Live dealer product affiliate niche with Neil Walker

every affiliate does reviews every affiliate has the same pretty much review yeah and there's nothing personal about those reviews the ones that do best for my eyes is when I'm reading them and it's got something personal in there it's a personal experience what they they got an example of how customer support helped them or didn't help them or what was problematic or whatever or you can easily see if someone is actually been through the pling process of signing up the casino because they'll mention the pitfalls

and mention the fact that you can never ever find the withdrawal button anywhere that's one of the most frustrating things but nobody ever ever mentions that in a review now in my review I will I said it's a bloody awful site because you can't find you have to do this these three steps to be able to make it withdrawal and by then they hope that you've lost the will to live and you go back and start playing I'm John R and you're listening to affiliate bi

the business intelligence and affiliate marketing podcast brought to you by stab welcome to the Fabi podcast today we're chatting with Neil Walker who is the founder of Live casino comparer and he's also consultant that does a lot of testing and feedback for game developers in the igaming space so Neil welcome to the show hi John nice to see it so um yeah I want to like I I've got a list of questions for you but I actually want to Pivot slightly different which is um I

believe you're an affiliate that doesn't really I don't want to say you don't care about link building but you tend to maybe my opinion is to do it more naturally where it seems like the whole industry is buying links and you're more of a product Focus or product first uh kind of guy just want to talk about um what that's done for you and what's your philosophies on link building and SEO okay yeah um certainly um I I had no previous experience when I um when

I became of of filate so I was pretty much a blank blank piece of paper um so so so um I just basically started to write content that I wanted to read um it it was as simple as that I didn't even know there was such a thing called SEO um I found out how to create a website um I started doing a whole load of research and then thought you know what this research is the sort of stuff I'm really interested in so I just

write everything down that I find um and of course some were reviews of casinos some were reviews of games and some were content that I just thought you it' be really cool if someone did this and I couldn't find anyone that had done this you know I really want to know what sort of sits behind the camera because we're talking about live dealer games so I approached the live dealer um operators and that was difficult to be fair I went to a few conferences and sort

of pitched up at um Evolution stand was my first one and said H looked at me with blank eyes and who the bloody hell are you why should we talk to you and whatnot um EV managed to get to sit down with with someone and he explained that um you know I needed to sort of show how enthusias Astic I was about Live casino before they would even even want to spare time talking to me so I sort of went away not with a flea with

my in flee in my ear but with a sort of Mantra yeah I must do better really um so yeah so I did that so I just write started writing content about stuff that I was interested in and put it on my website um website um yeah SEO didn't even understand what those three letters meant um I didn't know that there was any um standards for writing content or anything um I just sort of used my business backgrounds U because I had a you know career

before I became an affiliate and thinking you know I used to write business reports all the time um management summaries and a whole load of stuff that people consumed so I sort of knew how to write content that other people could read and so I just follow those standards you know and I went back and thought you know how how are books presented oh yeah you have an index and you have this and the bibliography and you have all these things so surely my website needs

to sort of contain those principles so that's what I adopted I just adopted an approach that made sure that the content was laid out it was easy to read um it was thorough um it answered the questions that you would probably ask yourself as you're reading content um to stop yourself asking those so I always include the answers in the content now um and that's pretty much how I started and then and then people started banging on at me that you your website's not going to

do anything if you haven't got back links and it's you know if you're not SEO you're not going to do anything and um suddenly back links became a huge problem for me even though I didn't realize that it was an issue in the first place you know I was already getting traffic getting traffic um so uh I started getting a few links from friends I wasn't going to buy anything why on Earth would I um and then people said oh yeah natural links are the things

that are really powerful what the hell is a natural link and how the hell do you get that you know I'm a small website that's got an audience of tens of people who the hell is going to find me and suddenly start linking to me you know so the thought of a natural link link link happening sort of on it say without any help from me I just didn't understand how that could occur yeah yeah if you got a big website then it does occur naturally

you know if you produce a new story and you're the first to do it then people are going to link to you but you know that has to be out there and hundreds of thousands of people have already got to seen it before it becomes a natural link so as a smaller thing it it's it's a bit difficult um and then one day I did pick up one before yeah so one of those 10 people that are reading it you know link to the site and

that was quite nice of them um so I asked them why um I contacted them I asked them why you know what was it and so you it was good content and it suited what we were writing about so um yeah so there you are and I think also I wasn't a threat you know was a fairly small small website was some interesting content really so um and I think I picked up some natural stuff you know so when people in forums are talking about games

and things I might often link to my site where I've written an article about it or uh put some statistics or data up to support something you know people like that sort of information um so I get link to from from forums um I've had links from the Press um for you know articles that I've written but they were shamefully written for the Press um you know to try to evoke something and I got that from an SEO agency that I started using because everyone told

me I should use an SEO agency and it took me probably 12 months to realize that I was just pouring my money down the the plug know everyone told me I had to use them you know I had to do best practice I said yeah okay understand that you know and I'm a bit raw um but if you're as good as you are say you are I'll pay you on the results oh we can't do that you have to pay us up front we can't guarantee

