Affiliate marketing in online casinos is a popular business nowadays. Casinos on the Internet are interested in having affiliate marketers who would promote their online venues because both sides win from such a deal: casinos get more clients and profits while marketers receive remuneration for bringing in those clients. You know, if anything is a win-win deal, then it’s thriving. And affiliate casino marketing is exactly such a deal today.
In this article, we’re diving into the details of affiliate marketing for casinos, considering practical pieces of advice on how to choose a niche for a marketer, what kinds of remuneration a marketer can earn, and how to maximize the profits for both sides.
How Casino Affiliate Programs Work
The attraction of new gamblers (or bettors/card players) is one of the most important and never-ending sides of the business activity of any online betting facility. Without an inflow of new clients who wager real money, it is impossible to exist for a casino in the long run. That’s why casino administrations long ago created the concept of affiliate casino programs.
Such a program is a description of the rules of attraction of new clients to a casino that is carried out by affiliate marketers, which can be natural persons and legal entities. For the successful attraction of a client who will have made a deposit and started gambling on real money, a marketer is getting paid. The payment depends on such factors:
- The kind of payment model of the program of affiliate marketing for casinos:
- Cost per acquisition (CPA): it’s when an affiliate marketer is paid certain money for some kind of event that a client does in the casino (registration, contact data verification, KYC procedure passage, depositing X amount, wagering Y amount, losing W amount, etc.). The sums of payment for each of the described can vary, being bigger or lesser. Basically, it’s a fixed payment for each action.
- Revenue share: it’s when a marketer receives a share of revenue that a casino has gotten thanks to losses incurred by a client. The best RevShare programs can offer up to 60% of that sum, with no negative carryover (the worst ones start at 5% or less).
- Hybrid deals: a combination of the two above.
- Performance: how many clients were brought in by an affiliate marketer (they usually pay in tiers, which means, the payment rises for each attracted client as their number per month steps over another threshold)
- Existence of a negative carryover and subtractions: whether money won by a client is deducted from the sum of remuneration paid to a marketer or not; and whether the same is true for all rewards and bonuses that the client received in a period.
Affiliate programs are run by managers from the side of the casino. They work on bringing in new affiliate marketers, managing work with them, giving them all the marketing and information materials to organize their work, managing various issues, watching after fraud prevention, and also can reconsider the rules of their programs.
Typically, online casino affiliates can or can be not allowed to have a sub-affiliate (an entity working for the marketer under the same contract with a casino, earning a share of payments of a marketer). If sub-affiliates are allowed in the casino affiliate networks, there can be a number of their tiers.
To monitor the success of the business, casinos offer their affiliate program tracking and reporting tool, which shows in its dashboard, how well this or that marketer works, how many clients they bring in and via what channels, what payments they earned, and other data. Good tools also provide valuable insight for casino owners, including global stats across all their programs, anti-fraud module, success in specific markets and geos, etc. — so they can make each casino affiliate program evaluation and improvement.
Casinos are typically interested in attracting high-value clients, who will bring live money. So, most payment models usually do not provide for the payment for gamblers’ activities that do not generate money flow in the casino (registration, playing in a demo mode, playing only for no-deposit bonus funds, etc.). Also, they must closely monitor the effectiveness of each affiliate partner they’re working with to prevent the money losses incurred by winnings, bot registration & bot traffic, and money laundering. That’s why managers of affiliate programs are tightly connected to daily information they receive from their performance monitoring tools to exclude from the program those marketers that bring little to no value, generate low-quality clients, or have a high risk of fraud.
Becoming a Casino Affiliate
To be included in casino affiliate networks, an affiliate marketer must meet a list of criteria. The most important for any casino is to be assured that a marketer can really deliver additional value by constantly bringing in high-quality clients, who will generate profits for a casino. That’s why every newcomer in this area must correspond to all or at least one of the following criteria:
- Have an infotainment website or landing page that will deliver an inflow of clients to casinos. For instance, this website may be a blog website that describes casinos, their bonuses, games, gaming strategies, winnings, etc. — so people read, click, go to casinos’ websites, register there, and start playing after depositing real money. Such websites may be stuffed with keywords that people search online the same as it may simply be very useful and answer people’s requests.
- Be an expert in banner, textual, contextual, native, or video/audio advertising, which is usually made via social media, YouTube, and similar platforms. By clicking these links, people should the same go to a website of a casino, register, and play. The basic difference from the previous point on the list is that the first kind of advertising is done via controlled websites while this one is done through independent (third-party) websites.
- Have a good program of email marketing, where letters are directly sent to emails of receivers. An affiliate marketer must have strong databases of email addresses, know how to work with cold, warm, and hot audiences, and have tools to mass sending of letters.
