Bingo Affiliates Cashing in on the Online Bingo Boom

The success of online bingo has made a lot of money for many companies.  Recent figures show the industry generated $1.2 Billion in gross gaming yield in 2008 and could even grow to $2 Billion by 2012. However, it is not only the online bingo operators and software companies that are cashing in on the money.

Bingo Affiliates are also taking a large piece of the cake.  Many online bingo sites rely heavily on affiliates to generate traffic for them.  In exchange they offer their affiliates either a fixed sum per depositing player or a commission based on the players spend at the particular site.  Sometimes this can be up to 50% or even £150 per sign up!

In the past few years we have seen a huge increase in the number of bingo portals and review sites all trying to get a piece of the action.  Searching for “online bingo” on Google for example will not only bring up online bingo game sites but hundreds of review sites and portals all promoting various other bingo gaming sites. The information is more or less the same on all these sites as usually the bingo operators supply their affiliates with reviews, logos, banners and other marketing material.

The competition is no longer limited to the bingo operators but is also bigger than ever for the bingo portals.  We have even seen portal sites launching with budgets similar to those of the big online bingo operators.  Oh My Bingo is a recent example of a bingo portal going all out in trying to beat the competition with its new television campaign.  Some portals have been so successful that they have gone from promoting other bingo sites to operators themselves.  Costa Bingo and Tea & Bingo are both good examples of promoter turning operator.  Recently, Bingo Port also announced it will be launching its own bingo site powered by Swedish gaming software provider NYX Interactive.

Having talked to a number of top performing affiliates, it seems that the key to success for any bingo affiliate is SEO and choosing which sites to promote wisely.  SEO plays a vital role in that affiliates want potential players searching for an online bingo site to visit their site first.  Obviously the higher the search engine ranking for important keywords such as “bingo”, “online bingo” and “bingo bonuses” the better.

Choosing which sites to promote is also of major importance.  A site must be capable of converting a visitor to a depositing player.  The affiliates we talked to recommend that an affiliate should choose respectable but less well known brands if they hope to make any serious conversions.  They say there is no point in promoting sites that 90% of the online bingo players are already signed up to, especially if those sites have a much higher search engine ranking.  Sites with big marketing budgets and which can be seen all over the place such as TV, magazines and newspapers don’t always have the highest conversion rates as in most circumstances the potential visitors are already signed up.  As such, newly launched sites do always seem to have the best conversion rates and with the number of new bingo sites going online, affiliates have a vast array of choice when it comes to choosing which sites to promote.

It must be noted however, that apart from the large number of UK based bingo sites we also have sites aimed at other markets such as the US, Spain and Latin America.  However, many affiliates are missing out on this International based income as they choose not to promote bingo sites targeting non UK players.  Let’s not forget that the US bingo market is as large if not larger than the UK online bingo market.  Another important factor to note is that UK based sites mostly list their promotions in GBP.  Unlike the US$ not everyone outside the UK is familiar with GBP and its value, so potentially affiliates are losing out on a wider international market by only promoting UK based sites.

In a recent interview with the CEO of a major international bingo network, we were told that the average affiliate payment has gone up from US$250 per month back in 2001 to US1600 per month in 2009.  He attributed this increase to the fact that affiliates are becoming more and more professional in their marketing practices and managing player retention in their own right either through a community based portal or by the use of all the social media tools currently available such as Twitter and Facebook.

So it seems that along with the growth of the worldwide online bingo market, so is the potential for affiliates to make serious money without the costs and burden of operating an online bingo game.