How to start an affiliate site in the niche of casino gambling? A step by step guide with a financial model

Bonjour, les amis, Bohdan is here. This is another one from our old time series "The Gambling MBA". Today's topic is how to start an affiliate site in the niche of affiliate gambling. It's going to be a step by step guide with a financial model. 

We start by saying that this guide applies to companies and people who are not professional website builders or professional marketers. Still, the first thing that I need to say is that starting up affiliate sites in this gambling niche is not for  total beginners. Obviously you need some understanding of overall online marketing, or you at least want to have a person who wants to be a head of productor a head of operations here.

Key questions to ask yourself before starting

So let's discuss the question you want to ask yourself before starting this business. So I have two questions and short answers for them from my standpoint. 

1. What's going to be your strategy: SEO strategy and business strategy as a website owner?
2. What's your industry and your category where you're working?

So, why even talk about SEO strategy? SEO strategy is something you want to put forward as your strongest foot. So, something that ensures that you're going to give to your clients valuable and new things. And questions you would want to ask yourself may include the following:   

• What are you going to do as a business? 
• What type of content do you want to produce? 
• Where do you want to take backlinks from?  
• What's going to be your signature (product) features, etc?

These are questions of SEO strategy, and the questions of Category revolve around where you want to be looking into? Is it going to be, for example, crypto casinos or traditional ones? 

Short answers on Strategy and Category-related questions (my take)

So as for those who want to start a website, my suggestion is to look more attentively at the side of crypto gambling. This is where more value flows to and therefore it’s fine to focus down to crypto gambling in the first place.

And secondly, take a strategy - there's lots of strategies, I’ve personally developed at least six of them - but take a strategy of being "Best in category". This is to say, pick a specific category, say, this is going to be crypto gambling with a focus on 

• coins and 
• specific deposit and withdrawals options or 
• overcoming restrictions.

Think of it as follows: you want to break restrictions, give people, for example, best no VPN or no KYC, etc casinos and so on and, this is how you try to become the best in this category. This is to say, produce more valuable, helpful content, produce more insightful content and be better than specific sites that you know. 

Framing Unique Selling Proposition

Let's go deeper into what your unique selling proposition or what value you are bringing to customers. Why is it important? Well, there's a lot of websites in Indonesia, you know, and most of them, you know, leave for some time and then die. With Google updating this algorithm, it's really important to answer to yourself: What's the purpose of your website? What do you want your user to do? 

This, for example, includes answering the following questions: 

• Is it going to look through comparison and choose one of the two? 
• Is it going to subscribe to your newsletter and then nurture the leads? 
• Is it going to be clicking the first link available or, alternatively, browsing through the whole table, etc?

AND you have to be very precise in answering these. 

So, in particular terms, it boils down to deciding “What is your most helpful Main Content (MC) vs your “filler” content?” Once you decide on this, everything will be more or less clear later on because you will understand:

• How to structure the content? 
• Where to put more emphasis? and 
• What pages must or deserve more links and so on. 

Why is it crucial to understand what is the purpose of the website?

We claim that the questions:

1. What is the purpose of your website in the first place? 
2. What do you want your users to do?  

are crucial questions as regards the ability to prioritize and structure the page’s content. But why exactly?
 
Most of the older websites that kind of stuck for a long time in the niche are now being downgraded by Google because they are losing their old time appeal. They’ve been producing increasingly lengthy, very detailed guides and pages, but they are losing their traction, because they're losing the touch with the client. 

So they cannot actually answer what is their purpose. It's kind of “do all, have all and for the goodness of all” pages. If you can be more exact, more strict, more precise in this, you have a chance to beat the competition.
 

Building your team

Let's discuss the team, what team you're going to need. So suppose you're focusing down on crypto and you want to be the best in your category. And remember, your category is something you frame it yourself. 

Problem question

“I want to:
 
build a crypto gambling review site,
focusing on smaller topics, like casino gambling using certain (smaller) coins, 
giving specific and precise answers to users' questions 
providing the first hand experience, i.e. try myself before recommending to other, and
(my purpose is) to make a customer switch from their old crypto casino to a better alternative.”

What kind of team do I need?

Solution

Here’s a composition of the team for this project:

1. Head of Product / Operations
2. Head of Content
3. Head of SEO
4. Account manager

The team's first person is a Head of operation or someone who has experience in SEO. For example, it may be a person with a prior background. Remember, it's very risky to embark on this, if you don't have a specific experience. 

Then, think of hiring two Heads: the Head of content and the Head of SEO. And, finally, the account manager, the person who's going to create accounts and maintain the cooperation with advertisers. This is the core theme or core team.

And It will cost you some money too. Let’s discuss it in further detail.

