So as I mentioned in my last post, I’ve been looking to run some paid search activity in the gambling sector for the first time. Due to Google’s stance on gambling though, that isn’t as easy as it first sounds.

If you want to run paid search activity in pretty much any other niche, you can simply sign up for an AdWords account, choose which keywords you want to target and get your ads up within the hour.

Gambling is different though with all of its restrictions. As keen as Google is to get their hands on your credit card details, they need to find out a bit more information about you before they give your ads the all clear.

To get the green light you need, you need to go through a specific approval process which isn’t quite as clear/simple as it might be. So, with that in mind, I thought I’d write a quick post to talk you through the process that I used to gain my approval.

Beginning the process

First of all, head on over to http://support.google.com/adwordspolicy/answer/176014?hl=en. This is the beginning of the process and provides information about Google’s stance on gambling.

Essentially, you need to ensure that gambling is legal in the country that you’re looking to advertise in.

For example, promoting casinos in the likes of the UK is fine, but if you’re looking to do something similar in the US, then you’re going to run into problems. For the purpose of this walk through, I will be applying for permission to promote gambling in the UK. However, if you’re looking to advertise in other markets, the link above will give you more information about what is and isn’t allowed in each of them.

Once you’ve read about what Google allows, have a look for the following paragraph (or something similar). At the time of writing, this is the second ‘question’ down from the top of the page.

You’ll notice that you have two different ways of applying: you can either apply as a ‘State Run Entity’ or as a ‘Privately Licensed Operator.’ As an affiliate, you’ll want to apply as the second option.

Now, despite the fact that the term ‘Privately Licensed Operator’ might sound like you need apply certifications from other industry bodies, I can assure you that in the UK an affiliate will not any other certificates or licenses to become Adwords approved.

You will need to have a quality, established site though which has quality and unique content on it as Google generally doesn’t like thin microsites – especially in the gambling niche.

So click on through to the Gambling Application form. You should find that the top of the form looks like the image on the left.

Now to fill this in, you’ll need the following information:

• First Name
• Last Name
• Contact Email Address
• Adwords Customer ID (you can find this at the top of the page when you login to your Adwords account)
• Type of country application (As long as your site only provides information, rather than specific gambling services, select ‘Aggregator’)

When you make this last selection, a further part of the form will be become visible, and you’ll be asked to enter the URL of your website. This should be the affiliate site that you’re looking to drive traffic to.

Google will check the site, so make sure it’s a good one. This process can be surprisingly simple if you have a good quality site, but Google can be very picky if you don’t.

What are Google looking for?

So what qualifies as a good quality site? Well, Google obviously doesn’t like making things easy for you, so you’re not going go find a specific check list of things for you to include on your website.

Having spoken to a few other affiliates, there do seem to a few recurring themes that Google like to see when evaluating a site though.

• Having a Gamble Aware link on your page can help
• Google won’t accept sites that only provide ‘tips’ or bonus codes
• Instead, they want sites that contain reviews of companies that are registered with the Gambling Commission and hold a valid operating license

Finalising your submission

You need to apply separately for each individual site you want to run Paid Search activity for, so don’t assume that you can put one URL in this part of the form and use your Adwords account to drive traffic elsewhere, because you can’t and if you try to, you’re likely to find that your ads are suspended pretty quickly (if they manage to run at all!)

Anyway, once you’ve finalised all your details, you can hit the submit button and you’ll be taken to another page confirming that your details have been sent to Google. From there, it’s a case of waiting three or four working days until you get a result.

Hopefully, you’ll get a response that is something along the lines of the email below. However, in case your application be refused, then you should receive feedback from Google as to what needs to change for your next submission.

Is the process worth it? The honest answer is that I’m not sure yet – I’ve just had my first paid campaign go live though, so I’ll look to provide some feedback on here over the course of the next few weeks and let you know how they go.

The post How to apply to run PPC Gambling ads on Google appeared first on The Affiliate Life.

I make a resonable income from my affiliate sites – it certainly doesn’t compare to some of the super affiliates out there, but it has allowed me to do things like buy my own place and start planning for a wedding.

As with most affiliates though, I’m not hugely keen on resting on my laurels. I’m looking to push on to the next level both in terms of the work that I’m doing and the earnings that I’m generating … and to help me do that I understand that I need to work more efficiently.

I think when you’re starting out with your first affiliate sites, it’s good to be a little bit disorganised: play around with a load of different stuff, learn what works and what doesn’t and try out a load of different niches to understand how to run a website and generate revenue.

As things develop though, you have to value your time a lot more to ensure that your business continues to grow in the way that you would like it to. You’ll need to start outsourcing your day-to-day stuff so that you can work on the bigger picture.

This is quite a big step to make and can be quite difficult for a number of affiliates, especially those who are still learning how to run a business. After all, if I’m going to be outsourcing my day-to-day work how can I make sure that the stuff I’m spending my time on is the stuff that will push both my business and its revenue forward in the long term?

To help with this, I’ve been doing a fair bit of reading recently around efficiences, business potential and strategy.

