The working world has certainly changed over the past couple of decades. Success used to coincide with gaining a university degree, working long hours, and lots of sacrifices, and whilst sacrifices are still needed, the idea of success in 2024 is all about having a good work/life balance.
Since the turn of the century, the Internet has gradually become more and more involved in all of our everyday lives and in 2024, a business without adequate internet marketing will almost certainly suffer. The advent of the internet created the ability to market to more customers than ever before, DigitalEdge is evidence of this.
The world wide web as it used to be known, connected everyone to each other. It means that websites are now businesses in their own right and they can market their goods to the whole world.
A new type of business created by the internet is affiliate marketing where affiliate websites essentially work as middlemen between a customer and a supplier. The best affiliate websites use writers and researchers who are experts in whatever the chosen affiliate field is.
Affiliate websites would usually compare different products so that their customers can then choose the best from a good bunch – thus the customer is happy and the supplier gets a sale. The affiliate will then get a cut of the profits from the product supplier – so in theory, everyone is happy.
How do Affiliate Websites Work?
Most affiliates use the internet’s roads in order to attract customers – search engines. The number one used search engine is Google and in order to bring customers to your website, it is essential to rank high in Google’s search engine results page (serps).
Now, there are plenty of different search engines; Bing, Duck Duck Go and Yahoo to name a few, but Google dominates the sphere and most affiliate websites use Google as their main source of traffic.
Of course, there are lots of ways websites use to generate traffic for their websites. Social media marketing is a common one. Websites will pay social media companies like Facebook in order to be shown in ads to other users. Even Google allows websites to purchase ads in order to appear at the top of search results.
In theory, the better the quality of content a website produces, the more exposure search engines will give them. However, in recent years, it has become harder and harder for niche websites on a smaller budget to generate their traffic from Google.
Independent Sites Versus Big Brands
An affiliate website called HouseFresh recently published an article lamenting how Google is ‘killing’ independent sites in favour of huge brands such as Forbes and Buzzfeed amongst others.
Big brands have been using their domain authority in order to rank for keyword terms they wouldn’t usually try to or expect to rank for. These big sites recognized that there was a lot of money to be made in the affiliate marketing game and got involved.
We won’t delve into this too much, but independent sites have been losing a lot of rankings since Google’s so-called Helpful Content Update in October 2023. Although it is still very possible to build an affiliate website on a small budget, it is growing increasingly difficult to generate traffic from Google due to the competition.
Affiliates in the Online Gambling Niche
Although there are successful affiliate websites in niches from clothes and technology niches to food and finance, there are plenty that revolve around online gambling.
These affiliate sites will work with online casinos and other gambling operators in order to send their traffic to the operators. The competition here is arguably the most fierce of any.
One affiliate site in the gambling niche that specialises in online slot reviews is SlotsHawk which is run by a small team of writers who have been involved in online gambling for over a decade.
Their editor Jean Prince was kind enough to talk to us and give us a little insight into what it is like to both set up and run an affiliate website.
“Well, when we first began to set up the website it was at the backend of 2020 when there were just two of us.
“We were already working full-time jobs so we had to work on the new website in the nights, evenings and weekends
It took around a month to get everything into a position where we felt the website was ready to go live.”
Any online business requires time and effort to be put into it before it can begin making any money, and this is what puts a lot of people off.
“Yes, an affiliate website is not going to make money straight away and you need a plan in place ideally.
“We made sure to get around 10 of our main pages live before we launched the website. In addition, we had to make some deals with our casino partners whom we wanted to send our traffic to.
“SlotsHawk became profitable quite quickly because it didn’t have any costs other than a domain hosting fee and some other bits and pieces.
“The main expense was our time. However, because we already had a lot of experience in the industry, we could do the majority of things ourselves and the most important thing is the quality of the content.”
Affiliate Start-Ups: Can it be Done?
Certainly, it is possible to set up affiliate sites on a budget, but expertise is imperative. Jean and his SlotsHawk team had spent several years building up their knowledge so they knew what they had to do. However, with web content management systems like WordPress, it has never been easier to create and own your own website.
The advice of most people would be to just go ahead, try it out, and learn as you go.
