake.

Warren: So you thought it might have been a little easier than it actually was, perhaps.

Brian: Yeah, 100%. It wasn’t like, here, throw up an ad and watch the masses come. The masses came, as far as clicks, but clicks will cost you a lot of money.

Warren: Yeah.

Brian: You need action. You need an action to happen on that click, or you might as well throw the money out the window.

Warren: Yeah. So once you started making a profit, what got you to break through to the next level, where you saw okay, not only can I make a profit doing this, but there’s some serious money to be had? What was that breakthrough for you?

Brian: It’s probably, going back to what I said, discovering exactly what that targeted demographic was. Once you hit it and find it and understand it, it’s just scaling it. It’s just throwing down the hammer, increasing that volume.

Warren: Okay. What did you do to scale it? Obviously, in PPC, you can throw more money behind it and scale it that way. But how did you find the right partners? How did you structure the right deals? What did you do to really make this a scalable business where not only has there been growth from where you started, but also you see potential growth in the future?

Brian: To be honest, a lot of that came with direct advice from Brooke Cole, at CAP, spent a lot of time with me helping me lay out, make the right connections, drawing down a roadmap to it. Then once we understood what we were able to deliver, it was then CAP helping us match up with the correct partner for what we had and what was the best fit to where we knew it would be a successful campaign on both ends.

Warren: Okay. Without giving away all your secret sauce, could you share with the audience some of your best performing partners? Maybe one or two, just programs that you want to give a shout-out to, that not only perform well but stick to their word and pay their bills? I think everyone’s always curious who those programs are.

Brian: Yes, I would say AffActive has been a very good and strong partner for us. Bodog has had a very tight relationship with us. They tend to always do exactly what they say they’re going to do. GWages, they’ve performed well for us. Rialto, another great partner for us to work with. Winner, Fortune Affiliates, all these guys are top notch. When I have direct meetings with them, everything that’s discussed happens. I’ve had no issues with things falling through, or after we’ve discussed it, anybody coming back and saying, “No, that’s not what we talked about.”

I’m very precise, and I detail out exactly what expectations they can see from me. I’ve been very fortunate that the same has been seen on the other side, that everything has been delivered as they said it would be.

Warren: Okay. Great. You’re also managing PPC campaigns for other successful affiliates who are trying to diversify away from SEO or email or media buys, whatever they specialize in. Why would you do that for your competition?

Brian: I get asked that question a good handful of times. I don’t view it as competition. I view it more as joint venture deals, that there are only certain spaces in PPC. If there are 20 positions, there’s only a certain number of those 20 that really bring the volume. If I can bring in a joint venture type partner that I can trust and we can do long-term business with, it’s a benefit of me to help secure those positions that drive the most players, for both the partner relationship and also on the JV relationship.

The competition are those that are not a joint venture partner with me. That’s the competition. You’ve made several good introductions for me. We run some PPC for some other folks. It works out great. We don’t tend to step on each other’s toes.
We also help monetize on things outside of this world into more the straight affiliate world. So it’s kind of a long-term joint venture deal. The more core people I meet in the business, the better all around business it is for us and hopefully for my JV partners as well.

Warren: Okay, great. If an affiliate is watching this that might be interested in utilizing your services or looking at a joint venture with you, because they’re, again, really good at something else, they don’t understand the PPC world, they want to leverage it, how would that work? Do you want to share any information about what that joint venture looks like, what they can expect, what you can expect? I think some detail around that might be helpful.

Brian: Generally, each deal is done a little different. I view every situation as its own and unique. Everything I do in my business across all boards – our email platform, PPV, SMS – anything that we do, I view each as differently. I want to find the need of that potential JV partner and expectations of what they want, and just see if that works and backs out for both of us.

Generally, the fee is a percentage on spend along with a price to set up campaigns. It just depends on how far and how detailed they want to go. Do they want to do some email data collection? Do they want to mail outside affiliate offers? Do they want to partner up and JV on some additional things that we do outside of this niche space?
I’m always open to different ideas and deals. I respect contacts that are made through CAP. I know those relationships that are brought to me are strong, that they’re good, solid people. I’m always open to entertain any kind of joint venture deal that’s brought to me.

Warren: Okay. If someone wanted to get a hold of you to propose a joint venture or find out more, what would be the best way to do that?

Brian: Contact Warren Jolly at . . .

Warren: How about a direct email address for you?

Brian: No, I don’t have a direct email address that I do give out.

Warren: So you’d like them just to contact you through CAP or through another medium?

Brian: Yes, through CAP would probably the best way. I would feel good that that relationship was brought to me via you, and that you’re confident in who you put together with me.

Warren: Great, okay. What do you like best about being a casino affiliate?

