How To Find Affiliate Marketers for Business

If you are looking for opportunities to expand your presence in the iGaming industry and want an effective marketing strategy, chances are you’re already familiar with affiliate marketing. Hence, you will want to launch your in-house affiliate program.

Finding suitable affiliate partners for your project might be a daunting task, but it’s definitely a rewarding one. Arguably, one of the finest and safest investments you can make into your iGaming company is an efficient and appealing affiliate program. And what’s even more exciting – you pay your partners based on their performance. No wonder affiliate marketing is also referred to as performance marketing.

But where to find affiliate marketers and how to be confident in their competence and efficiency? That’s what we are about to discuss.

Who the affiliates are

To better understand how to find affiliates, you need to understand who they are. Pretty much everyone, from an unknown blogger to a large conglomerate, has the potential to be an affiliate. But here is a breakdown of the most common and proven types of affiliates for your iGaming project:

Bloggers

A great choice as your affiliates. More or less well-known bloggers already have an established audience and the capacity to attract a new one. The probability of finding new clients is higher when the blogger’s main topic matches or intersects with yours. This partnership is going to bring more targeted traffic that’s more likely to stay for good and bring you profit.

Media platforms and forums

A lot of industry media platforms and portals revolving around gambling and betting topics consistently deliver high traffic. That is why it is a great place to promote your program and, therefore, for affiliates to find one. Some portals like Casinomeister have discussion sections and forums, where you can talk to people about their experiences with one or the other affiliate, and maybe even find a new partner right away.

Industry influencers

Today influencers represent a huge force that dominates the world of social media. They have a massive following on the most popular social platforms. And they can use that power to promote your product.

B2B affiliates

B2B marketing is a very powerful instrument to get exposure and attract new players to your online casino or sports betting website. Even more, there are many offerings of B2B affiliate services on the iGaming market. Good examples are platforms like Affiliate Guard Dog, GPWA, AffPapa, GAFFG, and also affiliate networks and marketing agencies. You just need to choose what’s right for your project.

Streamers

Successful and popular streamers can become great affiliates. Streams usually take place on Twitch or YouTube, although there are a lot of niche streaming platforms you should consider. After you and your future affiliate have agreed on the terms, the streamer can play at your casino or sportsbook and promote your brand via links and promo codes shared during the stream.

How to find affiliates

Now that you have established a credible program with great potential to attract partners, you are ready to move to the next step, which is finding affiliates. Here are some places and guidelines to help you find the right affiliates:

Listings

You may have seen pages like “Top-10 Affiliate Programs For Business”. Not only being in those listings is a way to find affiliates, but there is also a high possibility the websites with such listings ARE affiliates. Among the most massive affiliates in iGaming is AskGamblers – a great place to start by securing a listing of your online casino or partner program. Sometimes along with the listing, you will see brief descriptions of the affiliates and their programs, but it’s always better to reach out to them personally. Affiliate marketing is all about building relationships.

Directories

There are hundreds of directories, rating casino and sportsbook platforms, game providers, and affiliate programs where you can put your affiliate program on display. It is not the most productive method of finding marketing partners since you cannot develop relationships first. However, you will get the word out about your program and boost your odds.

Competitors

Find companies in your niche that share your market and provide the same or similar services. Usually, when you open their websites you’ll see a testimonials or a partners section. That’s where you can find affiliates. Find the contact details of those you’re interested in and get in touch with them.

You can also pick a project or a company you look up to and search for their name. It is very likely that most of the links you find in search, except for the official website link, will be affiliates.

Generally following competitor activity is, in itself, good advice. Pay attention to the resources you see them on and what they focus on in their messaging and communication.

Affiliate networks

One of the upsides of affiliate networks is that they do most of the work. They are aimed to help brands promote themselves via their affiliate marketing services. Registering on the networks like CPA Bro, RevenueLab, CPA Kitchen, and Matching Visions will open up your brand to a sea of affiliates who are eager to find affiliate programs to work with. All you have to do is place your offer.

However, in practice, not all the affiliates will bring the same results, since no one controls the traffic quality. Therefore, you will usually have to do your own search anyway and find those that work for your goals. Not only that, but you will also have to compete for the affiliates with other operators and pay commissions based on the terms of the affiliate network’s services.

