The Affiliate Marketing Podcast - Phil Fraser talks Entrepreneurship for Affiliate Business Owners

In the latest episode of The Affiliate Marketing Podcast, Lee-Ann Johnstone sits down with Phil Fraser, the previous owner of leading UK Bingo Site , www.whichbingo.com.

They discuss Phil’s 5 step process and the importance of planning. Phil also spoke about how WhichBingo built its niche around asking questions to get high up in search.

Listen to this episode to learn more about building an affiliate business and getting yourself on track to succeed as an iGaming Affiliate.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:36

If you want to stay at the cutting edge of affiliate marketing, you're in the right place. Join me for this week's episode and let's get started. Welcome back to Affiliate Insiders Podcast. This week I've got somebody incredibly special, Mr. Phil Fraser. Hi, Phil. Welcome.

SPEAKER_01 1:02

Hi, Nice Elian.

SPEAKER_00 1:05

Thanks very much for joining me today. So for those of us listening who may not yet know you, which I would find quite incredible because you're a figurehead in our industry, can you tell our listeners a little bit about your previous iGaming business, your exit, one of the most well-known bingo sites in our industry?

SPEAKER_01 1:23

Okay, so uh I launched and ran and subsequently sold Witch Bingo.

SPEAKER_00 1:30

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 1:31

Uh it was originally WitchBingo.com. Uh after UEIGEA in 2005, you focused on the UK market. So most people will know WitchBingo.code UK. Uh we sold the business in 2018 to Excel Media.

SPEAKER_00 1:44

One of the biggest um affiliate media sites in the world. And what have you been doing since then, Phil?

SPEAKER_01 1:51

Uh since then, well, I took a bit of time off by the swimming pool. Um, I've been doing some uh youth mentoring, I've been doing some voluntary work, and I've just launched myself as a business sounding board.

SPEAKER_00 2:04

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 2:04

Sort of somewhere between business coach, mentor, and non-exec director.

SPEAKER_00 2:08

I'm gonna talk to you a little bit about that later, but what I want to know are we've got a lot of affiliates that listen to the show and affiliate managers as well. And so I know that you know that space incredibly well from your experience with WitchBinko. Can you talk a little bit about some of the things that affiliates should be thinking about right now if they want to build and sell their business? Because it's quite a unique area to be in, and MA is quite um aggressive in our industry. So talk a little bit about your experiences about how affiliates that might be looking to sell should get themselves prepared and ready for that.

SPEAKER_01 2:42

Um I think one of the one of the key things to think about before before you get to the sale point is is is almost looking at yourself and saying, Well, why would somebody want to buy me? True. Now, if it's not, you know, it might be that you generate lots of traffic, it might be gener that you generate lots of traffic in a particular niche or a particular uh geographical area. Um, but you almost need to to understand what your sales pitch is fit for your affiliate site if you're gonna go out to sell it. Obviously, one of the key things you need to make sure you can do is make profit, and you need to be clear about how you do that. Um, but in order to make profit, and again, this is sort of pre-sale, is what's your niche? And I know you've you've you've you've talked about this before. Um, the riches are in the niches. Yes. Um, although we say niche, we say niche. So it doesn't work, the reaches are in the niches. Yeah. Um we were we were very lucky on which bingo is that that in in in the iGaming uh sector, in the iGaming, the whole space when we first launched, bingo was in itself a niche.

SPEAKER_00 3:46

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 3:46

Um and we we niched very hard on being a um a universal directory. So we had every single bingo site on our directory, irrelevant of whether we had an affiliate deal with them or not, because our USP was if you come to which bingo, you will find a review of whatever bingo site you're looking for. And that was our USP. So as a as a as an affiliate, now you still need to find that niche. You need to you need to be able to say to a potential purchaser in the same way that you'd say to potential audience, why should you come to my site? And in the same way to a potential purchaser, why should you buy my site?

SPEAKER_00 4:25

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 4:26

Um, and it's you know it's it's very easy nowadays to knock up a uh a WordPress site with 20 affiliate sites, uh 20 affiliate accounts on there, five-star reviews for everything. This is the latest special offer, bang.

SPEAKER_00 4:38

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 4:39

Anybody can do that. Why would I want to buy one of those when I can build one myself?

SPEAKER_00 4:43

And I know that you were talking about some of the five steps that um affiliates need to follow that are so important to consider um in the early startup of their journey as well. So does this lead into the kind of MA piece? Can you talk us through some of those five steps? I think I think you shared it on Emmy's podcast.