One phrase that has stuck in my head has come from a course on unlocking an individual’s potential. It went something along these lines: the common theme among those people who are successful is that they take action where as unsuccessful people simply talk about what they’re going to do.

This rang a fair few bells with me. The online market place is so diverse and includes so many different weird and wonderful things that it’s incredibly easy to find yourself playing the role of a child in a sweet shop:

I’m brilliant at doing this and it’s one of the main things that I need to change. Too often, I’ll hear something which I think sounds amazing and I swear to myself, I’ll look into it more and maybe even look at testing it for myself.

Only, a week or two later I’ll have completely forgotten about it and the next time I hear about it (if I do ever hear about it again!), will be year later and I’ll kick myself for the time I’ve wasted in testing its effectiveness.

Action

Things have changed this month though. In the spirit of taking action rather than just talking about a load of cool stuff, I am now making a note of all ideas I have as soon as I have them, and I’d urge you to do the same.

These ideas can be written down anywhere, but I’d suggest you keep them all in one place. If you own an iPad, then the ‘Tasks’ app will be up for the job, but I’d recommend something like Evernote which works across multiple devices and is perfect for jotting down ideas: not only does it contain a little notepad, but it also allows you to take pictures and save URLs. Oh, and it’s free.

Wherever you make your notes though, ensure you review them on a regular basis, as they are a great way to allow you to step back and see the bigger picture. From there, they will also give you the opportunity to prioritise your ideas. You may even start to see that a few of your ideas can fit together to provide a completely new insight which you may well not have got at all if you hadn’t written stuff down.

Prioritising your ideas will allow you to see which of them will help your company make the biggest leap forward in terms of your current strategy. From there, you can commit to a particular idea fully, knowing that completing it will be the best step forward for your business.

By all means, keep adding ideas to your list, but do not start working on these new ideas until you’ve completed your current task – after all, why would you? You’ve already identified your current project as the most important step to help you get to where you want to be.

Example:

It’s very weird how once you start to put the building blocks in place, you suddenly find a load more opportunities being thrown your way.

My list is obviously still very much in its infancy, but a week after I put the above into practice, I found myself in a presentation being given by Google regarding various innovations that they’ve brought in over the last few months.

A large part of the presentation was based around YouTube, where I have been focusing alot of my own efforts over the past few months. I found it really informative and picked up a load of information (generally around targeting and re-targeting) that I didn’t know previous existed. As a result, I started getting a load of ideas about how I could improve my own YouTube presence.

These were written down immediately, and while they each need to evaluated in their own light, I’m I’m pleased to say that I’ve taken the action that will allow me to evaluate all of my other ideas: I applied for accreditation to run gambling ads across the YouTube channel.

This might sound like a small step to a lot of people, but in the past I’ve been very good at having ideas on the spur of the moment and then never taking action on them.

Anyway, the good news is that I got approved a few days ago, so I’m going to push on and try a few tests. The data that I get from those tests will then allow me to make an informed decision on whether my other ideas are feasible.

They may well not be, which is equally fine with me. Marketing is all about coming up with ideas, testing how successful they are and then optimising those which work while looking to replace those ones that don’t.

All marketing starts from ideas though – and they’re not easy to come by and often pass through your head in a fraction of a second. So if you end up having one, don’t wait 5 or 10 minutes before you write it down as you’ll find that if they’re not caught straight away, often they’ll be gone for good.

Useful Tools: Evernote

The post Actioning those ideas which will take your business to the next level appeared first on The Affiliate Life.

I just wanted to give a shout out to the Pinterest page which I’ve set up for one of my sites – if anyone has an account there, I’d really appreciate a ‘Follow’ – and I’m happy to add you back

http://www.pinterest.com/slotgames

At the moment, I’m still trying to figure out how the whole thing works and whether I can drive any traffic with it, but I’ve set up a few boards and plan to add hi-res images for a wide range of online slots so hopefully it might be a useful resource to any of you looking for images to use on your sites.

If anyone has any thoughts or experience of using Pinterest, then please feel free to stick them in the comments below – otherwise I’ll report back when I have some decent findings.

The post Join me on Pinterest! appeared first on The Affiliate Life.

The question of how affiliate links and clicks should be tracked is one that has been around since I first became an affiliate about five years ago now.

However recently, I’ve seen a bit of an explosion of posts on various forums regarding the best way to do all this so I thought I’d write a quick post to explain how I’ve set up affiliate tracking on my sites.

I’m not suggesting this is the definitive way of doing things – in fact, I’m hoping that a few of may well point out a few holes in my system, so that I can improve it. However, setting up your tracking in the following manner does have a number of advantages:

• It’s quick and simple to implement
• Should your affiliate links change, all click throughs on your site can be updated with just a single upload
• All clicks on your affiliate links will be tracked in Google to allow you to see what channels and keywords are working for you.

I’ve included the PHP template files I use in a zip file for you to use yourselves. You may want to download these files before reading on so that you can keep a track of what’s going on … although, it’s all very simple so downloads are certainly not required!

Template files can be downloaded here »

So, here we go.

