Fundamental Requirements For A Successful Sports Tipping Affiliate Website

[Oracle]

Hey folks,

I would like to discuss the aspects that make a sports betting affiliate website successful and get input and discussion points from those that have developed a successful site and others that are currently in the trial and error stage to improve their site.

Firstly, what exactly would a visitor expect to receive from a sports betting affiliate site and why would they return?

1. Regular Tips posted on the website, probably at least 4 days per week so that when they visit there is new content.

2. Tips should be free. There are too many decent tipsters out there providing free tips that your actual target market neither have the funds or motivation to pay for tips.

3. A clean, well laid out website.

4. Betting strategy articles.

5. Bookmaker comparisons.

6. A social media presence with a decent number of followers to add a 'genuine feel' to the website.

7. Other attractions, e.g betting calculators.

8. Interesting news in your chosen sport.

9. Community feel, e.g website forum or wordpress articles with comment section

10. A website that helps the visitor, not one that attempts to sell something to the visitor.

11. Provide competitions where visitors can win something and allow them to compete against other visitors.

12. Provide a fun 'tone of voice'.


I have been considering the expenses required to provide such a website in Year 1 for new affiliates who provide the layout, images and articles but lack the necessary expertise to design a fully fledged professional affiliate website:

Amounts are rough estimations in euro.

Wordpress developer including plugins: €800
Wordpress Premium Theme: €45
Hosting: €150 (Hostgator Shared Business Plan)
Email List: €660 (Aweber mailing list, 5000-10000 subscribers)
Forum: €320 (vBulleting 5 + Mobile Suite Bundle)

Total: €1,975

Now that you have the site you have to spend time and money to let people know about it.

I would appreciate any input or discussion on what makes a good sports betting affiliate site with a good business strategy.

[Anthony-Coral]

A lot of the tipster sites have a freemium+premium model where some tips are free but there is also a paid subscription service for more frequent or potential higher value tips. I guess it depends if you want your principle revenue to be from subscriptions or from referred player revenues.

If a Premium subscription is offered I think its also important to keep a couple of freemium options so that punters can try them and help build their trust up.

Tipping Communities are useful for allowing people to give their own opinions and it provide a natural progression to tipping competitions etc all which can be used to drive revenues too. However, as with all community elements, it can require a deal of moderation and intensive effort and resources until the community reaches that tipping point and achieves enough critical lass of contributing members.

[Oracle]

A main source of income I am thinking about and more than likely is that this website will attract a lot of people to the site to use the various features, read the articles and see that days bet while discussing their own bets in the comments section.

The real thing I am interested in is behind the scenes in the 'forum'.

Some of these readers will be poor gamblers, losing punters and will provide a relatively small affiliate income. The good gamblers who come to my site will already have accounts at my advertised affiliate bookmaker and won't affect my affiliate income. If it pays for the site and a decent amount of advertising I will be very happy.

What I really want is the good tipsters to join the team. The benefits to being on the team is that you get all the tips from the team while only one tip is posted a day to the public.

I have 8 very good gamblers who make a sizable amount of money each year as the starting base.

The forum will have a very basic layout will have one section for new members who run their own betting logs for a few months in order to prove their ability and join the team and in private part of the forum where we share tips and strategies among ourselves. This is where the real money will be made when you have a good collection of bettors numbering 20-30 who regularly contribute who are the 1% of gambling forum users who get lost among the nonsense of the other 99%.

That being said the website and tips that are made available to the public have to be of a very high quality to convince the good gamblers who visit the site to partake in the betting log trial process.

I am willing to spend a couple of thousand to put some sort of infrastructure in place that would allow such a team to be compiled.

Long term there are many opportunities to grow the revenue options of the site and if this team supplies 5 tips a week with a ROI in the region of 15% which is delivered to the customers inbox free of charge (accompanied by an affiliate ad of course) there is a good chance that upon receiving multiple emails from me, with an opening rate of 85%+ that I could potentially get a lot of conversions as most people in the UK and Ireland open their first account with the land based operator that they are most familiar with and can be swayed to Bet365 sooner or later.

[Oracle]

I really thought this topic would generate a decent bit of discussion as it is relevant to almost all the members on the forum.

[MattPrice]

I think the problem you're running into here with the lack of discussion is possibly a microcosm of what you'd find when running a forum on your site.

At the moment, across many websites I use, there seems to be less focus on interacting via forums as more and more people use social media. In my opinion you would be better focused on developing this aspect of your strategy than the forum itself. There are of course, notable exceptions to this in the betting affiliate industry. But, these sites are well established with a strong and often committed audience. And, even then, some of the sites which were once incredibly busy now have quieter forums as people tend to flock to the affiliate's main web content or Facebook and Twitter accounts for a quick fix. This is just my experience though...