Using a free casino affiliate template

[Ace Fun]

I'm an investor in domain names, and I'm in the process of creating a number of sites to promote a variety of casinos. At the moment, I'm customising a fairly simple free template for casino affiliates ( and I will preserve the links as required in the license). Obviously I will include my own promo text and links, but the overall layout, and some of the images, will be unchanged. Does anyone have any idea of the impact this will have on the search engines, and on the surfers visiting my site?

[xecutable]

It depends on what the template looks like. From what I've seen, a lot of free templates, have this HUGE, above the fold banner that cuts your advertising space above the fold, by like 60% at best. While designs can always be changed, not every template is coded in an SEO friendly way. Some are quite messy and cause certain anomalies, but then again so are paid templates.

Why don't you invest in a casino theme, most of them go for like 50 bucks or so. This way you wont have to preserve any links, you'd be sure no malicious code is on them and they are used by many. That's just an idea, obviously I don't know your budget or how much you'd like to spend on something like this.

Overall your design should not have much impact on your rankings, given that there's no malicious code. In a way it's asking, if I get my car in red, would that affect my top speed.

[sweetbet]

Are you referring to html templates or wordpress themes?

[Former Member 14]

Here's some free advice... Throwing up a few casinos on a free template, ain't the cash cow people think it is. It take a lot, and I mean a LOT of hard committed work; most time for literally months and months on end, to even get your first (1'st) punter to sign up and deposit. Unless you can commit to a minimum of 12 hours a day, 6 days a week for the first 6 months, then my advice is, find an easier market.

I'm not saying this to put you off, I'm just telling you how it is these days. It's a LOT of hard work in the beginning, and generally takes a good 2 - 3 years of daily hard work, to achieve a position where your earning a five (5) figure monthly residual income.

Better to have eyes wide open, than shut IMO

[wonderpunter]

Why wouldn't you want to do a good job? don't focus on the search engines but focus on the reader... CTR... if you invest on domain names then you should invest in every aspect of the business.

[Progger]

Unless you can commit to a minimum of 12 hours a day, 6 days a week for the first 6 months, then my advice is, find an easier market.

7 Days, dont be so lazy
After the work u need a hobby,gaming,pets or cars...or something else. Because if u life cycle is make of, wake up - coffe- work - sleep...u go crazy after some months...

[PromoteCasino]

I agree with xecutable, free templates are designed to give the owner a free link. I am not a coder so rely on a well made template that allows me to modify easily to get the feel and design that I require. You can get some very good ones at places such as themeforest.net, prices ranging from $30-$60. Every template I have used is well maintained and updated regularly.

There are some successful affiliates that have used Wordpress templates and adapted for their own needs. Some are even in this thread.

Happyfeet is spot on, there are no free rides in to this industry and unless you are prepared to bang in the hours it will be short lived. You could get lucky and pick up a big player which is great for morale, this happened to a friend and it spurred him on to greater success.

Wish you well with your project.

[Ace Fun]

Thanks to everybody for their helpful replies. To put things in perspective, here is the activity for my old nick here on gpwa
Last Activity: 20 Sep 2010
Join Date: 10 May 2003

Things have changed a lot since those days, and I'm cautiously testing the water. I'm now retired, so I've got as much time as I want, but I do have a lot of projects on the go at the moment. I made a moderate income, but erratic, income from casino promotion in the past, but it took me well over a year to get started, so I don't expect instant returns. My primary interest is to build a store of wealth away from fiat currencies - hence my enthusiasm for Bitcoin and domain names. My objective is to build a few "permanent" income producers, and to have a small portfolio of names for sale that generate a bit of income whilst they are parked. I've got about a dozen casino names in a portfolio that is approaching 1,000, and I hope to expand that.

If I found an name and application that was suitable for a primary site, then I would probably use Drupal as a CMS. I've started this on a couple of political sites. Right now I don't know enough about the current market to even guess about the attributes of a primary site. I decided to start with a simple template that was aimed at home computer users playing the slots, and the points made by @xecutable were what promoted me to start thisd thread. The free templates semm to be based on a large image, and if this is repeated on many different sites, it could put off the surfers. Also, they seem to include link lists for quite a few sponsors, and obviously I won't have the traffic to support more than a couple of sponsors.

I started with a fairly old table driven template, but I think I'm going to dump that, and maybe try to find a responsive template so that I can include support for tablet and mobile users. I won't post the site link as I'm about to delete and replace the template.