Building Affiliate Sites for the AI Era: Branding, Data & Community First with Valentina Diaco

In most of the cases, okay, the first thing that comes to each affiliate mind is how to make money in the faster time possible. It's wrong. This kind of statement and mindset is completely wrong. We need to do a step back and and really and truly understand how we can differentiate ourself from the others. It's super super important, John. And I keep insisting on this point, market research, looking at the competitors, understanding their pain point because it's the only way you as a brand, as an

affiliate, you can le you can leverage those pain point and tap into the white spaces. The white spaces are those opportunities which obviously you need to then assess from a risk point of view. I'm John Wright and you're listening to AffiliateBI, the business intelligence and affiliate marketing podcast brought to you by Snapstrap. Welcome to the AffiliateBI podcast. Today we're chatting with Valentina Dako and she's the founder of Profit Matches which is for their mission statement is to align profit with purpose helping businesses in i gaming,

entertainment, and crypto achieve growth through tailored strategies and the power of AI and cutting edge technologies. Valet has an inspiring newsletter called Vidday Lens. I think I've got that right. Yeah. Which is it's about tech and marketing insights and there's a lot of AI goodies in there which I follow and realize I need to catch up and do my homework too. Valet, welcome to the show. Thank you, John.

Thank you for having me and very excited. All right. So what I did to prepare for this one is I downloaded the last eight newsletters of your newsletter and I uploaded them to chat GBT and I said what are some questions I should ask valley and some of the questions are actually influence. So my question to you is what else should I be doing on this podcast that you can think of as ideas for editing AI you name it.

Okay so before answering that question John what did you do? So you fed the machine with my content which means you help training it. You give machine learning access to my thinking which will now likely be recycled a bit in other AI answers for those who are super super keen to actually question and conversate with ChibiT. But you also use my name in a prompt and at least you help me grow my brand.

So thanks for that. dogs apart. I believe this kind of what you did which is great actually lead nicely okay to the main topic of this podcast and if I was you as a podcast host I think you made a very good use okay of AI but sometimes we need just to give a different spin. So instead of asking the top 10 questions, I would have asked and maybe you did.

So then along the podcast I will find those crazy questions and I would have asked three questions that no one is asking but should be. I think that's where real insight lives especially nowadays where we tend to see a lot of recycled content. But I'm keeping also my ideas in my back pocket because I got something coming up in a few months myself. But I promise you that I will share some cool tips on how to enhance high even post production and obviously pre pre-preparation when

you actually host the podcast. Okay. I think that's a good reason to chat with you about your consulting. So we'll save that for the side. That's for later. Uh so one of the first questions which we actually even chatted about before I said do you know about this idea about optimizing your website for chat bots and you're like yeah that's search AI optimization or what was that s aio so what is search AI optimization yeah okay let me explain to be honest with you it's not

an official term okay I actually meanted now three years ago when chach was launched in November 2022 and it stand for search artificial intelligence optimization and where SEO focus on Google's algorithm. Search artificial intelligence optimization is about answering being the answer okay in a AI generated response. Google call it search engine search search generative experience and is about how to be revert mentioned across AI platforms and I was reading an article from Sam Rush specifically the datos reports they launched and apparently there are over 1

million monthly searches on Google about chachib prompt. So this means that people are actually learning how to ask, not to search, how to ask and platforms like Perplexity and Gemini and clothes are the perfect example how we can start understanding how to position our brand, how to be referred and mentioned across this platform. So it's not really anymore search engine optimization but also search artificial intelligence optimization which likely likely will get to a point where AI agent will do the optimization on behalf on our behalf

simply because we are feeding the machine with the right set of data. So it's S AI search artificial intelligence optimization. It's about making sure that your content, your brand, your affiliates is part of kind of that layer. So is there when people are conversating with a machine and prompt the machine with certain type of queries. All right. So that's going to be the basically the title of what we're going to call this episode both as the written content as well as YouTube and the audio.

