Sports Betting - need some advice/guidance

[PhilF (ex-WhichBingo)]

I have a client from my consultancy arm that wants to get into sports betting as an affiliate. However my experience is only online bingo. So a question to all the UK sportsbook affiliates out there;

Is there any point in launching a new UK sports betting affiliate site? Irrelevant of design, content, niche, rankings.... surely everybody in the UK market now has an account with all the major bookies? There can't be that many more than a handful of (small) bettors who you can sign up as new members to the brands? Surely there's no point in me running links to Hills, Laddies, Corals, PP etc as anyone I send to them will already have an account and therefore I get no revenue?

Or am I being dumb here........

[chaumi]

I think this all depends on whether you can find (and rank for) a search term that is a 'sign up' term...but speaking as a sports bettor of over 30 years, there are still bookies where I don't have accounts..so in theory if you could get an offer in front of me which would appeal then there's a chance I could sign up (and I'd expect that to apply to many others too).

The flip side as you imply is yes, I think bettors do tend to stick at a handful of operators where they know the interfaces and where they're comfortable with the odds offered.

If you don't try though, you don't get...and if you could rank for a 'golden' keyword or phrase then there would definitely seem to be opportunities still.

[RacingJim]

Agree with the above, there is a point if you are good at SEO and can rank for something worthwhile. There is probably a certain amount of saturation at the big names, I see this myself, but there are other less exposed operators in the market who have decent products and convert/retain well.

[Oracle]

What content would you have on this website?

[JackTenSuited]

It can still be profitable if you find a good niche, starting another 'football tips' site may not be the best routes as theres loads of competition and converting players on these sort of sites are notoriously difficult and not particularly high value.

[TravG]

I agree with above also but you really have to ask yourself, isn't that true of all games, not just sportsbooks? I promote casinos and poker and really had the same thoughts thinking doesn't everyone who plays online poker already have an account with one of the major online poker sites? Again, as someone said above, finding a little niche and trying to promote some less popular but good online poker rooms would be the best bet. I still get new sign ups even though the online poker "craze" has passed. The same could apply to bingo, casinos etc??

So while you may not see the growth in online sportsbooks that you would with maybe something else, there is always someone somewhere that is just deciding to play or wants to change sportbooks. So ranking well for good terms I would think there is still good money to be earned.

I will also say I have a sportsbook site that doesn't do to well only because I have not been able to get it ranked high enough for some good terms. I could be wrong but it seems like there is 4 or 5 sportsbook portals that really dominate the search results and I think it will be hard to unseat them.

[Storebuilder]

As a consultant you would have to ask them why they want to do it? Do they have some unique perspective or can they bring something new to the table?

If not then I wouldn't bother - there are plenty of other opportunities available that are far easier to make money from.