This article is a guide to help any webmaster if they want to capitalize on the biggest sporting event in the world, the World Cup. The World Cup 2014 in Brazil will be more than a major sporting event with the 2010 World Cup final drawing 700 million viewers alone. If you know anything about the betting habits of football fans, most of them bet with their heart and not with their head. The World Cup is personally one of my favourite sporting events to watch despite Canada not having a team good enough to win the tournament. If you are a fan of football (yes, the game you play with your foot and a ball, not hand egg) and you want to make some money this tournament as an affiliate then this guide is for you.
This article was featured in the iGB Affiliate Magazine and you can apply the principles to other major sporting events and tournaments. If you need help selecting an affiliate program then find reviews of sportsbook affiliate programs here.
The 3 main areas you will want to focus on are:
1. Technical Setup
2. Go Mobile
3. Geo Targetting
4. Content Marketing
5. Social Media
6. SEO
7. Selecting a Sportsbook Affiliate Program
Is it too late to start a site?
It is never too late to start a website. Never. There might be some sites that have a big head start or established betting sites that have dedicated content and sections for World Cup but there is enough traffic to go around. beteuro2012.org launched With only 1 month before the Euro 2012 beteuro2012.org was launched and did quite well for a brand new site.
1. Technical Setup
Domain Selection For a domain you probably would want something that explains what the site is right off the bat. Although there is a lot of discussions about the cons of using an exact match domain (EMD), if you are creating a site for the short term then you will want your visitors to understand what the site is. CMS I’m a big fan of Wordpress and many top affiliates are using Wordpress including e-sportbets.org and beteuro2012.org where the Bet Euro 2012 site was launched using Wordpress and created 1 month before that tournament began. If you can’t decide on a domain or content management system and you want to spend as little as possible then try Blogspot.com which is owned by Google and has a reputation for giving traffic and rankings without having to make as much of an effort as you would with a Wordpress site. Don’t forget to make sure your CMS and template is mobile friendly using responsive design. Starting a website without a budget If you want to launch a website without any investment at all other than your own time, you have many resources available. Google isn’t the only player in the game but lets face it, they are biased and are the biggest search engine around. You can launch a website, setup all your social media accounts and connect it all through a single Gmail account. Here are your tools: Gmail - Setup your email with Gmail and run everything through this. Be sure to keep this email highly secure as it has control over everything. Blogspot.com - Once you have Gmail, you can do everything else and setup a blog in a few minutes getting your own blog URL and start writing posts and pages immediately. Google+ - This is like Facebook but you want to get yourself setup as an author so when you setup blogspot, they will probably try to force Google+ on you and just go with it. Feedburner - Just add this as a widget on your blog so you can collect emails of your users, it is easy to do and every time you make a blog post, your subscribers will get an email and your widget. YouTube - You might not need YouTube but it is a great tool to generate traffic. Social Media - Just join all of them and add them as widgets on your blog. Affiliate Programs - Join a few affiliate programs to get some banners and links setup on your site so you can make some money from your traffic. Be sure to pay close attention to our section on how to select the right affiliate program! Tip: If you are buying a domain and planning to do hosting, be aware of your target audience. If you have a .ca domain to target Canadians then ideally you would want your hosting done in Canada whereas sites like GoDaddy are typically hosted in the United States. Also be sure to check your host would allow online gaming content as some like HostGator say they don’t.2. Go Mobile
Sportsbetting sites are getting more mobile traffic and with so much mobile traffic you really need to make sure your site is ready. The best way to get a site mobile ready is through responsive design. There are plenty of Wordpress templates that feature responsive design. You can’t ignore the data and ask any sports betting related website what their mobile traffic is like. beteuro2012.org The site isn’t even optimized for mobile although with a simple template it is fairly readable. 21% mobile traffic, 6.5% tablet F1-bettings.com 26% iOS 17% Android 2% Other mobile OS Last year for the month of March 2013 the stats were 26% iOS and 10% Android. Almost 50% of the traffic to F1-Bettings is mobile traffic. Checking with a few other sites for the same time period of sites that are not mobile ready have less mobile traffic and this could be a result of not having a mobile formatted website. Regardless when your site isn’t mobile ready, the bounce rate increases for that mobile traffic and that means less conversions. When it comes to gambling, mobile phones are great for betting on sports, casino and maybe lottery. If you have targeted traffic already hitting your site then you’ll want to convert as much of that as possible and if you are not mobile ready, you might lose this traffic to someone else. There are plenty of Wordpress themes that are free AND have responsive design. Just go to wordpress.org/themes and in the search type ‘responsive’ and you’ll get more than enough themes that are mobile ready.3. Geo Targeting
