Author: CasinoAffiliateGuide.com

MAILING LISTS : This is by far the most target and best converting traffic you will have. These people WANT to hear from you and get your offers. In this case we are talking about OPT IN. Where you have a subscribe function on your site for visitors to enter their information and receive your newsletter, promotions, bonuses etc. PAID FOR email names is covered in the TRAFFIC section.
A quick definition of the most common.

SINGLE OPT IN: This is where the visitor enters their information on your site and is automatically subscribed to your list. It is the most common and most prone to abuse. Anyone can enter anyones email address and subscribe them to your list even if they hate gambling. You will get a % of complaints using this method. It is up to you if you want to deal with that or not. Your host may have less patience for complaints of spam then you do so take that into consideration.

DOUBLE OPT IN: The safest way to collect names because you will KNOW the person subscribed is the person who wants to be. The visitor you sign up on your site and an email is sent to them. They must reply to the email from the address they subscribed under in order to be added to your mailing list. All but no chance for some vindictive person to add a name to lists that they have no desire to be on. The extra step does seem to cause the sign up percentage to be lower, but with this method you will have a clean list of names that are really interested in what you have to say.

Whether or not you handle the list yourself and do the mailing on your own or outsource to a commercial mailing list company will be up to you. If the list is small, doing it yourself will probably be the best way to go to start. There are many great mailing programs available that you can install on your site and run your list from there. There are many programs available. You will be able to find them on the MISC RESOURCES page at many of the scripting sits but one of the best, and free, is MOJO MAIL. Lots of great features.

Single or Double Opt In setting and a low draw on the server resources (this will make your hosting company happy).
For outsourcing your list after it gets to be larger then you want or are able to handle, you will find many companies available. Prices vary widely as do the features and functions they provide so find one that suits your needs and don't be afraid to move from one company to another as your needs change as your mailing list is a very valuable commodity and you need to treat it as such. There are some that will do it free, but they will add their own ads(some will add several) to your mailing and all we can say about that is , Tacky, Tacky, Tacky.

PAY PER CLICK SEARCH ENGINES (PPC): This is where you will probably start. Unless you want to wait 1-3 months for your listing to show up in the free SE's you will pay to get your site in front of potential visitors.The king of this hill is Oveture or as you will eventually learn to call it, Overcharge. This used to be the Goto site. They changed the name and did some house cleaning. Bids here will cost far more then a pretty penny. Some gambling related terms will get bids of over $25 PER CLICK. Your best bet here will be to find some related multi word search terms that can still be had for a reasonable bid and settle for less traffic. The traffic there is very targeted and the results are now shown on most of the major search engines as sponsored links. It costs but can pay off nicely.

Find What would arguably be another in the top tier. Pricey, but not as much as Oveture. There are several other Minor Majors and the bids, and traffic drop accordingly. Ah Ha, Go Click, Search Feed and others can provide some traffic at a reasonable cost. Just be careful to make sure the traffic is good. Many SE's have been known to deliver what is affectionately called ‘Crap Traffic”.One area needs to be covered in the PPC section. There are 100's of them. They are popping up like weeds in a garden. Most are totally useless.

PPC sites are sold daily on ebay for less then $100 and there is a free/cheap program out there that makes it easy to run your own PPC. When you are at a PPC you have never heard of put your mouse pointer over a search term. Now look at your status bar in the browser. Do you see /smartsearch.cgi somewhere in the URL? While I am not taking anything away from the program, most people that use it have this idea that they will be the next Oveture and get rich ( from YOUR money I will add ), have NO traffic, have the SE on a $5 a month hosting plan and have NO security to protect you from bogus clicks. If you are bored and want to submit to them, go for it. Most will give you $5-$50 free in your account to try them out. Even with the free cash, most of these are still over priced. Your time is worth more than the traffic you will get from them.

These are popular with casino and affiliates both. When a visitor leaves your site without clicking through to your sponsors they are presented with a pop under loaded behind your sites window. This shows a member of the exit exchanges sites. You will get a corresponding pop under for your site when the same happens on another members site. The usual ratio is 2-1, meaning you will have to show 2 sites to have your site shown once. You can find a 3-2 ratio at times but don't settle for less. Since you may be new and have no real traffic to get views of your page you will want to go back a section and read it again in case you missed the answer. Understand, that you are not the only person doing this so the general pool of traffic will be of less quality then one may expect but it is still a better then totally untargeted traffic. Probably one of the largest and oldest in this area is:

Casino Trade
As with all traffic you buy, make sure you know who you are dealing with and check them out. Some casino exit exchanges are reported to shave you closer then a 3 blade razor.

