Mobile Affiliate Marketing For Dummies!

Internet affiliate marketing is a massive multi-billion dollar industry, from bedroom set-ups to multinationals, huge amounts of internet transactions are being facilitated through affiliate networks. Earlier this year, NMA reported that mobile affiliate marketing was a little way off, seeing as buying on the mobile internet was not yet commonplace.

What the NMA didn’t mention was that both the online adult content industry and the online gambling industry have been seriously into mobile for some time and that pure mobile generated revenues are on the increase. Mobile adult content is big business, and mobile affiliate schemes for this sector have been around for a while, but mobile gambling outfits (both pure-play mobile companies and PC web transfers) are now increasingly trying to grab a slice of what many people believe will be a massive industry.

Customer acquisition is key is the Mobile Casino sector, churn is high and all mobile gambling operators need a constant stream of fresh meat. Many outfits try and sign-up mobile gamblers via their websites, but this is not the most efficient way to obtain players. Mobile gambling requires players to be comfortable with mobile internet browsing, so some of the best conversion rates come from existing mobile internet users. This is where pure mobile affiliate schemes really come in and these are now a feature of nearly every mobile gambling operation.

The commercial model is simple, mobile affiliates are paid for the gamblers they refer to the casinos. One model is a fixed sum per player sign-up, the other is a slice of the gambling revenues from the players they refer. The amounts paid to affiliates vary widely, from £12 to £40 per signup to 30-60% of gambling revenues. I have heard some in the industry claim that mobile casino’s are prepared to pay up to £80 per acquisition and new players are valuable enough to warrant TV advertising (Probability recently aired TV spots in the UK for its Mobile only Ladyluck casino). There is certainly gold in them there hills……

Setting yourself up as a mobile affiliate is technically very easy. Go to any number of affiliate networks (Europartners is one of the best, in my opinion), sign up and get given URL’s with an affiliate code. Most also provide a range of marketing materials (mobile banner ads and text ads) all with your tracker code pre-inserted. You then need to find a way for mobile internet users to find and click on your links. You can either set up a mobile internet site or take out mobile advertising, or a combination of the two. Mobile SEO also helps to drive free traffic to a site.

If you go for the non-site option, you can start mobile affiliate marketing with $5, by using text ads on one of the mobile ad networks and linking directly from those ads to the mobile casino’s home page – using your affiliate code embedded URLs. You can check traffic via your URLs and any revenue using web-based tracking tools, again Europartners offers one the slicker and more reliable interfaces.

I set up a number of mobile affiliate accounts, ad network accounts, a mobile internet site and domain name over the course of a Sunday afternoon, and I have almost zero technical skills. It does help if you know something about mobile SEO and can create effective mobile ads. However, this is a great way to explore mobile commerce at the coal-face.

By the first month I’d broken even, so my hosting, domain name and ad costs at that stage were roughly equivalent to my player revenue – and that’s with around 30minutes a week worth of additional ‘tweaking’ . By the second month I’d moved into profit! Not quite enough to give up the day job, but certainly a fun way to earn some beer money. If someone had more time on their hands, they could think about setting up a larger mobile affiliate operation, to include adult and other mobile content – for example affiliate schemes also exist for mobile games. I’d love to spend more time on this, but I’m also trying to run a very busy mobile advertising agency!