anything so well hang on a minute so if you're selling me a service that you then can't substantiate and said it works then what on Earth is going on here so so I looked into it I studied it quite hard um and actually sort decided that it was a bit sort of you know what this is one of those Industries where someone tells you you've got to have it and because everyone else says you've got to have it you sort of go along with it and

then but the people that you buy that service from can't actually they can give your Lo a psycho Babel about how great they are and all these technical stuff but at the end of the day they're not um big enough to actually stand behind what they're saying and say actually yeah we'll do all this work for you and then we'll pay you on on the results that we get for you no one has ever said that that that I'm ever aware of um so I realized

that while the agency did a lot of good things for me you know they helped me think about structure and they helped me um fix some technical issues I had technical SEO as they called it um the content they couldn't help me with the tool because they hadn't a clue about how to write the type of content I wanted to they had content writers that would produce stuff for me and it was quite frankly rubbish um because they just didn't understand one the industry and two

players and three the games that you know I wanted to talk about so they couldn't help me on that aspect so I I got rid of them um you know and saved myself you know quite a lot of money a month and it's not held me back quite hon honestly um you know when I look at my statistics I'm one of these sites that it's technically it's not a performance site you know my Google what do they call it the um console and analytics yeah the

analytics are all really cool you know I don't think I've got one good quality page in terms of performance on my website anywhere f um you know my load times are are too slow um so technically you look at I've at I've at I've got it's it's not what Google say you should have should have but on the flip side that's hasn't stopped my site growing um maybe it would accelerate the growth if I had a more performant website but you know these are just we're

talking about sort of milliseconds of difference between something that's ranked good and something that's ranked poor um I've had people look at it and they struggle to to make the improvements that Google would like me to make um I'd have to strip out so much of the website to actually get it to be performant that it s wouldn't deliver what what it would do so I you know it's another one of these things is all this stuff being spoken you must do this must do that

I've just stuck to I can write content I know the content I write it in a way that I like to read it um and I hope the people that that find my website enjoy it and you know because of that um I seem to be doing okay you know um back in when was it it it February February 23 my site got tanked by Google um in the was it the reviews it was the reviews update I think okay and since then I had a

pretty Rocky ride it's been up and down with each update you know new update comes along I recover next update comes along and I tank a bit not so much and then up and down up down this last update uh if you look at my sort of figures now I've had a 10 fold increase in traffic since February 23 so in just over so in about 18 months my traffic has gone up tfold and this last release has had a big impact on this probably gone

up by five or sixfold in just the last last release I would definitely picked up since August so I've seen a a big uplift and obviously with a big uplift in traffic my fdds have improved my rankings have improved and things are all looking Rosy at the moment so Google showing me some love at the moment but it's not doesn't mean that I'm complacent so I am doing some of the things that they've talked about in some of the updates so you know I'm making sure

that my authorship is very visible on my articles now so I haven't gone back and retroactively done it just when I go through and refresh I do it but I actually auo the site anyway my image is on the front page yeah which is you can contact me um in the news articles it's there um the only place it isn't in in the individual articles and I'm gradually you adding stuff as I do it I'm not doing it in one hit I just do it as

and when I create new articles or I go back and um update and refresh old articles yeah um because I think that is part of part of it you know I also did a big Purge on my site recently so I deleted a huge amount of old archived articles um old news articles nobody cares to read something back from 2010 so you know I've deleted you know quite a lot of content from there that was more content for Content purposes um rather than you know money

making content or content of interest you know other don't call other don't cool news stuff that interesting you know it's of its moment within a you know two or three weeks perhaps a month it's it's relevant and then after that it becomes irrelevant and that's your you know linking to it for other other reasons so I I want to touch upon that what you just mentioned there which is I find fascinating I mean there is a weird problem in the SEO space where what I see

is like most Affiliates that have some success they are not always using an agency and if it was that easy to use an agency we'd all do it but what I personally find is a lot of them basically they either grow in in-house team or the founders they're basically like look I got to do one more additional skill on top of what I'm doing as an additional job and I've been there before I've done SEO Consulting I've done my own SEO and there's always more to

do and it's in an Ideal World you'd actually have one a full-time SEO doing this and two someone who's good which is not easy to find and I think for agencies there are good agencies out there but I personally find in IG gaming they're kind of difficult because um you know it's uh everyone's doing sales like what what you said as an opportunity I would personally jump that uh because what I like about your site and your content is that you can write that content better

than I can and I've got 20 years experience in I gaming like you're super Niche on live dealer so I mean like that would be an easy one to say Let me let me do the SEO well you do like the heavy lifting of the content I mean like a performance deal should be a no-brainer yeah yeah yeah um but yeah for for some reason and you know I have to say that the SEO company I chose I deliberately chose not an i gaming SEO company

