building your affiliate sites

Once you’re chosen your niche (see What are some profitable niche ideas for affiliate marketing?), you’ll need to create your website. Think about what you want your site and domain name to be – bearing in mind you may not get your first choice given the number of existing igaming websites – and register this.

You’ll also need to select a web hosting provider and content management system (CMS). If you’re just starting out, it’s relatively simple to use WordPress as your CMS and you can then start adding content relevant to your site.

While igaming affiliate websites typically link out to a number of partners from homepages and the other permanent pages, landing pages are also commonly used by affiliates.

These are standalone pages, usually without navigation, that are typically designed to drive organic search, PPC, email or social media traffic to a particular offer as part of a targeted marketing campaign. They allow affiliates to promote a campaign without page visitors being faced with multiple choices. This means they often convert players at a higher rate, and they also allow for good tracking opportunities.

These have long been one of the most popular tools used by igaming affiliates to promote particular offers.

Operators’ affiliate programmes typically provide landing pages for affiliates to use with specific promotions, so affiliates don’t necessarily need to create landing pages for many of the promotions they work with. However, sometimes affiliates want to create their own bespoke landing pages or set up a landing page between the user and the operator’s landing page.

You can use your existing CMS to create a landing page, though you may need a plugin. There are also a number of standalone landing page builders such as Unbounce and Leadpages that allow affiliates to quickly build landing pages.

The design of your landing page will be crucial in making sure it converts visitors once they arrive at the page and should be the result of comprehensive testing and optimisation.

From a technical perspective, it’s simply a matter of pasting in the link. From a strategic perspective, there are a variety of options for linking your landing pages to your website. If, for example, your website offers a comparison service, you may choose to link out to landing pages from your comparison results. On the other hand, if there are particular offers you want to push, you may choose to make links to your landing pages more prominent, perhaps with banner ads on your site or other prominent placement. Most affiliates will test various options or undertake some form of A/B testing of their campaigns to assess their efficiency and adopt strategies accordingly.

Many landing pages are designed to capture search traffic and send users straight to a landing page, thus bypassing the affiliate’s own website entirely.

There are a large number of software solutions aimed at helping both affiliates and operators with tracking. A good place to start for some of the best is the shortlist for the annual iGB Affiliate Awards. All but one of the finalists for the Best Tech for Affiliates category in 2024 were providers offering tracking solutions, with StatsDrone emerging victorious.

The main features affiliates will generally look for are real-time reports, anti-fraud tools, security, data privacy, dedicated account management, strong customer service and tech support. Other factors that are likely to come into play include price (and whether packages can easily be scaled up or down), languages offered, currencies offered, crypto compatibility, geolocations offered, third-party integrations, the level of customisation available, integration time, the marketing materials provided and whether data can be downloaded into other formats, for example, to use with Excel.

Another draw for many affiliates is the level of data and statistics provided. One of the reasons EveryMatrix’s PartnerMatrix has been so successful is its integration with PartnerMatrix Intelligence (formerly DeepCI), which provides useful statistics on traffic and won multiple categories in the iGB Affiliate Awards.

StatsDrone, mentioned above, gives users the ability to track links, but also contains a database of more than 2,000 affiliate programmes, with information on the commission rates offered, as well as features of those programmes (for example, API access, S2S tracking). It also allows users analyse their campaigns by collating all the data in one place and providing the option to segment campaigns.

Start-up and smaller affiliates may use basic software such as Google Analytics and Search Console, combined with Excel. The more sophisticated and larger you become, the more likely you are to need more advanced programmes to manage your workflows effectively.