Good traffic but little affiliate income

[BettingTools]

Hi there,

It's been 4 years exactly since I created my website www.bettingtools.co.uk and the income from affiliate programs has been very small.

After some analysis it seems that the reasons for this are a combination of players already having existing accounts, the fact that we attract shrewd/sensible players and that our horse racing tipsters are too good. I have 2 bet365 affiliate accounts which are both realistically too far in the negative to come back from.

Traffic has been decent though and in 4 years we've had 568,000 unique visitors and 6.3 million page views.

There's a good number of regular eyes on our site and an excellent SEO advantage to be had from a follow link.
1000 visits on average per day and a high of 5000 with an average dwell time of over 5 minutes and 49% bounce rate.

I'm now looking at going down the route of paid adverts and sponsored blog posts and if you are interested in this please PM me.

Advertising on our site would particularly benefit those offering a paid/subscription service and potentially some casino stuff could stand out and do well too.

Thanks
Brian

[BettingTools]

Just realised I missed a 0 off the daily visits figure and have corrected it to 1,000 visits a day now.

Thanks

[Synthetic]

Hi, mate.

I would like to help you with some useful tips.

First of all you said you SEO is good but it's not only about your backlinks and you know that. The avg time per visit is quite good and the bouce rate is also acceptable. But, your ON-PAGE seo needs some really good improvement.

1. Please do a quick check here:

1. https://developers.google.com/speed/...tools.co.uk%2F (39 mobile vs 41 on PC which is aweful!)
2. https://testmysite.withgoogle.com/intl/en-gb Please test your site and you will find about 11s loading time and 30% est. visitor loss (Due to loading time, which is tragedy)

2. Second, most of your Free bets are directly with links /goto where you send the visitos to the bookmaker`s site.
Advice:
1. Put some target="_blank" to your /goto/ links so the visitors will stay into your site and not leaving it! This way your analytics stats and BR could be better.
2. Add some content about each Free bet / bonus code (something like a review for the current year or so).

3. Idea: Why don't you write or order some high quality reviews about each bookmaker. I see only the one review for Bet365 which could be longer and updated with more chapters and media.

I hope you will scale the whole things up : ) Cheers

[BettingTools]

Thanks for these suggestions Synthetic and taking the time to respond - much appreciated.

I am aware the loading speed is not great and I have optimised as much as I can (css file compression and image size etc) without re-coding the site. It currently uses some complex queries to show in depth tipster analysis which ideally should be optimised but it's a big job.

Loading the bookie pages on a new page is a good suggestion thanks. I have done this in other places but looks like I forgot to do it here! Will do this now.

There are reviews for most bookies linked to from the directory page but admitedly they're not the greatest on the web. I agree that improving them could help but because of the reasons I mentioned above, I still don't expect affiliate income to increase significantly.

Revenue share from bookies is something I'm less bothered about now for a whole host of reasons.

Thanks again for your advice and well wishes

Brian

[BettingTools]

Thanks to those who took me up on this offer. I have been able to eat and pay the mortgage this month!

I just wanted to add that I'm also going to look at replacing bookies 300px*300px and adwords ads in my sidebars on the home page and the blog pages. These are the pages that get by far the most traffic on my site and if you'd like to take a position, the price for one of these will be £100 per month.

Please PM me if you're interested.

Cheers
Brian

[Top Online Casinos]

Thanks to those who took me up on this offer. I have been able to eat and pay the mortgage this month!

I just wanted to add that I'm also going to look at replacing bookies 300px*300px and adwords ads in my sidebars on the home page and the blog pages. These are the pages that get by far the most traffic on my site and if you'd like to take a position, the price for one of these will be £100 per month.

Please PM me if you're interested.

Cheers
Brian

Your site could also be seen as 'keyword stuffing'..

keywords:

on line betting, bet online, sports betting, free bets, free tips, tipsters, footy tips, soccer tips, tennis tips, bookmakers, exchanges, betting tools, betting odds, bet365, how to bet, betting calculators, betfair, sport, forum, football, gambling, trading, advice, predictions, picks, community, handicapping, betting directory, betting reviews

Keywords like 'trading' and 'picks', 'community'... They are all useless. You can take them all out. All meta keywords that is.

Then, something else I thought:

Instead of offering advertising, (read offering others to make more money than you will) why don't you sign up with a few casino affiliate programs and run a few ads from them on your site yourself? If you choose rev share, and you build up a few players, you will for sure generate more income from that, as that you ever will from direct advertising.

If you have that traffic, make use of it. Try an exit popup solution where a casino offer pops up when the visitor wants to leave your page. Bettors like betting, and possibly love casinos too.

People advertise to make money. Why not make that money yourself? Again, sign up with a few casino aff programs. Then run your own ads.

Best of luck and lots of prosperity.

