How to land an iGaming affiliate manager job

This week I’m helping out a friend prepare for a job interview. The job is for a senior affiliate marketing manager and all I know is it is for an iGaming company. 

I’ve done this work in the past managing affiliates before building iGaming affiliate sites so I’ve got some experience in this. 

I still focus on the B2B side of affiliate marketing and having 2000+ accounts, I can say that the playing field for affiliate managers overall isn’t good. The good ones usually find their way in getting promoted, join a bigger company or launch their own brand. 

Simply put, there aren’t a lot of good ones available to get and I think this is why we are seeing new ones entering the market. 

Interruption: Thanks to StatsDrone and FTDx for being sponsors of this newsletter!

Let’s also not forget that bigger companies don't mean better as we’ve seen many large affiliate programs drop their affiliate department and leave their affiliate managers high and dry. I’m keeping my mouth shut right now but thankfully social media comes with your comments hint hint. 

Enough with the stories, what I want to do in this article is help YOU land that great paying affiliate manager job. 

This article covers the following topics:

1. Networking

2. Starting your own hobby affiliate site

3. Mastering outreach

4. Finding affiliates

5. Tools to find affiliates

6. Choosing affiliate program software

7. CRM for affiliate managers

8. Data driven affiliate manager

9. FAQ

Before I get into the tools of the trade and all the things you can do to get the results for your new boss, I want to talk about the part of the job that I think is missing in the industry: relationship building.

Relationships are key for any affiliate manager

I talked about this in my recent newsletter titled Not enough marketing in affiliate marketing. 

The problem I see in today’s iGaming affiliate manager is the strung out energy of needing an account signup and as many FTDs as possible. I’ve personally had multiple affiliate managers create extra accounts for me saying it is easier for them to help me this way. BS. 

I definitely don’t want a 2nd account when my first account already has traffic and tracking links deployed. This behaviour makes me not want to work with the person and the affiliate program.

Great start to this long term relationship, I’m sure you treat your players the same too. 

Relationships are built over time and although we are working in B2B, people still want to deal with people. Yes, you might get some that care all about business and don’t care to know you as a person. At the end of the day, the relationship you’re trying to build is about building trust. 

Networking

Networking is something all affiliate managers should be focusing on. 

The advice I’m about to give might not be common knowledge or common practice either. 

You shouldn’t only keep your network focused on just affiliates. Other affiliate managers can be your ally and friends. Yes, you’re all competing for that elusive exclusive #1 position with that affiliate, but you’re not all going to get it. 

Unlike my SaaS product (heyyy StatsDrone) where my ICP will only choose 1 stats app, your affiliate will likely be working with 10 or more accounts. 

Simply put, there is no shortage of people in the industry to work with where your networking opportunities could open a lot of doors. 

I’m going to reference this numerous times in my article but it involves building not just relationships, but friendships with both affiliates and affiliate managers.

Speaking of friends, here's Rodion Gusarov from Royal Partners - affiliate program.

How can affiliates help you as an affiliate manager?

Simple, if you want to know how your brand compares with your competition, they may or may not share this data with you. I would say if you’re not their friend, they’ve got no reason to give you valuable insights unless you’re willing to return the favour.

So don’t be that guy (or girl) that asks for help but is not willing to return the favour. 

How can another affiliate manager help you?

Either they can introduce you to other affiliates where it goes without saying, return that favour yourself. Also if you’ve won over trust, you might gain insights in other parts of the business especially in working with affiliates. 

Are there communities for affiliate managers? I’d like to introduce you to Miles (Myron) Saacks who’s in a few of them and could likely introduce you to them as well. 

Starting your own hobby affiliate site

I’ve seen in some forums where some affiliates get mad when they see affiliate managers also running their own affiliate sites. 

Affiliates already know you have deeper insights by being able to see data across ALL your affiliates and to compete against them doesn’t feel right.

That said, what I’m mainly proposing isn’t that you do this to run a real business but simply to go through the exercise of trying to do a fraction of what your affiliate partners have to do. 

All I’m asking is you feel OUR pain of how other affiliate managers actually treat you. 

If you do this exercise, you’ll understand the nuances of signing up, getting tracking links and the best part of it, having other affiliate managers fight to get your attention.

You’ll see how other affiliate managers treat your ICP (ideal customer profile). You’ll see the newsletters the affiliate program sends out, learn about their contests for affiliates and their promotions targeted for players. 

Market research at its best amirite?

I actually believe most affiliate managers would be

if they went through this exercise. 

Here are the steps I’d do for starting an affiliate site for a trial.