so they'd never been in the space before so I wanted someone that was outside of the the game industry because I didn't want them to do exactly what everyone else was doing um you know my my my thought was well I need to do something different um and it different helps and that's that that that's good I don't want to be doing the same old same old I mean it's just like reviews you know every affiliate does reviews every affiliate has the same pretty much review

yeah and there's nothing personal about those reviews um you know the ones that do best for my eyes is when I'm reading them and it's got something personal in there it's a personal experience what they you know if they got an example of how customer support help them or didn't help them or what was problematic or whatever or you know you can very rare you can easily see if someone is actually been through the playing process of signing up the casino because they'll mention all the

pitfalls they'll mention the fact that you can never ever find the withdrawal button anywhere um you know it's you know it that's one of the most rating things but nobody ever ever mentions that in a review now in my review I will I said it's a bloody awful site because you can't find yeah you have to do this these three steps to be able to make a withdrawal and by then they hope that you've lost the will to live and you go back and start play

um you know so it's um you can tell where you've got agency writers it's you know just so obvious to me whether you know at real planer understands it but you know that's the industry that we're in so you know and it that's helpful to me you know if everyone's doing one thing and I do something different then that's good yeah I actually think that you know to just kind of like take a step back and go okay if I were to give advice on your

site um I don't think it needs much technical SEO I think you got the content like as good as you can get it like just don't stop that and I think the link building is interesting because you know it's I don't know too many Affiliates that will build an affiliate site have success without actively trying to get links or build them um but I think you're actually in a weird position where you have natural link building where it happens on its own then you're buying money

like you're basically spending money to buy links and then I think there's in the Middle where it's like what is the effort you can do to gain a link or what is something that you could pay for that helps the link building so it's still technically natural I mean I think people they kind of call this white hat you know you said for example it's like you got you know mentioned in the news like well how do you get more of that sometimes that costs time

time which in some cases can be money it's like oh I need to hire someone to do atre to do this and but I think uh I think that' probably be the the most impactful thing you could do without needing to spend too much time on SEO and then yeah I mean I I do pay to the o link I'll probably buy a link a month that's probably it and I try and pick up free links with affiliate programs and you know other other other things

like that um but I do often sit there and think you know what could I write an article that would generate some links or discussion not necessarily links but generate some interest in one way or another so what sort of article would that need to be well it needs to be a controversial article it needs to be something that's going to polarize people you know people are going to love it or they're going to hate it and would they do that enough to be able to

comment about it so you know using LinkedIn for example as a good good platform for that but you tend not to get many links from LinkedIn to a a a website it tends to be more to your your your page um and I don't know if Google ever looks that far so I can you know link to a link a link to something I've posted on LinkedIn but whether Google follows that and then understands what's going on there absolutely no idea I mean I think so

and like I I'll just comment on that quickly where what I think Google's trying to do in the past year with the helpful content update and all the other updates that are clearly benefiting you I mean on your website there's a picture of you and it's like ask the a question or ask you for help that's personalization and I think when you go into things like LinkedIn you don't always need to link back to your content inside LinkedIn because LinkedIn as a social Channel they really

hate it when you link outside of the platform now if you're doing that on the newsletter which is LinkedIn pulse um which is basically their kind of more of their public content facing side they kind of expect you to link out and it's fine it's a no follow link but I actually do believe Google's picking up on all of this because Google's trying to understand who is the authority in this and eventually it's like well who are you as an authority like your name is maybe

not it's maybe a bit more common but someone's looking for you in igaming you're G to have your own knowledge panel like you're basically building your persona as the one of the go to experts in live dealer space yeah so I use um YouTube for a lot of that really you know my videos because I think you know people like to consume through videos rather than reading that my videos can't go on a bit you know I'm a bit long- winded so people skip through them

but um you know I link in the descriptions of the videos back to the main article so people can read it if they want to so I I I complete the circle um I don't affiliate on any of the uh the videos I I could do um but I I don't um you know at one time you couldn't completely but you can now if you're careful about the operators that you you choose um but even L even YouTube gets a bit sniffy about affiliate links when

you put them in you know I wouldn't I wouldn't recommend it do it if you need to let like I mean here what I recommend like it's actually better to take if you're going to have a link take them to the review page or your product page yeah that and that's what I do I just do that naturally and I say in the video you know there's a list of Casino if you want to play there's a list the casinos on there that will where you

can play the game um so that sort of completes the circle and you know I've got a good you I've got nearly 10,000 subscribers on YouTube um and again I'm not actively chasing sub that all happens organically and naturally you know and I've had some videos that have had you know half a million hits and uh you which is quite noce to think that you know there's half a million people out there listen to me bore them for half an hour um that's quite amusing um

so yeah but it's a good um vehicle for me to uh you know show my authority and and as a result of that I tend to get lots of you know ask me questions come through the website so people contact me via that route you Senor video can you help me out here or this has happened or wherever I've got some information you might be interested in so you know it's and those questions they become content I'm assuming like when people ask you yeah they do