Setting up your website

1. Network Structure

As with a lot of other affiliates, I house all my affiliate links within a single directory called something like ‘go’ or ‘play’.

Within this directory, I have further individual folders which are dedicated to each of the operators that I’m promoting. These are the folders which will store my affiliate links.

I’ve included a screenshot to the left which should hopefully clarify this – it’s taken from one of my casino sites.

2. Analytics Tracking

Now each time that a visitor to my site clicks on a link, I want their action to show up in my Google Analytics reports. Therefore, it’s important that my GA code fires every time that a click is generated.

The easiest way of setting this up, is to copy and paste your tracking code into a blank document and save it as a .php file. For the purpose of this tutorial, I’ll name my file tracking.php and then upload it to my ‘go’ directory alongside the individual casino folders.

3. Inserting the Affiliate Links

When setting up the affiliate links, there are two things that we want to do:

• Include the GA code stored in your tracking.php file (mentioned above)
• Set up a re-direct to take your visitor to their casino of choice via your affiliate link

To do this, I use another simple PHP template I’ve built (named index.php). This template already looks for a file named ‘tracking.php’ in the parent folder so as long as you’ve put your tracking file in the ‘go’ directory you won’t need to change anything there unless you’ve named your GA code file something different.

Where you’ll need to make changes though are in lines 14 and 19 as this is where the re-direct happens.

You simply need to copy and paste the affiliate link from a particular operator into the relevant parts of the template. Make sure you copy your link into both parts of the template to ensure that players who don’t have JavaScript enabled on their browser still get tracked to you.

Save this file as index.php and then upload it to the relevant folder in your ‘go’ directory.

You will need to repeat this process for each affiliate network that you’re looking to promote. So by the time you’ve finished, you may well have a dozen or more index.php files which have been uploaded into their associated folders.

To make things 100% correct, you’ll also want to change the header tag in each index.php file to reflect the name of the casino that the user is being re-directed to.

4. Adding links to your content

With all this done, all you need to is ensure that any CTAs in your content point to your ‘go’ directory.

So, for example, if you’re looking to send someone to Omni Casino your on-site link would need to point to www.yourdomain.com/go/omni rather than inserting your affiliate link directly into the content.

Have a go. Check that it works – you should find that the user is taken seemlessly through to the operator you’re promoting almost without realising that they’re being re-directed via an intermediary file on your server.

5. Updating your affiliate link

As long as you’ve set up your content in the way I’ve described above, then updating your affiliate links couldn’t be easier. All you need to do is update your index.php template with the new affiliate link and re-upload it to your server (overwriting the original file).

Due to the fact that all of your in-content CTAs are pointing to the file in the ‘go’ folder, they’ll all automatically re-direct over this new link. This should save you hours/days/weeks as you won’t be needing to update every CTA individually.

Setting up GA

Right, so that’s the basics set up. To be honest, you could leave things exactly as they are and your players would be tracked without a problem and you’d still be able to manage your affiliate links more effectively than you had done previously.

However, by bringing Google Analytics into the picture, you open up a whole world of possibilities. With GA able to track clicks on affiliate links, you’ll be able to start to pull reports which will provide a greater insight into what is actually generating your clicks:

• Which keywords are most valuable?
• What channel is converting best?
• How long do people spend on the site before clicking? How many pages do they look at?

There’s all kind of stuff that can be reported on … and it’s pretty much set up in a single step.

Creating Goals in GA

I’ve already written a pretty in-depth article on how to set up goals in GA, so this will just be a quick run through as to how to get them to work with your affiliate links.

There are a couple of ways to do this:

• Firstly, you can look to track all outbound affiliate links in general
• Or, you can set up a number of different goals to break down your affiliate links by the operator which is being clicked through to

Tracking Generic Affiliate Clicks

Let’s start by setting up a goal that will track all affiliate links in general as this is a good way to make sure that your setup is working as expected.

• Click through to the Goal Setup screen (All Website Data > Goals Tab) and click the +Goal link under Goals (set 1).
• Give your Goal a name (I tend to use something like ‘Generic Click’) and then click on the URL Destination under the Goal Type option.
• Choose URL destination from the goal type options (see image on the left)
• Change the Match Type drop down menu to ‘Regular Expression Match’ and enter the phrase “/go/(.*)$” (Without quotation marks and assuming all your affiliate links are stored in a ‘go’ folder – if not, then update the expression accordingly)
• Click Save

Just for the sake of clarity, I’ll explain the regular expression that you typed in by saying that you instructed Google to assign a goal conversion to any page with ‘go’ (where your affiliate links are stored) in the URL structure.

Given that your GA code is being called with all your affiliate redirects, Analytics will view each of these called as a page view and assign the conversion accordingly.

Breaking down your affiliate clicks by operator

If you want to break down the affiliate clicks you’re getting by the individual casinos/poker rooms that you’re promoting, you’ll be pleased to hear that the process is largely similar to the one above – with just a couple of tweaks.

