Do you know how to build a successful iGaming affiliate program? Alona Bursak, the Affiliate Director at Lala Stars, has the insights you need. Alona emphasises the importance of having a strong, motivated team behind your affiliate program. She also stressed the value of building brand awareness and trust - key factors that determine how quickly you can enter the market and form partnerships.
Alona shares her criteria for selecting top-performing affiliates, including evaluating their reputation, experience, and willingness to collaborate closely. Beyond just revenue, she tracks metrics like average deposit size and player value to measure true program success. And she revealed the delicate balance between nurturing long-term relationships with veteran affiliates and onboarding promising new partners.
If you want to create an affiliate program that drives sustainable growth, Alona's expert advice is a must-read. Discover the secrets to her affiliate marketing mastery by listening to this episode.
0:00 Building a Strong Affiliate Brand
3:43 Criteria for Selecting Affiliates
5:59 Red Flags in Affiliate Partnerships
9:30 Strategies for Nurturing Long-Term Relationships
12:08 Measuring Success Beyond Revenue
14:34 Balancing New and Stable Affiliates
15:57 Final Thoughts and Future Plans
Join the 15-Minute Mastery newsletter: https://newsletter.15m.com/subscribe
Follow us on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/15-minute-mastery
Or follow Dmitry directly: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dmitrybelianin/
Click here for the audio-only version of this show: tinyurl.com/15MinuteMastery
Watch this show on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@15-MinuteMastery
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.
It's very important to have people who are eager to achieve something in our industry. Secondly, for us as a company to give opportunity for these people to grow up and to bring their experience and their fresh vision, you know, to our industry. You're listening to 15-minute mastery, a show that empowers you with insights from leading eye-gaming experts to enhance your personal or business performance. The show is brought to you by the AI-powered data analytics platform Blasq and supported by Ted Jovin affiliate and media company already media. Lava Stars, the leading casino partnership program in the next.io, two worlds, eye-gaming community. Hey everyone and welcome to 15-minute mastery. Today we have a great guest, Alona Bursak. Alona is the affiliate director at Lava Stars, one of our sponsors. She has a lot of experience in building and managing affiliate relationships. We're excited to learn from her experience to create successful affiliate programs and partnerships. Alona, so nice to have you here. Hi, Midri. Thank you for inviting me. It's a big pleasure to be here. Awesome. You're probably one of the biggest experts in building affiliate programs and I cannot wait to hear more about your experience and how to build a successful affiliate program. Let's start with the basics. Can you explain the key elements of building a strong affiliate brand and why it's so important in eye-gaming industry? Yeah, sure. Very good question. So, I think that milestones of building a successful affiliate program is first of all a strong team behind. Self-driven, highly motivated because everything stands behind, who is on the backstage of this, of creating this project. I mean, it's very important to have people who are eager to achieve something in our industry. Yes, it's my key point when we are hiring someone to our affiliate program. Secondly, for us as a company to give opportunity for these people to grow up and to bring their experience and their fresh region, you know, to our industry. Secondly, I would tell that to have, of course, strong tech team behind, so you can very fast react on any issues that can happen during the running your affiliate program, yes, and to be a very reliable partner for our affiliates who can be sure that any issues are facing a risk, yes, will be resolved immediately. And what else? And of course, just to build up also, brand awareness of your affiliate program, I think it's very important because if you have trust, everything just moves as faster, as is possible in our industry. And I think that the speed of entering the market, yes, the speed of entering like the right partners, relays on trust to build up in the industry, it's very, very connected. And why it's important, of course, it's important to have a affiliate program again, because you build up some trust, you build up some name, I think actually a affiliate program, it's a face of every brand that stands behind. Awesome, I absolutely love it, you know, like, for the players, trust is the number one attribute. And I think this is becoming the most important attribute for the B2B relations as well, because no one wants to work with no name brands. And I think you guys are doing a great job in building brand awareness and most importantly carrying the trust throughout your cooperation. And it leads me to my next question about the affiliates you guys working with. So what criteria do you use to identify and select the best affiliates for your program? How do you evaluate their potential? Yeah, so I would like to emphasize that a lot of stars actually open for affiliates with experience on different