sometimes or they might actually become a piece of consultancy work for me so quite often um you know games developers will see me and um you know watch my channels I know a lot of them do so ass soon as they release the game I think they can't wait to see my my review um and I know they do because when I go to the conferences you know I'm people are always tapping me on the shoulder as I walk around now which is quite strange um

you know they recognize me I have no clue who they are um it's great I just want to say hello see you in the videos love love love them so uh that's quite nice and some of them have been quite pretty young ladies BS from the various so that's quite you're now celebrity that always did you go a huge amount um so yeah so um I think uh one thing that you're also doing well is that you know I it's probably you're not even thinking about

from SEO you're actually like product and user which is great because that's what a lot of seos are are preaching these days but I think you come out it from a different point of view where because you're going deep on a topic I think you're actually publishing stuff that other people haven't written about so what we're typically seeing in you know the last 10 years of I gaming and SEO especially in affiliate marketing is everyone's writing the same content like Cino review they're not adding their

own spin on it they're not adding their own take they're they're not even adding their own personality saying here's what I think about it um but I think you're doing that by default like you're going super deep into the games you're one of a few that actually would go that in that level detail and I think that's wor working in your favor where maybe even people might start copying you which is fine because Google's going to know that you're the one who's pushed you know this

new content forward and I think uh I think the new search engines are going to be aware of like well what is new content like rewriting content I mean that's everywhere that's AI content not not not unique yeah I mean yeah and the use of AI I do use AI because I use it to help me sort of structure um articles there or I ask it you know what's the best structure for an article and it'll give it for me so that's useful but I don't

use it for creating content I sometimes might use it if I'm trying to work out mathematical problems or you know stuff like that probabilities and you know because I'm not a mathematician so it's quite I use it quite for that but then the results I use I can then articulate those in a in a way that people can understand because you know I'm driven there because I want to understand oh you know if there's six balls in a lottery game what's the probability of you getting

one number or two numbers three numbers so you know I explore that and then play around with with the data it gives me and then ask more questions so I can then start thinking about well if I'm talking about strategies how can I help players build a strategy around you know betting you know what's a good strategy and what should you not do and what's the result of that um so you know I I think in the the older days you got people like um The

Wizard of odds who would do you um came from a very mathematical background and he would you you go to his site I know he's sort of still there but sort of moved on um but yeah the analysis that he would do on games and playing through and looking at RTP and that is just at another another level um very interesting guy I've had you know lunch with him in Vegas when I last went and you know it exchange articles and links and things so it's

been quite a fruitful a fruitful um thing but again he approached me because he liked my content that's awesome and he felt he could add something so yeah we we worked together on a few things which is quite quite I mean just to to prove the point I mean I started in in igaming 23 years ago bonus hunting and I I went to a site it was like probably the first site or the main site I actually cared about it was that one in Casino Meister

so with wizard of o Mike I'm learning basic strategy Blackjack I'm learning it across all the different game providers he had everything yeah yeah absolutely so um yeah if you find a site that's got good data um and stuff that you can use and and understand then yeah you just keep going back yeah and you mentioned Caso Meister as well I mean Brian um you know has become a good good friend over the years you know I was introduced to him 10 years ago 11 years

ago when I came into the industry and yeah the other guy the guy that introduced me so I've sort of grown up in um within a group of Affiliates that are relatively small that have done things from a players's perspective so they' be my mentors um so to speak you know that I followed their lead rather than um you know what some of the other bigger Affiliates have been doing yeah but yeah so my group of Co Watsa Brian and Debbie and I and yeah yeah

Dave and you know there's a whole so yeah I I would agree because I mean I actually went in the opposite direction I started basically when I uh built a filed sites I was focusing on the SEO first and I was still doing the same things as with everyone else does so I mean like I had some success but I think I would have actually had a lot more had I actually said no I'm going player first and then I'll I'll sort the SEO later yeah

yeah yeah it just seemed logical to me and not knowing about SEO it's funny because you say that but what I see everywhere else and this is kind of common in SEO in any industry whether it's a marketing or e-commerce or anything else is everyone's doing money first and then product second like product's almost like the secondary thought and um like it if it came natural for you like that's great uh I can say for me it didn't um the old things that did came natural

where it's like how do I compare my situation to yours well what are my hobby sites cooking and house boating well those are products I built better user first like I'm not even thinking about the SEO and the SEO is kind of like it just happens after the fact and that even for what I'm doing today with my software it's like I actually like B2B content I like SEO content so when I do that a bit more naturally you know I don't even have to think

about SEO or I'm not thinking about money first and then you know and then product second no it's product is number one it's the driving course yeah it's interesting because you know when you look at um you know the Google search results if you you know type in best onl casinos or whatever you know whatever best you know term you want the page that you get it's just a list of the casinos above the fold certainly yes it's the first thing that hits you and I

know it sort of meets the intent of what the the question is that you type into Google you know so you're meeting Google's thing but actually is a pie piece of information a l rubbish really you know you just got a list of casinos there's no um not concept what's the word I'm looking for there's no context to it yeah so you just get you know NE Casino some bonus information you don't really know if or new what any of that means so you've got to

scroll down the page until you start finding content it's actually got to explain what you've just seen you know why these things are important and whatnot now for existing players for people that know that it's probably helpful they can probably oh yeah I'm just looking for a new casino yeah that's got a Bonus that I like to look off just and off they go for new players there a let all it it doesn't meet the intent I don't think but this is interesting because that's where

