Are you ready to grow your affiliate business? In this episode, Dmitry shares his tried and tested strategies for growing your affiliate operations.
You will learn practical tips on identifying new opportunities, whether your approach is performance-driven or SEO-focused, as well as discover how to diversify your traffic sources, from entering new markets to effectively using social media and mobile apps.
Dmitry also provides straightforward techniques to boost monetization, such as joining more affiliate programs and optimising costs. If you're serious about taking your affiliate business to the next level, don't miss these valuable insights from an industry leader.
0:00 Growing an Affiliate Business: Identifying Untapped Opportunities
4:23 Motivating Existing Teams Post-Acquisition
7:16 Improving Operational Efficiency in Affiliate Businesses
10:37 Diversifying Traffic Sources
13:53 Improving Monetization Techniques
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Welcome to “15 Minute Mastery,” the ultimate show for iGaming professionals, hosted by industry veteran Dmitry Belianin. With over 17 years of experience, Dmitry brings unparalleled insights and wisdom from top industry experts in just 15 minutes. Each episode delivers actionable strategies from all iGaming verticals to improve your personal and business performance. As the founder of Belianin, Dmitry also shares his expertise in nurturing high-potential iGaming startups. Subscribe to “15 Minute Mastery” for concise, high-value content and stay ahead in the competitive world of iGaming.
Some of the leads they create websites to focus on certain market or category of keywords or sometimes even certain sports but what happens is they focus so much on their key market that they don't realize that there is a lot of unwanted or left traffic which is coming to the website which they don't monetize. You're listening to 15-minute mastering, a show that empowers you with insights from leading iGaming experts to enhance your personal or business performance. The show is brought to you by the EI-powered data analytics platform Blask and supported by 10 driven affiliate and media company already media while it starts the leading casino partnership program and next.io, the world's iGaming community. Welcome back to 15-minute mastery. This week, Dimitri is jumping back into the hot seat for another frequently requested topic. In today's episode, we're exploring the keys to growing an affiliate business. So, Dimitri, you've mentioned a lot in the content you post, the growth potential is the first thing you look at when valuing an affiliate business. Can you walk us through the process you have for identifying untapped opportunities with existing affiliate businesses? I think the very first thing you need to take a look at is the source of the traffic, the nature of the traffic. So, the affiliate could be working on two sides of the affiliate spectrum, either performance affiliation or search engine optimization affiliation. So, if you think about the performance side of things, the potential to grow outside of the existing markets is probably the biggest one you could possibly bring in immediately in the business. So, let's say someone is doing a PPC in the UK, if it's done properly, the business is probably scalable and then it might reach some certain cap in the UK market. But then why not going into other English speaking markets, for example, going to Nigeria, going to, I don't know, for example, the United States, right, there are so many different markets you could immediately go into and to try to use your existing finals. Your acquisition techniques and to be able to utilize your knowledge, I think territory is probably the first one. The same with SEO, if you have a list of markets where you get infraction going into the same list of, you know, same language-driven markets, let's say you go to Portuguese language, why don't you go to Brazil, why don't you go to Angola, why don't you go to Portugal itself, right? So, I think the market is probably the biggest one. Second is working with the existing traffic, so this is mostly tied to the SEO affiliates because, you know, some affiliates, they create websites to focus on a certain market or category of keywords or sometimes even certain sports. But what happens is they focus so much on their key market that they don't realize that there is a lot of unwanted or left traffic which is coming to the website which they don't monetize. So, I think this could be probably the biggest gross opportunity. The third one is always looking at the costs, right? So, if the cost of the business are very high, you might start asking questions, okay, how do we cut this cost down to be able to improve the net revenue of the business? So, I think if you look at the potential, for me, this is probably the easiest and fastest opportunities you can immediately look into by looking at someone's business, like whether it's on a paper or talking with the founders, and these kind of businesses based on my experience could be facing an immediate monstrous gross. Sometimes this can be 3x, sometimes this can be 10x, and I think some of the companies I didn't manage to work within the last few years, we've managed to do even 10x probably in the