Internet marketing is about getting traffic (potential customers) and turning them into actual customers (converted). The conversion rate is the ratio of visitors who convert from website visits into desired actions (e.g. depositing players on a poker/casino/bingo site). The Conversion rate is defined as number of goals achieved divided by the number of visits (where goals may refer to registrations or depositors).

Here I present 10 top tips for affiliates to increase conversions from a gambling related web-site.

• Use Analytics - Information is Power. Get detailed information on yout site visitor habits using a third party analytics application such as Google analytics. Examples of the kind of data your analytics account can yield includes data such as how long visitors stay on the site, whether they proceed to a new page or leave (bounce), how they found your site (organic / direct / via a 3rd party site), if they came via search engine (organic), which keyword they searched for. Using the information available to you by analytics will give you a basis to tweak and test your site to maximise the # of visitors you reach and to work on conversions.
• Banner Blindness / In content links – banner blindness is real. Eye-tracking studies have shown that web-site visitors almost never look at anything that looks like an advertisement, whether or not it’s actually an ad. This means that you shouldn’t overload your site with adverts, and should consider placing advertis in the middle of articles, as well as using text-links within content to maximise conversions and clicks.
• Banner to Content Match - One important consideration if you choose to use banners is to ensure that banners match the content of the page (i.e don’t put bingo banners on a poker page). Some affiliate systems allow affiliates to set up rotating banner groups which will show a number of unique (but related) banners in one spot on your site. Using these rotating groups will help you get a quantifiable idea of which banners work best with your content.
• Custom Creatives and Promotions from merchants – Poker / Casino / Bingo sites are happy to create bespoke banners for your site. These can mention a promotion being “exclusive for site X” etc, to lend credibility to your site and to point out value in promotions for players (who often assume that promotions are network-wide, and that they stand a snowball in hell’s chance of winning!). If you run a small online community (via forum or mailing list), leagues and competitions are a great way to get started with getting sign-ups, and encouraging your players to be loyal to a specific brand. For example, a small poker related forum might get a poker room to “sponsor” a small poker league, by starting with a freeroll, then some value added tournaments (this gets players a- depositing, b- using your trackers, and c- generating rake). Such promotions are an excellent way to attract new depositors and signups on your site because of the value and small fields. This concept can be re-applied to different niches and products.
• Get the Scoop, Get the traffic – Good for SEO and good for getting a lot of targeted traffic to your site is getting an exclusive story and publishing it before anyone else. If you have a good rapport with an AM, they might give you a 20 minute headstart before they publish important news (such as moving networks). If you publish an article on the subject and hit the major poker sites with a link to your story it is unlikely to be zapped as spam (as it’s an exclusive story!), and will result in a lot of targeted traffic which you can try to convert. Scoops are an excellent way to generate massive traffic spikes, and traffic = potential customers.
• Call to Action – The “call to action” is one of the most important concepts in marketing and promotion. In simple terms, once you’ve established that you have something of value to offer and that your site / company the perfect choice to deliver it, you want to ask your prospective customer to take the next step. You deliver a call to action.

  This may seem obvious, however it is very common to see a call to action ommitted in promotional articles on large gaming sites where rather than ending the promotional article with a call to action, the user is merely presented with a bunch of terms and conditions which could instead be linked to, and replaced with some copy which tells the user to sign up (for example the if the article is about a live poker tournament, the call to action could be: ” Satellites are running NOW! – click the download link to try your luck and get your $600 deposit bonus”.

• Implement a Mailing List – Developing a mailing list is of massive benefit to affiliates. Having targeted user mailing lists at your disposal means that special deals which crop up can be monetised quickly via one bulk email to potentially interested parties. The other up-side of having a mailing list is that you can bring information to the attention of potential customers without them having to visit your site!

  How do you generate a mailing list? One option is to have a “newsletter” sign-up form on your site, this may be incentivised (e.g. “subscribe to our newsletter and you might win a free trip to ‘Vegas in our monthly draw”). Another method of developing a good mailing list is to deploy a forum on your site (using free software for example phpBB, or commercial forum software like vBulletin). Plugins exist to implement newsletter subscription opt-in for common content management systems such as Wordpress (e.g. Sendblaster Newsletter Plugin) , allowing you to easily implement opt-in or non-opt in mailing lists with little or no technical knowledge.

• Buy Traffic from niche sites – so you own a poker bonus site, and know that a lot of your target customers hang out on biggest poker forum in the world, which sells ad-spots to interested parties.

  Purchasing some banner spots on the poker site will get you maximum exposure targeting people who may be interested in your product. It is better for 1,000 poker players (your target demographic) to see your banner than for 1,000 people on a gamer site to see your banner (even though advertising here might be a tad cheaper). Do the math, Keep an eye on conversions, banner views and clicks, and optimise your campaign or banners accordingly.

• Build a Brand – A brand is a name or TM connected with a product or producer.Brands have become increasingly important components of culture and the economy.Brand Loyalty exists when customers have a high attitude toward your brand (which is then exhibited through repurchase behavior). Brand loyalty is a great asset to any online or offline company: in many cases customers are willing to pay higher prices, they may cost less to serve, and can bring new customers to you. In the case of large gaming companies, branding is especially important as it can sometimes serve as the delivery mechanism for over 60% of web-traffic, whereas non-branded competitors will have to rely on other traffic acquisition mechanisms such as organic seo to drive a similar amount of traffic to their sites.
• Pay Per Click Advertising – PPC advertising on search engines such as Bing, Yahoo! and Google (adwords) (PPC on Google is only available in the UK for gambling related sites) is an excellent method of acquiring cheap traffic, depending on the keywords you wish to target. The most popular gambling keywords are known to be expensive (”short tail” keywords such as “Bingo”, “Poker”, “Casino” etc, however running a small budget test-campaign using some “long-tail keywords” (e.g. “Bingo in London”, “Order Casino Chips online”) often proves to be very profitable for many webmasters, and a PPC is certainly an attractive route to market for internet marketers, but also represents something which needs constant tweaking and optimisation in order to acquire good conversions on budget

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