As a player-cum-affiliate myself, a number of Meister forum regulars have asked for information on becoming online casino affiliates. So I’ve put together my take on what it takes to make a go of it. It’s easy to get something up and running, but hard to make it pay, and even harder to make a living from it unless you have a few things going for you. But it is possible, and while it’s become a very competitive market, opportunities still exist for the dedicated affiliates.
- How To Market An Online Casino Online
- How To Market An Online Casino Hotel
- How To Market An Online Casino Free
- Starting An Online Casino
The first key element to becoming a succesfull casino affiliate is being an experienced player. If you are going to get valuable players following your recommendations, you need to know your “Reverse Withdrawal” from your “Withdrawal” and your “Deuces Wild” from your “Loose Deuces”! Well maybe not exactly those two things, as you may focus in other areas, but you’re getting my drift I’m sure. If potential players can see you know what you’re talking about, you won’t just be attracting one-hit bonus hunters. If you’ve played a dozen or so different online casinos, on different software, you’re probably in a good starting position for affiliate stardom!
Any casino can take advantage of that hype by holding their own local events. Know your customer. By orienting your events and games toward your customers and not your industry, you can react much faster to the use of new innovations and the internet for casino marketing. May 13, 2009 Just like its rivals for consumers' disposable income, America's $90-billion-a-year gaming and casino industry is significantly driven by database marketing.
Secondly, it’s important to know the basics of putting a website together. You don’t need much more than HTML, but it helps if you know enough to make maintaining it easy. Online casinos are constantly moving on, changing stuff and generally keeping you on your toes, so you’ll need to keep your eye on things and make changes fairly regularly. The casinos will help of course, with casino afilliate programs and program managers there to assist you – and bug you if you lag behind! If you know a bit more about programming, it makes sense to have a site running from a database so one change will reflect across the whole site. A good sense of design helps…maybe not essential, but your information certainly needs to be well laid out and easy to read.
The third, and most challenging aspect, is getting your site noticed. I can’t begin to explain how complex an issue it is to achieve this, but suffice to say you’re going to need traffic in reasonable quantities, and by trafic, I mean “targetted” traffic. So you have to know some stuff about “Search Engine Optimisation” (SEO) before you start. Google is the main search engine for gambling traffic, but don’t even think about targetting the keywords “online casino” until you are established. It will take months, even years to get strong Google placements on competitive terms, but your knowledge as a player should help you identify some “niche” search terms that you could aim for a good rank with. Webmasterworld is your starting point for SEO stuff. Take a day out to research before you even start writing your website. It will save a lot of time later.
Finally, content. Good strong honest information is the way to go. Avoid stuffing your pages with banners and bonus offers, as it will harm your site ranking over time and attract the wrong type of player. Plus if you want my opinion, signing up for a bonus is not good advice to give a player as the Terms are so restrictive these days. Aside from which, bonuses are constantly changing and keeping on top of them can be a nightmare. Try for unique info, based on your experiences and tell players the good and the bad. Above all, don’t promote online casinos that you either wouldn’t play yourself or have a bad reputation on the player forums. Research! Aside from the ethical standpoint, if a player doesn’t like where you send them ,they’ll move on and you’ve lost them, probably forever. When you consider you affiliate your players for life, and you often only get one chance to get them onboard, you don’t want to waste the opportunity!
For more information and to see the community in action, the best place for online casino affiliates to check out is the GPWA forum which is a pretty active and helpful place to be. If you want a list of affiliate programs for decent casinos to get started, along with plug-in bonus information then check out Affcaff.
Finally, what to expect. If you’re starting a new site from scratch (get a memorable or keyword-rich, but short as possible, “.com” domain name by the way!), you’re not going to see much income for at least six months, unless you get really really lucky. You’re not going to see your site indexed well in Google for 6-9 months minimum (the “Sandbox” – check the Webmasterworld “Google News” forum for more on that), and you’re not going to see sustainable traffic for a similar period unless you can get good strong incoming links in place. many affiliates buy links, especially to get started, but if you follow this route, get links from relevant sources – ie: other gambling sites. Avoid free linking exchange programs and do it the hard way. Google and Yahoo are very wise to “unnatural” linking methods simply to improve ranking, yet linking is one of, if not THE, most important factor in how search engines rank websites.
FOr those of you who haven’t already, please join our Webmasters Group in the forum. We also publish a newsletter for affiliates and affiliate managers. And of course there is more information on Casinomeister’s Affiliate Resources page.
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1. Peculiarities Of Online Casino Promotion — Several Things You Should Know 2. Online Casino Marketing: Focusing On The Company Profile 3. How To Build An Effective Marketing Strategy: 7 Working Tools 3.1. Social media 3.2. SEO Promotion Of Online Casinos 3.3. Emailing 3.4. CRM system 3.5. Partner Programs Are you one of those thinking of joining an online casino? Without the need to bet any additional money, this will allow them to continue playing. Online casino 24/7. This is also another good way that players go about to key their slot games right into their budget which is in fact an excellent method for them to control their money. Then, you must take the following into consideration. Knowing fully well that they will be able to fit their slots into their budget, online players get to enjoy a selection of wide range online slot games. 3.6. Loyalty Programs 3.7. Newsfeed 4. Gambling Advertising: Conclusion |
Online casino promotion is a very multidimensional endeavor, which importance cannot be underestimated. For a gaming project to generate revenues and grow actively, a literate online casino marketing strategy is required.
All operators have to realize that they can install the most advanced, interesting, and modern slot machines but it’s all useless if gamblers do not know about them.
Advertising is a way of conveying information to consumers regarding the casino, how good it is and surely better than someone else's. Although online casino marketing is in many ways similar to advertizing regular projects, it still has many peculiarities.
