London, 11^th May 2012. (PRESS RELEASE) For the third consecutive year, Malta-based NetRefer has won the coveted “Affiliate Software of the Year” award at the Egaming Review B2B Awards.

The EGR B2B Awards recognise achievements from all major egaming disciplines including betting and gaming software, networks, mobile, payments, recruitment, marketing, IT and infrastructure. An audience of top industry leaders from around the world was present at the awards ceremony held at the Wembley Stadium in London on May 10th, 2012.

This year’s panel of expert judges included CEOs, board directors of public companies and well-known online gaming brands, highly successful entrepreneurs and innovators as well as key industry advisers. The judges praised NetRefer for continuing to set the industry benchmark to empower clients with the best performance marketing solution.

Julian Buhagiar, NetRefer’s Malta CEO said: “This is an unprecedented achievement – the third award in as many events, and we are immensely honored. It is testament to our team’s enthusiasm and dedication to deliver the industry leading performance marketing solution as well as personalized support and professional services to our ever-increasing client base.”

NetRefer thanks all its clients and their affiliates, for their endless support, feedback and loyalty that have ensured its position as best affiliate software provider to the online gaming industry.

So, here you are, a start up affiliate program facing an actual problem: where to find good affiliates to promote your partner program?

There are a few questions which come to mind: Where to look for the affiliates? From which websites to recruit them? Is it worth spending marketing budget on attending affiliate conferences and if there is an automated way of recruiting affiliates? All these questions point to a single one: how can a Merchant effectively recruit affiliates into his partner program in order to increase his revenues?

Here are 5 affective ways to help you out:

1.       Use of Social media.

Spend some time daily on social media searching for affiliates. The choice of the right social media channel is particularly important here. Pay special attention to the geographical area of the affiliates you target. Recent studies indicate that the use of social media channels varies from country to country heavily depending on the linguistic aspects and culture, thus it’s worth researching the social media specifics of the market which interests you.

There are many forums, groups and blogs in social networks that your potential partners might participate in. Join the most adequate groups and start communicating. Don’t forget, when speaking in a forum to abide by its rules. Avoid spamming as this can damage your reputation causing the reverse affect. Always try to offer value from your side and in return this can help good communication with many users. It’s also worth keeping in mind that direct advertising of your affiliate program or spamming comments in social networks would most probably lead to you being banned from most forums.

The secret of utilizing social networks successfully is simple: you cannot gain more value than you contribute yourself. Thus, if you bring any value you will be most welcome in most forums and groups.

Special attention in the hierarchy of social media is worth giving to Twitter; it wouldn’t be wise not to utilize its popularity. Most webmasters have their twitter account where relatively high volume of their prime activity is tweeted about. Try to find them by the key words of your industry offering and initiate communication.

2.       Search engines

Every affiliate manager would naturally want to automate most of the work of searching for affiliate partners. Nevertheless, spend some time on studying search engine results for your key words. To help yourself, make a list of top 50 websites coming up with your key words, get in touch with the webmasters offering them collaboration.

Most of the affiliate websites have partner sections which mainly serve as a link exchange tool. Checking this section opens you direct access to a network of other industry affiliates with thematically similar websites. This search method guarantees limitless access to other related partner sources which you can dig into endlessly since a number of websites will have similar partner sections.

Most of the affiliate partners that you will find using the above method would have already been engaged in promoting other affiliate programs thus, they will be familiar with various rewarding options most commonly used in the industry making your negotiation process faster and easier.

3. Encouraging sub-affiliation.

When running an affiliate program you should aim at paying maximum possible affiliate commission to your partners, ensuring that at the same time your partnership is mutually lucrative. A good way of growing your affiliate numbers is through referrals or sub-affiliation.

If you decide to use this method of recruiting new partners, you should carefully review your current commission structure, considering the fact that you will need to pay out a percentage of the affiliate earnings to the master affiliate who brought them into the program. There are various referral commission structures that you may consider offering. Most commonly used in the IGaming industry are the following: percentage from referral’s Net Revenue, percentage from referral’s reward or fixed fee on referral. Whichever commission structure you choose, keep a close eye on the revenues brought in from sub-affiliation, ensuring that this structure brings you positive results.

4. Industry conferences and events
   

There are a great number of industry events and conferences held practically every few months. The choice is vast, thus its best to focus on those which suit your company’s profile most. With the increasing number of countries where IGaming has been regulated, it’s becoming more common to hold region specific conferences aiming at merchants and affiliates operating in the market. In return this ensures effective and productive networking.  Amongst the biggest regional events recently held were IGB Espana and IGaming France. These were market specific conferences dedicated to Spanish and French sectors gathering merchants and affiliates operating in these major European markets.

Special attention is worth paying to global events spread throughout the year. These gather a great number of Operators and affiliates from various markets and industry verticals, under one roof. To name a few, LAC – London Affiliate Conference is a major event held at the end of January, Affiliate Super Show which takes place in various European cities at the end of May. There are also a few events held later on in autumn, Affiliate Conference is the major one and is generally organized in Barcelona. These events are free for affiliates resulting in a generally impressive number of attendees.

