How did you first get into the affiliate space and how did your affiliate business take off? Is iGaming your only vertical?
Back in 2014, I got contacted by my old employer Dave, who had been doing some freelance work for an online casino. During his period at this online casino, he really got into the iGaming business. This resulted in him contacting me to start a new venture together. I needed some time to get used to the idea of getting into the iGaming industry, but soon, BestBettingCasinos.com was born. Within a few weeks, we had our website up and our first content live. We combined my knowledge of online marketing and Dave’s experience with iGaming and sales to start our own casino review site. Surprisingly, within a few months, we earned our first money. Although the venture was intended as a fun ‘side-project’, things got serious quite quickly. Nowadays, I work full-time on BestBettingCasinos. I also have another project which I have been running for years, which is a Dutch energy comparison website (goedkopeenergieengas.nl).
Tell us a bit more about your business model, concept, and culture.
Our company is based on one very important factor: a dedicated team. We like to give young talent a chance, and that’s why we work with a lot of local students. They are responsible for many tasks, including translating, uploading content, and creating graphics. Some of the students even started their own project within the company in which they hold shares of their own. We let all students decide what amount of work they do every month and they get paid per job. This means they can do less work when they need to study, and increase their work when they have more time off. Combining this type of work with your studies works very well since you can work whenever you want from any location. Most students that work for us come from the same town and many of them know each other. This creates a very social culture and fun working environment.
What sets you apart from other affiliates and what makes your traffic proposition/traffic sites unique?
Our content is definitely unique. Where most sites tend to write reviews of a few hundred or a thousand words, we go further. Our casino reviews easily exceed a few thousand words. Because of this, we will be able to highlight every item that makes a casino interesting. In addition to creating very extensive reviews, we also translate our content in many different languages. In most cases, we translate a review in all the languages in which a casino is available. Thanks to this, we can attract visitors from across the globe and we do it in native language.
What importance do you give to responsible gaming?
Since the start of BestBettingCasinos, we solely focused on getting traffic in using SEO. Our key strategy has always been that to offer our visitors the most extensive information they can get online. Because of this, highlighting the importance of responsible gambling is part of every review we write. By informing our visitors about all the tools they can utilize to stay safe, we hope we can contribute our fair share regarding responsible gambling.
How did you scale up your affiliate business?
Since we rely on traffic from search engines, we knew we couldn’t scale our business overnight. We always have been in for the long run and, because of that it took a lot of patience to get where we are today. Although this is the case, we pulled some tricks to go faster quicker. Soon after beginning with the website, we started translating content into German. Since this took off well, we focused on bringing in more languages over the years. Nowadays, we have over 20 different sub-sites for various regions. This is very challenging, but it is definitely also rewarding. On top of offering our product in various regions, we started expanding our reach by creating new products. By launching these new products, we try to target different niches. Currently, we are working on a live casino platform (live-casinos.com), a bingo website (bestebingosites.nl) and a casino review website aimed for the Dutch market which is about to open (onlinecasinosvergelijken.nl).
This is part of an exclusive interview of SiGMA Affiliate Grand Slam that G&M News is sharing with its global readers. If you want to access for free to the full interview, just click on this link.