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What do you veterans think of this:
Next month I am going to weed out the casinos I am affiliated with in a big way.
Instead of spreading a lot of traffic to a lot of casinos, I am going to concentrate on marketing a select number of casinos and send a lot more traffic to fewer casinos.
The criteria is going to be based entirely on how well they perform. I have a few that once looked promising but have not been converting very well for the past month or so. I’ll wait and see what all the conversion percentages are for this month and decide who to keep.
The reasoning is this. – By concentrating on fewer casinos, I can market them much more efficiently through my newsletter , etc.
– By concentrating on fewer, I can send them much more traffic each, thus will hopefully reach a better percentage of the net.
– I can have a much better business relationship with fewer aff managers. I may even remember their names!Fergie I generally agree….. BUT dont get too thin on partners or you can end up getting burned really bad if one or more groups go south.
For my first three years I sent all my traffic to four casino groups and was earning a huge amount of money. Then I lost one as they claimed I had a whale that kept winning $100k or more per month and was wiping out all my commissions from my other players with them. Since they carried forward negatives within a few months I was over a million dollars in the hole and had to accept that this partner was dead as an income stream. That was approximately $15-20K per month lost income! Almost overnight!!
Then if that wasn’t enough a second major partner switched software and in two months time THEIR commissions dropped by over 80%!!!
So in less then three months I saw 50% of my income evaporate. I had built huge player bases with these two groups and now that was basically lost.
Ok, so at least I had the other two….. Well, around that time Credit Card rejections started to soar and Paypal dropped online gambling….
Another big hit to income. I was now earning 1/10th of what I did just six months earlier!
I immediately scrambled to add on new partners and decided to never put all my eggs in so few baskets. Over the course of a year that strategy proved successful as I built up revenues at more then 10 new partners. I was once again doing brisk business and when one or two or even three of my partners have a bad month I dont worry about it.
So yes its extremely important to send traffic only to partners that produce, but its also important to maintain a wide enough base to ensure stability.
Thanks, Professor.
I’ve change my mind! Back to the drawing board.
lol
These aren’t mutually exclusive ideas. While four may be too few, 40 could easily be too many. And the more domains a person has, the more relationships might make sense. At the same time, for people with one key domain, anything over ten relationships is probably clutter. Six to eight might make the most sense. The balance between protecting yourself and not sending people to places where you get little back is a balancing act that you have to fine tune, well, basically forever.
Also, you won’t die if you experiment some. Cut back to fewer a couple months, see how much that improves your bottom line. If it improves a LOT, then the risk to reward of fewer relationships might outweigh the safety benefits of more partners. On the other hand if you make a trivial amount more, then safety will probably seem a better idea.
It also depends on what kind of traffic you have. If you have a lot of repeat visirors, you want to offer a lot of choices. If you have one time traffic, you want to offer less choices.
Yes, what I have is clutter.
I’ll do some experimenting, then.
Thanks very much for your thoughts, everyone
I agree with Classics.
Diversification is necessary for your protecion.
Overdiversification will interfere with your potential return.
I don’t have a problem managing multiple affiliate relationships–but it’s easier when you’re the affiliate. It also helps that I managed my relationships with my affiliates when I was an affiliate manager. Managing multiple relationships is a skill.
The approach I’ve tried to take is to focus on one partner a month. And I think 10-20 partners will be plenty for me at some point.
As always, some great advice. Thanks again, Cappers.
This has turned out to be a pretty interesting topic – to me, anyway.
And you know, it’s not always just the performance that makes a program good – it’s the aff managers. I have one or two who don’t really perform all that well, but I’ll keep them around and give them a fair shake just because the manager is a pleasure to work with.
Thanks for taking time from your retreat to help out, Dominique
I agree with Dominique in that it depends on your traffic. Those of you who utilize PPC’s and programs like adwords would probably do well with a small group of casinos. I on the other hand have one large group of loyal members and with the advantage of all that traffic going through a forum I can market unlimited casinos since every week theres a new one to focus on and I always have my front page which is a full list of no deposit chips, and a forum dedicated to every casino and every bonus on offer for those depositing players……
So I get to market maybe 30 casinos at all times, but each month I pick 5-10 to push and focus on over the rest where I just simply make a post for the latest promotion.
I know, that made no sense. lol
Got2Bet had for years earned most of its income from one provider, with trickles from others, and needless to say income was very volatile and impossible to predict. For some reason only that one provider made money and attracted clients despite similar to equal exposure.
Also, we shunned CPA deals as we got burnt more often than not on those.
Today, we have a combination of CPA deals and percentages, and income from many more providers, although the one provider is still the strongest and taking a hit there is painful.
I agree with Classics 6-8 with 1-2 new testings going on. Prof I was in the same boat when that 2nd group did a shift and the revenues when south.
I don’t think any of the majors are crooked, but we need to get the biggest share we can. They all know that new players are hard to find.
Brian
Also, we shunned CPA deals as we got burnt more often than not on those.
Today, we have a combination of CPA deals and percentages
This is the route we have undertaken and for us is working pretty well. ie. CPA and % deals.
I went from 25 – 35k a month down to $500 a month when that second group headed south.
I have always choosen to only market a select few…. but I watch the stats and sites like a hawk :hehe:
I have had big winners over several casinos this month and it looks like I will have my second losing month over nearly 7 years in the biz. Pretty good record but it sucks seeing it happen.
brian