If a beginner in casino affiliate networking is capable of bringing to the table at least something of the above, then casinos are interested in them. The biggest companies in the area of affiliate programs have all these and much more, so they employ dozens to hundreds of people who run all daily activities across multiple channels. So we must highlight that it might be (and will be!) difficult for a newcomer in the business of mobile casino affiliate marketing due to competition with large and established companies. Still, we all began one day, so, who knows, maybe, someday, you will also grow into a large company that will earn 6-7-8 figures of profits every month, working on affiliate casino programs.
So, when you decide to start this business from scratch (or you already work with some programs and want to expand), you must make sure you correspond to one of the criteria on the list above. After that, study the affiliate programs that are available and legal on your market, and offer your services to their affiliate managers (the contacts of managers are usually placed on websites of gambling venues that offer casino affiliate partnerships). They will often offer you to fulfill a partnership form to know you better. And, after receiving their approval, you’ll get an affiliate link, info materials, and credentials to enter the affiliate tracking tool.
It is important that you choose the right niche. For instance, you might consider promoting:
- large bonuses
- no-deposit bonus codes
- new games
- video slots
- poker
- roulette
- live dealer games
- big jackpot casinos
- simple and quick games
- raffles and lotteries
- sports betting
- or any combination of the above.
Additionally, the right niche includes the geo you’ll be focused on (country/territory/continent), which will significantly impact your promotion and advertising strategies because of the existing limitations (legal, language, mentality, wealth, financial, etc.).
In some geos, no gambling is legal. In others, it is allowed in full, online & offline. But each country is unique in this issue, having hundreds of possible factors contributing to the level of legality of iGambling or betting. For instance, if you want to choose the US market, you must receive a license to promote an online casino that is registered in the US, which consumes several months and thousands of dollars to obtain it. In a swarm of other territories, there are no such regulations, so everyone can advertise online gambling establishments. So your niche is a combination of such factors as geo, legal limits, kinds of promoted pieces, language, and others.
For a newcomer (especially if this is just one person), it is physically impossible to embrace just all niches, so the casino affiliate niche selection process must result in something much narrower. For instance, your target audience might be gamblers from Canada interested in video slots by Microgaming and bonus codes that start with a 100-dollar deposit. Focusing on such a niche might be a good start and, with dedication, hard work, and a bit of luck, you will start growing and expanding to new casino affiliate marketing strategies and niches in the closest future.
Maximizing Player Acquisition
Maximizing player acquisition as a casino affiliate is the primary task for every entity. Effective marketing strategies for casino affiliates must embrace modern casino affiliate marketing trends, which typically include:
- Marketing of content via websites, SEO, social media, emailing
- Affiliate website design
- Highlighting bonus and promo offers
- Correctly and bulkily describing the advantages of a product you promote, humbly silencing the disadvantages
- Description of loyalty, VIP, and other similar programs
- Mobile optimization
- Targeted advertising
- Niche and influencer marketing
- Gamification of your offers
- Tracking of results and self-improvement
- Sticking with compliance, casino affiliate legal considerations, and ethics of the field.
Building Trust and Credibility
Any affiliate marketer wants to build long-term trust and credibility with their audiences. Best practices for casino affiliates in this field would include such approaches:
- Publishing testimonials of happy clients (for instance, winners) and dealing with issues and questions that your users ask you as a publisher
- Be patient. Building a trustful brand definitely takes time.
- Be active on social media because people are one of the most social creatures on our planet and they want to chit-chat non-stop. So if you don’t communicate to your audiences, they will soon forfeit you even if your infotainment materials are of superb quality
- Don’t be too pushy: mildly offer and highlight, not demand to do something
- Being constant in building your brand is one of the most powerful casino affiliate marketing success tips
- Stick with regulations applicable for your geo, niche, and channel of advertising (legal, ethical, moral, financial, tax, etc.). Besides, rigidly following casino affiliate compliance and regulations rules will free you from the legal and financial consequences as an affiliate marketer in your geo should your activity attract the close attention of various local regulatory bodies
- Outline transparent privacy policy and terms of use of your offers to build trust through truthfulness
- Provide only true and valuable information, which should be bulkier than the one of your competitors. Only high-quality materials today can compete for audiences’ attention and win in the organic SEO promotion process
- Be honest about your content and reveal as much as possible. One of the great slogans of marketing campaigns of the 20th century says: ‘Tell only the truth. Tell as much truth as possible. Never tell all the truth.’ That’s a great thing to follow even today
- Finally, choose the right gambling establishment that offers effective online casino affiliate marketing opportunities for you as an affiliate marketer and for its gamesters in terms of fair play and legal compliance. That is very important if you’re aimed at building long-term trust, not ripping off your readers by submitting to them some fraudulent one-day casino that only takes but not gives.