• Click through to the Goal Setup screen (All Website Data > Goals Tab) and click the +Goal under your next available Goal (bear in mind, you will need a separate Goal for each product you’re looking to track)
• Give your Goal a name (something like Bet365, Casino Titan, Pokerstars etc) and then click on the URL Destination under the Goal Type option.
• Change the Match Type drop down menu to ‘Regular Expression Match’ and enter the phrase “/go/*insert_your_operator_folder_name_here*/(.*)$” (without quotation marks). You’ll therefore be left with an expression that looks something like /go/bet365/(.*)$
• Click SaveThis regular expression works in the same way as the generic one … with the exception that you’re telling GA (in this example) to assign a Goal Conversion to the Bet365 Goal only if a page loads from the /go/bet365 folder – the exact place which contains your affiliate link.

And that’s pretty much it. With the above setup in place, your readers will still be able to click through to casinos/poker rooms using your affiliate links … and you’ll be able to pick up a lot more insight into what’s working for you and what isn’t.

As I said at the beginning though, this is certainly not supposed to be the definitive way to track affiliate clicks, so I’d certainly like to get your thoughts on it. Feel free to leave your opinions/questions/criticisms in the comments below – it should make for a good discussion!

The post How I track my affiliate clicks appeared first on The Affiliate Life.

In the name of all things experimental, I’ve just signed up to Google+.

A lot has been written about Google’s social network, and not all of it has been complimentary. But I’ve decided to see things for myself and have now got a profile set up, so if you’re in the area, feel free to add me to your circles and I’ll do likewise.

My profile address is as follows:

http://plus.google.com/103227478207159459955

I’m looking forward to see how the whole thing works, so once I have some/any kind of feedback, you guys will obviously be the first to know!

The post I’m now on Google + appeared first on The Affiliate Life.

Following on from my review of 2012, I wanted to get my 2013 goals live, so that I can start working my way through them.

These were set up a few weeks back, so I’ve already started on a lot of them but I always find it’s easier to keep focused once your targets are written down .. that and the fact that it would be great to get your thoughts/feedback on what I’m looking to do.

Comments, can be written below.

Business Goals

• Revenue
  Those of you who have read my last post will be aware that I was really pleased with the revenue I was generating in the first half of the year … only to find that things fell a bit flat in the second half, when I wasn’t able to spend as much time on my sites.

  This year though, I want to see the whole thing through. My exact revenue target I’m going to be keeping to myself, but I will say that I’d like to see revenue increase by 15% this year.

  This may not seem a whole lot given the fact that I should have an extra six months to work hard in, but expenditure will be increasing this year too (see the next point!) and my main site was hit hard in the last Google update, so there’s some work that needs to be done there to get it back to its money-making ways of January 2012!

• Outsource more of my work
  The second half of last year showed me that if, for whatever reason, I can’t sit down and work on my sites, then things can come grinding to a halt. Not only is this obviously wrong, but it has reminded me that I actually got into this industry to give myself more free time to do other things … and yet, here I am spending more and more time trying to manage my network.

  Therefore, in 2013 I’d like to outsource a lot more of my work to ensure that I give myself more time to other things but also to safeguard against the possiblity that my daily schedule is interrupted for any significant period of time.

  Therefore, by the end of 2013 I hope to have found a good SEO company to look after one of my main sites as well as regular writers to provide high quality content for readers

• Traffic to SlotGames.org
  Seeing as I’m talking about my main sites, now seems to be a good time to mention slotgames.org, which I’m expecting big things from in 2013. Having purchased the domain almost a year ago and spent the best part of three months getting a design coded, I haven’t been able to spend the time getting any traffic of note to the site yet.

  That will change in 2013 though. By the end of December I want the site to be consistently ranking on the first page for its primary key terms in order to allow me the necessary data to work on in terms of conversion.

• Niched Mini sites
  I’m no different to alot of affiliates I guess – going through the various accounts I have with a whole host of registrars has reminded me that over the last 12 months I’ve purchased a whole host of niche domains that I’ve done nothing with.

  To be honest, my main focus this year will be slotgames.org but I do have a couple of nice niche domains that I’ve forgotten about, so I’ll be looking to get some content live on them to see whether I can get them generating some revenue without spending time each day on them.

• A stronger social presence for SlotGames.org
  So what am I going to be doing then, if I’m outsourcing a lot of work and only launching a couple of additional mini sites?

  Well, I really want to grow the social side of SlotGames.org. Being hit hard by the latest Google updates made me realise that I rely too much on natural search for my traffic and that I need to look to other sources for driving my visitors.

  Over the last six months, I’ve set up accounts at Pinterest, YouTube, Twitter and Facebook for SlotGames.org, but with the possible exception of YouTube, I haven’t done a whole lot with them.

  That will change though – while the SEO will be worked on elsewhere, I will be looking at continuing to grow the social side of things for SlotGames.org.

  By the end of the year, I would like the Facebook page to be interactive with people actively responding to questions and engaging topics being posted rather than just links to news articles on my site.

  The Twitter feed is currently brand new and has no followers – I will be aiming to add 200 followers by December.