SPEAKER_01 5:01

Yeah, there was there was more it was more general about any it's it's a business planning strategy planning tool, okay. Um, which I call the FFS.

SPEAKER_00 5:12

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 5:15

Um, and it starts with uh what does perfect look like in 12 months' time?

SPEAKER_00 5:22

True.

SPEAKER_01 5:23

And working backwards from there. So, what does perfect look like in 12 months' time? What needs to be in place to deliver that? How do I get those things in place? And then you drill down to over five steps to very specific things. So, for example, it might be um I need to get£100,000 worth of revenue coming in by next year. Yeah, if that's your ideal situation, what do you need to put in place to do that? Now it might be that I need a better website, it might need I need better traffic, it might be that I need um more affiliate sites on my or sorry, more more brands on my affiliate site. Yeah. Um and if you decide what those things are, you then go, okay, well, if I if I need, and it's it's all it's quite simplistic once you get into it. If I need some more of more brands on my site, which ones are there gonna be? Okay, how am I gonna do that? Well, I'm gonna need to research the market, I'm gonna need to touch base with lots of affiliate managers, I'm gonna see what the rates are out there, and then it's okay, if I've if I've then got 10 more brands on the site, um, somebody's gonna need to write the content, somebody's gonna need to do the graphics, somebody needs to make sure the links are right, all that sort of thing. So you actually get down to very specific things, but it you then flip it upside down, you've got your list of very specific things, if they all happen in place, you will deliver that extra hundred thousand pounds worth of revenue. But until you know what you're trying to do, you can't really put the things in place. And and and that first question, what does ideal look like in 12 months' time makes a huge difference in your strategy. You might say, I want to sell in 12 months' time, or I might want to acquire a competitor in 12 months' time. Those are two very, very different routes. Yeah, they will they will create very, very different strategies.

SPEAKER_00 7:10

And there are a lot of affiliates that are acquiring each other, like joining together, collaborating to actually go and seek bigger market share at the moment. So I think having a strat plan, and and maybe we'll delve a little bit deeper into the blog article that goes with this just to talk about those phrases, five steps, um, a little bit more um in detail. What advice can you share with affiliates starting out um in the industry today? Because obviously this industry changed an immense amount during your um, you know, rise and sell and exit. Um, what do you think, or what advice can you give to affiliates that are maybe one or two years into their journey in this very competitive market with the current you know regulations and restrictions that we're facing across the board? What kind of advice would you give to these affiliates starting out?

SPEAKER_01 7:54

I think this there's there's two questions that need asking. And one is because because with an affiliate site, you in effect you have two target audiences. One is your your consumers who are coming to the site, and the other is your uh B2B. So the affiliate managers, why should we appear on your site? And that's the question. So to the consumer, why should you come to my website rather than a hundred other ones?

SPEAKER_00 8:21

And I think that making sure that that um question is answered is some is sometimes one of the most important that an affiliate needs to do before they even launch their website or start their idea. Because you know, there are hundreds of review sites out there. What is actually gonna make yours stand out? What is and really delving deep into your customer avatar is so important as well, I think. Which sometimes affiliates they're not really focusing on that, they're focusing on where am I gonna get the traffic, which is obviously important because it drives the revenue, but the traffic actually also comes from whoever you're targeting. So I think that's a really, really important point.

SPEAKER_01 8:56

And it's it's you know, most affiliates will understand this that it's quite circular. So to ensure that somebody wants to come to your site because it's got something unique or interesting about it, that's great. But actually, you've got to get them there in the first place to see that it's that, so therefore you've got to do the SEO. But if you do the SEO and actually you've got a crap site, they're gonna land on your site and then disappear again. So it does go in a circular way, but unless you've got a decent product, you might have brilliant SEO. If you've got a crap product, it will be self-defeating because Google will see that people are people are however you've got to that high position on SEO, Google will see that people are coming to your site and bouncing, and that in in the long term will will destroy your your SEO anyway.

SPEAKER_00 9:43

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 9:44

Um, so it really does have to start with the product. And again, again, if you as I say, we it's one of the things we we were very clear on when we when we were running our business, you have two different audiences. So the customer, why should I come to my site? The affiliate manager, I guess. The affiliate manager and go, hey, I've got a brand new site called you know sports hyphen betting offers.org. Will you, you know, can we sign up as an affiliate? Well, why would I want to do that? Um and and you know, that that that niche or that reason could be the same for both, but it's sold in a slightly different way.