Tracking Performance and Analytics
To fully embrace the business of affiliate casino programs, besides paying close attention to casino affiliate marketing innovations and market trends, you, as an affiliate marketer, shall measure affiliate marketing success.
You have to use various metrics to know how effectively you’re doing. Typically, a piece of software to track all important stats is provided to affiliate marketers by casinos that cooperate with them. But third-party software is also utilized at various stages of work by an affiliate marketer to find out such data as clicks, referrals, conversion rate, CPA, ROI, revenue, lifetime value of a client, global performance, traffic sources, bounce rates, time on site, etc. This is strongly connected to choosing the right attribution models, delivering high-quality content, and making periodic surveys of your audiences to find out about their pains. It is important to utilize all the retrieved data during the process of casino affiliate analytics and data analysis to optimize the campaigns that are ongoing and ones that will be started in the future. Using practical data retrieved during the analysis helps you to:
- clarify or redefine your campaign objectives
- receive an in-depth understanding of your performance across channels to define the most efficient ones
- optimize your website/landing page/SMM/SEO efforts
- refine targeting
- use a multi-touch approach to client acquisition
- do the A/B testing
- monitor trends that are season-dependent
- leverage data when you create content
- build a cycle of data-driven development and improvement.
Managing Casino Affiliate Networks
It is important to choose one or several programs of affiliate marketing based on casino affiliate industry insights. To begin with, study the offers available in your region & niche and corresponding to your particular efforts in this business (and size).
Naturally, people are interested in:
- A bigger RevShare and fixed payments of CPA.
- No negative carryover.
- A possibility to enter the market even if you aren’t having a large flow of clients to target to casinos (some programs do have minimum cutoffs, though).
- Lifetime payment model (you earn on your affiliate link for as long as a casino earns on a client, even though cookies on a client’s device may have ended).
- You don’t pay to enter the affiliate program, for sure.
But money certainly isn’t the only thing of your interest at this stage. Or, at least, shouldn’t be. What will contribute significantly more to your long-term well-being is partnering with a really reputable casino or a partner program that has several such casinos under the same umbrella (ideally if their number increases over time).
As you will be building trust in casino affiliate marketing and grow in size over time, so your results in bringing clients will, too. And so, casino management can offer you an even better deal based on your personal input to their business.
Challenges and Solutions in Casino Affiliate Marketing
Being an effective part of any affiliate program, no matter, is it an online casino or another competitive business, is a hard task that requires everyday struggle. To successfully compete in the market, you have to be working on creating a strong and consistent brand and differentiating it from competitors. It might be a unique visual branding, tone of voice of your messages, intricate and unique visuals, exceptionally rare offers (including promos, bonuses, and new games), extremely narrow niche, or something other that will make you stand out from the crowd.
Never forget to focus on the quality of your content. Not only must it be precise and up-to-date but also be clever, engaging, and amusing. Heavily focus on the optimal usage of keywords in your SEO strategy, which contributes to your long-term success in search results. Actively use social media and, probably, influencer marketing, to effectively spread information about your brand.
Implement tools to collect, structure, and analyze data to adopt data-driven decisions. That will also actively assist you in building long-lasting relations with your readers, emphasizing their trust, positive experience, and testimonials. Always be in search of new and effective casino affiliate marketing techniques to avoid lagging behind the market (that always had and will always have a large speed of change and development).
If you are looking forward to staying in the affiliate marketing business for a long time, then staying compliant with legal and regulatory aspects is a must. The same as nurturing long-term relationships with operators by giving them steady and high-quality results without compromising them. If you manage to personally become friends with your affiliate managers or casino administration representatives (for instance, by meeting them at some iGaming convention), you can over time have tighter cooperation and better deals in the future.
Embracing Innovation and Trends
Sticking with market innovations considerably contributes to casino affiliate revenue generation. Among the trends that are being actively developing in the past 2 years, we can highlight:
- AI and its tighter integration with all working processes. It is predicted that by 2025, around 90% of all content on the Internet will be generated by AI. It is also helpful in data analysis (such as market and client behavior analysis) and pattern recognition
- An increasing power of influencer marketing
- Virtual reality and augmented reality, which can significantly boost the gaming experience, especially when it comes to games with live dealers
- Blockchain technology, which is used not only for payments in casinos and other venues but also to make sure the non-rigged gaming process and its outcomes, as well as preserve the history of gaming by people
- Multi-touch gamification and cross-device tracking
- Subscription models for premium content, which drive more high-profile clients to casinos
- Capitalizing more on mobile gaming, which has long ago become much faster, easier, and cheaper to play than via tabletop devices, let alone in brick-and-mortar venues
- Advancement in voice search, which is predicted to captivate over a third of the search market in the late 2020s.
