Producers Vs Parasites

Thanks To JohnH for this great guest post, I couldn’t agree more. Check out his sites about Online Poker and Casino Games to see how a quality affiliate site is built.

In the poker and casino industry there are two types of affiliate sites. There are the sites that are the authorities, and the sites that rely on the authorities to survive. What I mean is that for every solid poker related site you see, there are 100 spammy sites. Do the spammy sites make money? Some of them do. But for the most part their earnings don’t even come close to the earnings of the authority sites.

Let’s face it. If you want to really make money in this business then you have to be a producer. What I mean by this is that you have to send traffic to rooms that would have never had that traffic if they had not been listed on your site. Sure ranking for a specific room’s name can make you some great cash, but it’s no long-term strategy.

The amount of leverage you have when you get this type of traffic is unbelievable. The poker rooms and casinos NEED this kind of traffic. Try negotiating a high CPA when all your players are bonus whores versus when all of your players are highly valued, consistent players. Guess which one will get you a higher CPA?

Another benefit to being a producer is that you can get better links. Other affiliates link to you just for the hell of it, and because they know you are an established site. Also, try getting some good links to a spammy bonus site. It’s not gonna happen, at least not on any level where you can outrank the already established sites. I can tell you upfront that I will not be linking out to any low quality sites from my site that I’ve put a lot of work into. It just doesn’t make sense.

As an established site, you get a lot of exposure. This exposure then creates a brand whether you like it or not. It’s good to have a brand; you make more money when you do. You can’t create a brand of a brand. Someone can come along and take it, because that brand belongs to them in the first place. BonusWhores.com is a brand. SlotsGeek.com is a brand. Does your site have the potential to become a brand? If not, then you are wasting your time… unless you want to continue making nickels and dimes compared to thousands.

Don’t get me wrong; you can make a lot of money with an unbrandable site if you get it to rank for certain high converting phrases. The point is that the income from that site can vanish overnight. It sucks to have all of your hard work nuked overnight, but that is the risk you take being a parasite.