Become a Casino Affiliate (Step-By-Step Guide)

Welcome to this complete step-by-step guide on becoming a successful online casino affiliate!

My name is Carl Mansson, and I have been working as a casino affiliate for about eight years

On my journey to become a successful casino affiliate, I have stepped on many slippery stones, but through learning and experience, I managed to get by!

In this guide, I will teach you everything you need to know to start as an affiliate in the online casino niche.

So let’s get started, shall we?

1. How It All Works

An online casino affiliate is someone who, in one way or another, sends new depositing customers to a casino online.

So how does the tracking of new customers work?

When signing up as a new affiliate with an affiliate program, you will receive tracking links. These links will track the registrations and activity of players sent through this link.

This is how the operator knows what your commission will be and can track the deposits, bonus costs, and revenue generated by each customer.

2. How to Get Players to Sign Up Using Your Tracking Links

So, we figured out the science behind how money is made.

Great.

Now for the main questions, how do we get real people to sign up through our link and deposit money?

Excellent question!

Now, this is where you can get creative, but there are generally some popular ways to do it that require hard work but are very rewarding.

The most popular ways of acquiring new casino depositors are:

SEO Affiliation (Search Engine Optimization)

rank high for casino terms in google

SEO affiliation means you build one or several websites you want to rank in Google for search terms related to different casino terms.

(This is the absolute best way to succeed in affiliation as apart from the website, hosting, and link acquisition costs, the traffic you generate is FREE of charge.

(Also, I am a pure SEO casino affiliate myself, so the topic of this guide will be around this method.)

So, the advantages of doing SEO affiliation:

  • Organic traffic is free.
  • Nobody knows the Google algorithm, which means you can compete with any company and succeed.
  • You can implement your SEO strategy for any product and niché. Knowledge is very sought after by companies, so if you give up, you might have gotten enough experience and track record to keep working as an SEO.
  • You can make shit loads of money without working.
  • When you rank and send customers, the business is entirely passive if you want; of course, most people want to expand and keep increasing the cash flow with new projects or improving current projects further.

Disadvantages with SEO affiliation:

  •  Long learning curve.
  • It takes a lot of time even if you are doing it correctly, and you also never quite know if you are doing everything correctly, which is a part of the “sport.”
  •  An ever-changing algorithm from Google means you got to stay up with new directives and may suffer penalties and lose rank if you don’t or even if you do (Google doesn’t always make sense).

To get more insight into what SEO affiliate marketing is you can read here.

PPC Affiliation (Pay Per Click)

A PPC affiliate is someone who buys traffic for money and then wants to convert the traffic to make more money out of it than it costs.

To keep a good margin in the casino industry or any industry is very hard as an affiliate as you compete with the operators themselves (the owner of the products) who has better margins than you on the end products and, therefore, can place a higher PPC bid than you and still have a margin.

It can work, though, but from my experience, the people who are doing PPC have extremely high secrecy about their exploits and strategies.

If anybody finds a hole to make money, they nuke it until it’s wholly tapped and then move on.

It’s a tough industry for sure and requires quite a bit of capital to begin with, so it’s not recommended for beginners but rather for professionals who have a deep understanding of PPC campaigns and how to properly use them.

Advantages of PPC affiliation

  • If you, for some reason, do succeed with it, it’s probably the fastest way to live from casino affiliation.
  • If you find a hole to dig money with, you can often profit by exploiting it.

Disadvantages of PPC affiliation

  • Very hard and requires a deep knowledge of PPC, Google / Facebook Ads etc.
  • High risk of losing money while trying it.

E-mail marketing

Another way to work with casino affiliation is if you are an E-mail marketer.

However, this does, as you may guess, require you to sit on a lot of double opt-in E-mails.

There are good ways of building E-mail lists, though, and you may even be able to combine doing PPC or SEO affiliation to at the same time create an E-mail list that you can use for affiliation.

I do this, and I can genuinely recommend working a lot with E-mails as it is a great way to retain visitors to your site.

Figure out what your visitors want and use this as a sales pitch for them to sign up for your newsletters.

The services I use for E-mail marketing are Aweber for handling the leads and sending E-mails and Optinmonster to generate them with beautiful opt-in forms.

