The best types of sites to target include casino blogs, strategy sites, poker websites, and sports betting influencers. Follow the Rules. It's essential to look up all of the respective rules surrounding online casino affiliate marketing with your local authority.

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.

• With this model, affiliate casino sites earn a percentage of revenue that client casinos generate from referred players. It is considered as a long term income; that is why most of the affiliate online casino programs utilize this method. On the other hand, it is also prominent for online casino owners.
• When you join the affiliate program you earn a commission. This means the casino pays a percentage of the net revenue that they earn from the customers that you brought to the casino. Each month you will earn: 30% Commission of net revenue from your selected priority product group; 20% Commission of net revenue from the other product groups.

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.

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.

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.

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.

How To Affiliate An Online Casino No Deposit

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.

Online Casino Affiliate

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.

Affiliate Sports Casino Online

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.

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!

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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