So we're going to see if we can bump that. I like the keyword and the acronym. It's a good one. Okay. But it's actually an invented. It's not an official one probably because I spread the term around. There will be some reference. But what Google call this optimization across AI search engine is search generative optimization. I just coined this term myself. We're going to use it. So let's dive a bit deeper where it's like how do affiliates become part of the journey where Google Google and

other search AI tools aren't just aggregating your data and giving you the answer like you're actually part of the journey where you actually get the traffic. traffic. Yes, the landscape is completely changing right now. Search engines are actually hijacking affiliate content is happening. AI scrapes, summarizes, often pull out affiliates links. If we look at AI overviews on Google, we don't have any referral link anymore. And especially in our industry where our monies are tied to a convers to a conversion, sorry.

This can be an issue. I believe that affiliates needs to own first party data, own postclick value. I'm talking about tools, calculations. We can go deeper, okay, into this conversation and encapsulate themsel into themsel into AI suitable sources. Okay, we know that AI is actually scribbing the web and getting results from Reddit, YouTube, Trust Pilot. So I believe that Ailia should be thinking about how to structure their content in a different way and in a way that AI can understand and mention the brand and the

affiliates that we are referring to. Obviously the real challenge and we are all very aware of it is that in our industry AI will always favor regulated market. So if we right now okay live we type best online casino on chachi likely the results will be all regulated brand out there so for the opore market or gray markets or gray brands it's even more challenging so the idea or the thought is to understand very well how AI and machine learning works and how to um leverage

the importance of a brand, the importance of the community is not anymore about being visible on Google against a queries but is be referred because someone is asking for a more intentional conversation. I'm pretty sure that there will be lots of conversation happening on AI platforms talking about what's the difference between book of death and reactions. What are other players saying about these games? What are the games with the highest RTPs?

So the way consumers and players will be interacting with this piece of technology is changing the role of affiliates. And I think especially in the gray markets get the affiliates easily will be get filtered out right unless they don't find other roots v their community content structured data creative new creative way to actually boost their brand and their presence. Yeah. So, do you think sites that do casino complaints like casino reviews.com, casino guru, askgamblers, those are products.

Do you think that they're going to be part of the recommendation engine? Because I think we we chatted before about the idea that a lot of sites they have like top lists and the top lists are they're sponsored. Let's be real. They're basically it's like flat fee plus high revshare and a CPA, but without the flat fee it's like that listing doesn't exist. So, that's like an indirect listing.

like that's basically feeding AI in some capacity and not the way it should be done. Yes. I mean it's super super interesting question. I believe casino guru as gamblers will be part of those results on AI because they are acting as a mini product agent. And for me this is key like they they are smarts because they are not looking at the simply top listing walls. No, they are building an ecosystem.

So success today is not about traffic is about smarter traffic. So they I think they are able to shift they they probably did it already. They shifted their mindset from being content publishers. that's it to becoming more experienced businesses. Yeah. So literally I see affiliates acting as product teams understanding data building experiences using AI not just for scale purpose but for strategic advantage. Then obviously there are technical ways okay how to help AI platforms to refer your domain your website okay there is an open I

bot that you can actually add to your text file for example but it's not enough you need to build your brand you need to have a good use of structured data you need perhaps to rethink the way we write content And with Q&A, we need to learn how machine learning works. Like one of the model that machine learning is based on is the next token prediction. Probably meaning that every time that we feed the machine with data with some questions, the answer is based on the

likelihood of having the most relevant keywords attached. So probably the way we write or we build the top listing wall okay today won't be relevant in a couple of years because we need to think a new way of structuring and writing the content for that which could maybe I don't know encapsulate or have a real data feed from streaming from what people are talking in a forums on Reddit.

