Newsletters, your new affiliate asset class
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.
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Storytime, my first newsletters
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.
Running B2C newsletters
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.
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.
Newsletters, owning your own audience
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.
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.
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.
Social media, the audience you don’t own
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.
Newsletters as a digital asset
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.
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.
Recommended by LinkedIn
Signup, newsletters or forums, the great exchange of value
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.
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.
Newsletter research, spy on the competition
If you’re an affiliate, you should be signing up to all newsletters of your competitors to find out more intel such as;
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.
Studying B2B newsletters
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:
Newsletter optimization
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.
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.
Sites missing out on newsletter opportunities
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.
Here’s a list of sites that didn’t have any visible newsletter, signup form or even forum.
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'.
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.
Newsletters and a correlation with SEO
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:
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.
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.
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SEOptimist
1moUseful tips — as always! ✅💯
Investing in iGaming Industry
1moPeople think something is not working because they didn't have a chance to see how it should be done. But if you are lucky and have a skilled marketer with knowledge about email marketing - I'm sure the business will be scaled.
Owner/Director
1moWe’re big on newsletters. It can be challenging in some geos (such as most African markets), as they’re mobile first and not really email centric. But they make a great asset, protect us from the serp drama, and can provide a good feedback mechanism.
Editor, On Pattison. President, Access Media. Founder, Crossing Broad. Owner, Tip News. Former SVP North America Sports, XLMedia.
2moI'm all in on newsletters, but found a few hurdles to overcome w betting newsletters esp related to affiliate: 1) Since most are CPA, people receiving the email are generally not converting much since most are already signed up with the sportsbooks, though these absolutely could work better for rev share affiliates, especially with the DFS 2.0 sites. Traditional sports betting and casino much harder to convert people on. 2) Spam filters hate gambling affiliate links, so adds complexity. 3) Running lead gen ads also more difficult because you are constantly fighting gambling ad policies, even when you're approved. 4) Hard to differentiate content. That said, do think email is good strategy for affiliate in general, just very complex in gaming.
CEO | Management Consultant
2moJohn Wright - I loved reading this content. I genuinely appreciate your mention and recognition. You're doing an unbelievable job yourself. Keep it up. PS, already subscribed to Beehive!