levels. Yes, we are always happy to also have some new affiliates who are coming with their awesome new vision and experience. So for us, the most important naturally we have inside our internal QVC process, yes, for every new entering affiliate. Again, very important the reputation and the experience affiliate has behind. We have particular also features to evaluate depending on traffic source, yes, their sources. But most important to also to evaluate also their experience in the industry, their reputation in the industry for me, especially very important to understand like that this person is known, at least this person is visiting conferences, this person I met personally. I always tell them my affiliate managers, it's very important to make a calls like when you're entering, yes, the affiliate entering program just to discuss face-to-face, to see the person, to evaluate their experience and to be sure that we all on the same page, you can build up some trust words and long-term relationships. It's first of all, yes, for us. Because, you know, I saw the situation a lot like when affiliate just came to us very small in terms of volumes, yes, but then they just grew up immediately in six months and just because we together opened some new opportunities for them and they just followed it and just brought their vision and it was really cool, successful stories. They're like stories when we opened some markets for affiliates and like, you know, it's a win-win situation. But again, when both sides have experience and both sides are growing up in one direction. Yeah, I mean, they call it affiliate marketing and partnership marketing for a reason. So I think you came up with the really cool examples. So you mentioned, like, if you're good to have and nice to have attributes of affiliate whom you want to work with, but what about red flags? So what are the most common red flags you guys are facing when assessing the potential affiliate partners and how companies can avoid these pitfalls? Yeah, so red flags, again, when I don't have, I don't see this person on LinkedIn, yes, for me, it's very important. It's not necessarily sometimes they say, understand, yes, it's a choice of every partner. Someone just don't want to be public person. It's fine, but then I at least should understand the experience for me. It's important to make a call. And again, for me, red flag, if, for example, a new partner, he doesn't want or she doesn't want to join the call for me, it's weird, because like, why not? Why not exchange the experience to, you know, just like to face each other and just to discuss where you want to move forward? So for me, it's first red flag. Second red flag, when I'm checking through, for example, the resources through our, like, yes, CRMs, like, on other channels, to be sure that this person really is the owner, yes, of this source, particular source. So red flag, if I don't find this, don't find this match between what they offer in, and I don't see, you know, like, so then more things to discover. Um, what else? Red flags, I think, when I feel it's pushing you to something, especially pushing you, yes, like, you agree to me, maybe some deal with listening to start, and they're, like, very pushing, usually. And usually we are affiliate managers, the one who are pushing, yes, not vice versa. So for me, it's a bit strange, I think it's, it's most common red flags we are facing with. Yeah, I love it. But what about, like, I don't know, any forums or, like, catalogs, do you check, like, definitely reputation, anyhow, or, like, any history? Good question about affiliate forums. I'm here checking, in some affiliate, you know, there's, like, some chess between affiliate managers, like, who are just exchanging experience, and also, like, in double check, I'm, we are, we are having friendships with many other operators. So we just, like, how, like, community, also, you know, affiliate directors, head of affiliates, where we just, like, check, and did you work with this, like, yeah, yeah, work or no, you know, so I think it's internal, internally check up inside community forums, honestly, I don't believe, I don't know that much reliable forums and, you know, in forums, it can be anything, you know, written down nowadays, even maybe by bots, so I will not relate to any forum, I think. Yeah, yeah, I totally agree with you. I remember the times when GPVWA and, you know, affiliate guard dog were probably the benchmarks of, you know, any, any affiliate slash operator relations, and nowadays, I think it's more about, you know, get an access to some private communities with, like you mentioned, affiliate managers, you can double check and verify. I think that's really useful. So I think that's, that's a very good insight for everyone. So you mentioned that you had a lot of experience in, you know, starting working with, with the small affiliate and growing altogether, I think this is probably the biggest possible cooperation journeys in our industry, which is happening a lot. So I just wanted to hear your thoughts. Maybe you can tell us more about, you know, what kind of strategies you found the most effective in nurturing and maintaining long-term relationship with top affiliates. Yeah, you know, I was thinking of about strategies. I would call it not strategies, but some milestones, because again, for me, relationships in business, it's