As many affiliate programmes take around six months to build, the half-year stage is a good benchmark to reassess your strategy in order to continue its growth. It’s also an ideal time to check that your affiliates are still engaged with promoting your brand.
Here we discuss how you can build on your affiliate programme’s first six months of growth and continue its success in the long-term.
Exposure and Engagement
Your first task will be to audit the affiliates you’re partnered with and ensure they’ve been sharing content related to your brand. This is especially important for those with whom you’ve agreed a flat fee, because you’ll want to see a positive return on this investment (strong ROI).
Affiliate promotions are a great way to recruit new affiliates. Brands can offer a boosted revenue share or CPA for a limited time after running their affiliate programme for six months, just as they do upon its initial launch.
Player promotions are also effective when it comes to engaging affiliates. For example, enhanced odds offers similar to Paddy Power’s “Power Prices” not only increase brand exposure but can also help to reignite dormant accounts and convert new players.
Partnering with super affiliates such as Gambling Affiliation are another way to expose your brand’s name to a broader audience and can help you attract more depositing players. Meanwhile, blog posts can also help to achieve better reach, given that they are highly shareable on social media. In addition to this, blog posts cost nothing to create and share – except for some of your time.
Paying social media accounts with tens of thousands of followers, such as professional gamers and reality TV stars, to promote your bonuses and sign-up offers, could also help your brand reach a wider pool of potential converting players for a lower price – if you strike a good deal.
Recruitment: Thinking Outside the Box
Once you’ve recruited a number of ‘traditional’ affiliates who are actively promoting your content, you can start to think outside the box when it comes to looking for new partners. We touched upon affiliate and player promos earlier – along with attracting classic affiliate sites, these can also be great for helping to recruit other partner types.
Examples of outside-the-box recruitment include casino news and sports club fan sites with banner spaces, such as Casino News Daily and MetsMerized. Many of these pages attract hundreds of thousands of monthly readers, meaning that it’s easy to expose your brand to a large audience for a relatively low price if you get a good deal.
To Summarise…
After six months, your goals will still remain the same: to increase exposure and build brand and affiliate programme awareness, along with constantly growing your affiliate database to attract more depositing players and ultimately build revenue. If the bulk of your efforts and budget has been spent with classic affiliate sites, however, then you’ll want to look at diversifying your presence through alternative sources of traffic.
Provided you take the necessary steps to keep affiliates, partners and players engaged, both the affiliate programme and revenue will continue to grow. One year, 18 months, two years, and so on are future benchmarks to revisit your affiliate programme’s strategy and make new amendments to maintain growth.
To find out more about our affiliate marketing services, please reach out.
