New affiliate - Questions for the community

Hey guys, new affiliate here looking to launch my first solo affiliate site in the coming weeks after a lot of work. I'd really appreciate some support!

For context I have a very strong .gg domain and I plan to target players in multiple markets with .com sites, but I'm based in the UK and will for the most part ignore UK traffic.

I've worked as a content writer for multiple slot affiliate sites over the years, now I'm launching my own taking everything I've learned. But I have a few questions regarding areas that are new to me from the other side of affiliation I wasn't involved in

Q1 - When did you agree to add your first bonuses to the site? I'm nearly ready to launch but I don't have any operator relationships, so i need some easy win operators to add, just so that bonus page isn't empty. Right now I have fake placeholder deals.

Q2 - Does anyone have recommendations for affiliate networks that will work with me early on as a new affiliate?

Q3 - Do I need to make my bonuses geo specific. I.e. if I have UK traffic, they should not be seeing bonuses for crypto or other countries? Or can I show crypto casino offers to UK players?

Q4 - Are there any recommendations for UK friendly banks that I can use to send payments to, as I know they're quite selective about having business accounts linked to gambling.

Q5 - For those that are promoting crash games, what kind of bonuses are you pushing? As most are tied to slots.

Any other advice outside related to the business side of being an SEO affiliate would be welcome.

Welcome,

Whether you promote bonuses or not you likely want to make sure to have a handful of affiliate offers at launch. Otherwise 100% of launch traffic is wasted if you have zero places to send them.

As for the affiliate programs to start with, consider starting with the sponsors here at the GPWA, and go through them looking for operators and brands that take traffic for the geo's you plan on targeting. Read though a few thousand threads in the public sections as there are many other recommendations scattered throughout the forum.

Rick
Universal4

UK is going to get tough on UK sites that offer non UKGC brands which means crypto, they will start blocking them so I would run a UK site seperate to be on the safe side.

On Q3, from someone who runs a crypto-only site: don't show crypto casino offers to UK visitors, and not for UX reasons. UKGC-licensed brands don't take crypto, and the crypto brands that do aren't UK licensed, so a UK click either dies at the cashier or you've just advertised unlicensed gambling to a UK player, which is the one thing the Commission actually chases affiliates for. We geo-gate at the toplist level: every brand carries an allow/block list taken from its own T&C and the page only renders brands open in the visitor's country. Two things I learned the hard way: T&C lists lie by omission (a brand that simply doesn't mention Poland still blocked Polish players at the cashier), and whatever list a human sees, Googlebot from the same country must see the same one, otherwise it's cloaking, no matter how good the intention.

On Q5: most "crash" bonuses are ordinary deposit matches where the crash game contributes 0-10% to wagering, so the bonus is useless for the player you're targeting. Read the contribution table before listing one; the honest ones are rakeback or cashback style, not match bonuses.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by MacDaddy

Hey guys, new affiliate here looking to launch my first solo affiliate site in the coming weeks after a lot of work. I'd really appreciate some support!

For context I have a very strong .gg domain and I plan to target players in multiple markets with .com sites, but I'm based in the UK and will for the most part ignore UK traffic.

I've worked as a content writer for multiple slot affiliate sites over the years, now I'm launching my own taking everything I've learned. But I have a few questions regarding areas that are new to me from the other side of affiliation I wasn't involved in

Q1 - When did you agree to add your first bonuses to the site? I'm nearly ready to launch but I don't have any operator relationships, so i need some easy win operators to add, just so that bonus page isn't empty. Right now I have fake placeholder deals.

Q2 - Does anyone have recommendations for affiliate networks that will work with me early on as a new affiliate?

Q3 - Do I need to make my bonuses geo specific. I.e. if I have UK traffic, they should not be seeing bonuses for crypto or other countries? Or can I show crypto casino offers to UK players?

Q4 - Are there any recommendations for UK friendly banks that I can use to send payments to, as I know they're quite selective about having business accounts linked to gambling.

Q5 - For those that are promoting crash games, what kind of bonuses are you pushing? As most are tied to slots.

Any other advice outside related to the business side of being an SEO affiliate would be welcome.

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UK is a particularly tough market. But leaving my personal opinion on that aside, regarding your questions:

Q1 – You don't necessarily need to launch with bonuses already in place, but you do need to have at least some real offers. Otherwise, you're basically sending traffic to a dead end, which isn't beneficial to your site.

Q3 – Yes. Once you have bonuses, show them only to users who can access them/are eligible. Otherwise, that traffic will not convert, you will be creating a poor user experience, and that person may prefer to go somewhere else where they feel the information and offers are actually relevant to them.

Extra advice: Don’t rush into launching if you don’t have all the information, bonuses and offers in place. There are plenty of things you can build, test and improve along the way, but whatever you put live should already be useful and fully functional from day one.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by MacDaddy

Hey guys, new affiliate here looking to launch my first solo affiliate site in the coming weeks after a lot of work. I'd really appreciate some support!