  YouTube and Pinterest are slightly more of an unknown for me, so I will be aiming for 100 subscribers on each come the end of the year

• Monetise this blog
  Generating revenue from this blog comes back to one thing – regular, quality updates … and that’s something that I haven’t been doing over the last twelve months.

  I think that’s largely been because the topics I have been writing about have been very in-depth. My post on Analytics Goals for example took a long time to research and ended up running to over 2,000 words and I didn’t always have the time to write posts of this length, which made it difficult to keep posting more stuff up.

  2013 will see in-depth posts like this continue (as I believe it’s quality content), but there will be much shorter, useful posts too. Thoughts and reflections on the market and quick updates about what I’m doing to ensure that the site is kept fresh.

Personal Goals

• Health and Fitness
  I had two personal goals last year – and the first of them (getting fit) was sacrificed when time fell short because of the second (buying a house) … so this year, there is just one personal goal: to get back to my fighting weight.

  This year, I’d like to get back to the shape I was in a couple of years ago when I was training for the marathon a few years back. Things have started well so far with my diet where I want it to be and a few light runs under my belt.

  By the end of the year, I want to have dropped (and kept off) 25lb.

The post 2013 Affiliate Goals appeared first on The Affiliate Life.

2012 has been a year full of ups and downs for me both on a personal level and a business level. There have been plenty of ups and downs, but seeing as we’re coming to the beginning of a new year, I really wanted to sit down and recap what has happened over the last 12 months and set some new goals for 2013.

All in all, 2012 and has been a very strange year. As you can tell from looking around this blog (or from my lack of activity on any of the industry’s main forums) I haven’t really been around very much over the last six months.

This started back in June when I began looking to buy my first property. I knew that Id have to dedicate some of my time to finding a decent place, I just didn’t realise quite how long it would take. I won’t go through the whole story, but I will say that the guy I was buying off was a bit strange. It took him ages to do small chores and he was useless in answering questions about the place – so much so that I nearly pulled out of the whole thing a couple of times.

I stuck with it though and eventually completed on the place in the middle of November – almost 5 months after my offer was first accepted. It was a big relief and I’m delighted that I have something so tangible to show for all the work that I’ve been putting into my sites for the last few years.

I’m currently in the process of doing it up a bit, so will post some pictures later on in the year – especially if I’m able to build into the roof, where I’m hoping to set up some kind of a games room/office.

Due to the amount of time and effort that was put into finally completing on this place, my sites have taken a bit of a hit. I haven’t been able to put a lot of effort into driving traffic to my new site (slotgames.org) and traffic to my main revenue driver (BestCasinoOnline.com) has dropped fairly heavily.

The good (and slightly bizarre!) news though is that from a revenue point of view, 2012 has been a big leap forward for me. Income has almost doubled compared to what I earned in 2011 mainly due to the hard work that I put in over the first six months of the year.

That ended up building the foundations for the second part of the year, so that even when I wasn’t able to put the same effort into my sites, I was still able to see good revenues – in fact, December has been my third best month of the year.

So with that in mind, let’s have a look at how I measured up against the goals I set myself for 2012.

Business Goals

• Start up two more quality sites – I haven’t quite managed to do this. SlotGames.org is one site and I’m very pleased with the quality and the sheer scale of content that I’ve been able to get up there. That is now up and running properly, although I haven’t been able to drive the traffic to it that I would like. That will remain my next target.

  I am currently working on a second site which won’t be of quite the same size, but will still be of a high quality. I will let you know about that, once I’m pleased with the way it’s working.

• Increase revenue to five figures consistently – While my revenue has made a big leap this year, I don’t believe I can quite say that I’m earning five figures consistently yet. There have been five figure months, which I’m really pleased with … but things need to take another step up for me to be able to rely on that sort of income.
• Improve reporting processes – This is something that I can definitely say I have achieved. While there is still room for improvement, I now have a much better insight into the visitors that are coming to my site and the casinos that are performing well for me. This has come as a result of a number of spreadsheets which I have set up to work together to track conversions, keywords and revenue.
• Regular updates to my blog – You just have to look at the last time that I posted something up here to see that this has to be classed as a failure.
• Run my business more professionally – Again, something that I have definitely progressed with. I’m still not quite where I want to be, but I feel that I have a much better grip on my company. I now employ professionals in various areas and have a much better grip on the cash that is flowing through my operation.
  

  Personal Goals

• Increase Fitness – The year started off well with this, but unfortunately my regular workouts and exercise were the first things to go when time started to run short in the middle of the year and so a lot of the good work that I put in over the first six months went to pot in the second half of 2012.
• Buy a House – Well, I’ve definitely done this. It’s taken a lot more time and effort than I thought it would do, but I’m delighted to have finally got my own place and even more pleased that a large part of the cash came from my affiliate earnings.
  

  Summary

  Having gone through the goes above, I find myself on one hand delighted that I’ve been able to make such a positive step forward in 2012, while also feeling a little frustrated at what might have been if I’d continued to dedicate myself to the sites over the second half of the year.

  There’s no doubt that time has been a massive problem for me this year and something that I certainly need to manage better in 2013 if I’m to be able to keep growing my business while also having outside interests … which is, after all, the main reason I got into this industry.