So yeah, I see a lot of things happening right now which we need to absolutely ride this own the space otherwise would be too late too late. So that gives me an idea of something I've been thinking about which is the concept of ideiation in creating affiliate sites. So I think the ideation and the ideas they've been stale for a long time. It's like casino reviews. All right, we're going to do our blog and our casino reviews and it's the same content over and over again.

And we know that's not really working anymore, but what you explained like just from listening to you, it sounds like how do you use chat bots, but it's a step above. It's like how do you create something useful that is going to be both useful to users but be interesting for like all these open like chatbt perplexity. So to give you an example, it's like imagine creating an affiliate site that all you do is you aggregate all the casino complaints.

So it's ask gamblers and casino guru and casino reviews and whoever else does it like lcb.org. Imagine having one central place where it's, oh, you want to know about this one casino, here's all the complaints across all of them. It's aggregated. It's like a super super tool. John, you nailed it. I think a data aggregation okay in general is the way where to go okay is if we look outside of our industry okay all the big data aggregation brands out there okay Booking.com is the first

one that came to my to my to my mind it creates an ecosystem it's an ecosystem okay it's an aggregation because people want one source of truth in in order to grab that kind of trustworthy answers. Reason why is not is a product mission. So is what is the problem that we are trying to solve? First question that an affiliate should ask always and second step is okay we aggregate different kind of sites to give the ultim the answer the right answer to the ultimate players.

Obviously from an monetization point of view there there is an advantage okay because you get a piece of the pie each time that user search for something and you deliver that piece of output. And the second step is to focus on branding to actually build that trust. Why? Because it's not only a matter of having a listed link out there, a paid link. Consumers are becoming very smart.

We are smart. We know immediately we understand where and how a a link or a site or an affiliates is paid. Okay. For pushing a type of casino, a specific game, the competitive advantage is to get the feeling of what other peers are experienced on that casino. This is what leverage okay the trusted the brand assuming that the product is a high standard for me product needs to be functional needs to solve a problem and needs to be solid and robust assuming that you got a

solid product then you need to create this ecosystem around which includes branding which includes involvement of the community which involves not anymore traditional paid advertising advertising But this kind of big network of peers of creators of streaming that can uh help boost your branding and your main USPs. Okay, I want to take this idea a step further and sometimes what I do on this podcast is I used to do affiliate coaching and I'd have some guests.

I walk them through and give them ideas and work through how do we make their site the next level. So I want to take this opportunity to do it for someone I've been chatting with recently. They have a site that's called Africa.com. It's a startup aspiring to be an affiliate site. So, it's got what you think is on there. It's got your football related soccer content covering African nations.

I have some ideas of what could be done further. But what do you think what we could do to come up with some ideas about what they should be doing to go how can they not be just another blog that maybe Google and search engines are going to not respect at all. Okay. So Africa soccer rights maybe I mentioned something quite obvious okay but I would go hyper local okay leagues betting behaviors but also the ones that other people are ignoring right now so identify the

white space out there and then if we go back to what we mentioned earlier about how affiliates can act as a mini product teams I would use AI to generate match day stats, build prediction prediction prediction models, connect them with to bonus offers, syndicate content across social channels, create interactive tools, lead a poll, pay out reviews, building a community before chasing rankings. So while maybe if we look back couple of years ago maybe five six years ago okay the first thing that affiliates would have done

it is think about ranking think about metatag think about off onsite SEO techniques. I think this is still needs to happen. Okay. I still think that SEO expert can leverage so much more than anyone else. Okay. this piece of technology, but then you need also to open your eyes and to see what's happening around there. Build a community before chessing rankings, I think, is one of the top things that I would recommend a soccer.com to do.

