What are best traffic sources for newbie affiliates?

[Online18Casino]

Back to your question, as when first starting out their are some easy places to get a little traffic from people interested in gambling (so its simi targeted). Here are some of the things I have done, as Muffin had said stumbleupon may be good I have never really used it but here are some others as well.

Try answers.com and giving some answers to open gambling questions and providing your link as the source.. The trick is, to provide good and valid answers. Yahoo Answers can be good as well, but harder to get your answers to stick now-a-days.

Try following people who follow land based casinos on twitter... Many of them will follow you back and then you have an audience that you know likes to gamble.

Those are a few, you can search and think of others on your own but to get started that will provide a little valid traffic and if you do it enough you can really get some good offsite links in Google.

 

[honestgaz]

I rest my case! .. lol

 

[bleety.com]

Thanks to everyone for providing such quality answers

So main takeaways were:
1) Build up your content (Q&A, reviews), partner up with proven affiliate programs
2) Pursue SEO as a mean to get people on your site and target very low competition keywords and longtails at first
3) Provide quality advice and leave links on answers.com and similar sites
4) Social media – follow people who follow casinos on Twitter
5) Persist 6 month to a year to get results

 

[MacCOR]

To follow the advice about answers.com - can anyone tell me if it's possible to create an account on the site that is not connected to Facebook, because I was unable to find such an option? I really don't like when sites only allow logging through Facebook :/

 

[clara.affactive]

Hi,


Wow Bleety cool tips to start. What about the social media related traffic? I know it used to be good sometime ago before google updates but now doesn't seem to be so good as it used to be... What do you guys think?

 

[nsawins]

Sites that don't rank high in the engines need to have SOMETHING on their site that brings back repeat traffic. The guys on the top of the 1st page in search engines can simply make big money off 1 time visitors if they are going to a review page that warms up the visitor and convinces them to click on the call to action button and register. For sites that don't get 1st page search engine traffic than it's best to have something on your site that makes someone come back time and time again so you can eventually get them to sign up for something. Sites that get less than 100 visitors a day can still make good money if they have a loyal following that values the content that you supply regularly. Don't get caught up in thinking you need 5k plus page views a day to make big money in this industry because you don't.

 

[muffincrumbs]

That is totally true. My site http://casinobonusandfreechip.com used to get 2k visits per day when it ranked for no deposit bonus. Now my other sites only get a 100 or so per day but I am banking more than when all those cheap skates combined.

As far as offering something no one else has to get people back, well that is the best possible way to get it done.

 

[clara.affactive]

MacCor,


I also checked your site and saw that you have some problems with the "top free slots" at the bottom... the lower 2 images are not displaying.

Really liked your site, looks like up to June you managed to get some traffic pretty well... the advice worked!

 

[Erik]

some great tips i found here on AGD.
On my site i just started with seo and linking.
somebody told me that you have to make as much new post or topics a day ( about 30+) to get good rankings and hits. and of course it has to be written and not copy past steeling content.
i dunno if its true,but its very hard to get some serious real traffic with new sites.
especialy because google sees gambling related topics as spam and of the hughe amount of sites related to gambling

 

[muffincrumbs]

Just generating content is not enough for a new site. A lot of us tried it and 99% the site just sits there dead. If a site is truly popular then others will link to it on their own, and that's what you want! Generating that much content if it is really good can get you all sorts of recognition, shout outs, and it will improve your SeO, but only by the amount of popularity the posts have. This is measured in traffic, incoming links, the long click (clicking from a search page and not returning to the same page to select a different site), 1,609 other factors, and on-page evaluation as only one small component.

 

[byebyebaby]

I have been doing this website sh#t ;-) for maybe 3 years now and wasted my first 2 with doing everything wrong. What helped me get stuff right are forums like this, CAP and GPWA. Read a lot of posts, questions etc. And don't take one answer from somebody else as the truth. But when 10 people, who have solid websites, give the same answer, then that might be true.
Also don't be scared to ask questions, how dumb it might seem, just ask. At some point I was posting 5 questions a day and I got real good help.

Last tip if you haven't heard it already, CONTENT. Keep adding quality, own written, content. Update regularly and visitors will come.

 

[TigerLair]

It certainly is a tough market to get into, we are currently trying backlinks at the moment. its soo early on for us, we are daily adding content too, and our site is fully optimized for google too. But that doesn't guarantee that we will get into the top 100 for the most popular keywords, those sites that are in the top 100 will have been around for a long time and have many many backlinks and other factors involved.

I am giving these backlinks a month or 2, to get fully indexed, then we will re-evaluate and see if we need to do more to promote our website further.

Tiger

 

[Online18Casino]

It certainly is a tough market to get into, we are currently trying backlinks at the moment. its soo early on for us, we are daily adding content too, and our site is fully optimized for google too. But that doesn't guarantee that we will get into the top 100 for the most popular keywords, those sites that are in the top 100 will have been around for a long time and have many many backlinks and other factors involved.

I am giving these backlinks a month or 2, to get fully indexed, then we will re-evaluate and see if we need to do more to promote our website further.

Tiger

Be really careful with the backlink profile.. You really only need a *good* handful of links to get you started.. I have had high ranking completive keyword sites with a total of 14 (give or take) good, targeted backlinks. Quality over quantity really is important in this area.

 

[TigerLair]

Thanks online18casino, and yes we are trying hard to be careful with which backlinks we get and use.

We have another trick up our sleeves though in the next few weeks if these backlinks don't work that well.

Tiger

 

[MacCOR]

MacCor,


I also checked your site and saw that you have some problems with the "top free slots" at the bottom... the lower 2 images are not displaying.

Really liked your site, looks like up to June you managed to get some traffic pretty well... the advice worked!

