A casino affiliate works in partnership with an online casino and essentially exists to advertise online casinos. He or she will get paid commission for each player that either visits the casino site or becomes a depositing player through a unique affiliate link. There are different payment models for affiliates and casinos can offer more than one.
- How To Start A Casino Affiliate Websites
- How To Start A Casino Affiliate Website Site
- How To Start A Casino Affiliate Website Account
How do they work?
If you’ve been searching the web for online casinos may have come across websites that appear to be casinos, but do not actually host any games. ‘Affiliate marketing sites’ or ‘affiliates’ make money by promoting online casinos to potential players. In effect, affiliate markets are middlemen between players and casinos.
Hello, I've run some casino affiliate websites myself for years. I know how difficult and time-consuming it is to create your own website and adjust it so that it looks relatively good. I have created my websites mostly with Wordpress in these years.
This term is not unique to the world of online casinos. In fact, it originated in a different industry altogether – e-commerce. However, the basic premise is the same across the board. An affiliate is a person or company that drives custom to a particular site, brand or company.
In essence, each affiliate works as a small, independent marketer on behalf of the other company, earning an amount of money (i.e. commission) each time a new customer is guided to the goods or services on offer.
- Joining an affiliate program is actually very easy. However, some will require your website to be in perfect shape and represent what the casino offers. This means your content needs to be accurate and should include game reviews, casino reviews, and much more before the affiliate site will allow you to use their casino to attract players.
- Top 10 Casino Affiliate Programs 2020. Casino affiliate programs are what we would call a win-win situation. By splitting the workload of finding new customers, both casinos and affiliates can mutually benefit. The basics of how it works couldn’t be simpler.
Let’s look specifically at online casino affiliates. An affiliate can be one passionate player with a casino blog or an entire marketing agency. Each of these performs the same task – bringing new players to their partner casinos.
Each affiliate is given a unique URL link to embed in their website/s. These links are a way to track where web traffic is coming from. By using the affiliate’s online reach, casinos can share the burden of marketing with a multitude of affiliates, thus bringing their products to more players.
Online Bingo and Travel Affiliate Websites Benefits Start-ups The downside to that is that there became a proliferation of online services in any one niche which can sometimes overwhelm consumers. This overload of information is what has driven a boom of online affiliate businesses in casino, bingo, and travel. Looking for online user reviews is a great way to find out which casino affiliate program is the most honest and highest paying. We’ve heard plenty of good things about game-revenue.eu, so that is a great place to start your research. They offer between 40% to 60% of commissions, depending on how many customers you’ve brought them.
How to spot an affiliate
It can sometimes be hard to tell casino affiliates apart from casino websites. They usually have similar imagery and employ the same type of language aimed at enticing players to sign up and gamble.
However, there are a few tell-tale differences between casinos and affiliates …
No games
Most obviously, casinos have game catalogues displaying all their products. Affiliate websites do not run any games of their own, but they often provide online casino game reviews and can offer free play demos of certain games.
Multiple brands
Affiliates usually market multiple casino brands. If you see a lot of different logos, offers and adverts, you’re most likely on an affiliate site.
Referral
Casino affiliates’ main goal is to get you to sign up to one of their casino partners. If you see lots of links saying ‘Sign Up!’ or ‘Play Now!’ then you’re on an affiliate site. Casinos, by contrast, require customers to create accounts in order to gamble.
How are affiliates paid?
When it comes to payment, there are two models that are very popular among operators. The first is called revenue share. In this model, payment for the affiliate is a percentage of the profits made by the traffic generated by the affiliate, usually over the course of a month. In this case, higher traffic equals higher payment.
The second model is called Cost Per Acquisition or CPA for short. This is based on the number of users who, thanks to the marketing efforts of the affiliate, perform a particular action. In the case of online casinos, this is either the player signing up for a casino account or signing up and making a first deposit.
Some casinos offer just the one payment method, others offer affiliates the choice of two or more. Now, it’s important to know that some affiliate programs run by casinos enforce certain restrictions that can be disadvantageous to the affiliate or not compatible with the kind of marketing an affiliate does.
Affiliates, like casino players, should carefully read the terms and conditions associated with joining a casino affiliate program and keep any eye out for things like bundling schemes and negative carryover, which can mean a smaller payment at the end of the month. Just like casinos, not all programs suit all affiliates.
How to become an affiliate
Most casinos offer affiliate programs. Indeed, affiliate marketing has become an integral part of the online gambling industry at this point and many brands are keen to employ affiliates to broaden their potential reach.
The first step is to take a look at a brand’s affiliate program page. This is usually reached via a link, often stashed in the footer of the casino site, and includes important information you will need to know before becoming an affiliate.
Signing up to become an affiliate is free but keep in mind that it is only one step of the process. Once you receive your unique affiliate link, you will need to put it to use. Blogs are a popular choice for amateur affiliates and indeed many affiliates often start out as casino bloggers.