Yeah. Some of my ideas were basically like not everyone's still doing podcasting. So podcast with video gives you a chance to be in the social realm to pull people in and it's a component of community building. But I like your idea about asking things like chatbt and go what are some data insights that I can feed back to my community because I actually think that's one of the things missing in affiliate sites is we're all hungry for data because data tells stories and data is I

think we're in the age where people want to feel smarter about what it is they're into. It's look at the sports space. It's all player data. It's give them even more or aggregate the aggregation. Yeah. There is also one one thing that I I've I'm noticing okay every time that maybe I run some consultancy is that we brands affiliates operators as well probably we make always the same mistake of jumping into something without understanding the real value that we want to create and this goes also

across AI is not using AI or any tools out there okay there are there are plenty plenty. Touchivity is one of those but believe it or not is not that it is not the one that I use frequently. I use a lot perplexity. I use Gemini in certain instances. There are so many out there available. It's more what we want to create in terms of value. Do we want to understand where a player turn?

Do we want to understand what amongst all the media channels that we are using the one that is generating I don't know the faster payback. Do we want to create a data aggregator site where people can see all those streamers that go live and we never know okay what time they go live with. Yeah. For me it's important to establish the value that we want to create and then we can go to the next step and understand what kind of tools to use how we can

leverage machine learning how we can understand the best journey that we can offer to the customers. I agree. So my previous guest and who we published this week was Louis Grenier from an author that I have here which is Stan the F out. So he talked a lot about positioning and I got a chance to ask him a question going what do you think about the affiliate marketing space in relation to marketing and positioning and he had a pretty strong take which is like affiliate sites

they don't really differentiate. They're just like, "Oh, we're going to be like New York Times and rank for best laptops." And it's like, you know what? There's no marketing behind it. And there's zero positioning. The only positioning they're using is like they're using their brand to to try to rank for Google, but we know that's not working anymore. So, what do you think about this concept of like how affiliates need to do positioning and the state of actually marketing yourself to being not just an another

affiliate site? This might sounds very harsh. Okay. So maybe all the affiliates out there will have very good and in most of the cases okay the first thing that comes to each affiliate mind is how to make money in the faster time possible. It's wrong. This kind of statement and mindset is completely wrong. We need to do a step back back back and and really and truly understand how we can differentiate ourself from the others.

It's super super important, John. And I keep insisting on this point. market research, looking at the competitors, understanding their pain point because it's the only way you as a brand, as an affiliate, you can let you can leverage those pain point and tap into the white spaces. The white spaces are those opportunities which obviously you need to then assess from a risk point of view. It doesn't mean that if there is a wide opportunity so nobody's going there and you go there, you succeed.

No, there is a reason why it's called white space. However, if you look at your competitors and understand what is successful on your competitors and what is missing, you can be different. you can leverage. So many times in our industry from an operator's point of view because I was I worked mainly from a casino point of view but dealing with affiliation with social media programmatic PPC SEO the idea of penetrating a market is done without a comprehensive analysis of that market.

It's just because other people are going there and all of a sudden okay usually casino operators affiliates just owning okay and getting market share there but without the desired results. So my point going back to what does it mean positioning and branding is to analyze the landscape. Build your own vision. Try to solve a problem and disrupt things. Keep what is performing very well. Okay, which are a little bit okay.

We cannot forget the traditional way of doing things. We cannot just simply we cannot. But then also test, learn, give more more more um ownership to your ultimate consumers and customers. We've been talking for ages about user centering approach. But if you ask me right now, what is there a casino? Is there a cazasino? Okay, I'm not going to the affiliate space. Okay, we can but I'm not going there right now.

Is there a casino who really adopts a user centering approach? My answer is no. There isn't. And now we are in a phase where we need to think about the ultimate consumers more than ever. We need to make sure that our brand, our affiliates, our casino is out there when they're looking for, which is a completely different way of searching on Google. And again, I'm not saying that search or the amount of conversations that are happening right now on JBT will be the running Google right

now. But there will be some changes for sure. We are still talking about how many I think 16 billions of searches on on on Google against maybe 500 500 millions prompt on JBT. So there is a discrepancy. I'm just saying that if affiliates wants to tap into a different uh audience and segment, if affiliates wants to be out there and come up with a different way of making money, then they need to disrupt the way you're doing things right now.