Success Stories of Top Casino Affiliates
There are many successful casino affiliate stories. Let’s briefly overview five of them:
- Website onlinecasinoguide.in, registered in 2019, with its primary audiences in India, claims to earn over $10,000 a month. Its niche is the focus on high-quality and fair reviews of Indian gambling houses on the Internet, which attracts around 30K visitors a month.
- https://casino.guru/ website that was launched in 2016 today is a worldwide-large business, with a presence in over 150 countries in the world, supporting 17 languages. It has outgrown only one niche and today, it is about everything in the world of online gambling, including reviews of casinos, games, bonuses, giveaways, complaints, user reviews, forum posts, and more. It does not only do affiliate marketing but also changes the landscape of the industry thanks to its large audience, which accounts for 1.4 million monthly visitors (with their biggest share in the Americas and old Europe). Now it has a #32,000 global rank, which makes it possible to earn around 9-8 million dollars a year.
- Casino.org website globally ranks approximately the same as the previous one on the list. It was started in 1995 and it is one of the most well-known websites that do affiliate marketing for casinos. It earns from 5 to 6 figures a month.
- Andreas Oscarsson, who was an active affiliate program entrepreneur in the 2000s, claimed to have earned over $1 million in this business. Sadly, he was assassinated in 2009. If not that, he might well be a billionaire today.
- https://www.casinocity.com/ registered in 1995 today earns steadily somewhere about 5 figures a month (closer to 6) in dollars, having a website total traffic of around 100K visitors a month.
These are only a few examples of successful affiliate marketing businesses for online casinos. And there are many more of them that started in the 2010s and 2020s. If you are dedicated, purposeful, persistent, and energetic, you can make even a new affiliate brand start earning from 3 to 4 figures a month in your first year, and from 4 to 6 figures a month in several years after.
Frequently Asked Questions About Casino Affiliates
- What is the role of a casino affiliate?
It is a person or entity that generates new clients to casinos so they register and play.
- How do casino affiliates generate revenue?
After a client spends more money in a casino than wins back, affiliate marketers are paid a share of that revenue or a fixed sum.
- Can I join multiple casino affiliate programs?
Yes. That’s one of the basics of earnings of affiliate marketers.
- What marketing strategies work best for casino affiliates?
There are numerous ways how to attract players as a casino affiliate. But typically, these are creating traffic from a landing page or infotainment website, placing ad banners on various web resources, offline advertising (which is kinda expensive), word of mouth, email marketing, participating in specialized gambling web forums, visiting iGambling festivals and happenings (to exchange experience and for self-advertising), and personal connections.
- What is an affiliate program of an online gaming venue?
This is a deal offered by a casino administration to pay remuneration to natural persons and legal entities that attract new gamblers to this casino. The size of that remuneration will vary depending on the details of the figures of the affiliate program, the number of gamblers an affiliate marketer will have brought per month, and the net income from every invited gambler for the casino.
- Do all affiliate programs created the same?
No, they all differ in specific terms of payments and requirements for the quality and quantity of attracted leads, which result in casino affiliate commissions. That’s why an affiliate marketer shall thoroughly study the details of every program before enrolling.
- How to become a casino affiliate?
First, you must build a tool (or a batch of tools) that will serve for the promotion of casinos, poker rooms, or sports betting online venues that you will have selected. It must have a great potential of generating enough traffic to the advertised website or you may be prohibited from entering this or that affiliate program. Then, you must apply to those top casino affiliate programs that are of your interest and, after getting approved, start working.
- Tracking casino affiliate performance: how to make it?
As a rule, every affiliate program has an online tool that allows tracking the degree of success of your affiliate work for this program. Log in there and look at the stats.
- What are the biggest challenges in casino affiliate marketing?
This is a highly competitive environment, which is pretty much saturated as of 2023. There is competition in every niche and every market. So earning money by doing affiliate marketing isn’t going to be an easy walk with money thrown at you. This is all about dedication, constant hard work, and embracing the market’s newest trends to stay afloat. Smaller marketers and beginners may soon wear out because of a high tempo and density of work and leave the market, with their place being promptly absorbed by larger and more experienced players. But, just like in any business & job, persistence, self-improvement, and hard work are great helpers.
Conclusion: Unleashing the Potential of Casino Affiliates
Casino affiliate programs can be anyone’s source of income if to consider that a full-time job, not expecting that a few simple actions will start throwing bags of money at you. The harder the task is, the juicier the reward is. And affiliate marketing for online casinos is exactly such.
Affiliate marketers are highly sought-for by modern casinos because they can generate tremendous numbers of new gamblers, which casinos are ready to pay for. And since it is a big (and ever-growing) pie of business, everyone can seize their opportunities for prosperity. So, are you ready to embrace the exciting journey of casino affiliate marketing?