  Any thoughts you might have on how to best manage time and outsource work would be most welcome below … as would any thoughts you have in general about my performance for 2012.

  I’ll look to post up some new goals for 2013 shortly.

  Related Posts:

  • 2012 Affiliate Goals
  • 2013 Affiliate Goals
  • Results for January 2012
  • Objective complete: offer accepted on new place – thanks to all
  • Results for February 2012

  The post 2012 Affiliate Review appeared first on The Affiliate Life.

  ]]> http://www.theaffiliatelife.com/goals/2012-review/346/feed 0 http://www.theaffiliatelife.com/personal/offer-accepted-on-new-place/332 http://www.theaffiliatelife.com/personal/offer-accepted-on-new-place/332#comments Wed, 25 Jul 2012 07:40:33 +0000 Simon http://www.theaffiliatelife.com/?p=332 This blog has largely been about online marketing and my specific experiences promoting a variety of online casinos. However, I wanted to start up a section of the site to write a bit about more personal stuff that I get up to away from the internet … and a good place to start seems to [...]

  The post Objective complete: offer accepted on new place – thanks to all appeared first on The Affiliate Life.

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  This blog has largely been about online marketing and my specific experiences promoting a variety of online casinos.

  However, I wanted to start up a section of the site to write a bit about more personal stuff that I get up to away from the internet … and a good place to start seems to be to tell you all that I’m in the process of buying my first place.

  I’ve wanted to buy my own place since I left uni just over 10 years ago now, so I’m delighted that I’m able to say that I’ve had an offer accepted on a place in South East London that I can (hopefully!) call my own.

  Affiliate marketing is a huge reason why I’m able to do this as, without it, I wouldn’t have had the money to put together a deposit given that property prices anywhere within sight of London seem completely crazy.

  By my reckoning, it’s around 5 years since I put my first website up and started wondering why nobody was coming to have a look at it. This site is still live (theshortstack.co.uk for anyone interested!), it’s only really there in name.

  Since then I started a range of additional sites in the first year alone – and then scrapped them all 12 months later and started again once I started to learn how wrong I was doing things.

  At that time, the thought of earning a little bit of extra beer money seemed a bit unreal – and yet here I am a few years later able to put down a deposit on a place.

  As I mentioned above, the first year was a huge learning curve for me and I’m hugely grateful for everyone who has taken the effort to show me where I’m going wrong and point me in the right direction.

  I’m not going to go through a huge list of people, as that’s just boring reading but I do want to say a special thanks to Hazo (from intensegambling.com) Giorgio (from pursuingsuccess.net) and Jan (whose latest project is downloadroulette.net).

  I think we all started in industry at the same sort of time and I’ve learned so much just from having them available on Skype.

  Big thanks need to go to Jess from sportsbettinglines.com as well. He mentored me when I first joined PAP as it was then and pointed out politely why my 12 page business plan for theshortstack.co.uk was useless

  And finally a big shout out to Dealer Dan, who I met up with at my first affiliate conference. The guy is a star and I’ll always be grateful for the time he took to buy me a drink, talk me through my sites and introduce me to all the AMs.

  I’m going to stop there as this is turning into an oscar acceptance speech, which is overkill but I just wanted to highlight the fact that without the support I’ve had from the great people at PAL (many of whom ask for absolutely nothing in return), there’s no way I’d be in a position to be fulfilling one of my ambitions.

  For that I’m hugely grateful – so a big thank you to everyone.

  If/when the house completes, I’ll get some pictures up on here. We’ve potentially got a huge roof space that we can build into and I’ll be looking for some advice on how to turn that into some kind of an office/play room.

  Related Posts:

  • 2012 Affiliate Review
  • About Me
  • 2012 Affiliate Goals
  • 2013 Affiliate Goals
  • 10 things I ask before signing up to an affiliate program

  The post Objective complete: offer accepted on new place – thanks to all appeared first on The Affiliate Life.

  ]]> http://www.theaffiliatelife.com/personal/offer-accepted-on-new-place/332/feed 0 http://www.theaffiliatelife.com/affiliate-programs/10-things-i-ask-before-signing-up-to-an-affiliate-program/300 http://www.theaffiliatelife.com/affiliate-programs/10-things-i-ask-before-signing-up-to-an-affiliate-program/300#comments Tue, 10 Jul 2012 08:28:06 +0000 Simon http://www.theaffiliatelife.com/?p=300 Inspired by Graeme’s post about the 10 things that all affiliate programs should offer, I thought it might be useful to share the check list that I use when considering whether to promote a particular program. Like a great many of you, I get contacted pretty much on a daily basis by a number of [...]

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  Inspired by Graeme’s post about the 10 things that all affiliate programs should offer, I thought it might be useful to share the check list that I use when considering whether to promote a particular program.

  Like a great many of you, I get contacted pretty much on a daily basis by a number of affiliate programs (many of which I’ve never heard of) who are asking me to promote them across my sites.

