INSIGHT
“Having banner ads in the sidebar is no longer effective,
as people use adblockers or have banner blindness so
your sidebar is often overlooked.”
want to link to affiliates. You’ll either need
to pay webmasters more money for a link,
settle for lower quality sites, or use blackhat
techniques to gain links. However, when
you have something strong to offer, the
work gets a lot easier.
Use social effectively. Don’t just share
your own content - reach out to others
to show them it and ask them to share it.
Invest in paid social with promoted and
sponsored posts. Facebook is limiting the
reach of page posts because they want to
push their paid platform, so you don’t have
a choice but to use paid social. The same
with Twitter, as there’s so much noise on
Twitter you want to ensure you reach as
wide an audience as possible.
On the subject of paid, PPC can
work very well with content marketing.
The keywords you can target are less
competitive and cheaper than betting
keywords. You can reach a much wider
audience with paid search results and
display ads than you would otherwise get
through search and social alone.
Conversion
The step that’s often overlooked is the
conversion. Your blog should work to
convert visitors like the rest of your site
does, but having banner ads in the sidebar
is no longer effective, as people use
adblockers or have banner blindness so
your sidebar is often overlooked.
In the planning stage, you will have
identified what your objectives are so your
blog should be built with these in mind. If
it’s to get them to read more articles, you
should show them related articles and use
your articles to refer to previous ones that
are related. If it’s to build a community,
then take advantage of the many
WordPress plugins that enable this. The
Selection Sharer WordPress plugin allows
users to highlight text on your page and
share the page via Twitter or Facebook,
quoting the text they highlighted.
CoSchedule and MyTweetLinks do
something similar and are worth checking
out. LiveFyre is a comments plugin that
synchs comments people have made about
your article on Twitter or Facebook and
add them as comments to your site.
Including calls to action within your
article results in higher conversion rates
than having CTAs in the sidebar only.
However, when deciding on CTAs on
your blog, think about the journey a user
would take if they landed on your blog
first. Chances are, they weren’t outright
looking for a signup bonus, they’re either
already part of your community (follow
you on social, subscribe to your RSS feed,
or bookmarked your site) or they found you
through your promotion efforts.
At this stage, your CTAs should be
about the next best action. This should be
personalised to the user and their behaviour
to offer them an action that is best suited
to the situation. Segment your visitors
between new and returning.
For new visitors, you’ve got three
potential options: 1. get them to join your
community by signing up to your email
newsletter (give them a reason to give you
their email) or, alternatively following you
on social; 2. get them to continue reading
other articles relevant to their interests to
build some trust in you before joining your
community; or 3. get them to sign up to
one of the bookies on your site by either
sending them to the bonus offer page,
bookmaker reviews page or sending them
dir ectly to the operator.
For returning visitors, chances are
they’ve already taken advantage of the
bonus offers, what you want to do is get
them to continue to bet with the operator.
This is where you take matters into
your own hands – don’t just rely on the
operators to turn your referral signups to
loyal customers, if you’ve got them to trust
you and join your community, you can
get them to continue to place bets. So for
the returning visitor segments, the CTAs
should focus more on placing bets instead
of signing up or joining your community.
Conclusion
Content marketing can be a powerful
strategy for any online business but only
when done right. With proper initial
planning you have a strong starting
position; you know what kind of content to
create on your blog, what goals to set up on
your analytics platform to measure success,
and what you need to do to achieve results.
i
dita Pacram
Name: Afer
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14
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ua
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When: 6 Fe
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Where:
AFERDITA PACRAMI is
CEO of the successful
iGaming SEO agency 90
Digital. She has been in
digital marketing for over six
years and specialises in setting
up teams, implementing creative
digital strategies and improving site
engagement through the use of visual
cues, narrative, and psychology.
iGB Affiliate Issue 55 FEB/MAR 2016
51