I actually think the world of search is changing right now because you know I think uh you might not be a well-known personality in the player space yet like you're you're building that Persona like no different than Brian is but I think actually you know the way search is changing today it's people are using social media to get their answers right I want to listen to a person that's going to tell me their top 10 casinos or top 10 whatever and they're they're going to probably

consume it in a video format so it might not always be in a live stream or a set YouTube video but like this is why Reddit is dominating so much people are kind of going I want the answer not from AI content and I don't want it from one of these traditional trashy affiliate sites that are just basically like you said they just rank and here's your whatever and it's like the intent is technically there but it's it's not deep it's not a bottom of funnel

content it's not let's get deep into it I think we're we're already moving into this transition where those fight sites might find their ways of still getting those rankings but they're now using more people behind it like it's people buy from people yeah yeah I think you're absolutely right yeah it is uh yeah SP which means like my opinion is that you know your site and you as a personal brand like you're actually I think going to be worth more in time so the more you

keep working on the site it's you're almost kind of stuck with the site you know it's going to be difficult to say hey we're going to replace you with some other person that is we're going to try to train them with your experience and passion it's in the back of my mind because you know at some point I do you know I'm 61 now so you know I want to retire um so so I will want to you know sell like you know comparer um you

know that's certainly sort of within within my um thoughts but yeah just how how I do that and how I transition it from my face to someone else's face is is the most difficult thing I mean yeah a new owner will do what they want with the site you know and so they might choose to be away with that Authority the face and all that sort of stuff uh and that's their business you do what they they like or you become some something like a maybe

not like a part-time consultant but it's like it's kind of like you're still going to be someone that let's pretend it was me that wanted to buy this site yeah um I'd be like I still need to find a way to have you activate it not full-time work but I mean if it's like you know a meeting once a week or the occasional appearance it's um you as the author author author would be helpful at actually building a team that can support this and keep it

going forward yeah I mean that yeah I wouldn't just sell it I did say to someone yeah if I sell it that's it I just want to walk away and have nothing more to do with it but um actually I quite enjoy doing quite a lot of what I do I mean I don't enjoy the writing so much these days but I like looking at the um the games I certainly like giving my opinion I like doing the videos because they're really easy to do you

know it's just 20 minutes of my time um you know learn the game play it talk about what I think about it um so that's quite a good thing so I would I would carry be quite happy to carry on doing that because it's not much much effort and not not much time but it keeps my face my face there you know I had someone that was interested in the site um and did quite a bit of due diligence at the end they just came around

and said we can't the risk of you is just too great you know you're because you branded it so well you know if you walked away then we would lose lose that and I thought it was a shame because I thought that was a real opportunity for for them um and for the site as well because you know my site is where it is because of me it's just me you know if there was a team behind my site and we could do more it would

absolutely fly in the rankings I'm absolutely certain you know and if people were prepared to put if link building so important and they're prepared to put some money into link building then it would it would it become come much more than just live casino comparer you know it's got a good it's got a really good Bas in live at the moment but you know it could be even it could be M much bigger um I could make it much bigger on my own but I'm just

not prepared to put that time in at the moment you I'm very much a lifestyle affiliate so it's yeah I'm doing all right out of it and I've got a large lifestyle thank you very much um which is perfect because I mean you do Consulting so it's kind of like you've basically in my opinion you've built your own personal brand and picked a very specific Niche that I think is relevant and you know if people want to know more about the live dealer space I mean

like I now know who I can go to talk to for this yeah it's it was quite bizarre the the consultancy stuff you know it's know it's know it's um sort of just happened by chance um and then I found myself sitting in a boardroom in Romania um with a whole load of load of load of techies around around the the room asking me questions about roulette and these are the people that design these games they're asking me about what I thought about their games and

roulette and what insights I could give them to make their games better and you know I've sort of been in the industry for about five years then that's amazing this is rather rather remarkable and then what was it more remarkable was you know I just told them what I thought and then sort of six weeks later they came up with a road map pretty much of everything that I talked about improvements and said yeah we're working our way through this road map now and you'll start

to see all these changes come into our our roulette games and whatnot and then sure enough they all started appearing um and then some of the things that I mentioned started appearing at other po fist well they they all cop each other actually that that's that's one of the questions that I've written down but um maybe before pivoting into that question um what do you see happening or interesting or changing in the live dealer space because I see it in the background but I'm tuning out

because I'm like I'm just a service provider for affiliates I don't care what kind of affiliation you do it's I'm just helping you do your thing and I've seen this piece of the business grow like just looking at companies like Evolution gaming I'm like wow they became Giants and yeah um I actually thought it was a tiny Niche but it seems to be much bigger than I realiz it's massive um you know um live games I don't know what the stats are but they count for

