How'd you get started?

[mooncereal]

Just curious, how did everyone get started in this niche? Background in SEO? Interest in gambling?

For myself, I work in tech but before this I worked in digital marketing for years. Did some websites on the side and was able to rank them decently.

I also run some private poker games on the side but i'm new to gambling marketing/SEO. My first goal is to make $100, and I won't stop until that happens. At that point I'll keep it going!

[universal4]

Welcome and I hope you do not have a huge struggle to make the first $100.

Most here can tell you though, it will be a great feeling to see the first payment come in and hopefully you will be able to say that it was the first of many.

Will be interesting to hear some of the stories as to how some folks got started in the industry. (I still get stuck trying to remember if I was here before or after dirt)

Rick
Universal4

[PaulEchere]

I personally work in sportstech and igaming (by proxy). A friend (who worked at a casino operator) once told me about affiliates and how they bring in players, so I became curious enough to give it a go myself.

Do you already have a website set up or some ideas / plans on what, how and where to target?

[wonderpunter]

I was doing weight loss affiliates and happened to be living in Costa rica almost 20 years ago when we were at the boom.

[allfreechips]

Got a free hosting account when 1and1 first opened in 2004, then i needed to make a webpage about something so io picked free casinos i was enjoying at the time.

[nwalker]

When I started playing live dealer games online, i started documenting everything i found out, stuck it on a website and just kept creating content that i thought other prople in the same position as me would be interested in. That was 11 yrs ago and i'm still going.

[mooncereal]

Thanks, Rick! I'm not giving up until I get there.

So I went live with my site (South Africa market) but I realized after speaking to affiliate managers and here on GPWA that the player value is pretty low. I am working on a new market now, but debating if I should continue to invest in the SA site or not. I don't think I can pull off huge volume without spending some $$$ and I'm just not sure if it's worth it to me yet.

[mooncereal]

Awesome!

[mooncereal]

That's super cool man! Just checked out the site it looks awesome.

[xecutable]

From a random comment with an affiliate link on a forex forum. Was most likely spam but I had no idea an affiliate link is back then either. After searching for the brand, this forum came up. Took me nearly 2 years to lurk around here and make my first 200$, another one to become a full-time affiliate, and this was back in 2009.

I've been enjoying sites since '99 so even if I didn't make any money, I'd be doing something in this space.

Overall now it's the time to absorb as much information as possible and experiment. Given most of us started some 15-20y ago, the path back then is different than now and what worked for each affiliate in most cases is very individual.

Learn from affiliates not managers. There's like 5 that have 20 year experience and know what they are talking about. The rest were trained to rank check on Alexa (lol) and have had a 2 day training written by chatgpt. From that point on, it's "what traffic do you have?" "I need traffic from X Y Z" and that's about as "personal" as it gets.

Find programs that you can build a relationship with, and are trustworthy. It sucks to throw years of effort just to get your account closed or your commission reduced cause of a shady program. Remember that 60% of 0 is still a 0, find converters not big % promises. And yeah if this is the thing for you, you'll eventually catch a break.

[golfbettingsystem]

Enjoyed gambling in its various forms from way back, I used to try accumulators and perm bets on the old weekend football coupon in the local Ladbrokes as a student in the 90s with 10p per line stakes.
Learnt enough in various corporate marketing roles to give this game a go and although it’s been up and down in the past 16 years or so I wouldn’t have it any other way now. In fact I fear I wouldn’t last a day in a corporate job now!

[eenzoo]

20 yrs back a "wank or bank" link in the footer a po*** subscription site took my attention.

[Juan Roman]

My first job after university was at a local sports betting affiliate company back in 2008. After the owners were arrested for doing affiliate marketing two years later (they were eventually cleared of all charges after spending 10 months in jail), I started looking for iGaming content writing jobs via forums, found a few, and eventually got offered a full-time position by a big casino (and betting) affiliate.

As I didn't want the other gigs to go to waste, I found some more people to help out and that eventually led to starting my own content writing company. After balancing both for a few years, I decided to leave said affiliate, focus on my company and started building my own affiliate sites. It's been an amazing journey and the GPWA forum and valuable member comments have helped me so much in the process.

[PaulEchere]

Thanks, Rick! I'm not giving up until I get there.

So I went live with my site (South Africa market) but I realized after speaking to affiliate managers and here on GPWA that the player value is pretty low. I am working on a new market now, but debating if I should continue to invest in the SA site or not. I don't think I can pull off huge volume without spending some $$$ and I'm just not sure if it's worth it to me yet.

Yes, the player value is pretty low, however, whether to continue or not might depend on a few things:
- Do you already have traffic? Or do you see it growing?
- Have you spent any time on building a backlink profile?