I agree. Now, I've got a thought that I want to bounce off of you, which is this concept of well, if we're building products and we're building data, like aggregated data, we're trying to give the answers back to the users. There's I think there's now two ways of doing it. Now, the old way was you build the interface and you build your reporting and you've got all these buttons and searches and all the fun stuff.

But when do you think or maybe it's like it's not when it's like you have to do it. When is a chatbot going to be useful to put inside these things? So, it's like people can just go, you know what? I don't want a clunky interface cuz sometimes interfaces can be like blocks, like giant blocks. And it's I want to go super specific. And I want to ask just one question.

Can I get the answer to give me a list of all the free spins casinos in Chile in Spanish that except micro gaming software? Yes or no? Yes, you can. You can. And I think this is also the purpose or the main scope of building AI bots. I could also call it AI concierge bot. Okay, it's literally a bot that can recommend and get give you okay and trigger certain questions based on your request.

It can show me top brands for crypto traffic in LATAM with above average FTDs. I I think by the way is where in general we should go. If we take BI data product and marketing all together, these are the kind of micro product that I believe an affiliate should be exploring and building. building. Okay, I agree. So I like to ask these self-serving questions every once in a while which is so I'm pushing my lucky but I like doing it.

It's what do you think like that you've got a chance to know what we do as a company? What do you think we can do in terms of marketing for staff to get more users? And we think we have a weird problem and it's a similar problem I hear in B2B which is long buyer journeys and maybe is it positioning and marketing that we all need to do and it's not just us.

We talk to all the B2B companies and it's the same thing over and over again. What can we do to become not just problem aware but solution aware? What are your thoughts? thoughts? Okay, now I already told you that I admire Stadron and what you do, guys. So, it sounds a little bit like a little bit cheesy, but I believe that you're already sitting on a high value, okay?

Affiliates data. And if we go back to our conversation, I think you should turn that into micro product. Okay. Big product, trust, of course, link health checks. Yeah. checks. Yeah. or bold okay create this kind of premium AI dashboard where user users really type show me I don't know show me top brands with this kind of acquisition media mix this is where I see that you could go probably from a product point of view and and from a marketing okay and branding and branding perspective you're

doing lot a lot and there is also I think it's not a blocker okay but the truth is that there are a lot of technical limitation yet okay because of the legacy of our industry just recently we start talking as an industry about being datadriven looking at your own data leverage of first party data the truth is that there are a lot of of of um technical limitation of product that have been successful just because we are in a lucrative industry.

So I think from a product point of view you got covered from a branding point of view and you're doing a lot of of things I would be even more dis distract destructive in in in the approach. Yeah. Okay. You're very good at a podcast that I I would now I don't know build some in interactive games that people can play with that is tied to this free premium AI for example.

Yeah, I think I've got more ideas and I don't necessarily need to share them here but I thought this was a path we should definitely go down and you've just validated that. So whatever I learn here, it's like I'll be able to share with the B2B community and yeah, it's going to be an easy recommendation to say chat with Valley. Nice. Nice. Nice. Nice. So another topic that I know is very hot with a lot of affiliates is like the it's if and when do I

use AI tools in my content team? So I just want to ask how would you build a content team or rebuild a content team for an affiliate site? What is your methodology and recommendations? recommendations? Yes, I do believe okay that AI needs a manager no matter what. Okay, you can minimize the cost because the reality is that you that you that you can nowadays and going forward even more you can have a smaller team and take this opportunistic approach where you have your kind of co-pilot

okay AI agents I still believe it's not going to replace the kind of human being but AI needs a manager so if you ask me a content team and now I foresee it. There is this AI guru strategist that know exactly how machine learning works. It's always on top of things and it's able to extrapulate okay the value from AI machine learning automation. Then I still still still consider three four vertical expertise in house human being but with a different skill set again needs to be

data driven and product focused and very curious to test new things and then I would actually automate everything with AI agents from how to feed the ultimate consumer with personalized results results to analyze data. I would just keep that kind of human being task force for the creative part and not to really because I think humans can bring a different type of energy and perspective. It cannot be replaced by any kind of robot.