a huge amount of profit for a casino um you know games like roulette and back Jack and back are are the three staple games um that all life Casino providers have they're the the games that are traditional live dealer player want to want to play play um and yeah it's it's much bigger than I think Than People realize and of course you can't play Live DEA games for 10p you know the minimum Blackjack hand you'll ever find is5 pound but very rarely you'll find a five

pound table in the evenings it's 15 25 pound just to sit down um roulette again you know you might be able to pay for 20 PS spin but you don't you know so your your minimum bet is a lot higher uh and therefore the uh the amount to be gained is obviously higher for the casino um even though there's probably less players but then you look at a game like crazy time which is one of the biggest games out there um you know they have concurrent

players of you know 13 14,000 that any one time all playing and they've got two two versions of that they got two crazy Titans plus all their other other games um yeah Evolution are a special case because they've innovated massively in the industry and they've also you know consumed and uh bought other you know slot game developers and so forth so they're much bigger than the original live dealer operation that they they started out ads um yeah they're a massive massive industry but they you know

they're looking at quality you know and they put the money in um they innovate they're you know the innovator in the industry everyone else follows what Evo do um you know if Evo's done something then someone else will either copy it or try and reinv what's just been innovated and do something slightly different but they would probably never have got there in the first place even hadn't done the first Innovation so the concept of multipliers everyone's got those now on their games or has got multiplier

games but that came from Evo and that came from lightning roulette a game I hastened to add that I I trashed in my video review uh when I first saw it because I couldn't think why he would want to take less money on a straight up bet for the chance of getting a 500x multiply it just didn't make sense to me but uh I was wrong and yeah it's become the most successful game that Evo have produced today so so um but that just that concept

of multipliers has been now has gone through all of the games so every game's got multiply game and then all the other Li Casino providers will now start to copy that concept and when they've caught up so everyone else is in catch up to Evo um where we are in live dealer at the moment we've got more RNG creeping into live than we've ever had before and that's because the games are becoming more complicated um they're more difficult to get through compliance and and and Regulatory

um licensing so RNG is a very easy way to to do that because it's cheaper um and it's easier to to license so that's why we're seeing a lot of RNG in these um game shows where we go next I just don't know you know it's I was wandering around a Cino in Las Vegas 10 years ago I could look at all the different games and go yeah we haven't got any of these in live d so that's the future that's what we're going to get

in live dealer and sure enough we we've got quite a lot of those games now in live dealer we've certainly got a whole range of signed bets that we never had before um in various games um but what new games come out I don't know you know I've chewed the fact with with a lot of people um and I think live games for me what I like about live games is the fact that I make decisions so I play the games where there's an element of

my decision- making in there so Blackjack I have to decide whether I'm going to stand or I'm going to hit uh and some of the other games like that roulette I have to decide you know what numbers to bet on um so I've got an active role in the game um games like backck you have no or you decides which spot to bet on you the game plan is already defined and you just follow what what comes out so games that have got um player interaction

for me uh where I'd like to see the future I see uh if I think about the younger generation you I said I'm 61 so I'm old school if I think about my son the games that he's bought up on and potentially how he would cross over into gambling the games that he's familiar with so Call of Duty and fortnite and all those other sort of games where you're role playing and you're doing something and you you're getting a a reward for completing something whatever I

could see gambling games going in that direction so if you had a a game what was like squid game or something where you have a pool of players that start the game and one player ends up or five players end up at the end as a winner and you have to make strategic decisions along the way I could see that becoming live gambling games um that' be RNG in it but I think that would be pretty cool if I yeah um and I you know so

whether they're looking at that I'm absolutely sure they they're looking at that sort of stuff and deciding what could what could they do what would fly past The Regulators how could they monetize gaming in a way but but but um there's not just RNG where you're just watching something unfold where you've got some some way to become involved and you know if someone said to me yeah that you could join this game is going to be an hour's worth of play but it's going to cost

you1 pound to join but you got the chance to win £2,000 for 100 quid what I'd do it ticket yeah absolutely and then you're joining and then you just do whatever you do um and I know that for the the Ceno that's an hour equals we absolutely know how much revenue would make because the entry fee is this that's the price fee this is how much it cost to run the game we know what how much money we're going to make um so they can do

that sort of stuff long long as the Biggers added up they could do that and always make money it's a bit like these um you know car Lottery things you know buy a ticket in the airport and you win a port you know this type of things you know it's sell enough tickets the vehicle can buy 10 Porsches give one away it's money so it's you know so that's Innovation I know Evo look back to our childhood and look at board games and other bits of

pieces for inspiration and pragmatic have done the same and so um playtech um you know Snakes and Ladders I think they're good ideas but when the games hit the actual screen they don't actually quite deliver what you'd hope they deliver because they've lost the essence of the board game that you played when you were a kid um and that's that's the difficulty I think they've got they've got to maintain that essence of what made you play Monopoly every day or what made you play this you