Peculiarities Of Online Casino Promotion — Several Things You Should Know
Operators aspiring to generate gambling traffic sufficient to carry your project forward, you’d better apply promotion instruments from Google and Bing. Features of the region, competitors, search query information are to be taken into account when it comes to promotion. This way gambling advertisement will be very efficient.
If you are not a novice in gambling you are probably aware of how tough competition is today in the gambling world. Thus, online casino promotion and gambling website monetization is not an easy task. Moreover, online casinos are not your only opponents. Those include bookmaker business, many totalizators, poker room(s), lotteries, etc.
Big investing is required if you want to enter the top ten list in terms of main keys. It will take up a lot of time to reach this goal. Therefore, it;s better to start working with low-frequency queries with a vivid themed binding.
Online Casino Marketing: Focusing On The Company Profile
Integrity as well reliability have the top priority in the gambling industry. Projects following those principles enjoy the trust of the targeted clientele. There is a great deal of influence brought on the side of the feedback from gamblers on different websites and top lists of the best online casinos in the forums. Players like to discuss certain establishments with each other. In case the majority of comments positively or neutrally toned, efficiency from advertizing campaign will increase significantly.
Negative feedback centering around fraudulence and troubles with money withdrawal interfere with effects promotional activities. That is the reason for operators who shown themselves on the damning side to correct their reputation in the first place.
It's a separate topic to discuss, so there's no point in considering it in detail. We here analyze what online casino promotion implies.
How To Build An Effective Marketing Strategy: 7 Working Tools
Online casino marketing is made up of a variety of technologies, which you can use to successfully popularize the project. Below we discuss the main promotion tools, which allow increasing gambling traffic and gambling website monetization.
1. Social media
A standard method to announce oneself to target your audience is via personal accounts in social media. We recommend you have own accounts in each known service. In this respect, you should maintain direct contact with your audience and do everything you can to attract the players. So if you are not sure how to promote online gambling website the right way you’d better start with social media. You will contribute to recognition of your brand greatly.
You can announce everything that happens in the establishment, or just publish important gambling news on your page. The goal is to develop comfortable environment for people with common interests to discuss a certain topic, game strategies, recommend interesting videoslots to each other, etc. If the work with the visitors in social media is done correctly gambling website monetization will bring a lot more profits.
2. SEO Promotion Of Online Casinos
How to promote online casino? Make sure that your resource is in the list of top ten target requests. This way you will increase casino traffic monetization and consequently the amount of visitors.
The SEO concept implies:
- working on internal optimization(working with text, using keys, creating a website map, internal relink, etc.);
- popularization of the resource for search engines(developing as many external references as possible — pages of other websites featuring links to your resource);
- ongoing work on maintaining and improving the obtained results.
Using SEO online casino promotion as a promotional instrument you can generate casino traffic monetization, while spending minimal money. SEO can boast efficient growth of attendance and opportunities for adequate evaluation of the resource performance.
3. Emailing
Emailing can actually help you make very good results for relatively small money. But you can't turn this service into spam. Letters should be sent only to interested users who have subscribed to emailing and voluntarily provided their addresses.
Writing a letter should also be approached with particular care. You should better trust this to a professional copywriter. Although you can just describe anything you deem appropriate in these letters.
4. CRM system
How To Market An Online Casino Online
CRM means Customer relationship management. In this case we players are implied. This is a multi-level structure that is analyzing user needs. Using this instrument you can successfully identify new development paths and simplify the managing processes greatly.
CRM enables you to:
- to automate relations with the clients;
- get the relevant information on the customer base at any time;
- quickly serve a user to increase his or her loyalty;
- control employee performance.
Today's online casino marketing cannot do without CRM because this system allows automatizing most processes. The collected and analyzed data allows creating new development strategies of a gambling project.
How To Market An Online Casino Hotel
5. Partner Programs
Gambling advertising would be incomplete without partner programs. Operators can buy gambling traffic from specialized companies. Payment is credited for each attracted customer. The procedure is as follows: owners of gaming website place a banner on the resource serving as a link to casino site. Operators pay their partner money for each transition or registration with a deposit.
There are many different partner programs today. An operator is only required to register a project on appropriate website, select the most suitable variant of collaboration(in terms of price-quality ratio) and start working. When choosing a partner, you should consider a great many of parameters, the main ones being quality and attendance. If you buy gambling traffic you will be able to speed up the development of your project.
6. Loyalty Programs
After you bring a new player to resource, your target is to retain his interest. The steady increase in the quantity of visitors allows the project to start bringing stable income. But sooner or later, you should start taking steps to hold your customers' interest. Special programs are designed to build relationships with gamblers.
Access to such programs should be made available to every user who has completed the registration, confirmed the identity and deposited to the game account. A player will receive many bonuses, take part in advertising campaigns, and so on. In addition, operators can create a special program that will exchange bonus points for money.
All of the above has a positive impact on the final choice players make. Quality service will allow you to acquire a great number of loyal gamblers.
7. Newsfeed
You have to actively maintain newsfeed announcing all events regarding the casino. You can use a separate section and your accounts in social network to post a link to casino website. There’s a myriad of material to create content, so you can easily find something to work with.
How To Market An Online Casino Free
Gambling Advertising: Conclusion
Starting An Online Casino
We discussed here just a small fraction of the tasks to be accomplished within the framework of promotion. If this matter is a dark forest to you, it’s better to seek assistance with Casino Market. The company has been in the gaming industry for years and has a great deal of experience. Don't waste any time! While you will try to understand the subtleties of marketing, the competitors will lure your target audience away.