the same as relationships in any other, you know, part of your life, friendship, like, you know, everything just like stands on the same milestones. So first milestone, of course, it's trust. Secondly, it's loyalty and such is that to be sure that you grew up together in the direction you chose together. So yes, what does it mean? For example, if we are building long-term relationships with affiliate, we know that they're successful in particular market and we are successful in particular market. For us, it's important that we are keep growing, you know, improving our brands on our side for this market and affiliates are like, yes, top affiliates also, they are working on increasing volumes exactly in this market because they see the potential in cooperation with us. So we know when we grow up together in the same direction, it's actually the best and that how it works and that's what we, what our goal to achieve with every partner is that comes to our affiliate program. Right. So you mentioned conferences and face-to-face meetings previously. Do you think like face-to-face meetings and you know, private events conferences are the way how to build like a better relations and maybe you can talk a little bit more about it as well? Yeah, sure. Yeah, I believe so because why it's important because still you didn't meet personally, you're still just like, you know, and another one I can pick in Skype, you know, I mean, you just like, again, everything building up in a trust. I can't trust just like some picture in Skype, but I can trust a real person. That's why it's very important. It's still, you know, still relates like some basics of how people building up their interaction, yes, and creativity together. It's still relates in real connections, not something online. I still believe that robots can't replace this part, you know, in our life. Yeah, for sure. I totally agree with you. So I'm a big fan of revenue metric and, you know, pretty much this is the most important and the most easiest to measure, you know, from the outside. But how can you measure the success of a affiliate program beyond just revenue? Are there other important metrics you can track to understand whether you're doing a great job with, you know, building your affiliate program? Yeah, of course. In terms of metrics like revenue, it's actually the final results that not only depend on actually on affiliate or our product, yes, but also on the third part. It's actually our customers and we never know how it happened from months to months. So definitely we are not really on revenue, but we're relying mostly on average deposits soon, for example, it's very reliable, you know, a metric to check out actually if the traffic works well with us really paying attention to the ratio between the opposite counts to FT account, yes, like, so we this is how we see how much players involved is into our product from the traffic source. And also very important metric, of course, like player value. Again, yes, it's like average average deposit or deficit soon. That's mostly we are paying attention to. So because it means like that as much like as much, let's say, high player value is going to bring affiliate as is valuable for us because all the profit relates on this, yes, and I think actually it's the main focus to join us as product to maintain cool relationships with VIP players, yes, so the same for affiliates, the main focus I think should be to be successful, it's how they can bring us as much as possible exactly this high value players using their creative approaches, just to grab them, it's not that it's not easy, but I think that the success is actually there. So, me as affiliate director every time I'm thinking of this, like, how to find affiliates who target this audience, you know, also like what keywords to use, what is important for these players, how they're searching for this brand, that's what's important for me. Yeah, I totally agree with you. A quick one here, like, do you guys measure the amount of active new affiliates, like whether it's growing or not? And like the share of like revenue per affiliate, how important is for you to, you know, look at these metrics as well? Of course, in a perfect story, you have a balanced picture when everything just bad. Usually still, I mean, there is, you know, some huge ones, so let's say whales in our industry, the affiliate whales, and who just like taking the core markets, yes. So usually in, I think, in our case, in our affiliate program, 30% is always stable affiliates, yes, high, like, high trusted, high experienced affiliates, and 70% like new ones, but they 30% they bring them most, yes, 30% brings like 70% of our profit. That's the ratio we have in our affiliate program. To become a whale, it also takes a long time, I think, in our industry, for affiliates, I mean. Yeah, yeah, for sure, for sure. I mean, I think you've highlighted a few very important things, which not many operators are actually focusing on, especially the trust element and the co-operative element. I think anyone in our industry listening to this episode will find a lot of very interesting, useful and very tactical insights. Thanks a lot for being with us, Alona. It was a real pleasure, and I cannot wait to see you in person. Thank you. It was a pleasure as well. See you soon at our next conference at SBC Sound. Thank you. Thank you. [BLANK_AUDIO]