For context I have a very strong .gg domain and I plan to target players in multiple markets with .com sites, but I'm based in the UK and will for the most part ignore UK traffic.

I've worked as a content writer for multiple slot affiliate sites over the years, now I'm launching my own taking everything I've learned. But I have a few questions regarding areas that are new to me from the other side of affiliation I wasn't involved in

Q1 - When did you agree to add your first bonuses to the site? I'm nearly ready to launch but I don't have any operator relationships, so i need some easy win operators to add, just so that bonus page isn't empty. Right now I have fake placeholder deals.

Q2 - Does anyone have recommendations for affiliate networks that will work with me early on as a new affiliate?

Q3 - Do I need to make my bonuses geo specific. I.e. if I have UK traffic, they should not be seeing bonuses for crypto or other countries? Or can I show crypto casino offers to UK players?

Q4 - Are there any recommendations for UK friendly banks that I can use to send payments to, as I know they're quite selective about having business accounts linked to gambling.

Q5 - For those that are promoting crash games, what kind of bonuses are you pushing? As most are tied to slots.

Any other advice outside related to the business side of being an SEO affiliate would be welcome.

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The answers will be slighlty different depending on where you're getting your traffic from. If it's natural SEO in Google you'll have no traffic for a while, so you don't have to rush to get offers in place. If you're doing PPC or driving from active social channels then you will need something in place.

As others have said, every visitor is a potential customer, so you have to ensure you're delivering a personalised experience for them. By that i mean Bonuses and Promotions should at a minimum be Geo Targetted, you can decide whether to keep them in English or Native language - you've not said how your content is displayed to them? So spend some time getting your Geo targetting working, this will enuse you don't waste any traffic you get.

Unless you're specfically targetting a country, you'll be surprised where traffic comes from. In the early days i thought i was targetting UK but got more traffic from India, which I initially ignored. Then i started geo targetting offers and casinos for it and bang I started making decent money.

Be prepared to flex your approach.

If you have no traffic, Affiliate programs will be wary of working with you. There are some good ones out there, but sadly you're more likely to get traction with Off shore operators more than fully regulated ones in the beginning.

As for Banks, you do Marketing, not gambling, so thats an easier way to describe it. My business account was with HSBC, but most of the money payments came into Skrill, and Crypto. There are other online accounts like Revolut, but I don't have any experience with them. You'll lose money paying fees getting money to you HSBC account so you can withdraw it. UK Brands are more likely to do Bank Transfer others no so much so you have to have several options for receiving payments.

Don't worry about being perfect, get the site launched ASAP. Google will love you doing regular updates to it, and it gives you a chance to start getting one or two links to increase its visibility.

Good luck.

Wow!!! You might have just saved my life with your answer concerning Q3.

Q4. Depends what sort of entity you are running (UK business etc. or?) but just because you are based in the UK doesn't mean you need to use UK banking. There are many online banks and EMI's in Europe that are both crypto and gambling friendly. I would avoid any that charge onboarding fees at least initially and try to focus on free options. There's another forum called offshorecorptalk that has some pretty good details on exactly this.

On Q3 I agree with NoDepositCasinos, but the how matters more than the what, and it's where I'd have got it wrong a month ago.There are two ways to show only the offers someone can actually use. You filter the list on the page - same URL, same page for everyone, brands the visitor can't use are hidden and you say so in plain text, something like "4 brands hidden for your country". Or you keep one page and send people to different destinations depending on where they are. The second one reads as cloaking, and I watched a review site get taken apart in public over it a few days ago: users worked out that the same "Official website" button led to different brands depending on the country, and that was the end of anyone trusting the rankings.Practical bit for whatever you build: never let the country detection look at the user agent. If Googlebot and a human in the same country don't get an identical page, that's the line. It's easy to cross by accident, usually via someone sensibly suggesting you serve bots the full list so everything gets indexed.Q2 - the programs that took me on with no traffic history were the ones running their own brands, not the big aggregator networks. Several self-serve crypto programs approved me the same day, two established sportsbook groups took about two days, one asked for nothing beyond the domain. The aggregators were the ones that ignored me. Worth starting there rather than waiting on a network.

1. The bonuses you get depend on which operators you start to make deals with, so those will come naturally.
2. Very few. Your best bet is to bombard casino affiliate managers with a request to work with them. It's a numbers game in the beginning. Once you have around 10 agreed, you're good to go.
3. Re crypto offers to UK players, legally you can't, but technically you can. Tread very carefully here. Make your crypto proposition more ‘global’.
4. I'm in the UK, but I don't have a recommendation about this. If you're willing to partner with crypto operators, I think you'll naturally find other alternatives.
5. Moot point. Get the deals first. The bonuses that are available with the operators come later. 



Hope this helps!