If you are reading the pages in order, then you already know that TARGETED TRAFFIC is king in this business and lack of it will hasten your exit to your future as an Amway salesperson. If you are NOT reading the pages in order and you jumped here to find out where you will get the traffic that will turn you into the next casino affiliate millionaire, sorry to disappoint but this will be more of where NOT to get traffic more than where to get it.

With any luck this will save you a dollar or two that can be used for more effective and honest marketing techniques. Again the word HONEST rears it's ugly head. In the traffic area, even more than in the casino affiliate area, honesty is more often then not the exception rather than the rule. It seems these days everyone is a traffic broker. Everyone has millions of targeted hits to sell you cheap. You know the tout.

“If you have a $24.95 product to sell and just 1% of the 10,000,000 people you spam to respond, then you will be able to buy your own Caribbean Island”. OR “We can provide you with up to 100,000 HIGHLY TARGETED hits a day from our laser targeted network of sites.”

Now if you believe this, I will say goodbye now because you will not be around in this business long and just wasted money that you could have had more fun starting a barbeque with. We will cover some of the more popular cheap traffic here. Some are worthless, some are just pretty close to it and maybe some you can turn into your benefit.

It's your choice. Besides promoting casinos with your portal site, some programs make available to their affiliates a chance to brand the affiliate program with the affiliates own name. These are commonly referred to as ‘FRONT ENDS'. You may also want to control everything. After all, as many times as your were ripped, shaved, ignored and shorted, you may feel it's time to have control of your own BACK END.

Programs vary. You can find those that will give you an entrance page. You have it hosted and point your domain name to it and market your own name. The rest of the casino itself is handled and hosted on the casinos' own servers. Players just pass through your page in the same manner as they would an affiliate banner. This is the easiest way to get started, although it may not be the best as you will have to match the casino ‘look' if you don't want it to be seen as tacky.

Other programs will provide a full template or several to choose from. With this, everything is hosted by them and the only thing you get to change is the name. The theme, graphic, text and updates are all provided by the casino and you can't make any changes so make sure you like what you choose.

Another type is an almost complete custom site. You will be provided with most if not all of the pages that you can customize and tweek till your hearts content. Index, About, Banking, Preview, Promotions are just some of the pages you will have access to. You will have to provide hosting and do all the updates yourself. This is far more labor intensive and requires an up front cost for hosting on your part but it gives you total creative control of the site so marketed correctly, it should provide a better return on your investment.

Yet another program involves the casino themselves, or their creative group, designing an entirely customized site for you based on your name chosen and theme wanted. These are usually made available only after you have proven that you will and more importantly, can, market successfully, a casino front end via one of the above ways described. If you are having good results with any of the above programs, send an email to your casino rep and ask them if they can/will provide this for you.

Another program doesn't even exist. But it is out there. If you are a born silver tongued devil, or you are making your favorite casino heaps of cash, all ya gotta do is ask. Talk to them and explain to them the benefits of either you or them, making a casino front end for you to promote. Just because they don't advertise it on their affiliate site does not mean they wont do it. If you can explain the benefits, ie increased exposure, fresh new player base, multiple marketing streams, more CASH for them, you may be surprised what they say.

So what do these great little marketing gems cost? NOTHING for the most part. So if someone is offering to SELL you one, think twice and head for the door. Now I am not saying all these companies that sell front ends or trying to rip you off. Not at all. But you can get them free of cash. You will have to provide the work and hosting in some cases to get them going. They resellers are charging you for doing that work and sometimes hosting. You will probably find better hosting prices by tossing a dart at a page in the phone book so check the entire package out. You will also sometimes get a higher percentage of the payout. You will have to decide what your time and effort is worth in real dollars. In reality, unless you are doing something truly constructive ( watching Oprah doesn't count, sorry ) or making money, your time is worthless. At least how it relates to this business. Spend an hour a day on your own front end and in a week or two you will have saved yourself a lot of cash.

MARKETING COMPANIES: There are (to) many casino marketing companies on the net today. I am not talking about affiliate program sites but those that ‘market' casinos. They will contact you relentlessly. You will get almost as much spam from them as you do herbal viagra and mortgage loans. They will offer you ‘generous' CPA deals ( make sure you read the CPA section to see what you should be doing now ). They will put your site in front of millions of gamblers foaming at the mouth, ready to max out their credit cards. So you say to yourself, ‘Self, I think I am going to hire me a marketing wiz to get me some of that thar' traffic'. -INSERT DUH HERE- Well rube, just what in blazes do you think YOU are. If you can't market your own site, then why should a casino pay you to market theirs.?????

