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- Newsletters, your new affiliate asset class
Newsletters, your new affiliate asset class
A digital asset you can sell or add value to your affiliate assets
Newsletters is not a new topic but an important one in affiliate marketing.
I’m going to give you the tl;dr version of this article which is that newsletters are part of your asset class for your affiliate websites.
Many affiliates are missing out on this means of owning some of your own traffic and as part of your digital assets.
Newsletters are a part of your product, which is helpful for SEO, which can also be optimized.
Also I don’t have the stats but it isn’t difficult to find a lot of iGaming affiliate sites that have no means of capturing any data whether a newsletter, forum or a login. They are newsletter-less if that is a word.
I'm building up my newsletter list at Beehiiv so please subscribe here if you can.
Just 41 subs on Beehiiv, c'mon, signup!
Newsletter sponsors to thank
StatsDrone because I co-founded it and we help affiliates with stats
FTDx - is a cool service that helps operators and affiliates make more revenue by capturing lost opportunities via GEO targeting
I’m going to talk about my personal journey in using newsletters followed by my recent research on newsletters.
I’ve had B2C and B2B affiliate sites for the past 15 years. I only did some newsletters mostly because I saw other affiliates doing it. As an affiliate manager, I would be very interested to get my brands promoted in every channel of an affiliate.
Some affiliates would bring in bursts of depositing players (FTDs) with a single newsletter push.
After running a few casino affiliate sites, all with newsletters, I was appalled by the lack of attention affiliate managers paid to these sites.
They were very in your face as a player to signup to the newsletter so you couldn’t miss it. I would notice some affiliate managers signing up to the newsletter which is great.
Otherwise, the most common message with every affiliate manager was “what GEOs” and “I want homepage #1 position in your toplist but won’t give you a good revenue share until I see some results”.
Most of the affiliate managers didn’t care to ask what are some of the most valuable pages on our sites that could deliver more players.
The truth is, if you wanted 10 FTDs from us as fast as possible, it could probably happen with 1 or 2 newsletters sent out or take 1-2 months from the website.
So in running my own newsletter, I was always keen to see how I could get more newsletter signups for the same amount of traffic. I didn’t use popups but tried to imply some value.
Quick tip: I focused on design and implied value of the newsletter to make people curious.
Just click on the '4' and see what expands
I think I did an ok job at this and at one point when the site was struggling with rankings, the newsletter saved my ass.
I could at least continue to generate players all the time and even send them back to the website. This constant cycle of always picking more more subscribers than were unsubscribing was part of the success I had in running some affiliate sites.
I’ve started a B2B newsletter on LinkedIn called the Affiliate BI newsletter.
What I liked about LinkedIn is that it gives me the ability to leverage my existing profile to quickly collect my subscribers.
At the time of writing this, I’m sitting at 2104 for the number of subs.
Analytics of the Affiliate BI newsletter
The other benefit of LinkedIn newsletters is that your content ends up on LinkedIn pulse which is basically a long form LinkedIn post that easily can get indexed in Google.
This is how much traffic LinkedIn Pulse is getting, data by Ahrefs
At least LinkedIn newsletters give you really great insights
Last but not least, LinkedIn adds social proof and if your newsletter post takes off, it can appear in the feeds of more and more people.
Midway through 2024, I noticed one of my favourite LinkedIn thought leader wasn’t around anymore. It turned out that Tom Hunt had his profile suspended. He had over 100k followers and I know his profile drove so much business.
It looked as though he would have never got his account reinstated but it did. At that point, I made the decision to save as many subscribers as I could to my Beehiiv newsletter just in case I end up having my account zapped at LinkedIn.
If you want to start your own newsletter, you can signup to Beehiiv here.
All your subscribers are worth something whether you monetize it or not.
If you don’t believe there is a marketplace for buying and selling of newsletters, just search for ‘newsletter’ on Flippa and you’ll find all sorts of newsletters available.
Track the performance of your newsletter
How do you know if your newsletters are performing well?
There are a few easy solutions to this. Technically you could use a postback tracking link which is like using dynamite as a tool for fishing.
The easiest way to track it is by creating a new campaign with that brand you are working with and designate that campaign as a newsletter tracking link.