If you are going to do SEO casino affiliation, E-mail opt-in forms is a must-have, in my opinion!

3. Building Your First Casino Affiliate Website

It’s rare that a casino affiliate only makes one website in their career (unless they have a good developer or team of developers).

So don’t be too hard on yourself about making your very first website look amazing.

It’s not going to look amazing, and you can often get bits and pieces from other affiliates by asking enough.

For the LOLs, here is a screenshot of my first casino affiliate website that I made in 2015.

my first casino affiliate site

Nowadays, my projects look slightly better, as you can see in the following screenshots of our casino guide Gambla.com, nowadays Gambla is solely focused on the US market.

For Gambla, we do have developers working on our site, but this is all due to making enough money with average-looking sites to actually be able to hire great developers to make your sites amazing!

Do only what needs to be done in order earn money, and with money you can do anything.

– Carl Mansson (Maybe someone else as well) XD

Enough with the stories.

You need to get yourself a good web hosting service, a domain, and a WordPress theme to get started.

The “CMS” content management system you should pick to make your website with is WordPress for ease of use, and it also works very well with Google.

Some of the biggest sites on the planet, like Apple.com and such websites, are all built-in WordPress.

To get set up with your domain, hosting, and WordPress, go on live chat with your hosting provider, and they will help you out.

The Host Your Should Use

I really couldn’t recommend this host enough, Cloudways.

They are by far the fastest host and I run all my sites with them.

Sign up via this link to Cloudways to get 15% off for the first three months.

Learning WordPress and Getting Your First Site Ready

I recommend WordPress for doing your casino affiliate website. It’s a great CMS and gives you much freedom in making and developing your site as time passes.

It’s vital that you learn the basics of WordPress so that you can manage your website If you have a lot of time and enjoy making websites, you can practice your web development skills and create your very own affiliate site.

Our official content partner is TeamWork Content, contact me on Twitter and I’ll sort you a good discount on your first order as I know them very well.

My recommendation, however:

As for the absolute best chances of making it in casino affiliation as a beginner, I recommend getting cheap help to make you a fundamental site with a casino list.

The four types of pages you need for your site are:

  • Homepage template: (displays what content is on the site) Some people also use this page as the main page to rank, but I don’t.
  • Subpage template: (these are the pages you want to rank in Google. They should be the best pages and, of course, contain casino listing tables.)
  • Blog article template: (Blog articles are great for targeting smaller words and keeping your site updated with new content every now and then) OBS. Don’t confuse this with the content freshness you want to update and keep your subpages fresh with new content and updates as often as possible.
  • Blank page template: (Good for the boring stuff like about us pages, privacy policy, terms of use, contact page, etc.)

To get a basic casino affiliate website up and running. I recommend signing up for a site like Upwork and getting someone to do it for you cheaply.

It should be fairly easy to get this done for around $200-$400.

This will probably be the best investment you have ever made if you dedicate yourself to becoming a casino affiliate.

What to tell the web developer making your site:

What’s good is that you can show the developer examples of already ranking affiliate sites you want your new site to be similar to; the more simple the site is, the cheaper it’s going to be.

I recommend not copying any other affiliate so it’s too similar, as they might get angry once your site gets bigger and makes money.

On your site, you need to be able to write text + have a list of casinos with an option to display features and terms and conditions as well as a play button that you can use to send the customers.

These are the fundamental things an affiliate site needs to have.

Google around the words you would like to rank for to get inspiration about more details you may want to have on your new awesome casino affiliate site.

A good way to find keywords to rank for is searching for “online casino” and then checking the sitemap of the sites you find to see all pages and articles they have written.

There is usually a target keyword that has most all pages.

Learn the basics of WordPress as soon as possible, this is making your new affiliate life so much easier!

This video is excellent for taking your first steps as a junior Web Developer!

This video helps you get started faster with WordPress as a casino affiliate.

4. Partner up With Casinos and Get Your Tracking Links

You are very close to being an online casino affiliate now!

You have a site with a casino table but don’t have any partnerships ready yet.

If you made it to this stage of the guide, you are already one I genuinely believe will make it great; not many people I know made it as far as you have now!