1. Buy a domain

2. Setup a WordPress website

3. Learn keyword research

4. Pick a very deep niche

5. Create content and pray

If you want to skip points 1 and 2 then start a Reddit forum or a YouTube channel, similar idea. 

Mastering outreach

If I had to grade most of my affiliate managers for various skills, I would be giving failing grades on outreach to most affiliate managers.

In fact, even some of the well known and respected affiliate managers I’d say don’t always succeed and could improve. 

What is outreach?

For me, when I think about outreach, I think about email marketing and you have 3 objectives.

1. Get the email delivered

2. Get it opened

3. Get it actioned

Great outreach specialists take the time to get good at these skills and they use it to achieve their goals which in the end is making sales. If you fail at one of these 3 objectives then your mission has failed and you end up wasting a lot of time thinking email marketing is broken. 

You can get a link to Dan Ray, link building course here.

We all have a spam folder and many affiliate managers are in the dark in knowing if their emails are ending up there or not. 

Whether you build up a newsletter with an affiliate database or send individual emails, it is your responsibility to learn about outreach, email marketing and avoiding the dreaded spam folder. 

Email newsletter checklist

I’ve got a small list of things that you need to learn about and ensure you don’t have deliverability issues.

1. Warming up your emails

2. Checking SPF, DKIM and DMarc records

3. Learn about spam triggers

4. Email writing tools

There are no shortages of courses for outreach and I recommend you invest the time into your new career, or continued career path in affiliate management. 

The first 3 points are things that you can learn about in other courses or reading materials. The best communities for this are white hat link building groups on Facebook or any other community. 

Lavender.ai email writing tool

Checkout Lavender.ai which is an email writing tool that critiques your emails and scores your writing.

No it doesn’t correct your spelling mistakes and today, bad spelling (or misspelling?) now might be an advantage that says you’re not automating your emails.

It tells you if you’re writing too much text, have bad formatting or using keywords that are likely to trigger spam.

You can get it as a Chrome plugin and besides, they use the colour purple too and I got mad respect for them for it. 

Finding affiliates

There are easy ways of finding affiliates and then there are hard ways.

Let me state one way NOT to find affiliates and that is by buying a database. 

I have old sites I’ve worked on well over 5 years ago and to this day, I still get emails and Skype messages asking for traffic there. It tells me that this affiliate manager has bought or acquired an affiliate database. It sends the wrong message about trust, I mean if you’re willing to buy an affiliate database, what else is your program willing to do?

I’m going to share some of the tips for finding affiliates that I’ve learned from doing affiliate management, running B2B affiliate sites and now of course trying to get affiliates to promote StatsDrone. 

You know, StatsDrone, the tool that helps affiliates get all their click and revenue data from over 1500 iGaming affiliate programs.

Yes, that is over 1500 affiliate programs representing well over 3000 brands. 

If you’re an affiliate manager, show us some love and mention us in our next newsletter!

Back to the article at hand. 

These are not the only channels but I’m going to stick to 5 ways of finding affiliates.

1. Google search

2. Ahrefs

3. LinkedIn

4. Skype

5. Social channels and communities

Google search

This one is the most basic method possible. You type in keywords that you know affiliates would rank for. A great one would be to pick a brand that you know people are reviewing like this new casino called cawino.com. 

What you do is search for these keyword phrases:

• Cawino review

• Cawino bonus

• Cawino bonus codes

Here you’re going to find a lot of sites that review this new brand. You can also search for other keywords like “slots bonuses”, “casino reviews” or “bookmaker bonus codes”. 

Ahrefs

I’ll talk about Ahrefs a bit later in this article but another fast way of finding affiliates linking to this brand say Cawino, you can use Ahrefs to look up and find affiliate sites linking to cawino.com. 

Need help with Ahrefs, finding affiliates or needing consulting, DM me on LinkedIn.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn can be a challenging place to find affiliates. It is a great place for networking but not all iGaming affiliates spend time on LinkedIn. 

With that said, here is how I think you can and should leverage LinkedIn to your advantage.

When you get affiliates signing up to your affiliate program, if you search for their name or company on LinkedIn, you might find them.

I would recommend you connect there on LinkedIn because if they are frequently on LinkedIn, they’ll be able to see your content there especially if your content relates to your affiliate program. 

One more point I’ll add when it comes to LinkedIn. These affiliates can see connections in common and they can learn a bit more about you and put a face to the name. 

This is one of the reasons why I think LinkedIn is such a critical networking tool. Not everyone is on it but for the ones that are on there, they see your picture, your posts and it is your chance to be top of mind of your network. 