Use StatsDrone to filter your newsletter data and conversion rates
That way you’ll know the exact performance of your newsletters campaigns and be able to understand if there is a different player value than the rest of your website or traffic.
You can add a tag for “newsletter” within this campaign using the StatsDrone app and you’ll now be able to filter every newsletter campaign as a collection.
Now you won’t have to wonder if your newsletter is a waste of time or not. If you are finding your campaigns are not performing well, you’ll want to ensure you have solid open rates, read rates and ideally click through rates.
Why are people signing up to your newsletter?
You have to answer this for your players. You’ll have to give a good reason to join and the less value you offer, the lower your signup rates are going to be.
Here is what I’ve learned as my best tips for doing newsletters.
Be consistent
Go above and beyond for delivering value
These 2 sound simple but they require work and dedication. Newsletters don’t succeed for the exact same reason other affiliate sites don’t succeed. It is the same reason why most podcasts fail, because they either aren’t delivering quality content consistently.
If you’re an affiliate, you should be signing up to all newsletters of your competitors to find out more intel such as;
How often are they emailing
Which brands and products are they promoting
Which newsletters don’t end up in spam
Newsletter content ideas
If I was an affiliate manager, I would be doing the exact same thing. That is signing up to as many affiliate newsletters as you can get your hands on. I’d perhaps create a separate email for that because we know that account will get a ton of junk.
I’m in the B2B space so that means I’m always studying B2B newsletters as well as subscribing to newsletters that are of personal interest to me.
Ok, I’m a geek, my interests are affiliate marketing, business and investing.
You can still learn a lot about newsletter ideas for your affiliate site when you’re staying alert to great ideas and excellent execution of newsletter strategies.
Here are 3 favourite newsletters that I like to read:
I won’t go into explicit detail here but newsletter tech and strategies are changing all the time.
Your job is to ensure that your audience loves your content and doesn’t report it as spam or worse, it doesn’t automatically end up in spam.
Newsletter Operator
All I will say more on this topic is to study it. Find podcasts on newsletters and a great newsletter on … newsletters is Newsletter Operator.
High ranking affiliate sites with newsletters
As you can see from this list that there are top ranking casino affiliate sites and sure enough, all of them have a newsletter via a signup button.
Top ranking sites on keyword 'casino bonuses' on Ahrefs
gambling.com
casino.org
oddschecker.com
chipy.com
casinoguru-en.com
lcb.org
askgamblers.com
Now I’m looking at affiliate sites linking to 888.com using a tracking link. In particulate I’m looking for WordPress sites with an Ahrefs DR in the 20-40 range.
888.com Ahrefs link data
Here’s a list of sites that didn’t have any visible newsletter, signup form or even forum.
ontheballbets.com
golfbettingsystem.co.uk
bingomum.co.uk
freebetting.com
pokerlistings.se
punters.pub
casinos-slovenia.com
Now these 7 sites are nowhere near as big and powerful as the previous 7 giants I mentioned, however they are lacking that detail.
Now I just noticed the big site bonus.com is without any newsletter CTA and it actually ranked high for 'casino bonus newsletter'.
bonus.com needs a newsletter. You're welcome for the free link ;)
Could this be the detail that Google is looking for?
A newsletter is a product and hopefully we know a thing or 2 about products in affiliate marketing from last week’s newsletter.
I’ve noticed that sites that are getting rewarded these days tend to be ones that have products. I would call forums a product and newsletters themselves a product.
Blogs and pages aren’t really products anymore if they are just information.
If you believe that Google is targeting the spammier of websites, we have to imagine that these sites are missing a lot of elements:
Products
Newsletters
Social media accounts
Why is that? Because if you’re trying to build and scale say 700+ websites, it is very time consuming to create a custom newsletter for each site plus social channels for all of them.
AskGamblers is a giant product focused website, of course you can register
These are likely some of the signals the new Google is looking for.
If you’re an affiliate manager, you might notice a big difference in quality of a site if they happen to have a newsletter.
I'm building up my newsletter list at Beehiiv so please subscribe here if you can.
Newsletter sponsors to thank
StatsDrone because I co-founded it and we help affiliates with stats
FTDx - is a cool service that helps operators and affiliates make more revenue by capturing lost opportunities via GEO targeting
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