With the online gaming industry forecast be worth a reported $41.4b by the end of this year it’s little wonder that the amount of iGaming affiliates continue to grow exponentially, all desperate to capture a piece of this burgeoning market.

However, as competition intensifies in an already saturated SERPS and with Google changing their goalposts, (see the most recent ‘mobilegeddon’ update). Many affiliates become destitute, unable to cope with the pace of transformational change and restricted by the inertia of tired search tactics.

Long gone are the ‘dark’ days of keyword stuffing and spammy link building. If you’re thinking of starting your very own iGaming affiliate site, keep in mind the following tips:

Quality Content

Essential to monetizing and converting precious traffic, every affiliate must place significant emphasis on producing, fresh, quality and relevant content. In SEO terms, fresh content ranks higher and quality content, enveloped with subtle targeted keywords (don’t stuff!), can give rankings a boost as well as lower bounce rate.

From a user perspective, interesting and informative content gives customers a reason to engage with the website and exciting content can be shared via other mediums to drive traffic. Although some iGaming verticals are more difficult than others, there is no excuse for poorly constructed, low quality content. Whether you chose to list previews, live odds, bookmaker promotions etc…always ensure your content is well written and immaculately structured. For an additional tip, share your content on a social platforms like G+ to help it index quicker.

Embrace Social

Although affiliate marketers continue to leverage Google and other search engines, diversifying traffic sources is becoming increasingly important in iGaming which is why it is essential to make the most of social media platforms: Facebook, twitter and G+. Most gaming affiliates fail on social media, particularly Twitter, because they are unable to establish a distinctive ‘voice’ amongst the white noise. It is important for social accounts to refrain from being over promotional. You should always work on the ratio of 1:3 or 4 in relation to promotional posts/natural. Grow your followers organically, resist the temptation to purchase 10,000 automated followers to create a ‘false authority’ and reach out to influencers in your vertical. There are many great tools available like followerwonk that will enable you to access a plenitude of data related to your followers; allowing you to discover where they are located, what time they tweet and who you can target in their circles.

Additionally, it will come as no surprise to learn that Facebook and Twitter posts with images/videos receive more engagement so ensure you load each tweet/facebook post with high quality resolution media. Above all, remain active. If you’ve identified through social media analytics that the peak activity time for your followers is 2am, then schedule Tweets using tools like Buffer to reach users at that time.

Clear CTA’s

Many iGaming affiliates, particularly casino affiliates, abide by the mantra that ‘more is better’, listing a whole host of casino games and strategy content in an attempt to acquire long tail traffic. However this often works to the detriment of the user experience. Decision paralysis and ‘feature fatigue’ can set in; you may think lots of choices are a good thing but users need to be guided.

That’s where clear and concise CTA’s are needed to cement user trust and drive engagement, as well as helping to secure those all-important conversion. All posts should have strong, actionably described CTA’s that link to money pages. In terms of CTA buttons, there is much conjecture surrounding which colour is the best for conversions; some moderate evidence suggests that bright orange may be the best. However, the crux of the matter is that CTA’s need to stand out and should be brightly contrasted against the background theme. CTA’s can be tracked via Google URL builder, so find out what works for you.

On-site

One of the basics of on-site SEO across any niche is internal linking yet it’s amazing how many iGaming affiliates seem to neglect this practise. Internal links serve to provide clear paths for spiders to follow from point A to point Z in your website, they must be descriptively anchored and direct towards relevant pages. If you happen to acquire powerful backlinks to your domain then you will want to maximise all the SEO potential this can gauge so ensure you have more internal links directing to pages that you want to rank high; in essence you want to spread the link juice around.

Users these days have short attention spans due to the high volumes of content they have access to and, despite the penetration of the smartphone that encourages easy scrolling, recent research suggests that content placed above the fold still grabs 80% of our attention. As a result, you must make sure that CTA’s, offers and promotions in this section of the page are attractive and enticing enough to encourage users to click through.

There are many more tips you can follow in order to become a successful iGaming affiliate, many more of which we will look at in more detail in the next two upcoming posts. However, this basic guide should help you overcome some of the most common pitfalls.