[BettingTools]

All those keywords are accurate in terms of what the site contains and there's definitely not any keyword stuffing there. Some might be unecessary and not help towards the rankings but I believe the effects of these are very minimal these days anyhow.

Casino's aren't really within my interests and haven't been something that I have wanted to promote or felt enough of an expert on to advise about. Perhaps I should look at them but as I said previously, I'm trying to move away from revenue share deals.

I've aso seen emails from some of the top affiliate programs saying that exit popups are against their terms and conditions by the way (for today at least ).

[wolfie]

Hi Brian, just a tip from my side. I was browsing through your site and saw you offer a horse racing tipping service. I was tempted to sign up, but in the end I did not, as I could not see anywhere if and how I could end the subscription if I was not happy with the service.

It is also not clear how I can pay (other than "it is automated").

Also, what kind of tips are they? Are they tips for winners, or are they lay bets or trifectas? I can only bet on the Tote in Holland (also on UK races), is it worth it to subscribe? Are there daily tips, weekly tips, monthly tips?

Lots of questions, and no answers on the site.

I think if you were to show a list of the most asked questions and their short answers above the call to action, you would get better results.

[BettingTools]

Thanks Wolfie, I think you are right and I definitely need to add more info about the tips. I actually do ok from this side of things and it's only the affiliate income that is poor. That said most of the subscribers will be those who have known of the site, the tipsters and how it works for a long time.

I'll definitley look to add in the type of info that yourself as a first time visitor might be looking for.

Thanks again, great tip!

[wolfie]

You're welcome Brian. And maybe you are already doing well with the tipping subscriptions but you could have been doing a lot better, who knows?

[Top Online Casinos]

All those keywords are accurate in terms of what the site contains and there's definitely not any keyword stuffing there.

Ookay. If you say so.

Some might be unecessary and not help towards the rankings but I believe the effects of these are very minimal these days anyhow.

Uhm? ...

If the effects are 'very minimal' as you say, then why risk it. You have too many keywords. Possibly the 'positive results may well be minimal' The negative way of seeing it could be seen as 'stuffing' or too many keywords, then it can harm your site. Google is just a bot. If they see too many keywords, the bot is not going to think twice.

Best of luck with your site.

[PROFRBcom]

If the effects are 'very minimal' as you say, then why risk it. You have too many keywords. Possibly the 'positive results may well be minimal' The negative way of seeing it could be seen as 'stuffing' or too many keywords, then it can harm your site. Google is just a bot. If they see too many keywords, the bot is not going to think twice.

Best of luck with your site.

His site takes 11 seconds to load and still has stats of "1000 visits on average per day and a high of 5000 with an average dwell time of over 5 minutes and 49% bounce rate."

I sincerely doubt he has trouble with Google lowering his traffic thinking he is KW stuffing his meta tags!

[BettingTools]

Yeah, I wish there was a quicker fix for the speed issue. It's down to the inefficiency of my queries but it's strange how some users report loading it 3 or 4 seconds and for others it takes over 10.

[DanHorvat]

Loaded in 1 second for me on mobile.

Could be a server issue, or/and some visitors catch your site at the moment when some heavy cron is running.

Why is a Google Ad central to your site and not some CPA bookmaker banner??

[BettingTools]

Thanks Dan, I think you could be right there. I have a lot of crons running.

The switch to Google ads is a recent change as a test to see if there is any ranking boost. I don't have any CPA deals at present but I guess these would perform a lot better than google ads!

Cheers for the suggestion.

[Progger]

Server need 5,12S to response....

switch the host...

[eenzoo]

Not possible to open from Prague!

But if you want some input how to build income in this niche, maybe have a lot at bettinggods.com?!

[bossrm]

your wenbsite down now

[Former Member 14]

Hi there,

It's been 4 years exactly since I created my website www.bettingtools.co.uk and the income from affiliate programs has been very small.

After some analysis it seems that the reasons for this are a combination of players already having existing accounts, the fact that we attract shrewd/sensible players and that our horse racing tipsters are too good. I have 2 bet365 affiliate accounts which are both realistically too far in the negative to come back from.

Traffic has been decent though and in 4 years we've had 568,000 unique visitors

Dont' wish to come over as negative but that's only 389.041 unique per/day. When one factors in bots, and all the other crap that hits sites these days (scrapper/script kiddies/hackers/probing bots etc.., most using botnets), you may find that those unique daily numbers are hit heavy. It would not uncommon to see a drop by 75% between what are not really qualified traffic, compare to actually bona fide punters.

I'm not a sportsbook affiliate. But, it would seem unless your attracting a decent amount of bona fide punters each day, your going to be hard pushed to make the dollars. As a point of reference, I believe TheGoonerGuide.com (The Gooner being a GPWA Private Member) receives around 10K in unique a day. So in my opinion, unless you can generate lets say a min of 1K unique punters per day, it's goin to be a tough gig.