Gambling affiliate

A gambling affiliate is a commercial entity with a relationship with a peer or a larger entity.

We well define the gambling corporative, a facility that houses and accommodates certain types of gambling activities. It can be a casino, poker room, bingo halls, lotteries, sports betting agency, as well as hotels, restaurants, retail shopping, cruise ships and other tourist attractions. It includes also the entities licensed to provide online gambling services.

A gambling corporative may be referred to as an gambling affiliate of another when it is related to it but not strictly controlled by it, as with a subsidiary relationship, or when it is desired to avoid the appearance of control.

Gambling affiliate marketing typically refers to an electronic version of the traditional gambling advertising channel concept. A gambling affiliate is a website which links back to a corporative gambling site like CasinoTropez.com.

However, as the Internet marketring continues to evolve, gambling affiliates are no longer restricted to website owners. Bloggers and members of different online community forums can be affiliates as well. Many emerging affiliate programs are now accepting bloggers and individuals, not necessarily webmasters, to be affiliates.

A good source for a gambling affiliate to buy an already promoted specific or generic domain name, web site or blog, is Gambling Sites For Sale.

Gambling affiliates can also be referred as publishers. Many publishers are very well known gamblers ( Tony G, Daniel Negreanu, etc.).

Illustration of the concept of gambling affiliate marketing

Gambling affiliate marketing is a web-based marketing practice in which a business rewards one or more gambling affiliates for each visitor or customer brought about by the affiliate’s marketing efforts.

Affiliate marketing is also the name of the industry where a number of different types of companies and individuals are performing this form of internet marketing, including affiliate networks, affiliate management companies and in-house affiliate managers, specialized 3rd party vendors, and various types of affiliates/publishers who promote the products and services of their partners.

Gambling affiliate marketing overlaps with other internet marketing methods to some degree, because affiliates often use regular advertising methods. Those methods include organic search engine optimization, paid search engine marketing, email marketing and in some sense display advertising (in their own web sites, or on specialized web, sites such as Casino Online Advertising). On the other hand, affiliates sometimes use less orthodox techniques like publishing reviews of products or services offered by a partner.

A specific form of email advertising is to publish article, discuss or advertise on specific mailing lists and egroups, such as http://groups.google.com/group/casinoonline, http://groups.google.com/group/onlinegambling, http://groups.google.com/group/pokergame (hosted by Google), or http://groups.yahoo.com/group/bet-gambling, http://groups.yahoo.com/group/casino-gambling, http://groups.yahoo.com/group/casino-players, http://groups.yahoo.com/group/online-poker (hosted by Yahoo!).

One of the most important action in search engine optimization, is to get links back to your site from other similar web sites. Because Google and the other search engines penalize the reciprocal links, it is widely used the cross-linking methods. The best and most efficient ways to do this and this way to promote your web site and get more traffic, are the banner exchange (See MultiMedia BX) and webring methods. A webring in general is a collection of websites from around the Internet joined together in a circular structure. The best gambling webrings you can find at webring.com (http://u.webring.com/hub?ring=bestonlinecasin3, http://u.webring.com/hub?ring=betgambling, http://r.webring.com/hub?ring=poker).

The rise of blogging, interactive online communities and other new technologies, web sites and services based on the concepts that are now called Web 2.0 have impacted the affiliate marketing world as well. Most of the turnkey web sites from Gambling Sites For Sale include these characteristics.

90% of gambling affiliate programs today use revenue sharing or cost per action (CPA) and the remaining 10% are other methods, such as cost per click (CPC) or cost per mille (CPM). CPM and CPC are today still heavily used in display advertising and paid search.

Cost per mille (thousand) (CPM/CPT) requires the publisher only to load the advertising on his website and show it to his visitors in order to get paid a commission, while PPC requires one additional step in the conversion process to generate revenue for the publisher. Visitors must not only be made aware of the ad, but also pursue them to click on it and visit the advertiser’s website.

Cost per click (CPC/PPC) used to be more common in the early days of affiliate marketing, but diminished over time due to click fraud issues that are very similar to the click fraud issues modern search engines are facing today.