SPEAKER_00 10:26

You you spoke a little bit about product just now. So do you think that newer affiliates coming into the marketplace, into this competitive marketplace, should be focusing more on their product and less on just content and traffic? I mean, is there an opportunity now with COVID to actually get really innovative with new products that would then help to actually build those commercial deals with operators?

SPEAKER_01 10:48

I think there's there's there's a number, again, there's a number of things to this because depending on where you are on your on your life span of your business, you know, it's it's very, very difficult to go, right? I've got this massive master plan, and I've got to get this right, and this right, and this right. Unless you actually get a website live, before you actually do, you've got to do that first. You know, we all watched uh bake-off a couple of nights ago. You've got to, you've got to, you know, to get to making those brilliant cakes, you've got to have made a lump of concrete. You've got to make the errors along the way. So, yes, there might be a big picture view of some brilliant different way of attacking this, but you've got to, you know, you've got to start somewhere. Now, at the time we exited the market, particularly in the sportsbook market, there were lots of people using things like Facebook, Instagram, all that sort of stuff, Twitter, and they were come, yeah, come that's a completely different subsector of the market.

SPEAKER_00 11:45

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 11:45

And we were very much, you know, we're a website, we're we're, you know, we're on Google, and that's pretty much it. We never went into Twitter or Insta or Facebook. So there's lots and lots of different ways. But you also splicing the cake.

SPEAKER_00 11:59

You differentiated because I remember uh having this conversation with you a couple of years back, and and you were with your team, and you guys differentiated your proposition. Yes, you were a review site about bingo, but you also started looking at voice search very early on, and you made sure that your content was matching what people were asking, um, and that your your kind of like um localization of language and all of that was in place. So you were sort of spotting trends early and then making sure that your proposition or your product was matching those trends in order to like sort of beef up your your traffic and acquisition. So I mean, uh what made you do that? Like, why did you think in that in that vein?

SPEAKER_01 12:39

We one of the things I I did from quite early on was my mindset was this this is a business, this is a proper, proper grown-up business. Yes, we were yes, we were a you know, we were a what you call a bedroom affiliate for five years. Um, but in my mind, this was always a proper business. Um, so we did things, we did things the right way, but we also we we we built the business as a business. So we had in-house SEO from very, very early on, yeah. Um which meant that I had somebody in my ear all the time saying we should be doing this, we should be doing this, we should be doing that. Um, you know, when Google moved the consistently moved the moved the goalposts, I had somebody who knew what was going on was ahead of the game. But at the same time, we had this overarching um, it was almost a positioning that we had without me thinking about it. That we'd in my mind I'd always positioned which bingo is like the BBC of Bingo. Yeah, we were the we were the authority, uh, we would do the right thing, we would, you know, we'd be 100% consistent, and we'd have every single website on there, etc. etc. etc. And that even the sort of terminology of some of the uh review content and the news content, we we always tried to be the industry authority, and you tie that in with intelligent SEO, um, and it sort of created our positioning for us to be able to be in that situation. So, you know, if we'd had just another website with just another exact match domain, there's no difference. We had something that that historically had built from very, very different. But don't forget, right at the start, we had you know, we were very, very we were myself and my wife sitting at home, kitchen table, and you know, the one of the biggest celebrations we ever had was the first six dollars we saw on screen that somebody had clicked on a link and deposited money, and we got some revenue back, and that was yay! Yeah, so people people look at where we were, where we ended up. It was a long you know, it was an 18-year journey.

SPEAKER_00 14:49

Was it really that long?

SPEAKER_01 14:50

It was 18 years.

SPEAKER_00 14:52

Lord, okay. Shows you how long I've been around because I mean in the early days, and I thought, wow, this is a great site.

SPEAKER_01 14:58

Yeah, we started in 2000.

SPEAKER_00 15:01

Wow, so way at the beginning, way at the beginning of our.

SPEAKER_01 15:04

But we had lots of, you know, we had a our first web our first website was built by me, and I'm not a web developer, on something called Microsoft Front Page.

SPEAKER_00 15:14

Good lord.

SPEAKER_01 15:15

Okay, way pre-WordPress.

SPEAKER_00 15:19

Yeah, you probably wouldn't have even seen that. So that's it. But this is the other thing that I wanted to talk about because you know, you the the journey that you're on now is so enriching. If there are any affiliates out here or affiliate business owners, or even operators that are looking for business sounding board, honestly, Phil has been around that long that he's seen the history of online, and there really is no substitute for experience when it comes to kind of business development and and you know nurturing a startup business and growing it into something bigger. One of the things that I wanted to ask is just, you know, one piece of advice, because every podcast we like to just give one takeaway that people can really just take back and hone in for their business, for their growth. What is that one piece of advice that you would give to your younger self when you were starting Witch Bingo, when you were starting your affiliate business, um, that may help some of the affiliates and even the affiliate managers that are listening to this podcast as well. Um, what would you tell them about your younger self and and give us advice today?

