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.