Thread: Where to start

Started my first Casino website 2 months ago. The site is getting almost 1000 unique visitors per month. I'm well experienced with Affiliate marketing and SEO. With Affiliate marketing I am active in many niches; but mainly travel. Casino is a niche I am not experienced in (yet).

With this traffic I would assume I already did my first steps ok I guess (it's related traffic btw). The website however is focussed on a Singaporean casino.

I've placed some banners on the website; mainly 125x125 buttons (6 of them in the 'sidebar'). I also placed some 300x250 banners on the site. Income is still zero and I believe I am stuck at this point. I can't think of anything to better to get some income from the visitors.

It's mainly because I do not yet get 'the whole playing grounds' of Casino related Affiliate marketing. What would be the steps to take to get a better idea of what to do next? Which sites give a good impression on where to start? If I were to place myself in the shoes of my visitors; what would I be doing (or should I be doing).

Any input is greatly appreciated!

Ilya

Hi Warren!

Thanks for the input. Much appreciated .
I will pm the url so you can have an idea.

Your input is valuable; as I didn't think of most of these items yet.

For one I haven't looked into the market in which I'm operating. I figured every Singaporean (most of my traffic) is just able to go online to gamble...but perhaps that's not the case?

My ration is perhaps not that healthy yet; though my traffic comes mainly from people interested in the 'offline' casino . Of course I try to get them interested in the online world of gambling . The site is very young, so I must admit that I actually didn't expect making much from it already.

I will look into the amount of banners. Thanks for the tip on the heathmap. As I'm just using a custom Wordpress theme; I don't know how I should start tuning the site more. I even don't know if the merchants I'm promoting right now are a clever choice.

Time for some actions

Thanks again!

houben77,

Warren gave you some good information.

A few other things to maybe look into:
- are the keywords you're targeting good converting words or just traffic generating keywords?
- does your site include all the deposit options for the casinos you are promoting? if your readers are aware of the depositing/banking options it may help convert into sales when they are signing up.
- are you showing lots of traffic and sign-ups through the casino you are promoting, or are all the stats next to nothing? if you are seeing close to 0 on all the main stats you might want to check with your affiliate managers to make sure everything is working properly on both ends.
- you mentioned you don't feel super comfortable with the sites you are promoting, maybe do a little more research to make sure you are promoting trustworthy casinos so you get paid.

Just a few extra thoughts, but good luck with everything!!

Not sure if this helps but when I was with Nine.com we tried to introduce Soccer into our marketing efforts to bring in UK players and give our existing player base more sports betting options.

The result was that our current data base did not cross over and we were unable to capture the UK players. Was it because we were competing with companies like Bet365, was it because Nine was managed by Americans and the site was written and read as a US facing brand, was it that we did not have a marketing manager that understood the UK market and how to take us into that direction?

I'm not sure why we did not succeed but I know that we were very successful marketing to the US market and as a manager I would not take a job promoting a non-US facing brand.

As a matter of fact I was approached right before coming to Gambling Wages for a position as an Affiliate Director for a Live Dealer Casino brand for a European facing brand, I had to decline. You may want to look at the top performing Casino Brands featured in your Google search and build your marketing efforts around those brands and countries they are facing.

Cheers,

Houben, yes please post the URL so we can get a general idea of your landing page.

As Marty says, you might be experienced in aff. marketing but not necessary will that means that you can manage sites out of your niche successfully. However, we all start at some point to grow and be successful. So I think you can be successful, it is sometimes small and little things that can make a difference.

I think that your traffic is tremendous, so you have the potentials to be a successful affiliate in the gambling industry.

Wish you the best of luck.

Cheers,

Melanie

You have a lot of traffic mate, is it totally focused on the Singaporean market or is this site attracting a lot of Aussies (they like to holiday in Singapore) too?

I would bet that if you were getting 25% of your traffic from Australia/NZ, you could throw some Aus-specific banners up and you'd get some depositers pretty fast.

My 2c