GPWA Times Magazine: Turning Kicks into Clicks

[GPWA Daniel]

(This interview was originally published in the January 2026 issue of the GPWA Times Magazine.)

Milan Novakovic explains how affiliates should prep, pivot and profit from the World Cup and other major event traffic spikes.

[themilann]

Big thanks to the GPWA team for featuring this, and to Gary Trask in particular for giving me an opportunity to give the interview and be featured on the GPWA magazine.

The reason I wanted to write “Turning Kicks into Clicks” is simple: the World Cup is one of the few moments where even solid affiliates leave serious money on the table because they treat it like a 4-week sprint instead of a 3-phase project.

Two things I’d highlight from the article (fast takeaways):

1. The work that matters happens before the first whistle.
   The affiliates who win the World Cup are usually the ones who, weeks in advance, have already:
   
   • audited & cleaned up all their “World Cup” and generic football pages (dead links, expired offers, dead books, etc.),
   • refreshed internal linking into soccer content and high-intent clusters,
   • pre-built promo blocks and comparison tables ready to swap in as operators update offers.
     When the surge arrives, you’re just rotating deals and tightening CTAs, not rebuilding pages from scratch.
   
   
2. Post-event clean-up is where you lock in the long-term value.
   Once the tournament ends, most people walk away and let those pages rot. The smarter play is to:
   
   • strip out short-lived promos and turn the winners into evergreen football/soccer betting content,
   • recycle prediction/props pages into more general league/season guides,
   • use the data from EPC/CTR to decide which angles deserve a permanent place in your site structure.

Given everything that’s happening this year (more regulated markets, more competition, and Google’s core updates + AI chaos), I’m curious how others are thinking about it:

• How far in advance do you start prepping World Cup / Euro / Copa America content now?
• Are you planning to lean more on news/reactive “live” content (injuries, VAR drama, prop markets), or double-down on evergreen football/soccer SEO and let the traffic flow through that?
• And do you treat World Cup pages as one-off campaign landers, or as assets you want to keep ranking and repurposing for the next few years?

[newcustomeroffer]

A good read that, thanks for sharing.

The expansion to 48 teams should help interest levels globally with more of the betting public having their team in the competition, can't be a bad thing in that respect.

[themilann]

A good read that, thanks for sharing.

The expansion to 48 teams should help interest levels globally with more of the betting public having their team in the competition, can't be a bad thing in that respect.

Appreciate that, thanks.

I agree on the 48-team angle. From a betting and content perspective, it’s huge. More countries in the game means more hyper-local interest spikes, more languages, and way more long-tail stuff to target (outrights, specials, “team X to qualify from group Y”, etc.).

The only downside is the risk of format. If some groups are weak, the football might be rubbish, but even then the traffic will still be there as long as “my country is in”.