You’ve all seen the refer-a-friend bonuses that certain sportsbook push in order to have you bring in another member or several new members through the door. This is perfectly fine but is on a personal acquaintance basis, and if you’re thinking about making it more professional you can sign up with bookmaker affiliate programs and promote their offers to people you don’t know personally. This allows you to scale your operation.
Where to promote?
For many years, websites and blogs were the only way to promote anything, including sportsbooks. In recent years, with the emergence of social media, there are several new platforms where you can push your products and we could even say social media exist precisely for that purpose – to sell something. Facebook doesn’t really allow sports betting content so you’ll probably have to do Twitter, which is known to have a strong sports betting audience. There are also ways to promote a product in other media, even offline, but websites and Twitter are pretty much your best bet. Pun intended.
How do you make money?
When a person signs up through your affiliate link, the player is tracked as “your” player. This allows the sportsbook to keep track of that player’s income or loss, and if you are on a revenue share deal, that will mean that you get paid a percentage of player’s losses. Since you will have a larger number, say, 100, players, you will get paid based on their performance as a group. If they as a group lose $1000 and you’re on a 25% revenue share deal, you’ll get roughly $250.
There are also other ways to make money such as CPA (cost per acquisition) deals that pay per head, and you only get paid once for each player, but to have such a deal you’d have to prove your performance first and then negotiate a CPA deal you’ll be happy with. But, for all practical purposes, revenue share deals are superior as your players accumulate while with CPA they never to as you’re letting go of the player as soon as you’re paid for him/her.
Are these companies fair?
And this is where things get serious. As a sportsbook affiliate you definitely will get screwed sooner or later, your players will get stolen by the brand, your commissions confiscated, your affiliate accounts closed. There is always a small portion of sportsbook brands that resort to this kind of behaviour, and that’s why it’s imperative to find some facts about a brand before you enter a long-term arrangement with them and start spending your time and money to promote them. It’s much better to read about bad behavior of some brand and then choose to ignore them, than it is to hope for the best and go with that brand because you like them as a player. A brand can be good towards players and bad towards affiliates, or the other way around, and in fact most brands fit this profile and brands that are good towards oth players and affiliates are rare.
In this part of your operation you will simply have to be a true businessman and will have to be very picky regarding whom you work with.