If both are yes, then I'd say - by all means continue and create a second one.
If both are yes, then you can easily use the first website to sell backlinks which in some cases can be pretty ok pocket money and you can also use it for non-reciprocal link exchanges.

If it's brand new website with no traffic and backlink, might be a good idea to pivot completely, unless you have a good plan of now to grow BLs and traffic without investing lots of $$ and time.

[iso2009]

I started with a football highlights site back in 2007 or 2008. Never went into casino, cloaking ads or anything like it and I kind of regret it now.
The landscape is so different now (tons of regulations), I think I was so lucky so start when the Internet was free and wild.

[mooncereal]

That makes a lot of sense. I am going to see about getting backlinks from operators and forums etc... and see if I can get some motion without having to spend a lot on backlinks. For now, my budget is something like $1500/month so I don't know about investing nearly 20k/year on a site with fairly low upside potential. thank you for the advice.

Yes, the player value is pretty low, however, whether to continue or not might depend on a few things:
- Do you already have traffic? Or do you see it growing?
- Have you spent any time on building a backlink profile?

If both are yes, then I'd say - by all means continue and create a second one.
If both are yes, then you can easily use the first website to sell backlinks which in some cases can be pretty ok pocket money and you can also use it for non-reciprocal link exchanges.

If it's brand new website with no traffic and backlink, might be a good idea to pivot completely, unless you have a good plan of now to grow BLs and traffic without investing lots of $$ and time.

[PaulEchere]

That makes a lot of sense. I am going to see about getting backlinks from operators and forums etc... and see if I can get some motion without having to spend a lot on backlinks. For now, my budget is something like $1500/month so I don't know about investing nearly 20k/year on a site with fairly low upside potential. thank you for the advice.

In terms of your budget. IMO $1500 / month is an overkill for sure, if we're only talking about backlinks. Of course, if you're are looking to outsource the entire thing completely, that's different.

[mooncereal]

In terms of your budget. IMO $1500 / month is an overkill for sure, if we're only talking about backlinks. Of course, if you're are looking to outsource the entire thing completely, that's different.

You think $1500/month is overkill for backlinks? What's your thoughts about a good budget for a new site? I'm genuinely curious. Maybe I can move things around and do content & backlinks for the same budget...

[mooncereal]

My first job after university was at a local sports betting affiliate company back in 2008. After the owners were arrested for doing affiliate marketing two years later (they were eventually cleared of all charges after spending 10 months in jail), I started looking for iGaming content writing jobs via forums, found a few, and eventually got offered a full-time position by a big casino (and betting) affiliate.

As I didn't want the other gigs to go to waste, I found some more people to help out and that eventually led to starting my own content writing company. After balancing both for a few years, I decided to leave said affiliate, focus on my company and started building my own affiliate sites. It's been an amazing journey and the GPWA forum and valuable member comments have helped me so much in the process.

What's the story of their arrests??

[PaulEchere]

You think $1500/month is overkill for backlinks? What's your thoughts about a good budget for a new site? I'm genuinely curious. Maybe I can move things around and do content & backlinks for the same budget...

Yep, I do think that $1500 / month is an overkill for backlinks, especially for a new site.
With new sites (especially in saturated and very competitive niches like igaming), I'd probably want to be reactive rather than proactive - meaning pushing up KWs where you are already seeing a positive trend upwards.

I'd say, once you build a solid foundation of content ("solid" may vary depending on your intent and plans), let it sit for a month or so and see what G thinks of it. You will definitely start seeing some pages outperform others - you can double down on those as there you are likely to get best returns on your BL investment.

Talking about exact amounts, if we're talking about a one-man operation and a singe website, $600 - $800 per month is more than enough to build out a solid backlink profile.
The main reason being (in my opinion) is you buy links that "work" and you probably want to make sure that what you are doing "works" before continuing.

So the ideal scenario might look like this:
- You have content on your website and you see which pages / KWs get more impressions / clicks than others
- You identify which of those pages are likely to bring you $$ (where you can get FTDs or which might drive people to reach out to you to buy BLs from you)
- Once you know the KWs and pages - you do competitor and backlink strategy research where you identify places where you might want to get BLs from. These should be somewhat (or completely) niche and GEO relevant.
- You identify a topic for a guest post publication. The goal here is to create a post which will get clicks. If you publish a guest post with a backlink to your website (on a different website) and that page never gets any organic traffic - there's very little use from such BLs. So you'd want to craft a post that is relevant to your target KW and that covers a subject / KWs that people are searching for and that will likely get clicks (a good number of impressions at the very least).
- Then you let that sit and you try to analyze the impact. This is the tricky part because it is very easy to confuse correlation with causation. But really, anything about G, its algos and methods of working with them is, in essence, tribal knowledge.

That's one possible formula for a good backlinks. If you have that as the objective - you won't really need to spend more than $600 - $800 per month on BLs unless your website gets really big.