  Like a great many of you too, I’ve been burned in the past by programs who have popped up, taken a load of my traffic and then folded again without paying me. Aside from the fact that this is just stealing, fly-by-night operations like this are particularly annoying as as they generally mean that you end up wasting a whole lot of time researching and writing reviews for a company that doesn’t end up existing six months later.

  Therefore, when I get approached now I have a checklist that I work through on my own and with the Account Manager. My initial questions are as follows:

  How long has the company been around for?

  This is a big one for me – as I say, in the past, I’ve had the misfortune to lose a fair chunk of change as a result of affiliate programs going bust or just simply deciding to close their doors without paying affiliates. As a result, I don’t work with a company until they’ve been around for at least a year.

  Obviously, that 12 month threshold is very much a personal thing but I’d encourage you to come up with a similar requirement. Such a time frame will not only give you a better idea of a company’s financial stability but it will also allow you to gather feedback on how they perform from other affiliates.

  What kind of reputation does the affiliate program have in the community?

  Doing a search for feedback on a particular program at forums such as PAL or GPWA doesn’t take too long and is well worth the effort.

  Bear in mind though that you’re always going to find someone who’s had a problem with something. People are always going to be more encouraged to post about things that have gone wrong rather than when things that have gone really well.

  That’t not to say though that you should just overlook criticism – far from it. You just need to be able to separate the serious issues reported by respected affiliates from other guys who are moaning because their CPA scam didn’t pay off.

  If you don’t find anything about a particular program, don’t be afraid to ask and then go back to the relevant affiliate manager if necessary for feedback.

  Are their terms affiliate friendly?

  Affiliate Guard Dog is the best place to get a quick answer to this question. AGD automatically tracks any changes to an affiliate program’s Ts and Cs and provides a quick overview of what they mean in plain English.

  Essentially here, I’m looking for programs who aren’t flagged as rogue. If a program has been branded rogue, then it’s usually because they’ve stolen from affiliates in the past, in which case I don’t want anything to do with them.

  I also expect programs not to carry over negative revenues or bundle my earnings. That’s not totally set in stone – I do promote a handful of casinos who either carry negative revenue over or bundle earnings but they’re very much the exception to the rule and they must be strong programs elsewhere for me to consider them.

  Will your players thank you for recommending them?

  So you’ve safe-guarded yourself by checking out AGD, now head over to both CasinoMeister and the relevant casino homepage to make sure that your players aren’t going to be ripped off either. Some of the things I want to know include:

  • Have their been player issues at the casino recently?
  • How quickly are payouts processed? Players don’t want to be hanging around for ages waiting for their winnings to hit their bank account. If they don’t receive their money quickly, why would they want to play there?
  • In a similar vein, what sort of limits are put on payouts if a player wins big? Will they get their cash all at once or are they going to have to put up with $50 payments every month for the next 20 years?
  • What are the wagering requirements on the welcome bonus? For casino, 25x-30x times the size of their initial deposit and bonus is fine, but I have seen casinos expecting a player to wager up to 60x, which is just mad (and terrible for your conversion rate!)

  How responsive is the Affiliate Manager?

  If I’m happy with the answers I’ve got from the first four questions, I’ll usually respond to the email I’ve had asking whether the AM is on Skype.

  Again, it’s a personal thing, but I like having my AMs on a messenger. The main reason for this is that it’s much easier to build a relationship with someone that way, but it also means that it’s quicker to sort out any issues and also stay up to date with any news/promotions that are happening.

  See how long it takes to get an answer to your question and once you have their Skype username, keep a track of how often they’re online.

  What are the features of their affiliate tracking?

  What type of software does the affiliate tracking run on? Are we talking something out of the box like Income Access or NetRefer or is it a completely bespoke system? If it’s the latter, what information can I get out of the system and how often are the stats updated? If you’re tracking various jackpots, you’ll want to know whether you’ll have access to feeds.

  Are they able to offer bespoke promotions/landing pages?

  It always surprises me in this day and age how few affiliate programs are able to offer individual landing pages for their games. If I’m running a roulette site, then it shouldn’t take a genius to figure out that I’m going to convert more players by sending them to a page which tells them all about a particular casino’s roulette offerings. Sadly though, too often I’m only able to send my players through to a casino’s generic home page.

  One thing that affiliate programs are doing more and more though is providing their affiliates with branded landing pages. By that, I mean a page which is basically a copy of their normal homepage with my logo embedded in it. Again, this is a great way to improve conversions and also helps to build the reputation of my own portal.

  I’m also going to throw in here that I normally ask whether a casino has geo-targetted their landing pages. I don’t particularly want to create and implement a dozen different links for a dozen different countries when it’s much easier to send players over one link and let the casino re-direct the player to a landing page containing geo-targetted information.

  How do they pay their affiliates?

  Make sure that you can be paid in the way that you prefer. If you like to collect your earnings in a Neteller account at the end of each month, then make sure this new program can pay out to Neteller.

  If you’re a US affiliate who doesn’t have a wide choice of options regarding your payment methods, can this program pay you directly into your bank account? If so, who will the payment come from and how long will it take to be processed?

