Online casinos still heavily rely on affiliates to increase their new traffic and revenue. The entire casino affiliate industry has grown significantly in the past few years with a number of new entrants coming to the fore. We caught up with Alex Galinos, content marketing manager & webmaster of Best50Casino.com, an affiliate portal that does things a little differently compared with regular casino affiliates.
Alex sheds some light on the site’s “secret sauce”, as well as what he believes can make a big difference in this competitive field.
AI: Could you give us an overview of the company’s casino affiliate background and some of your previous projects in this niche?
AG: FS Media Group has created a growing network of affiliate portals that are active in the fields of online betting and online casinos. Our two major sites are Bookmakers.bet and Foxbet.gr. The first one is an international sportsbook-related only portal, while the second is one of the most respected portals about betting and online casinos in Greece. The core of our values as a company is accuracy and objectivity in the content we provide. Our goal is to share factual information with the players in order to establish a reputable name for our sites, and we have achieved that very well so far. We are part of an industry that knows its subject-matter quite well, so it’s our belief that we need to be very detailed when we address the players. Until recently, our network was mostly focused on sportsbook both on a global scale, but also in our local market, Greece, with a few local casino-related sites as well though. This changed with the launch of best50casino.com, our first international attempt that’s exclusively online casino-focused. This project was inspired by the massive success of Bookmakers.bet.
AI: How has your newest site, best50casino.com performed so far and what’s the USP that makes it stand out from the rest of the competition?
AG: Best50casino.com is performing unexpectedly well so far, especially if you take into account the fierce competition in the casino industry and the fact that the site hasn’t been around for very long. Best50Casino is winning its fair share of the pie, mostly thanks to the GEO-targeting that we have implemented. We’re already targetting close to 30 regions across the globe, intending to double this number in the coming year by including less competitive countries as well. As I said earlier, our main goal is to provide players with accurate and thorough content. This becomes even more crucial since we decided to adopt the GEO-targeting method. We need to address each market using their local “language” in order to attract the players, and dig very very deep to provide top-notch content. Of course, none of these could be accomplished if we didn’t have a dedicated team of SEO and Digital Marketing experts that choose to spend more time researching than actually writing and optimizing the content. Our website is 100% SEO-focused with an emphasis on user experience and we have a whole team dedicated to GEO-optimization to ensure we post nothing less than 100% accurate info. The ultimate goal of the site is to be regarded as a respectable source of content for players from all around the world, to the point that they will visit it to get educated even on complicated subjects like legal aspects of gambling.
AI: Best50Casino was recently shortlisted in the IGB Affiliate awards 2020 on the Best Affiliate Newcomer category. What do you think led to that in such a short time?
AG: We hope that this is only the beginning of an even greater future success. It’s the first tangible hint that we’ve got something good going on here and the first prize for our hard-working team. I believe that what distinguishes us from the competition is the willingness to dig deeper in the information that we share. We use only trusted sources while researching, and we avoid the detrimental methods that a lot of other affiliates follow, meaning gathering info from the competition without double-checking it or just producing content for the sake of it. Another key to our success is the fact that we pay a great deal of attention to securing exclusive offers for our players in an attempt to increase their loyalty and of course encourage them to return to our site for more.
AI: What are your predictions for the future of Casino Affiliate Marketing and what does that entail for FS Media Marketing?
AG: A shift towards Super-Affiliates that gather many networks under their “umbrella” has started to become more than obvious. Usually, these networks have achieved the establishment of their brand name and after winning players’ loyalty, they tend to become sloppy towards their content. These sites rest assured on their “brand-name laurels” and the information that they provide becomes superficial and sometimes even inaccurate. For sure, we acknowledge that only great content won’t do the job, at least not entirely. It is the reason why our network is investing in branding as well, always without sacrificing quality for quantity. The fact that the industry has become overcrowded made us aware of the need to turn to less conventional markets as well as smaller operators. We believe that the future of casino affiliates lies in detailed research and the production of authentic content, and that’s what we intend to continue doing.