Understanding Unit Economics

Let's deep dive into what is a unit economy. This is something I propagate, I evangelize. You may have seen my videos on unit economy. Simply saying, this is when you count everything in your business towards a certain unit. Practically speaking, you pick your main strategy unit and then tie everything  to it, or calculate every expenditure and revenue on the basis of this unit.

Example of application of unit economics to affiliate sites in gambling

 Let's take an example. 

SEO Strategy

Suppose, your strategy is as discussed above. It means that you don't want to produce hundreds or thousands of pages. You want to produce less than 100 and you will have all of them indexed. Importantly, these pages must have more than 10 keywords each. 

Core metric

Your core metric is going to be, for example, Number of keywords per unit of indexed content. So this is the metrics that would  suggest you, your basic unit.

Basic unit

And your basic unit on the site level is: Cost / Revenue per keywords per indexed page.

Fixed and Variable Costs for affiliate website in gambling

 Now, if you look deeper into the theory of unit economy, you will find costs fixed and variable.

Composition of Cost Fixed for affiliate website

Costs fixed for affiliate publisher:

1. Salary (remuneration)
2. Office rent
3. Software subscription

So the cost fix for your project will be salary or remuneration for this team. In our example case above it’s 10 to 12K euros per this team prior taxation. It may also include rent, if you run a physical office. Additionally, let for up to 1k euros for SaaS to run SEO, Content management, Account management, etc tasks.

These are fixed costs because, no matter whether you earn money or not, you ‘ve already incurred these costs.

Composition of Variable Costs for affiliate website 

All the rest is going to be variable costs, which is to say, costs linked to your performance. If it's performing better than you put up more and otherwise.
Composition of Variable Costs for affiliate website

1. Development costs
2. Content costs
3. Backlinks or promotion costs

 Likewise, you will need some development work in the beginning, but then you may stop. It includes content or additional content writing because your Head of content will not cover all your content needs herself. And then you’d need backlinks.  

For simplicity, let's say that 1,000 words text will cost you 25 euro on average and your backlink on average (across all sources) will cost you 100 euro. So these are the unit prices that you're going to pull together. 

Financial model

Then we have a financial model. I give three of them with a calculation of the break even points, which includes: 

• How much you will need to invest?
• How much will you earn?
• When would you break even? 

So, I will give them as links in this article (and video). If you have a specific request, for example, for a certain market or with regards to a certain budget, probably want to contact me through my agency NERTIS. I'll calculate your financial model for a fee.  

A Step-by-Step Guide to Launching Affiliate site in gambling

Then we proceed to a step by step guide: what and in what particular order you must do if you decide to embark on this affiliate site endeavour.

Sequence of steps to do when launching affiliate publisher site 

To launch an affiliate website in online casino gambling you may want to go by the following sequence of actions:
 

1. Website’s Design Product Research Document (PRD)
2. Website development assignment
3. Hiring the team
4. Content Strategy
5. Content Planning and Editorial Calendar
6. SEO Reporting

So, first is design. You will need to have a technical assignment for design creation. It’s very important, because a design is not only pictures and fonts, but also a structure of information. 

Second is obviously technical assignments for developers. Clarity matters, since you need to understand what you need to have and how it must work in the smallest details before you start. 

So, these two things probably must be done by a Head of your operation or the most experienced person in the room because they will lay foundations for the further work. 

 Finally, the third point is hiring. Hiring people, which includes evaluating the candidate's experience and a potential fit, running online meetings, requires a high level of qualification and must be assigned to the head of operations or the most experienced team member. We do these services in my agency, NERTIS: we provide help, we may recommend people or get help with assessment of their qualification. 

The fourth thing that you want to go into is a content strategy. Content strategy includes:

• Developing you Content structure, 
• Keywords strategy (which groups of keywords you want to target vs not)
• Setting up content-related metric(s) that you’d put into your financial model

 When you’re done with the content strategy, you proceed to content planning and a simple editorial calendar telling the team what to do by week, by month, etc. 

And finally is SEO reporting.  It's about creating a series of basic templates, which, however, are not basic in substance. This includes (as tailored to the metric(s) that you want to track):  

• SEO temperature report, 
• Keywords temperature report
• Monthly performance report
• Report by page type

We can help you with this, so as to make sure that your target metric(s) is observed across the group of reports and you get a holistic view of a project’s performance. This is how you can easily evaluate whether or not you're approaching your target numbers.

Conclusion

 This is probably a very succinct guide on how to approach the process of launching the affiliate website creation in the niche casino gambling. This includes key questions to ask yourself before the start, an approach to your value proposition for clients, steps you need to go, basic structure of the team and your basic costs structure.
 
If you have questions, suggestions for me, or you want to cooperate, please find my email. Also you can search for my agency called Nertis and ask for our services.