Affiliate links can be embedded into all sorts of online content, including banners, pop-ups, text links and so on. A budding affiliate will need to think about who their audience is and what kind of content they respond to the best.
Being a successful affiliate means understanding the mechanics of a good website, the function of different sorts of content and putting all that together into an appealing online resource for readers and potential players.
Things to keep in mind
Always do some research on the casino brand whose affiliate program you are thinking of joining. Even if you are a long-time player at that casino, you may find the program is not exactly what you want and it’s worth having that information before becoming invested. Besides, you wouldn’t want to be involved in marketing a casino that is unfair or unethical towards its customers.
Next, keep in mind that as an affiliate, there are other rules you must adhere to as well. The UK Gambling Commission takes a keen interest in the marketing and advertising activities of casino brands and affiliates should be aware of these rules. For example, the UKGC demands that marketing should not be appealing to anyone underage, to prevent them from being encouraged to gamble illegally. Casinos must follow these rules and so should affiliates.
At the end of the day, affiliates play an important role in getting the word out there about casino brands. As an affiliate, it is crucial that you believe in the brands you are working with and that you, as a participant in the online casino industry, do your part to ensure that any gambling activities you promote are safe, fair and secure.
Congratulations! You have started your very first casino affiliate site and you need links! You’ve come to the right place. Getting links on the internet is hard and getting links to a casino affiliate website is even harder. The traditional approach of writing amazing content and assuming casino affiliate links will appear by themselves won’t work. So we have created this guide for you. It doesn’t cover every single way to get links; there are plenty of more innovative ways of doing it, but at least it will get you started.
Get casino affiliate links from your affiliate manager
You should have signed up as an affiliate to at least one casino by now. Talk to the affiliate manager there and have them put a link to your website from their affiliate signup page. Offer them a better position on your website in exchange for this promotion.
Write a positive slot review
Write a review of a slot and then have the slot provider give you a link. It won’t work with the big ones (Netent, Play’n’go etc.) but smaller game providers might give you one.
Buy casino affiliate links from existing websites
If you want to make money, you have to spend money. Make a list of websites with good backlink profiles, email them and ask for a link. Pay them for it. The better the link, the more money you can spend.
Sponsor an adventurer
There are tons of people who do crazy stuff for charity. Walking the Sahara, climbing Mount Everest or hiking through the Middle East. If they have a blog: sponsor them and get a link.
Set up your own PBN
This is the most scalable solution of getting links. This is what the big companies are doing. Google usually frowns upon this and some people argue that it’s no longer a valid approach to SEO. But if you are an affiliate, you probably care more about being number one than about what other people think. What you need is expired domains with backlinks and good, diversified hosting.
Trade with other affiliates – the more you trade the better
This is a good reason to attend the next affiliate conference. When having a good time with the other affiliates over a beer (or ten) mention that you would like to trade links. This process will be easier if you have a PBN or a network of casino-specific satellite sites. The more you have to trade with, the easier for you.
Buy casino affiliate links from somebody who already has a PBN
If you don’t have anything to trade with, you might be able to convince other affiliates to sell you links from their own PBNs and satellite networks. You don’t have to make the same investment that you would if you had built it yourself – but it won’t be as cost-efficient in the long run.
Reverse engineer your competitors’ link strategies
This is the bread-and-butter of experienced SEO experts. They analyse their competitors’ backlink profiles and quickly identify how to replicate the links. Get an account at Ahrefs or Majestic and learn how it’s done.
Hire an SEO company that provides backlinks
Some SEO companies only do on-page optimization, but the majority of them will also help you with backlinks. If you have the money to hire an SEO company, this could be the way forward. There are a lot of success stories out there of affiliates who didn’t do any of the SEO work themselves. Instead, they hired consultants to do it for them.
Hire an outreach agency that takes on casino clients
Same as above. These guys scrape the web for contact information for website owners. They then offer them editorial content collaborations. If the website owner agrees, he will receive an article in exchange for a link. You usually pay per link for these services.
Buy casino affiliate links from a shady source
This is not something we recommend since it can totally destroy your rankings. However, if you are in the business of Churn & Burn there are many resources online where you can get loads of shady links for a small sum. Be prepared to launch a new website every month or so because a lot of them will get de-indexed.
How To Start A Casino Affiliate Websites
After getting the links, set up landing pages
How To Start A Casino Affiliate Website Site
Now that you have the links all figured out, you need to have landing pages that will attract visitors. We at Topcontent offer high-quality iGaming content services, and our casino writers can write all kinds of casino content from casino reviews to slot descriptions and sportbook content (check out a Topcontent review or a two, and you’ll understand what we are talking about), and then lean back while the money flows in.
How To Start A Casino Affiliate Website Account
Good luck!