If you are working with sportsbooks then you will definitely want to do geo targeting unless your audience is a specific language like Italian then maybe you can get away with not needing to geo target your ads, banners and links. If your site is in English then it makes sense that you will get US, UK and rest of world traffic and some sportsbooks don’t take players from all countries with some examples like Canada, Australia and United States to name a few. The same goes with a language like Spanish with so many countries speaking the languages, not all sportsbooks are available to players in Spain for example. Portuguese? Again you have Portugal and Brazil for traffic possibilities and you might want to focus on sportsbooks that are stronger in certain countries. Another example is Sky Bet, they are very strong in the UK but only take players in UK and in Ireland so your rest of world traffic would be wasted if you sent them to Sky Bet so in this case geo targeting would make the most out of your traffic. When you implement geo targeting you are preventing your site from sending traffic to betting sites where players won’t be able to signup. Tip from Dealer Dan on geo targeting “Geo-target. A US Bookie who you can get a landing page and some sort of free bet or promo offer with. A big UK bookie who has special deals and promos such as Bet365 and Paddy Power. Come World Cup time, these guys are like Amazon for conversion/retention”.: A geo targeting plugin that works with Wordpress is from Epikmedia.com. Use bonus code gaffg to get $10 off (I seriously don’t get any commission from this).4. Content Marketing
Your content needs to attract the right user and sell. You don’t want to get into the mistake of spending too much time talking about the match without talking about the betting aspects of the match. So what type of page and topics can help you attract the right users and convert? Good: Sportsbook Reviews Match Betting Tips/Odds Betting Guides Bad: Match Previews World Cup News Team Profiles If your content isn’t focused enough then you might have a possibility of attracting a lot of traffic but traffic that doesn’t convert as well. A common mistake is writing match previews and hoping that the users that found your page through a search engine would be kind enough to click on your banner. Sure there might be other strategies to take this type of traffic and try to pull a sale from it but it is essentially swimming against the current and maybe your time is better spent doing something else. There will be a lot of people watching the games but not all will be interested in betting however the ones that are interested will be your easiest conversions. So you can write content about the schedules, team profiles, player profiles but this is the type of content you might have a harder time converting and you should at least ensure you have your core content covered especially the content that is going to help you attract the right converting traffic and also give you a chance to convert it on your website as well. World Cup news might be interesting to read but try to understand what will convert better, world cup news or world cup tips? Someone searching for world cup odds, tips or betting are going to be the type of traffic you will want to get. My Tip: Remember around the world online gambling is still growing and there are a lot of people out there that are still learning how it works. Guides and instructional videos are always a great way to attract these new players and to win their loyalty and trust. Also sportsbook reviews are just as important and make sure your review suits the needs of your audience. Tip from Dealer Dan: “Lots and lots of content. Even if you don't rank for the primary keywords, you can still get longtail. Look at every possible bet and write an article on it. Think about other shit people will be looking up, and cover it. For example even something as simple as "What time is the England game on at?" and you can target that keyword. In addition - mailing list. Hook them up for the future - my BetEuro2012 site has a couple k mailing list users I can hit come World Cup.” Niche & USP To follow up with content marketing, what is your niche, what makes your site special as in it’s Unique Selling Point (USP)? Is your site about tips, a betting guide to the world cup or focused on a team like England? What about a focus on mobile betting or maybe focus on other countries and markets? One aspect of betting that always attracts the right type of crowd is providing tips to your users. If you can provide tips for your users then you have a means to attract and convert users. If you aren’t experienced at providing this as a service then maybe you want to search for a partner that knows sportsbetting inside out to help with content and providing analysis of the games. Tip from Dealer Dan “Odds comparison between the sportsbooks works wonders.” Betting Trends & and Knowing Your Customers In the world of sports betting it helps to understand the trends of the sport and habits of your users. When it comes to an event like the World Cup there is a lot to absorb. Remember most players bet with their heart and not with their head so that probably represents the majority of the gamblers out there. This means you will see a lot of people either betting for their favourite team, favourite player or will just be betting on the favourite to win regardless of what return is available for them. Players will naturally respond to betting offers as well as this is what sportsbooks will offer to get users to not only signup but make a deposit. The other aspect of betting customers is they like to make money so this is where if you have a decent tipster service available you can get some followers and within this section of traffic, of course players will follow a tipster but often deviate from the recommended bet as sometimes it involves betting against your own team to make a profit. So what are the trends and favourites going into the world cup? Lionel Messi plays great for Barcelona but Argentina doesn’t seem to translate this into success. Current odds are at 4/1 to win the tournament. England is great at inventing sports and it stops there. English fans will bet loyally on their team but they don’t seem to win much in the tough games. Current odds are 33/1 to win the tournament. Brazil are the host team and have won the most titles so they are 3/1 favourites to win the tournament and is probably not a great bet. Spain won the last 3 major tournaments, expect a lot of people to just bet on the winning team, odds of 7/1. What else can players bet on?- Top Goalscorer
- Group Qualification
- To Reach Finals
- Group Winner
- Every match