So, time to get you set up with some casino partners!

Top Casino Affiliate Program

I recommend using Matching Visions.

They gather many brands in the same login platform which makes it very easy to get started.

When you have signed up, you can log in to their program, enter your payment details, and see the dashboard of how many sign-ups and first depositing customers you send each month.

It’s from this login you will also be able to get tracking links to the casinos.

These links are then placed on your website, to make the tracking links look a bit nicer, I would suggest you get a WordPress plugin like pretty link.

How tracking links look without pretty link example: wlshadowbet.adsrv.eacdn.com/C.ashx?btag=a_567b_128c_&affid=281&siteid=567&adid=128&c=

How a tracking link will look with pretty links: exampledomain.com/visit/shadowbet

Time to Make It Rank

You are now all set with a website and have placed tracking links to various online casinos on your site.

What to do next?

Well, this is the part no one truly knows yet a lot of us do succeed. Making an SEO strategy that works.

It’s not entirely true that the SEO work begins now. SEO is the whole site, how you send customers to casinos as well as how you build backlinks to your website.

But in order to understand SEO, you should try to think logically about how it is possible Google may figure out what website is the best one for searchers.

A big factor that I think about a lot when trying to rank my websites is pogo-sticking.

Basically, this is the % of clicks your website gets that do not find the answer and go back to Google to try to find their answer on another website.

You want to avoid at all costs that searchers don’t find anything they can use on your site and go back to search results. This is one factor you can be very creative with.

Backlinks

In a very competitive niché like gambling, you need backlinks and you need to get them in every way possible however you need to make sure that they are relevant to your topic which is gambling, or that figure out how to make the backlinks relevant.

Oh yeah, if you don’t know what a backlink is, it’s a link from another page on the internet to your site that you are trying to rank in the search engines.

So how do you get backlinks?

Many affiliate programs offer so-called testimonial links where you can write a few words about your partnership with the program and they will link back to your site.

Some affiliate programs will demand placements on your site or that you first sent them a few customers in order to do so. But in most cases, you can simply persuade them to place your link on their page.

Here is an example of how testimonial backlinks look.

casino affiliate testimonial backlinks

Where else can you look for backlinks?

The good thing about the internet is that there is a whole lot of information on it!

With tools like Ahrefs, you can in many cases see where a certain site has backlinks already.

Simply insert the URL of a site that ranks on keywords you also aim for in Ahrefs and see where that site has backlinks.

Then you just contact the sites where this ranking site has their backlinks and ask what they want in return for a backlink to your site!

You can also use free blog services or make additional websites in order to get more sites to link to your own or trade with your friends in order to get as much link power as possible without actually paying for it.

Psst. you can also get it from great sites such as Apple, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon!

Friends Are Important in Affiliation

One of the main reasons I am sharing this knowledge in this guide is that the most valuable asset you can have in this business is friends who also are affiliates.

This goes a long way with everything from free link trades to, exchange of knowledge and mentorship. See things from different people’s points of view.

This industry evolves every single day just like Google’s algorithms, so to get perspective from various people is super important as someone else might have noticed something that worked or didn’t work for them.

This is all very good information for you to learn from!

For example, we’ve launched both SocialSweeps and Gambla with our friends at Growthleads and PlayersBest Inc. These are just examples on how well things can go if you collaborate with other affiliates and iGaming professionals.

Getting Paid

When you have managed to get some ranks and you are actually sending customers it’s time to get paid.

The best practice here would be to save up to maybe 5k USD / euro in the affiliate backend. When you have that in-store, start a company and take the funds to your new company bank account.

You Are Ready, Let’s Go!

That’s it for now! With this information, you should be able to get started with your very own passive income casino affiliate business.

But I am sure there are plenty of questions that will come up if they haven’t already so just add me on Skype: carlmansson92 and message me. I will answer everyone as soon as I can!

If you know anyone else looking for good casino affiliate tips, feel free to share this article with them, and of course. I do not mind if you build your blog and link it to this page as a good casino affiliate guide!

Some of the Casino Sites Made by Readers of This Guide

Best of luck and talk soon!

Carl Mansson

(This article contains affiliate links)

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