Online ads

There are at least several reasons in favour of using this method to get attention: ads attract quality affiliates, they are not time-consuming, and you don’t need any special knowledge to run them. When you are looking to broaden your audience, ads are a superb tool. Consider Google Adwords, Facebook, and LinkedIn for reaching out to potential partners. But do not exclude other ad networks. Some of them can be more niche and better suited to the iGaming vertical. Make your ads visible and unconventional, make them stand out.

Make your affiliate program easy to find

It’s essential to put a link to your affiliate program on the most prominent place on your website – the homepage or main game lobby. It may seem obvious, yet too many companies fail on that and create unnecessary difficulties for themselves. Be sure to include the necessary details on your affiliate program page, like what types of commissions you have, clear terms of getting rewards, and how to apply to your partner program.

Make a step further: create a landing page and write a blog post on your website, so you could use SEO tools to promote your program. Keep in mind that you might require additional promotion (social media, email, paid ads, etc.) to drive enough traffic to your website.

Conferences and live events

To build strong and long-lasting partnerships, first, you need to build relationships. And there is no better way to do that than to attend networking events like Affiliate World or Affiliate Summit, or just any affiliate event near you. Look for conferences related to your industry, they have higher relevancy. The downside is that tickets to these kinds of conferences and events can be costly, but it is a worthy investment. Most iGaming operators tend to put up a stand that represents their brand and affiliate program to attract new affiliate partners.

Building effective affiliate relationships

Creating an affiliate program and finding partners is only half the story. To get the best out of your partnership, you need to take into consideration some important aspects. Let’s talk about them:

Affiliate program

Focus on building trust in your affiliate partnership. It’s essential to always be clear and straightforward about your partner program. This means that you should be upfront with the conditions of enrolling in the program and the conditions of getting commissions. It’s not enough just to create an affiliate program, it has to be good, fair, and transparent.

There is a reason why it’s called a partnership. So organise your program the way there would be communication both ways and so that your affiliates would be able to always get feedback and statistics on their performance. Affiliates are part of a big community, and when your affiliate program is sub-par or unfair – that community will know sooner than later.

Affiliate managers

Part of the partnership-building two-way communication are affiliate managers. Having a professional and client-oriented support system is essential for building trustworthy relationships between an iGaming business and an affiliate. The partners need to know they have an expert who’s always available and ready to solve any issue.

Software

When forming your network of affiliates, affiliate software is a must both for your business and for the partners. With affiliate marketing software, you will always know which affiliates have brought in which players and your partners will always be able to access their performance statistics and adapt their marketing strategy if needed.

A comprehensive affiliate management software gives you tools to collect data and organise the processes of monitoring affiliate activity. It includes multi-level statistics on various parameters and different ways to export the statistical reports (CSV, XML, JSON, API calls). Ideally, it should go the extra mile and provide media management tools to add custom landings and banners for affiliate pages.

Affilka offers all of the functions a great affiliate management platform should have, plus integrated payment service providers, a commission constructor, and an incredibly detailed guide on using the platform. Now you can save time (and money) on learning about how to use the software.

Creating a trusted reputation for an iGaming brand

We have already established that building relationships is incredibly important for successful affiliate marketing. But what’s equally important is building a reputation as a reliable and modern brand. Some key principles will help you achieve that:

• Competent/qualified customer support that helps both players and affiliates, available 24/7
• Transparency towards the players. You have to be an honest brand with clear gambling terms that doesn’t trick players and treats them with due respect. Your potential affiliates have to be sure they don’t bring clients to a scam online casino since their reputation is at stake. Otherwise, they risk losing their source of income
• Timely payouts and attractive commissions
• Giving affiliates quality promotional materials and assets
• Individual approach in everything, including personal commission rates
• Striving for expanding the affiliate program. Constant promotions and monitoring of competitors and market tendencies, adapting the affiliate program conditions to new trends and improving the terms for your partners

Summary

Now that you have an idea of the key principles in finding affiliate marketers, you know where to put your efforts to get the best performance possible and start building partner relationships that last.

Ideally, you want to reach the point where you don’t need to actively find affiliates, but they come to you. That’s when you know you’ve built a reputable iGaming brand. In any case, remember to prioritise quality over quantity. Aim to find quality partners who will bring you quality traffic and don’t waste your resources pursuing large numbers of poor-performing affiliates.