Thanks for the info. Need to figure out what's up with those slots, because they seem to work fine on some browsers and not on others for me.

 

[AussieDave]

We have another trick up our sleeves though in the next few weeks if these backlinks don't work that well.

Expecting things to change within a month or two, especially for a brand-new-site, is risque at best. Keeping in mind, online gaming is unlike any other verticle, in regard to SEO, links etc etc.

Your site is registered for 12 months only.

Not saying your site is spammy BUT spammers register domains for 12 months, hence the name, throw-away domains. (Google is well aware of this). To gain some cred from Google, I register all my new domains for a min of three (3) years. When my domains need renewing, I again register for another three (3) years minimum.

If I make changes to my sites, I give it a good three (3) months to view changes in the serps. New sites, I give them six (6) months.

My suggestion, aim for natural, stable growth and dismiss the mindset of "tricks" and what not. These things will likely hinder your progress - shooting oneself in the foot comes to mind

Given your a new affiliate, I'd be reading up on Good SEO Practices. I see your using 2x H1 tags on your home page. Rule of thumb:

H1 Tag - 1 only per page (Overall heading of page)
H2 Tag - (Secondary heading of main page or specific sub heading content) - can use multiple instances.
H3 Tag - (Sub heading of H2) - can use multiple instances.
H4 Tag - (I use these for navigation title headings or for footer titles) - can use multiple instances.

H5 & H6 I don't use anymore thy're pretty much obsolete.

Would also recommend joining a seo forum too. While some of this info will probably only related to mainstream sites, you will find useful tips and guides which you can transpose to your affiliate gaming site.

As a side note - you have a <header> tag. Should it be <div id="header"> or <div class="header"> maybe? It also has a closing </header>. This tag is reserved for HTML5 (responsive layouts). Where as your site is XHTML 1.0. might want to fix that Maybe it's this that's screwing with some browsers not working with the slots or maybe it's other coding tags that shouldn't be used. Might want to run your site through http://validator.w3.org/ it will check your markup code and report errors etc etc.

Closing food for thought, one which a long time casino manager mate of mine uses as his sig... If it was easy everyone would be doing it!

 

[AussieDave]

there's no easy route into making money being an affiliate - it takes a LOT of hard work.

I'm not aiming this at anyone but there seems to be a huge misconception, that making money as an online gaming affiliate is easy peasy.

When I started out 14 years ago, it was a cash cow and you could throw up a crappy page, with couple of banners and turn player signups into cash, quickly. These days, man... it's a tough gig. Even seasoned affiliates like myself are having to pull out all stops to keep ahead of the field. If that's not hard enough, you have to make sure you don't upset Google or its alog updates, which, can knock your site back into the stone age, overnight!

Honestly, unless a new affiliate is prepared to work a minimum 12 hours a day, 7 days a week for the first 3 - 4 months, whilst accepting they probably wont see any decent income for the first 12 - 16 months, then this is what's needed in this verticle. If you can't put those type of hours in to building your site, then sorry but I think your wasting your time and are doomed to fail!

 

[AussieDave]

For traffic, I would recommend SEO, but target very low competition keywords at first. And longtails. Even if a term only brings in a couple of visitors a day, it's still valuable to a new affiliate, and you can target several and slowly build your way up into the more competive keywords.

Long tails are one of the least spoken about but one of the most rewarding sources of traffic if thought about correctly. Albeit 1 or 2 visits a month from 1 long tail term doesn't seem like much. However, I've had sites where they get 3,000+ long tail queries a month. Do the math on that and it adds up to a lot of highly targeted search queries

Keep in mind, like most things in this niche, long tails are no exception and they take a while to be fully indexed.

 

[TigerLair]

Thanks for all the input, and advice, but we are in it for the long haul, and saying we only registered our domains for 12 months, doesn't prove otherwise either m8. (in my honest opinion).

We have 880 pages in our sitemap atm, and we also have indexed 442, at present, and we are well on the way to getting a good ranking in google eventually, it will just take time, and i am not saying you don't know what you are talking about.

And we are putting a hell of a lot of time into the site every day. and saying all what you said, does not mean that we are not, and if you think we are doomed to fail, then your wrong, we are very confident we are going to make it, our aim is to be BIG and to compete with the BIG BOYS in this very tough industry, big boys meaning the big named sites which i wont name, but we aim to be different to those too, we for example will never ever list rogue casinos ever.

and we have our mascot, if you think we are just a 12 month company when we have a mascot i find obscure m8.

Anyway, thanks for the input.

Tiger

 

[Online18Casino]

Thanks for all the input, and advice, but we are in it for the long haul, and saying we only registered our domains for 12 months, doesn't prove otherwise either m8. (in my honest opinion).

We have 880 pages in our sitemap atm, and we also have indexed 442, at present, and we are well on the way to getting a good ranking in google eventually, it will just take time, and i am not saying you don't know what you are talking about.

And we are putting a hell of a lot of time into the site every day. and saying all what you said, does not mean that we are not, and if you think we are doomed to fail, then your wrong, we are very confident we are going to make it, our aim is to be BIG and to compete with the BIG BOYS in this very tough industry, big boys meaning the big named sites which i wont name, but we aim to be different to those too, we for example will never ever list rogue casinos ever.

and we have our mascot, if you think we are just a 12 month company when we have a mascot i find obscure m8.

Anyway, thanks for the input.

Tiger

I like your attitude thus far, and as long as you keep that attitude up you are likely to do well! I like to think I FORCE the serps to recognize my sites by throwing so much content and work into them. Many days I do work 12 hours... Some days I work none, but for the most part I am always working whenever I'm not doing anything else. For the most part I enjoy it so to me, it is easy. Or at least a hell of a lot easier then getting up every morning at 7am to make someone else rich!

and we have our mascot...

No lie, this part kinda made me laugh out loud