Brian: The people in this niche space are good people to deal with. Everybody is creative and innovative, always on, thinking outside the box, creative. The events are great events. Just good networking, good social people.

Warren: Okay. And what drives you crazy about it?

Brian: Got a few minutes?

Warren: We’ve got some time left.

Brian: Exactly. Probably for us, one of the more challenging things is player tracking. We own an affiliate network as well, so we’re able to place pixels for all of our publishers. That to me is the biggest challenge. That if I was able to place a pixel to see the value of clicks and to see what was actually, truly driving and the value of the person that it drove, it would be such better intel for all parties involved here because you would be able to see the price of that click to drive what type of person it drives.

Right now, it’s a little blind. Yes, you can get links. We’ll produce you 500 links. But you’re trying to match up 500 links with 50,000 clicks a day. That’s a full-time job in itself.
Fortunately, some of our partners have been able to place pixels. It’s made a huge difference. It’s made a huge difference for everyone. That right there, tracking and understanding, some platforms show you the demographic on the back end, it just helps reaffirm where the good value traffic is coming from.
To me, that’s one of the bigger things is that I don’t understand why it’s not more easily accessible. It benefits everyone to be able to place a pixel or to have a better tracking source other than just here’s a URL. It puts the constraint on the affiliate, which the affiliate’s job is to master what he does. If everybody would work in partnership, it would be a better formula for everyone involved.

Warren: Okay. So, if an operator’s watching this interview and they want to work with you and get some of your traffic along those lines, what would be your one word of advice to them?

Brian: Allow me to place a pixel.

Warren: Okay.

Brian: If I can place a pixel, it helps tremendously at both ends.

Warren: Okay.

Brian: Helps both of us see a lot more intel and make a lot better value decisions.

Warren: Okay. What are one or two tools that you use every day to help you with your affiliate business?

Brian: Biggest tool, CAP.

Warren: Thank you for that.

Brian: Just a lot of KeywordSpy. We use KeywordSpy a lot. Compete, I’m a big fan of Compete. It’s all intel. Biggest thing is just intel.

I know a handful of affiliates, “Oh, I work four days a week, I make $100,000 a month.” I don’t understand that concept that if you do that, why wouldn’t you work 16 hours a day and make $20 million a week? It’s just long hours of analyzing data and understanding what it is you’re good at.
There’s always room to improve. I’m always looking for a better ROI, a cheaper click, a higher quality score. You’ve got to break apart your business, micro, and then build it back up. Figure out where your weaknesses are and plug that hole in that dam.

Warren: Okay. Where are you going next with your business? What do the next 12, 24 months look like?

Brian: They look like Canada, Australia, some other German, some outer-lying European countries. That’s the big focus.

Warren: Okay. I guess lastly, what would be some words of advice? If there’s a newer affiliate watching this interview or someone who’s thinking about getting into the industry, what would be your words of caution or advice? How would you prevent them from making maybe similar mistakes that you’ve made?

Brian: I think the biggest is listen. Do your intel. I think forums are a good place to listen and pick up little tidbits. I don’t think they’re a place to live. I don’t find a whole lot of value in gossip. But I think they’re some of the places to understand and figure out whatever means of traffic. I would focus on that means of traffic. If SEO is your thing, focus on SEO. If email is your thing, email.

It’s not until recently that we spread out. We have email and different things, but our core competency was PPC, and that’s all we focused on. We focused on one partner, and we understood that partner inside and out before I moved on to another partner. It’s the same as we progress into Australia and other countries. We’ll take each country one at a time, master it, get it to a level that’s profitable before we move on. To me, that’s one of the things I think people fail.
Also, six figures does not come overnight. It’s definitely there, but it’s definitely not going to happen in 60 days. It can definitely happen within nine months.

Warren: You still believe that to be true today.

Brian: Yes, I do. Yeah, I do, 100%. If you’re trying to get to a party and you have a flat tire, you’re going to figure out a way to fix that flat tire to get to the party. You’re not going to give up because you have a flat tire. You get a second one. You’re going to figure out a way. You’ve got to be constantly changing and figuring it out.

New ways are always evolving. I graduated University of Georgia in ’96. There was no Internet. This is all new. So it’s constantly learning, changing. You have to continue to learn, re-evaluate what you’re doing, refocus and fit the need. You can’t lay dormant. That’s the biggest thing.

Warren: All right. Well, thanks for your time, Brian. We’re up on time right now. We really appreciate all the inside information, and again, it’s a pleasure having you.

Brian: Yeah, Warren, thank you very much. I appreciate all that you and Brooke and CAP have done for us here at Winley. Thank you very much.

Warren: All right. You’re more than welcome. Take care.

Brian:All right.