last, sorry, within one month after, you know, getting hands on immediately on the business. So, I think these are three of the key things I'm looking at in terms of the potential of the affiliate business. Yeah, that's really interesting, and I know one other aspect you've spoken a lot about before is access to the existing team, especially if they have local knowledge that the current affiliate business doesn't have access to. So, what qualities do you look for in the existing team, and how do you ensure that they stay motivated post acquisition if you decide to keep them on? So, the affiliate business, once again, if it's performance marketing driven, then it's completely different from SEO driven, because with SEO affiliate business, your main, obviously people is your main asset, but outside of people, website exists in affiliate accounts, and we have share, which is rolling, I guess, are your main assets. So, let's say the SEO driven business, the team left tomorrow after you acquired the asset, means that you still got the website, which is ranking well, which got a lot of new revenue coming into the website every month, but let's say you're buying a Google BPC team, and the team has gone tomorrow, your business has gone tomorrow. So, I think your question, in this case, is twofold, and should be also considered from the angle of the traffic nature perspective, but in order to keep the team motivated in both cases, I think the best possible way is to give them some skin in the game. So, giving them equity and performance driven incentives, which will essentially allow them to make with a smaller share the same or even bigger amount of money they were making before the business acquisition or merger or any possible interaction with the outside company. So, the ideal scenario is probably keeping the team 25% of the equity could be even lower, but like I mentioned to some of the examples when the business is experienced 5 to 10x growth in the next 3 to 5 to 6 months, then essentially founders are ending up with a much bigger amount of net revenue, especially if the proper optimization has been applied to the business. And the next one is, obviously, we talked about the growth opportunities, some people are doing and motivated by things like opening new markets, opening new product verticals, tapping into more sports, more traffic channels, things like this. So, some people are driven by the challenge, some people are driven by cash, equity motivation, obviously, but I think striking the right balance of both is the right way to build a long-term and sustainable affiliate business. And also, I know through a lot of the work you did with already media and you continue to do, they're described as an infrastructure driven affiliate business. So, what are some of the key improvements you can typically implement to enhance operational efficiency within an affiliate business? That's a good one and I think most of the affiliates, I think I could probably even say 90% of affiliates, they don't fully utilize the power of their existing traffic. This is probably one of the biggest issues most of the affiliates got. If everyone would have got a third party, TDS, and stats drawn probably is one of the greatest examples of you getting access to thousands of affiliate platforms overnight to be able to utilize your existing traffic properly to be able to road your traffic properly, I think this is probably the biggest revenue opportunity and the business optimization opportunity of all. I would have put this as number one. Number two, if you think about the infrastructure of the website itself or if you're a PPC affiliate, then probably this is your cloud infrastructure. How fast your website is loading, how easy your website is accessible from numerous applications around the world, how well your website is optimized for mobile. We keep saying probably for 10 years plus how it's important to have a mobile optimized website, but how many of these websites are fully mobile optimized? You mentioned already, we've acquired POCOR listings in January this year, but we probably rebuilt the whole website from scratch because it wasn't really well optimized. For mobile, it wasn't really well optimized for all the territories the business operated and etc. I think for many affiliates, infrastructure driven mindset, whether it's your in-house infrastructure or borrowed infrastructure, you could have acquired using SAS model or on-premise model is the right way to go. And I don't think it's so expensive these days to buy subscriptions or mention stats on. I think these guys are quite inexpensive compared to the uplift your business can generate, who are getting the access to the right tracking and start aggregation techniques. So I think the pass already media has taken is a very complicated, very, I'd say, a self-sustainable pass and it's very hard to walk. And I don't suggest most of the affiliates listening to this right now to walk the same pass because it's very expensive. It's very long-term and it drags a lot of resources. So what I'm suggesting instead to apply this infrastructure during mindset with a set of existing tools in the market and to try to find a set of tools for every stage of your business, starting with running your P&L, running