You can search for various keywords in LinkedIn and see what you find. It isn’t easy but it is possible. Some of the bigger media companies are easy to look for while others don’t always have a company name that matches any of their websites.

Of course as we all know, most iGaming affiliates on LinkedIn are more ‘media’ companies so you might not find their associated sites but you’ll discover them in time. 

Skype

Just like LinkedIn, you can add people on Skype too.

Probably one thing that is better about Skype is you can actually start searching for random keywords and results will almost always show up. You can actually search for keywords like ‘casinos’, ‘casino bonus’ or ‘casino reviews’ and you’ll always get results. 

You also have social proof here where Skype shows the number of connections you have in common.

Social channels & communities

YouTube, X, Discord, Slack, Telegram, TikTok. You’ll be able to find affiliates all over these channels. This could help you stay on top of the game perhaps better than some of the other affiliate managers that do less market research. 

As a bonus, there are other affiliate marketing communities in iGaming and there are numerous industry chat groups where you can find them with SBC, SiGMA, iGB, NEXT and AffPapa to name 5 popular channels. There are affiliates inside always posting that they are looking for help or deals. 

Ahrefs, the secret weapon for any affiliate manager

Ahrefs is one of the best SEO tools on the market. There are alternatives to Ahrefs like Semrush and Senuto but I’m showcasing Ahrefs here because I use it currently. I can also show you how to use it for market research as an affiliate or as an operator. 

Sadly they don’t have an affiliate program for me to refer to you but Semrush does so check out Semrush here. 

Here is my checklist of what you can use tools like Ahrefs and Semrush for.

1. Look at the traffic and reputation of an affiliate site

2. Find most affiliates linking to your competitor’s brands

3. Find when your affiliates remove links to your brands

4. Study which sites are gaining and losing rankings

Tool to find affiliates

If you’re looking for a tool to find affiliates, DM me as we’ve been working on a market research tool that helps you know what affiliates are in the space and understand their traffic metrics too.

Choosing an affiliate program software

This might become part of your job at some point, either to select an affiliate program platform in building a program or you might find the existing program needs a change. Sometimes, affiliate programs outgrow the platform they got started with. 

Today, there is no shortage of platforms to choose from. At StatsDrone, there is a big list of affiliate program software to know about including a list of affiliate programs using them.

What are some of the popular affiliate platforms to work with? Here is a short list:

• MyAffiliates

• RavenTrack

• ReferOn

• Cellxpert

• Affilka (by SoftSwiss)

• PartnerMatrix

• Trackier

I won’t list everything but if you need help knowing the intricacies of each platform, at StatsDrone we integrate with as many platforms as possible and know their nuances.

If you need to get more feedback on the favourite affiliate platforms, you should always ask affiliates what they personally like for the backends they have to use. 

You can also ask your affiliate manager friends too for their experience with the platform they currently use. 

Listing fees

Listing fees, aka flat fees, are a fun part of the business. 

Once you’re faced with the demand of needing a listing fee from an affiliate, this is where you gotta put your network to use and also use market research tools as well. 

Dmitry Belianin knows a thing or 2 about listing fees and he wrote a detailed article on the topic which you can read here. 

Did you know that StatsDrone offers affiliates the ability to add all their flat fee deals in the app?

Yes, I agree it is pretty cool. 

What any affiliate manager should be prepared for is a dance.

If you paid out all the listing fees and the rates every affiliate handed to you, you’d probably run out of money fast.

I want to talk about something that is unfortunate we have to talk about it, but I think it deserves more attention so this idea isn’t swept under the rug. It has to do with you, the affiliate manager, and scammers targeting you. 

Watch out for affiliate fraud

At some point, you might get an affiliate pretending to work for a website when in fact they don’t. This commonly happens on a fake email address or a Skype account that is being used to impersonate a business. 

This person will attempt to sell you an amazing limited time deal of a top position for a lower than normal cost. 

Unfortunately, your job is to assess the realness of these people and make sure they are with the companies they say. A quick Skype call might show they are at least a real person for starters. 

I would say this is why it is equally important to network with other affiliate managers. They could possibly help you know if you’re dealing with a legitimate person of that company or at least do a proper introduction to make sure you are dealing with the right person at that affiliate site.

One more tip and is more of a suggestion is if you negotiate these flat fee deals, be sure to check they are valid in the jurisdictions you’ve paid for. Affiliates quite often have to do the same to ensure their revenue share or CPA deals are being honoured as well. It is something both parties must stay on top of.

Why do affiliates insist on listing fees?

Some do it for many reasons and the most common one is if you are a new brand, they don’t want to do all the work in loading your reviews, data and content if there is a risk the brand goes out of business within 6 months.