know yeah and I think there's always going to be the examples of uh games that had a lot of money or marketing put behind them flopped and then the games that you're like this is the ugliest or worst game ever and it becomes just super popular yeah absolutely I mean isugi have got a couple of games up there sleeves that are going to be coming out fairly shortly and when I first heard about them I thought brilliant absolutely brilliant and I've tried them in demo mode

and there they just don't work um so I sort of looking forward to seeing the the completed games um and and you know reviewing them and it's really sad there such a brilliant idea I think doesn't actually translate so well when you actually start playing it um but we'll see you know i' be wrong lots of times so I might be wrong about these ones so we we wait and see so we sort of touched upon it a little bit but what do you think it

needs to change in igaming I mean we kind of zeroed in on one aspect of live dealer and I think you touched upon like what Innovations are we having uh you know you got one example of a company that's uh pushing things forward but there's always talk in our industry as a whole that everyone's just kind of copying each other and it's like what's new and exciting so want to get your take on it cool idea um I don't know I've got a VI um new

Innovations only come out you know gamechanging Innovations only come out once it be five 10 years yeah in slots I don't know much about slots but in the last big innovation in slots I can think of was megaways probably the new way of the the slots tumbling and all that sort of stuff you know the big time gaming stuff that was a a bit of a game changer when they first first came out everyone's got them now but um yeah Evo with their multipliers um with

their first game show as well they were you know pivotal pivotal moments What's the next thing I I don't know certainly on the the casino side I just I just don't know you know if I look to again wandering around the casinos in Vegas there's nothing I see in there um I think oh we haven't got that online yeah online seem to be in advance of what landbased is is doing um agreed or they see well they seem to be good bed Partners you know if

you go to G2 in Vegas and you walk around the conference Hall there and you see all the slot providers there with a you know sparkling slots and you know machines things we pretty much got those online and have had for a while um you know so the new games tend to be branded you know so the latest Batman the latest Marvel the latest there you know but they're all pretty much the same thing it's just a branding exercise more than anything anything else um I

don't know uh I mean I gaming itself sell you know if you take apart you know the role of Affiliates I think you know I know you've got some questions about about that so we might might touch on that in a minute but it's difficult to look into a glass ball from a player perspective because that's where I am I'm sitting right at the end of that end of the tunnel I'm not in amongst it with the with the developers or the the forward thinkers thinking

about what you can do I'm reacting to what what's already being being put out so it sounds like you're kind of halfway there I mean like if you are a consultant then you know these other game providers are saying hey we want to get your take on it I mean you know I think one thing you're doing well is basically you're saying well I need to test and try these games and if you don't test them it's kind of like you're just like everyone else which

has been been affiliate marketing I gaming for a long time it's like get content writers that write about the games they they're basically looking at other reviews of the games they're not even trying them out um I think that is changing and I think there's always been a demand for players to gravitate towards you know what they want which is like who are the experts and Authority in the space so I think you're already building up that road map and it's a you know it should

be the insights or the main takeaway that other feels kind of go how am I going to pick a e year what am I going to do you know how do I become the best at this and you know from your side it might look easy but I think for other people it's like are you willing to do this work the answer is no it's like I'd say don't even get started yeah well even within sort of live there's niches within the leich you know you

can go as deep as as you like um you know I've tried to do stuff with a fairly broad broad bash brush and you know I admit you know I'm not an expert on a lot of these games you know I learn how to play them um try and work out whether I like it I try and work out whether other people will like it I try and work out how you can play them so you get a decent amount of playtime um you know and

I do my research and you know I have a look around and because I'm the that content doesn't exist anywhere I've got to sort of work it out um I'm not copying anyone else um in fact you know I don't look at competitor sites I don't look at you know people say to me well you need to look at what your competitors doing no I don't actually because then I end up just copying what they're doing and you know that may or may not work um

you know I'd rather do my own thing um so i' say the competitors it's only useful if they're bringing something cool to the table if they are then you want to learn about it like what do what do they have as an edge in knowledge or information that I don't have but when they don't have that it's probably the opposite happening for you I think people are probably looking at your site going oh we're rewriting this because I actually have that happening to me it's like

I write content in affiliate marketing and I'm like wait a minute that idea I just wrote about is now appearing on other people's blogs kind of repurpose I'm like thanks you know next time please link link link back yeah but you know it's annoying when it happens but it's flattering when it happens because you know that you you've got to step in front you know and people you're right people do copy you you know um it's a compliment I I'm actually think of my competitors as

being and it's SEO that tell me about competitors nobody else so I naturally think my competitors are other Live casino sites other Affiliates are talking about Live casino but it's not from SEO point of view it's gambling.com and casinos.com and you know all the huge huge Affiliates they're my competitors well actually I'm not competing with them at all um because my content is reaching a different audience from the ones that they're going after um you know and where I try and compete on a toe-to-toe basis

with them I don't come off I don't fair that well or doing some some things but not in others because of the power that they've got behind them and the size of their networks and sites and things so I don't even bother trying because that would send me down the wrong path I was to listen to the SEO I would go hell B for trying to compete with the Lamborghinis and the Ferraris of the world when I'm a mini you know I want to beeting repeating