Now I wont say that using a service is always bad. Just make sure you get a win win situation out of it. If they want to sell you CPA, first and foremost, ask them if they also BUY CPA. You shouldn't be surprised why they will sell this way but refuse to buy this way. They are always looking for new traffic sources just as you are. So make sure you are treated as an equal. What they do is no different from what you do, they just generally hire more out of work used car salesmen.

Banner Exchanges, Pop ups/unders, Hits, Exit Exchanges and more are covered in the TRAFFIC area of this site. Even though it is all marketing, this type of marketing rates it's own section.

In this case, we are talking about the statistics provided by the casino affiliate program so you can track you progress, or lack there of.

Stats will become a major part of your life. When you first start you will probably be consumed by them. Checking your stats every hour or so and wondering if they are really tracking. This will ( hopefully ) pass and after the bloom is off the rose you can go back to have a small shot at having a life. But you still need to track them. The more information they provide to you, the better you well know how you are doing. Click, downloads, conversions, deposits, fees will all become second nature. Knowledge is king and if a program has lousey stats, let them know. They may not know they do since they probably aren't promoting other casinos.

WHY SHOULD I?

Because maybe not all programs have that ‘perfect' backend software to capture everything, maybe the served was down for a week and they ‘forget' to tell you, maybe they are just plain dishonest.

OH MY…..A DISHONEST CASINO AFFILIATE PROGRAM ?

No Joe, say it ain't so. It is. In this biz as much, no, much more than, a ‘regular' business, there is theft, corruption, greed and dishonesty. Sorry if this bursts your bubble but life in the big city isn't always kind.

‘SHAVING' is a popular term for this. You send 100 visitors and your stats show 90 or less. It may very well be a technical glitch and it may not. A program may be short of cash and hurting so where are they going for the money first. The players? Don't pay them and they are all over the net trashing you. The bank? Yeah, like a bank will lend an online casino cash after the dot bomb craze, not to mention they are usually on an island somewhere. So they may, just may, shave a little from a webmaster here and there to cover this months martini bill. You don't have to stretch your imagination to far to see this happening and you wont be in this business to long before you see it happen to you.

Tough love time… You aren't dealing with the Sisters of Assisi here. This is a tough business and a CASH business so that breeds greed, and you are going to get taken sooner or later. DEAL WITH IT. It is part and parcel of this biz and it comes from all the money floating around in a totally unregulated environment.

See the big picture.

Are you making more then you are spending and getting a reasonable return on your effort? If so, don't give yourself an ulcer over who is stealing from you because more often then not, it is more than one. Consider it a cost of doing business. just like hosting, advertising, etc. Vito takes his cut before you do. If you can't hang with that, go sell Amway.

What's the difference and why should you care?

Because it effects your bottom line and anything that has an effect on the amount of dollars going into your pocket you damn well better start caring about. The programs out there are pretty evenly split 50/50 on which type they offer.

SINGLE TIER

This is the easiest to understand and requires no effort on your part at all. You market the casino to players and you get paid based on the type of payment plan and program you have signed up for as discussed before. If another webmaster finds the casino program via your link and signs up, it will have no effect on your income.

MULTI TIER

Ok, now you have more work to do and thought to put into this. If you want to take advantage of it. Multi tier works just like the single tier as far as the players are concerned. The play and you get paid as normal.

BUT

If a webmaster finds the casino via your link and signns up for the program, then you will stand to make a percentage of what that webmaster makes. The webmaster is considered ‘under you' or for those that come from an MLM background, part of your downline.

It should be said right now that no matter how many webmasters you have under you, they will NOT be paid any less then they would normally make had they signed up direct. If it is a 25% net program, they will still get the full 25%.
YOU on the other hand will get a small percentage of their net. It varies but is generally in the 2-5% range. It isn't much but it is far better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick and if you get enough performing webmasters under you it will add up.
OK, that scenario above is for a 2 Tier Program. Some are 3-4-5 even 10 tiers deep. It all works the same. You get a % of the webmaster under you and you will get a smaller % for a webmaster that signs up under them. They will also get the ‘second' tier percentage of the webmaster under them that you get for them being under you. This goes on for as deep as the program allows.

Simple? Really it is.

So you will need to consider if and how you will market the program to other webmasters as well as players. There is no reason to not take advantage of it since it is already there and means more potential income for you for about the same amount of work. A simple WEBMASTER page with your multi tier programs and a description of them with your link is all that many do. Just remember the quote on the front page here, a banner farm will draw a lot less interest then a good description of WHY they should sign up under you.