So I will use that layer of creativity and technology skills but then all the rest pretty much all automated. Okay, so personalization is something that comes up over and over again and we know in the corner there's a lot of these CRM tools out there like CRM for maybe they're for like affiliates for their players but it's more on the operator side. So, what would you say whether we're talking operator or affiliate about what we could build for a chatbot in terms of personalization?

Like, how do we get good at this? And how would you do this? If you had a project, let's here's the example. You're an affiliate and you've got a product which captures a lot of first-party data. You now have their emails. How would you build something that's going to interact with those users where they're not always on the product, but you at least have their email? What does the email flow look like?

Okay, like? Okay, the lead generation technique through an email, it still works and it's very powerful. Chatbot tools, there are many out there and some of them looks very robotic. Some others are really well inserted into the entire flow. So for me as a users is not the matter of being replied by a chatbot but is how this chatbot is helping me to solve a problem. If they capture my email is only one signal that can use from a business point of view.

maybe not as a user but it would be more inclined and perhaps smart smarter to captures many other data is the email is the social plug-in is if we talk within the crypto space is the wallet ID so many interaction points that are enable the business to really enhance that personalization the bot it's a bot the way the bot is built is the game changer. So if the bot is well inserted in the UX in a way that the user doesn't even realize that is a

bot. This is the innovation piece that we need to everyone to think about. There will be a point where us as a consumer they won't even realize that we're talking with a with a robot simply because is well embedded in the way we use that kind of affiliate site in the way we interact with that kind of YouTube widget. There are already platforms and tools out there.

I don't know if I can mention a few but I build a notion page which is a very simple directory. I'm converting it into a website by the way so we become much much better user friendly where I listed down some AI machine learning tools dedicated to a gaming specifically. But back to your question John, it's super super important that we are not considering the bot as a separated piece of technology separated from our branding or our positioning is part of it.

I remember when I used to plan okay this marketing strategies or marketing plans you think about branding, positioning, SEO, programmatic, social media, affiliates. Now there is a new kind of layer of complex complexity but also a very cool piece of technology that we need to think of. How apart from the traditional media, we can have a chatbot that solve a problem for our customers and create a emotional connection with our player because knows almost everything that he does on our website and likely what does outside

our website too. website too. Agreed. So what do you see of the future of affiliate marketing as it intersects with business intelligence? Okay. So if we recap what we mentioned earlier on, we said that ideally all these brand and affiliates will act as a mini product teams. I see affiliates evolving into this space together with BI. For me, BI will evolve from reporting and interpreting data to prediction.

tools will help you understand not just which casino works by but why affiliates will likely able to trigger an alert and tell the players this offer convert converts better than any others or from a BI point of view we'll be able to understand if you know a casino is able to generate more FTDs is because it's shown to telegram users and has this kind of engagement rate.

So it's all powered by AI agents that test learn optimize in this background of BI affiliation attribution affiliate. So it's if there is a word that we can use is really a new affiliate stack. So as there is the tech stack, the media stack is the new affiliate stack, BI, AI, attribution, and community. I agree. Uh Valet, this was super insightful. I've got even more questions, but we'll save that either for the next recording or our next chat.

How can people get a hold of you? Yes, I am on LinkedIn under Valentina Dako. Profit Matches is my business page and there is Profit Matches website which is still an option page but I'm working to convert it into a website. Thank you for having me. Thank you for being on the show. Thank you. Thank you. Bye. Thank you for tuning in to the AffiliateBI podcast. I'd like to take this time to ask for a small favor to leave a rating and review wherever you listen

to your podcast. That helps us expand our reach to rank higher in podcast directories and reach more listeners.