Managing your time as a growing affiliate

September 21, 2009 in Affiliate Marketing

Once again I am a lucky SOB! Over the past few years I’m been lucky enough to get to know some of the top poker and casino affiliates in the world. Once again I asked one of the super affiliates I know if he would make a guest post and thankfully he agreed! this article is by PAL member Michael Wittmeyer who runs Best Internet Casinos among many other successful websites. This guy knows his stuff so pay attention!

Disclaimer – I planned this article to be about 700 words or so, but it ran pretty long. I had a lot of info that I wanted to include, and if you read through the whole thing you should get at least a few ideas for making more money.

Once you have been in the affiliate game for a year or two, you likely are making a steady $X,XXX per month income and are looking to take it to the next level. Unfortunately, most affiliates never make the jump from $X,XXX per month to $XX,XXX per month due to a lack of focus and direction. This article is going to provide tips to mid level affiliates who wish to take it to the next level and ramp up their income.

Evaluating your business

The first step you should take is to evaluate your current business to assess your strengths and weaknesses. To do this, I suggest you determine which of your sites make the most money, and which of your sites seem to eat up your time without making much money. Preferably you would be able to determine your top three money making sites or ideas so you can further evaluate them.

Once you have identified your top three websites, ask yourself these questions:
- Can these sites be expanded or improved to make even more money, without straying from their core business plan?

- Can you replicate the site’s business plan in new markets, or even duplicate it in the same market?
Once you have answered those questions, you can move onto the first step for making more money –increasing current profit streams.

Increasing your current profit streams

There are two ways to increase your current profit streams – by expanding your sites, and by improving your sites.

Expanding your sites

Most people think the best way to make more money is to build new sites, but often times it is much easier to expand your current sites instead. If you determined that any of your sites can be expanded without straying from their core business plan, I would highly suggest you do that before buying any more domains.

I’ll provide you with an example so you know exactly what I’m talking about:

Imagine you own a craps website that has fifty pages on it ranging from online casino reviews to craps betting systems to “how to play craps” type articles. Your site may seem complete, but you can actually add quite a few topics to the website. Think about adding reviews of craps books, advice on playing craps at live casinos, adding more online casino reviews, including information on famous craps players/personalities, etc. There are quite a few more craps related topics that could fit on the website and will bring in a ton of long tail traffic that will convert.

By expanding your current sites you are able to leverage any CPA/MGR deals you have already negotiated, you stay in a market you already know, and you avoid sandboxing that could occur when starting a new site.

Improving your site

Now I’ll discuss the other way to grow your current revenue streams, and that is by improving your current websites. Here are a few ideas for improving your current sites:

1. Make sure to promote!
I see so many pages on affiliates’ websites that don’t have a single affiliate link on them. Even if the page is a strategy piece or a betting system or anything else that is not exactly related to online gambling, you can still promote! For example, if you add a page to your craps website about the Iron Cross system, add something at the end like “Want to try for yourself? Practice the Iron Cross system at Bodog Casino!” Your click through percentage will be low, but low is better than zero.

2. Test, test, and test some more.
Another way to easily increase your current revenue streams is to test new page layouts, content layouts, tables, and charts to see what converts best. I personally use www.CrazyEgg.com for this. It’s only $10/month, and you are able to test multiple versions of your pages and save the data so you can compare it and see what layout converts the best.

A few obvious suggestions – on your money making pages, keep the promotions above the fold. Also, make sure the pages aren’t cluttered and there is a clear call to action for what you want the player to do. Buttons work sometimes, but a lot of times a simple blue text link that removes the underline when visitors hover is best. Toplists can be good, but make sure to test different setups to see what works best.

3. Get Better Deals
This one seems obvious, but I wanted to point it out anyways. The easiest way in the world to make more money is to get a better CPA or MGR deal. If you haven’t ever negotiated with your programs I recommend sending each of them an email right now asking if you can get a higher rate, or if you can’t get it, what you need to do to get that higher rate. Often times they will simply say “add me here, and I’ll give you X” and you will be making more money.

There are plenty of other ways to increase your current revenue streams, but the ideas listed here should keep you busy for a long time.

Developing new profit streams

The next way to make more money in this business is to develop new profit streams. Here are a few of my ideas for how to do this properly:

1. Use your current business plans in new markets.

I think the easiest way to build new sites is to take what you have made money with before, and simply apply it to a new market. For example, if you had completed the craps site we talked about before, make a roulette site with roughly the same amount of content, with a similar backlink profile, and with similar promotions. Craps players aren’t all that different from roulette players, so what worked before will work again.

You could also make slightly more drastic jumps like poker to casino or poker to dating or casino to credit cards, etc. There are a lot of affiliate markets you can jump into, and most of them work basically the same way. If you have been successful at this, you can be successful at a lot of things.

2. Buy sites.

Another way to instantly increase your revenues is to buy other affiliate’s websites. You have to be careful with this one though. I know that I have seen a ton of “for sale” posts at PAL and instantly had an urge to buy the site on the spot. However, you have to be patient and wait for the right opportunity to arise. If you are in the market for a site, make sure the site you are looking at fits into your current business, has current revenue streams, and isn’t relying on a ton of purchased links that will eventually expire. If the sale is a big transaction, obviously use an Escrow service to cover yourself.

Also, I would never spend more than half my current liquid assets on a website. You never want to have a cash flow problem in this business, because often times growing your network can be very cash intensive.
That’s about all I’ve got for now, but I’d like to wrap this post up with a little motivational piece. I personally know how discouraging it can be to work harder and harder but see your income stay at its current level. You will be going along making $5,000 in January, $5,000 in February, and $5,000 in March, even though you’ve been working hard and growing your network.

Just keep grinding though, because everything always seems to come together at once. A few rankings will slide up, you’ll negotiate a new deal or two, a new site will start earning, and all of a sudden you’re making $15,000 in April. Stick with it and it’ll pay off.

Tags: poker affiliating, Poker MArketing, Poker SEO