First post in this part of the forum, hope this is allowed
After 7 years of playing at casinos and gaining a lot of experience along the way I have decided to stop playing and move into the affiliates world by investing a substantial amount of my winnings into a new venture with a well known figure from the TV quiz world.
The plan is to set-up a brand aimed at the UK marketplace which not just lists licenced casinos but tests on a monthly basis support response times and withdrawal times of those casinos. There will be a dedicated FREE telephone helpline to players, an office open to the public which provides assistance with disputes and most importantly helps problem players by providing information on local counselling and how to stop for good.
Any pointers from members of the CM community would be appreciated
Hey there, well done for getting into the world of affiliate!
I stand in this odd position where I'm both an operator and an affiliate… Anyway, obviously the reason affiliates exist is because they handle risk on behalf of the operators. In return affiliates get commission (you know that of course)
I have a few suggestions:
Read the Google quality rater guidelines.
These are written for manual reviewers at Google to evaluate the quality of websites. In turn this information is (probably) used as a training set for artificial intelligence algorithms that judge the 'quality' of a website.
The important part: it's a complete guide to how Google evaluate quality and therefore how users evaluate the quality and relevance of a website.
Link to the source PDF:
I've talked about this over the years on calvinayre and iGamingBusiness amongst other places. If you search here are several videos and articles on quality rater guidelines:
Ranking on brand
I did a presentation on this London affiliate conference 2017
link to presentation:
Very simply, if you're a casino without much brand equity then affiliates are massively important for building confidence in that casino brand. In my own casino, we've accepted that affiliates are important and so they rank around brand phrases. That's okay because it's third-party validation that were a good casino. We've also made a big thing about asking customers to to honestly review us, so anyone checking us out can see a balanced view of what were like.
As an affiliate, if you can rank on brand, you know these customers are seriously considering joining that operator. Therefore conversion rates are going to be higher and that's a good thing.
It's very tempting to say every casino is good, or the casino which pays you the most money is the best but if you reference Google quality rater guidelines, you'll appreciate that you exist on Google's search results because you are fulfilling a need on behalf of customers. That's why for example AskGamblers is so important to us because of the huge body of user reviews and information about us. It's also why it ranks number two after our brand phrase and therefore why we pay them more money than any other affiliate. But that's okay, because we help each other.
(Aside: this is a strategy casinomeister should be pursuing and I don't know why they don't)
SEO/links et cetera et cetera
links don't work like they used to. Because the cause and effect of link acquisition is so loose, it's very easy to be sold into the idea that buying loads of links are suddenly going to get you rankings. It just doesn't work like that any more.
The cycle is now:
- You build a website
- Google evaluates algorithmically for quality and relevance
- You get links into your website that have good page rank and TrustRank (remember page rank and TrustRank are not advertised by Google , so it's important to use a proxy like majestic CitationFLow/trust flow and make sure sites you acquire links from other kind of sites you be happy to present to a Google employee from the spam team.
- Google detects the links coming in and based on how they've evaluated your website they will 'audition' you on the search results
- If you get suitable click through rate and engagement, Google will see your website merits its rankings. If not, you go back down
- If you have another inflow of links, you will probably be re-auditioned, but you only have so many chances before Google distrusts you and you are consigned to the bottom of the index
tip: when you're evaluating sites for link placement I always use SEMrush data as a metric. If a site ranks on Google, it's more likely Google actually likes that website... Then I use majestic CitationFLow and trust flow as a secondary metric to evaluate the power of a domain. Finally the basic premise of pagerank i.e. more page rank on homepages than in some random content page still holds because the pages which have the most links to them within a website are typically the most prominent. There is a variable which is external pagerank of course. But whatever way it cuts, you can evaluate all of this 'pagerank/TrustRank'stuff using a tool like majestic.
And that's about it. Think about the utility you offer to someone making a decision about which brand they go with and everything else should sort itself out.