your accounting, going all the way into emerging all the affiliate stats into one place and getting rid of spreadsheets and outdated tracking techniques. So another thing you speak a lot about within your content is diversifying traffic sources. You don't want that single point of failure within an affiliate business. So can you share some successful strategies you've used to create synergy between these traffic sources, maybe introduce new ones? How does that work for you? Right. I think also looking at it from two sides of the coin performance affiliates and SEO driven affiliates, it all comes down to the same question. How do I diversify my traffic sources and how do I make my business more sustainable? And thinking about it these days when both of these businesses are becoming more fragile with the introduction of AEI from Google and other advertising networks. This is where you start getting more about your players' data, not just blind-depassing through your player contacts, sorry, not play contacts, but players towards the links. Right. You start thinking more about how do I collect the audience? How do I retain this audience? How do I sell this audience? So I think probably the first one would have been getting access to players' data and creating something which is usually called inbound market end mix. So obviously if you're an SEO affiliate, you can put it on your website. If you're a PPC affiliate, you can work around pixels, you can work around retargeting techniques, still embedding some of the free-to-play apps within your websites and things like this. But the most obvious one for SEO affiliates is the social media side of things. No one really taking care of that, right? And this is where I think one of the biggest growth opportunities are, but at the same time, one of the toughest to implement opportunities for, because the amount of expertise of the social media within Diagramic is insanely limited. And not because it's something very hard, but because for years, gaming has been closing its eyes on the channel and just being smashed by the regulation in certain countries, not being able to fully utilize the creativity side of the social media assets they were having. So I think social media is probably the easiest one to tap into after the data collection. And the latest probably, but not the least, least one is mobile apps. So if you think about your current website or your current business, and if you don't have an app, this is probably one of the greatest opportunities you could have gotten, because most of the people, they even use App Store as the search engine. So if your business has a great content, if your business has a great art section, tip section, you should probably venture this into the app, because this is how you get a content accessible across multiple platforms. So I think this could be the easiest upgrade overnight, so then you can start utilizing Apple Search Optimization, Google Optimization, start buying some ads and building some more interactive and more retention during funnels with your product and your existing traffic. So once you've diversified your traffic, you're driving more traffic. What are some techniques that you've used to instantly improve monetization of that traffic within an affiliate business? What's the low hanging fruit that someone can go into a new affiliate business and implement immediately to start generating more revenue? Yeah, so I think I mentioned two of these already. The first one is probably more territories. So if your business is well represented and ranking, let's say in Indian subcontinent, going into all these three five countries represented in the region is a great idea. Same with languages. If you target certain languages, then you go and target the same territories with the same language. So that's the easiest. Second is monetizing your traffic better. So, you know, get an access to more affiliate programs, get an access to more tracking links, which you're getting from other operators to start generating immediate revenue. And the third one, I mean, this probably the most obvious one, but using the EI to get your operational expenses down. So if you create a lot of pages on your website, how you can do this better with the help of AI, how you can automate it, how you can, you know, I don't know, for example, the bonus collection bit, right, a lot of affiliates are collecting bonuses manually, how you can do this for the help of AI, how you can structure your website better with the help of AI. So I think first one, getting into more territory is second, monetizing your traffic better and the third one, optimizing your business costs using using AI and access some of the most innovative tools to the markets right now. This is how I think you can probably triax any business in the world right now. That is a quote that's going to be used in a short for sure. But Demelis is superb as always, I've really loved this and there's lots of great insights in here. And as always, these are topics that Demetri dives into within the 15-minute mastery newsletter in a lot of detail. So you can find the link in the description for that. But we'll call that the day and thanks again for your time, Demetri. It's been brilliant. Thanks a lot, John. Cheers.