SPEAKER_01 16:22

That's a really, really tough one. Um, I I would switch it round to say the advice I would give to any business is is set a target and then put things in place to get to that target. Because we were, whilst we had a general idea of where we were going, which was build a business, make more money, we never had, because we never had to get financed, we never had a business plan.

SPEAKER_00 16:47

See, this is the thing. I think a lot of affiliates struggle with this because they're self-funded, right? So there's no accountability on that.

SPEAKER_01 16:53

Correct, correct. And that's good, and that's good because um you can go, right, I want to go in this direction or I want to go in that direction, and I've got I don't have to justify it to anybody. And I struggle, and I and that's one of the things, one of the things my team struggled with with me was as with many entrepreneurs, I'm a I'm a shiny new thing person.

SPEAKER_00 17:14

Oh, look, there's another butterfly, let me go chase that. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 17:17

Oh, look, look, there's another thing over there, and and the owner, and it got to the point where we actually we had um an external consultant came in and sat down and talked to the whole team. And one of the things I was told by my team via the consultant was take all your new ideas, get them out of the office, set up a separate, and what we ended up doing was I set up a separate company to house my shiny new ideas, so it didn't bother them doing and I couldn't see that until they obviously they were telling me at the time, until it was sort of somebody sat down and said, You've got to keep your nose out, you know, go go away, leave us to run the business. We know what we're doing, yeah. And particularly, you know, the web dev team. I've got this great new idea, build it, build a new website for this fantastic new idea, which obviously they do because I'm the boss and I can tell them what to do. Yeah, but they'd be sitting there going, Well, this is stupid, and then I go, Well, why hasn't that been done on Witch Bingo? Well, we're we're doing this shiny new thing you told us to do. Yeah, um, so but I mean that's the upside of being an entrepreneur, you can do what you want. The downside is sometimes you haven't got those controls that make you go right. Does this match where we are trying to go? Now we had, um, having said that, that sort of shiny new thing, we had um a B HAG on the wall. So anybody who's not read Good to Great by Jim Collins, fantastic book, and a B hag is a big, hairy, audacious goal. So you said it's like the old shooting for the stars thing, but we had it in the meeting room, it was on the wall in the meeting room, and often either I or usually somebody else in the team would say, Does that help deliver that goal? And it makes it very black and white because you actually look at something, this is a shiny new thing. Wow, this is really exciting. But actually, does it help deliver that goal? And you can go, well, actually, it doesn't. And unless you've got that goal either sitting on the wall or you know, on a post-it note on your desk or whatever it might be, or in your, you know, in a business document, unless you have that goal, you don't know whether what you're doing contributes to or actually makes worse your effectiveness to get to that goal. And I was guilty of that as much as anybody else.

SPEAKER_00 19:34

And I think this is a very valid piece of advice, not just for affiliates, but for affiliate managers too, because even if you're managing an affiliate portfolio, you need to set yourself goals, you need and you need to be like sense-checking yourself, not just working on the top tier to drive more sales, but actually looking at the other value that's in your program as well. So, from a business perspective, I totally get what you're saying, and I'm gonna be getting that B Hag up in my office too. Um, the shiny new things, um exactly the same. And I think most entrepreneurs are ideas people because they need to have ideas in order to go and create, right? So having that um as a skill set isn't a negative thing, but learning how to keep it in check, I think, is the is the kind of key story here. And I think many of our listeners are gonna um identify with this story and and some of the kind of um experiences that you've shared with us today. So I'd love to thank you for your time. I really appreciate having you on this podcast and sharing your journey, um, giving some advice. I think many of our uh listeners are gonna really enjoy this podcast. So thanks very much for joining us today, Father. It's been an absolute pleasure to speak to you and and some of the information that you've learned over all these years in business. Thanks. This podcast is sponsored by One Account. Oneaccount offers a free, real-time age verification solution for affiliates and helps to ensure audience compliance in highly regulated markets. The process is super simple for players who need to age verify to access free-to-play games, and the tool integrates seamlessly into your existing affiliate site. To find out more and get started with one account in your affiliate business, visit www.oneaccount.net forward slash business.