By Damian Martinez, journalist at G&M News.
Based on your extensive experience in the industry, what lessons did you learn during that time?
I’ve been both on the operator and the affiliate sides, and now I’m with an iGaming affiliate marketing agency, so you can say I’ve been a little bit everywhere. With all that experience, I can say I’ve learned a lot of things in this time, like how to build a huge network. Over the last 15 years, I’ve been meeting different people. I’m very sociable so I’m always at a conference or an event trying to listen and talk to people. From every conversation, you can learn something, but the most important thing is to build your network, develop a lot of relationships that can turn into friendships. That will help you very much in the future.
In October 2023, you co-founded iGamingAffiliates.io. How did the idea of the company originate and what is its mission?
The mission of iGamingAffiliates.io is to build, grow and manage our clients and the iGaming affiliate marketing programs. Johan Syrén, Daniel Stanton and I created the enterprise last year. The three of us were working for a company before this and we were doing something similar, but in a smaller scale. One day, we said: “We can do this ourselves, but much better,” because the three of us have been in the industry for more than 15 years. We started to build the initiative in March and in October we got the company registered and licensed. We wanted to go much further than before, in our own way. The idea was to highlight affiliates not only as marketing agents, but also developing an original business where people can come and get help with everything in terms of consultancy. Now, we have eight people in the company, and we just hired different executives to work with SEO that can help to build affiliate sites.
What would you say are your responsibilities as Chief Marketing Officer of the company?
At the moment, when you’re in a small company, you are always doing a little bit of everything, but my main goal is to take care of marketing campaigns and help out and support our affiliate managers.
What are the most effective marketing and affiliates strategies that online operators can implement to drive traffic to their platforms?
Everything is about networking. If you want to succeed in affiliation, you cannot skip going to conferences and talking and meeting people. You must be that guy that just talks to everyone because that’s how you will build your own network of contacts. I feel that people now are a little bit lazy in this sense. There are a lot of Skype calls, but that is not enough. When I started working, I was sitting and just sending emails to all the affiliates in the whole world to try to get in contact ith them, when all I had to do was to go to different networking events and talk to people. When you build relationships and develop contacts with people, then it’s quite simple. It’s all about hard work. I know it has a big cost, but you will have a return on the investment. There are a lot of operators out there that never go to conferences and, in consequence, they struggle and find it hard to grow.
Recently, you attended G&M Events Spain 2024 and took part in a panel discussion. What were the main conclusions that came out of the debate and what is your assessment of the gathering?
It was a great event. I was also there last year, and I think there were an important number of people both times. It’s always good to meet some old and new friends. The panel in which I participated had three speakers and we talked about marketing strategies, brand positioning, relationship with affiliates, and business development. We could probably have been there talking for ages, but unfortunately the time ran out. It was a wonderful panel, and I was happy to be part of it.