In the case of CPM or CPC, the publisher does not care if the visitor is the type of audience that the advertiser tries to attract and is able to convert, because the publisher already earned his commission at this point. This leaves the greater, and, in case of CPM, the full risk and loss (if the visitor can not be converted) to the advertiser.

CPA require that referred visitors do more than visiting the advertiser’s website in order for the affiliate to get paid commission. The advertiser must convert that visitor first. It is in the best interest for the affiliate to send the best targeted traffic to the advertiser as possible to increase the chance of a conversion. The risk and loss is shared between the affiliate and the advertiser.

For this reason affiliate marketing is also called “performance marketing”. Gambling affiliates are not employed by the advertiser whose gambling entity they promote, but the compensation models applied to affiliate marketing are very similar to the ones used for people in the advertisers’ internal sales department.

Some advertisers offer multi-tier programs that distribute commission into a hierarchical referral network of sign-ups and sub-partners. In practical terms: publisher “A” signs up to the program with an advertiser and gets rewarded for the agreed activity conducted by a referred visitor. If publisher “A” attracts other publishers (“B”, “C”, etc.) to sign up for the same program using her sign-up code all future activities by the joining publishers “B” and “C” will result in additional commission (at a lower rate) for publisher “A”.

This system rewards a chain of hierarchical publishers who may or may not know of each others’ existence, yet generate income for the higher level signup.

Two-tier programs exist in the minority of affiliate programs; most are simply one-tier. Referral programs beyond 2-tier are multi-level marketing (MLM) or network marketing.

Gambling affiliate sites are often categorized by advertisers and affiliate networks. There are no industry-wide accepted standards for the categorization. The following list is very generic but commonly understood and used by gambling affiliate marketers:

• Search affiliates that utilize pay per click search engines to promote the advertisers offers
• Comparison gambling sites and directories
• Loyalty sites, typically characterized by providing a reward system for gambling via points back, cash back or charitable donations
• Bonus sites that focus on gambling promotions
• Content and niche sites, including gambling review sites
• Personal websites (these type of sites were the reason for the birth of affiliate marketing, but are today almost reduced to complete irrelevance compared to the other types of affiliate sites)
• Blogs and RSS feeds (See for ex. http://betbloggers.com, where anyone can have a free gambling blog)
• Email list affiliates (owners of large opt-in email list(s))
• Registration path or Co-Registration affiliates who include offers from other companies during a registration process on their own website.
• Gambling directories that list gambling sites by categories without providing bonus, gambling comparison and other features based on information that frequently change and require ongoing updates.
• CPA networks are top tier affiliates that expose offers from gambling advertiser they are affiliated with to their own network of affiliates (not to confuse with 2nd tier)

Gambling affiliate networks that already have a number of advertisers usually also have a large number of publishers. This large pool of publishers could be potentially recruited. There is also an increased chance that publishers in the network apply to the program by themselves, without the need for any recruitment efforts by the advertiser.

Relevant sites that attract the same audiences as the advertiser is trying to attract, but are not competing with the advertiser, are potential affiliate partners as well. Even vendors or existing customers could be recruited as affiliates, if it makes sense and does not violate any laws or regulations.

Almost any website could be recruited as an affiliate publisher, although high traffic websites are more likely interested in (for them) low risk CPM or medium risk CPC deals rather than higher risk CPA or revenue share deals.

Affiliate programs directories are one way to find affiliate programs, another method is large affiliate networks that provide the platform for dozens or even hundreds of advertisers. The third option is to check the target website itself for a reference to their affiliate program. Websites, which offer an affiliate program often, have a link titled “affiliate program”, “affiliates”, “referral program” or “webmasters” somewhere on their website, usually in the footer or “About” section of the site.

Even if all those methods seem to indicate that a site does not have an affiliate program, it could still be the case that there exists a non-public affiliate program. The only way to find out for sure, is to contact the site owner directly and ask.

(Article derived from Wikipedia)