What about retention and player value?

Perhaps if affiliate programs did more to improve retention and player value, there would be less new brands opening all the time and existing ones would stay afloat.

Here’s a small sample of tools operators should be making use of for improving player value:

• WarriorLab - VIP consulting, seriously talk to Gali Hartuv

• ThrillTech - Jackpot builder and retention tools for players

• Greco - stop bonus abuse

• Fast Track - CRM for players

• Optimove - alternative to Fast Track

• FTDx - earn revenue on geo blocked traffic

Back to the problem of brands constantly closing.

To put this into perspective, StatsDrone is adding around 50 new affiliate programs per month and marking around 30 as being closed. That is at a rate of around 360 per year and ironically enough, since March 2021, StatsDrone has closed over 1000 iGaming affiliate programs. 

Below is something Darrell Helyar posted last month showing some of the trending programs by affiliate software.

If your brand happens to have amazing acquisition and retention metrics, then it is possible you might not have to pay many listing fees where if the affiliate is looking at their data, they’ll realize your brand might be better in a top position without a listing fee compared with a brand that may have a lower player value. 

I know, imagine making data-driven decisions. Don’t worry, we’ll get there one day.

Affiliate manager CRM

I swear there isn’t a really good affiliate manager CRM.

I think a good CRM needs to combine the data from your backend with other CRM tools like Hubspot, Salesforces, Pipedrive, Monday or whatever it is that you use.

Too many times, I have affiliate managers contact me and ask all sorts of stupid questions such as:

• What GEOs do you have

• I can’t find my brand on your site

• Have we paid you?

• What commission plan do we have you on?

If you’re asking me questions that you should have the answers to, I’m a bit concerned.

I’m also annoyed when I’ve answered any of these questions in the past and the affiliate manager hasn’t taken the time to review our chat history.

The worst is replying 6 months later. 

One of these days, someone will build a fully integrated affiliate manager CRM tool. 

Data driven affiliate manager

Is it your job to bring in a good ROI? Are you responsible for more than your own affiliate department? 

All those companies I just mentioned like Greco and Fast Track are all part of data. You’ll want to be part of the proactive approach to being a data driven affiliate manager. 

This will be one skill that could help you stand out from the rest.

On the Affiliate BI podcast this year, I got a really interesting insight from Adam Rowley who is the managing director at RavenTrack. 

This was the key takeaway from that episode:

Your affiliate manager dashboard

I’m going to create a very basic dashboard template in Google sheets and although it may be nothing special, I just doubt that most affiliate managers go through this exercise. 

You can make your own copy of the Google sheet but you can manually populate it with your data.

The whole point of this exercise is to understand the important KPIs across all your affiliates. The 2nd sheet for campaign analysis is not important for every campaign. However, what I would encourage all affiliate managers is to build a list and document your best and worst campaigns month over month.

Any campaign that was once a great performer but has dropped, you really should identify it. 

I mean StatsDrone customers can analyze their best and worst performing campaigns so you should definitely compile this data on a month by month basis. 

By tracking all of this, it is possible you might have better visibility if your affiliates have given you less visibility which can affect conversion rates and player values. 

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1siWJbwvqdZ-6h1RZ37JebDJQu2piAoAJ7Yh9JWneS9Y/edit?usp=sharing

Your network is your asset

Remember that your network is part of your asset. 

Some programs prefer to hire an affiliate manager that has an affiliate following. If you have connections on LinkedIn and on Skype, these are YOUR connections. 

I personally don’t hire whether people have a big following on LinkedIn or not but I know some companies view this as a very tangible asset. 

I at least know that if StatsDrone didn’t work out, at 11k followers and 850k post impressions, I could leverage this for a lot of jobs. 

If you don’t have these connections built up, then you can start by building them up today. 

Frequently asked questions for affiliate managers

Put the questions in the LinkedIn comments here and I’ll either answer them or others can jump in too. 

3 thought leaders in the affiliate management space I’ll give the shoutouts to again:

• Lee-Ann Johnstone, founder of Affiverse

• Stefan Paul Muehlbauer, founder of Affpal

• Dustin Howes, co-founder of Affistash

Affiliate manager podcasts to listen to:

• Affiliate manager training from Affpal with Stefan Muehlbauer

• VIP strategy in iGaming with Gali Hartuv

• Understanding retention and player value with Adam Rowley of RavenTrack

• Affiliate manager challenges with Zach Measures from Everflow

• Affiliate manager training and tools with Dustin Howes

• Affiliate management tracking & tools with Clemence Dujardin of MyAffiliates