competing with other other other minis um yeah because I stand a better chance there but then at the same time I think you're still owning a space that they can't touch so yeah yeah yeah yeah and from an acquisition point of view that's always going to be of interest going okay if we can't do this well it's uh how do we get this part of the space that is kind of like off limits for them yeah and that's pretty that you know and I yeah I

hope my site does go to an affiliate um you know a larger affiliate because you know it deserves greater visibility um yeah that's my own you know that's my opinion now just look at the numbers well uh rounding up uh this discussion I mean I know you've got a background as a business analyst and I know you're product Focus first but um there's data a lot behind your side um in your business so I want to ask what do you think of the future of affiliate

marketing is as it intersects with business business intelligence uh you know what when I first started my site I was creating databases I was logging every game every [Music] [Music] [Music] um every minimum and maximum bet every side bet every game had and all that sort of things so I built a huge database of all the games every provider had and then what games every Casino had because at that time uh live games weren't everywhere so if you were looking for blackjack with a specific of

rules it's quite difficult to find it so I wanted to hold all that data so I could get the player to the right place the difficulty I had was once I collected all the data was being able to create an interface at the front of it that people could query to find the information they wanted um so what I ended up doing was using that data and then just finding a way to be able to publish it on the site and let people just manually look

through it I couldn't actually make the connect I couldn't create that bit of code that would um that would have done it I could do it now because I could just type my requirements into check GPT and it would just do it all for me um it works yeah pretty much I could get a working prototype anyway um using the data sets I done so it's something I may look back at but so I think data actually is hugely important um if you can uh find

out a way a way to use it you got to have the data and then you find out what do I want to use that data for and how can I monetize it so I've got all sorts of ideas in my head all sorts of data that I know if I collected that I could monetize it like that it create a I would need a a real Tech and a programmer to do it but there are some knowing what player habits are knowing Lots what sort

of information they look for and only a player would know this I know what sort of site would absolutely fly with um with with players for some of the data that I think you could collect really good example of this is traxo so if you've ever seen traxo they were the first site to start scraping data of all the results or crazy time and the uh some of the other game shows and players just love data about past results so it helps them form an appeal

of how to bet in the future so they want to know when this number last came in so they can bet on that in the future and make some adjustments so the guys there have done a fantastic job you know I ran into them years ago when they first started and you know we did some stuff together so sort of known them but they've been very successful driving it's a data driven site that's being become a very affiliate a very good affiliate site um so I

think data will become even more important because it helps differentiate from the Dr that's out there all the templated sites to reminding something specific that people want and even me as an affiliate you know I if I had more time having more data just data just data just about performance of my website where my clicks come from where my ftds come from um would be really helpful and if I'd set up my links differently I would have that information now but go back 11 years when

I didn't know what the hell I was doing I just did stuff to try and make things as simple as possible for me um so I've used the same link for one casino right across my site so that help me knowing what page they click that on and you know how's that ended up in the affiliate program and you know how did I convert them so that would have helped me inform me on the content what I need to change what I need to improve what

are my really good money pages and I've used things like events and Google analytics I got someone to help me put all that together quite frankly it's a bloody nightmare um it's not easy to navigate especially when you don't really want to navigate it don't make it easy for you to understand what's going on I have got a list of obviously all my money pages and I know what's going on there so it does help me to some respects that it doesn't get me to where

I really need to be to be able to make the changes that would really really help me um so I'm losing traffic all over the place I'm absolutely certain uh and just someone with a Keen Keen Eye and a bit of data behind them could sort out you know could improve the monetization of my site dramatically yeah and and I think what the takeaway to answer that would be you know I think these tools they do exist but they also require a lot of time no

different than SEO it's like you can do the SEO yourself but then you could really become a full-time SEO and not do your other full-time work building your site I think uh that will be the future of these tools and affiliate marketing is the the more done for you service like I know it can be technical to set it up but no one wants to do this because they'd rather spend time doing what they're good at which is product yeah awesome Neil uh thank you so

much for doing this I gained a a better insight and appreciation for not only what you do but I mean I've been studying product marketing for the last two years and um I know what you're doing is the right thing and I'm really happy to see that uh the last Google updates put you in the uptic so happy to Showcase that to some of my audience just want to pass it back to you how people can get a hold of you uh so there's the ask

me on uh my website you just click on that put your name in and just send a message and it comes straight through to my email my email is Neil livecasino capa.com you can find me on LinkedIn um again you can message me through that we'll connect through through that that's prob the the V light I do use Facebook and I use Twitter um but not so much really to communicate with with uh anyone it's more just to Showcase what content is on my side so

uh yeah either direct email go through Linkedin are probably the best best ways to get me will include that in the show notes Neil thank you so much for doing this cheers thanks very much John thank you for tuning in to the affiliate bi 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 Direct podcast Direct podcast Direct and reach more

listeners