  One other thing that you’ll want to check is whether any fees will be charged for withdrawing your earnings. If so, how are these fees calulated and who will be paying them? For example, if your bank charges you a management fee for handling incoming bank wires, is that something that’s going to be coming out of your affiliate earnings or something that will be covered by the program?

  What commission are they offering and how is it calculated?

  Commission is something that can be negotiated on a personal basis. Whether you prefer to work on rev share or CPA is very much up to you, but whichever you chose make sure that you understand how your earnings are calculated.

  Personally, I prefer to work on Rev Share so there are a few things I need to know:

  • Is the Rev Share for the life of the player? If not, then I’m out of here.
  • Am I being paid on Gross Revenue or Net Revenue?
  • If Net, what deductions are made from my earnings before I’m paid?

  CPA affiliates may well want to know different things, the main one being whether a CPA payment is triggered based on specific wagering requirements or when a player generates a certain amount of revenue for the operator. These two are very different things – you want to make sure that you’re still going to get paid for your player, even if they win big within their first week and never come back!

  Do I need to hit a particular threshold before I get paid?

  Most affiliate programs will ask you to earn a certain amount in commissions before they pay out – be sure to ask exactly what this amount is. Anything up to around $200 is ok for casino (probably about $50 or $100 for poker), but there are programs out there which try to set $1,000 limits before they have to pay you – these are obviously not ok and should therefore be avoided.

  In Summary

  Unfortunately, at the moment there is no such thing as the perfect affiliate program which is going to satisfy all the requirements above. However, doing research into a program you’re thinking of promoting is certainly worth the effort and can avoid tears and a lot of time being wasted at a later date.

  Luckily, with the affiliate community as it is at the moment, it’s fairly easy to get a good grip on whether a program is worth getting involved with and hopefully the above questions have given you a bit of food for thought when it comes to asking AMs about their product.

  But what do you think? What do you like to know before you start promoting a casino, poker room or sportsbook? If you feel that I’ve missed anything out, feel free to leave your questions in the comments section below for additional discussion – I’d certainly like to hear them.

  Related Posts:

  • Conversion Rates and Player Values: 2012
  • Affiliate Program Reviews
  • 2012 Affiliate Review
  • A new year, a new domain …
  • About Me

  The post 10 things I ask before signing up to an affiliate program appeared first on The Affiliate Life.

  ]]> http://www.theaffiliatelife.com/affiliate-programs/10-things-i-ask-before-signing-up-to-an-affiliate-program/300/feed 0 http://www.theaffiliatelife.com/other-stuff/the-post-i-promised-myself-i-wouldnt-write/289 http://www.theaffiliatelife.com/other-stuff/the-post-i-promised-myself-i-wouldnt-write/289#comments Mon, 09 Jul 2012 12:29:07 +0000 Simon http://www.theaffiliatelife.com/?p=289 I umm-ed and aghh-ed a lot when I was considering starting up this blog. Not because I didn’t like the idea of publishing my thoughts on the web, but because last time I created an affiliate blog it died a slow and painful death as I went months without updating the site and then let [...]

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  I umm-ed and aghh-ed a lot when I was considering starting up this blog. Not because I didn’t like the idea of publishing my thoughts on the web, but because last time I created an affiliate blog it died a slow and painful death as I went months without updating the site and then let the domain expire when it came up for renewal. It wasn’t pretty.

  Nevertheless, I like writing for the internet and so having my own (perhaps one day ‘popular’) blog discussing the state of the affiliate industry is always something that has appealed. So as I got confirmation that my previous domain had indeed expired, I promised myself that the next time I gave this blogging lark a shot, I’d commit to it properly.

  And I here I am again, receiving an email asking me whether I’d like to renew this domain and realising that it has been six weeks since I made my last post.

  The reasons for the lack of activity on theaffiliatelife.com are many and varied. They include my brother’s wedding, the fact that I’m now in the process of buying my first place and the launch of a new website which has taken up a lot more of my time than I first thought it would.

  However, things have changed a bit now: the new website is up and running (more on this later!) and I have now outsourced a lot of the content writing for my other websites to ensure that they’re being properly updated – something that I didn’t always have the time to do with a number of other projects on the go.

  Hopefully, the fact that I now have a bit of additional free time on my hands will also allow me to focus more on getting some good content up on theaffiliatelife.com. So from today I’m announcing that this blog isn’t dead – in fact, I’ve just renewed the domain – and that going forward I’ll be focusing a lot more on it. You can expect a more useful post to go live within the next couple of days.

  To finish off, I’m going to give a quick shout out to my Twitter feed which I’ve also recently resurrected. I’ve only got a measly 20 followers at the moment (no offense meant to those who are already following me!), so if you find yourself on Twitter regularly, then feel free to hit me up.

  Right, that’s enough for now – hopefully the apology has been accepted. I’m going to spend some time getting the next article written so I’ll speak to you soon.

  Related Posts:

  • About Me
  • A new year, a new domain …
  • 2013 Affiliate Goals
  • Goals for April 2012
  • Results for February 2012

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