With the Goodwood Horse Racing Festival coming up this month, it’s a great opportunity for sports betting affiliates to find keywords that will drive traffic around this key event. In this article, we’re teaching you how to curate content that will draw in these sports fans to then convert them through to an operator.
Finding niches to boost your results
Creating this kind of niche content can be fantastically useful for affiliates, as you can target a niche that your larger competitors aren’t. Take a look at how the search for ‘betting on horse racing’ stacks up:
As you would expect, we have all the big players right on the front page. We’ve got PPC ads and highly ranked organic results. Looking into the Keyword Planner tool, we can see these related keywords rank between £30 to £40 per click. This is hardly affordable for smaller affiliates and you can easily be relegated to the bottom of page one, where you won’t really get much traffic.
However, if we go for more specific terms relating to the Goodwood Festival, then we can start to spot where the niches begin to arise:
There are fewer PPC ads and the content becomes less relevant as we move down the page. By the fifth result, we can see that Google has begun to serve up generic horse racing content. That means that if you created a well referenced, specific article, then you could take this position. We can see that the prioritisation within these results lean to the more specific content, so build on these and create something even better.
In terms of paid media, these results can be purchased through PPC for as low as 71p per click, which gives you a lot more to play with in terms of your marketing budget.
How to create this content
If you’re not a horse racing aficionado, then you might want to go to experts for help understanding what’s popular and how you can niche your strategy to find unicorn phrases that will drive better results. Using pundits and guest bloggers can give you this kind of expertise, which lends itself to your brand. This is common within the affiliate industry, if they have a strong social following then this can also build your brand further.
Creating a content schedule that contains multimedia elements, instead of just text, will bring you even better results. This means you may need to put more into the creation process, but your ROI can be much higher as a result. Infographics, video content and images are all easy ways to switch up this information and give it in a new way.
Remember that you want to be giving value to your user. This could be with a how to guide or perhaps a comparison of the top odds. Understanding where your user is on their journey will allow you to appeal to them. Create a sales funnel of content, with general tips for those at the top of the funnel and in depth content for those ready to make a decision.
Top of the funnel content can include the history of the festival and event details. This kind of content will attract those that are just looking to learn more about the festival. As you move towards the bottom of the funnel, you’ll want to create content that’s for those that are ready to bet, like odds comparisons and favourites. On the site, you’ll want enough content and suggestions to take those users at the top all the way through the funnel and converting with an operator.
This kind of content has to be monitored regularly to be effective. This means you’ve got to check out the bounce rate and the dwell time on your pages. The pages that show the most promise can be invested in further and used for other events. This allows you to gain insight into what your users want to see, which can bring you better results for more competitive sporting events further down the line.
As an affiliate in a crowded market, you’ve got to look for these niches in order to thrive. The more inventive you are, the more you can get from your marketing budget. Come along and join us at AffiliateFEST to discover more about how you can get ahead in a competitive market place and learn from digital experts that can help your business thrive.
