Understanding Sports Affiliation
Fenway Park from the Monster Seats. Hit a Home Run with Sports Affiliation.
By Rick Wolf
When building any online business, you need to diversify revenue streams. There are four revenue streams available to all online businesses: programmatic advertising, direct sales/sponsorships, subscriptions, and affiliate marketing, also known as affiliation.
Today, we are going to focus on affiliation.
You probably understand completely what advertising, sponsorship, and subscriptions mean. These things are likely in your everyday online life. You see an ad. You get an upsell to pay for content, services, or any value-added. With affiliation, it is a bit different.
What is affiliation?
Affiliation is a performance-based revenue model where your company earns a commission for promoting a partner company's products or services. Many companies have a core strategy using affiliates to drive their increase in customers. Affiliation will ensure you get paying customers for your marketing spend, as most deals will be as written above, performance-based.
What is sports affiliation?
Of course, your online company can send people to Amazon or Target to create affiliate revenue. Still, in sports, there is an excellent opportunity to send people to companies you know your audience is interested in. If you are running a sports information site, more than 30% of the people visiting your website are fantasy players and/or bet on sports. If you run sites specific to fantasy sports or sports betting, that number is 100%. Therefore, there is a direct correlation between those visiting your site and their desire for offers for sports betting and fantasy sports operators, services, and products.
Many companies focus on driving traffic and creating subscriptions for sports, and leave affiliation behind. There is a lot of revenue available for sports companies with some work and some technology. Here are some things you need to know to size how much revenue you can make from sports affiliation:
Google News access - the first important thing to answer is whether your brand is in Google News. If you are, you have a huge leg up in driving an audience to affiliate partners and generating customers for them, thereby generating revenue for your company.
Domain Authority - What does that mean? Domain authority refers to how Google and other search engines evaluate your URL. This is more art than science, but the length of time you have been on the active URL with the same link structure aids in making the authority higher. Google wants to be sure you are not spoofing them.
Traffic - How many unique users and page views per month does your URL generate? What is the size and engagement of your audience? Important to understand.
Now, once you have those answers, it's time to assess what is next. Of course, we want you to hire GameDay to work with you through all the ins and outs and maximize the revenues.
What we would do for you, and of course, you can do it on your own:
Model - Create a model for the audience, including potential / expected revenue, as well as costs.
Create a foundation of evergreen content - your brand needs to become a leader in the search world in the areas you are affiliated with.
Install Affiliate Management Technology - Politely collecting information about your audience and putting only offers they WANT to see is the key to success. For sports affiliation, geo-targeting is the most essential component. You don’t want to put a sports betting offer in front of someone from California. GameDay has a license to software that integrates with all websites, geo-targets, and displays offers in a priority order set by your team, delivering them once.
Create partnerships - GameDay has a partnership with a company that provides links for sports affiliation. Our partner can negotiate higher rates as they have a conglomerate of sites to distribute links and gain customers for their partners. You can make direct deals on top of those to integrate into the system.
Reporting - If partners are not skilled at reporting, you need to adjust their priority accordingly. Understanding the journey can help you adapt and make a place for your audience to be happy.
Revenues - Getting paid promptly is critical to spending to create more revenues. Make sure that reporting and revenues are reconciled monthly.
Getting Started
Once begun, half done. As you see above, it is a matter of planning and then getting going. Remember, you can decide what offers to put in front of your audience so you can start slowly. Consider a survey or a poll to see what offers your audience WANTS - making them part of the process will help you succeed without alienating them with a flood of offers they don’t covet.
So, what are you waiting for? Write to getstarted@gameday.com today!