Whether your marketing budget allows you to exhibit at these venues or not, they are definitely worth attending.  Major conferences generally attract thousands of affiliates; this creates a unique networking opportunity right on the floor. Establishing direct personal contact significantly increases your chances to recruit affiliates into promoting your affiliate program there and then.

5. Direct recruitment via media channels.

Direct affiliate recruitment is something one should not underestimate. If you pay attention and apply good SEO strategy to your affiliate recruitment page, there is a good chance that some potential partners will land on your page whether referred from the search engines or other internet resources.

Direct traffic is a valuable source, therefore your affiliate program’s professional look and feel should be in your list of top priorities. The Partner program’s home page has to be striking and must clearly show to an affiliate what you are offering in terms of commission plans, products, marketing tools and payments. Once a visitor is ready to become your partner, the key element in ensuring he converts into an affiliate is a streamlined sign up process. Ideally the sign up page should consist of just key questions laid out on a single page taking the user through sign up process as fast and painless as possible. This encourages affiliate sign up bringing partners into the program and allowing them to start promoting right away.

News posts on your website or blog allows regular communication with the affiliates, keeping them periodically updated with the latest promotions or recent innovations of your affiliate program. Inform your affiliates, treat them as valuable part of your business, keep communication flowing and the results will certainly come.

Regardless of the ways you choose to find affiliates, one thing which is always important to remember is that quality of the partners that you recruit depends on the reputation of your partner program. It’s worth keeping in mind, the more trust your affiliate program projects the better is your chance to attract valuable affiliates who will generate higher revenues hence more profit.

A wave of consolidation and mergers, predicted for the industry by a few key Online Gaming publications back in April 2009, has evidently  increased three years later, when the gambling industry has undergone a series of acquisitions, which happened so fast that it suggests more consolidation will follow.

The start of this irreversible process was marked with the 888/Ladbrokes merger talks and continued by the  888/Party Gaming merger discussions that extended for years due to an agreement with US authorities that was never concluded, thus leading to a change in the course of action.

The first significant merger in the Igaming environment happened between the two gambling giants Austrian-based Bwin and UK-based Party Gaming. Their consolidation completed just a year ago in April 2011, when the world’s largest listed online gambling company was formed, bwin.party digital entertainment.

Just one month after, Igaming tabloids were flooded with yet more major acquisition news. Nordic oriented Betsson group strengthened its position in the region with the 60 million euro acquisition of Betsafe, a privately held Malta-based operator, announced on the 13^th of May 2011.

It’s hard to say whether these provoked other Gambling giants to kick off their market acquisition, but clearly this was the starting point.

One year on in April 2012 (there seems to be something ominous about this time of the year) breaking news reveals  the details of yet another Scandinavian-focused gaming firm, Unibet, who announced its 16 million Euro cash purchase of Nordic Betting group known for its brand, Bet24.

A few days were all that the gambling community had to digest this news, when on the 18^th of April, it was announced that Betsson, who’s expansion started a year ago, purchased Nordic Gaming Group, another Malta based company owning well-known brands  NordicBet, Tobet and Triobet. Through this acquisition, the  Betsson group steadily continues strengthening its position in the Nordic region.

Latest acquisition news shocked the poker world on a global scale, when on the 24^th of April 2012 industry giant PokerStars announces its intention to purchase its long-time rival Full Tilt Poker.

Reinforced by all these events, this wave of consolidations has now transformed into a tsunami swallowing smaller gambling companies and forming consolidated gambling giants that will surely survive this gaming apocalypse . The remaining question is: who will be the survivors of this market acquisition marathon?  The recent sequence of events clearly indicates that it’s now only a matter of time before the next acquisition will be announced.

GZIRA, MALTA – April 20^th, 2012

As part of an ongoing commitment to corporate social responsibility, NetRefer participated in an initiative supported by the 34U organisation in Malta. For this event, the team dedicated an afternoon to plant new trees in a rural environment. It felt great to be able to give something back to society.

NetRefer employees planted a total of 10 new trees in the national scouts’ park – a contribution to the environment in an attempt to make the Maltese islands greener.

Team NetRefer is constantly committed to worthy causes locally as well as globally and will continue to take part and further contribute by organizing many more similar events – because we care!

It is the third year that NetRefer has been shortlisted for the prestigious EGR B2B Awards for Affiliate Software of the Year.

NetRefer has been awarded this prestigious title twice, and for two consecutive years in 2010 and 2011. Thus, and equally as much as before, our entire team is excited for the upcoming event. The choice of venue for this year has fallen on The Atrium at London’s famous Wembley Stadium, that will see hundreds of the leading igaming industry representatives on the 10th of May at the night of this distinguished awards ceremony.

Team NetRefer wishes the best of luck to all shortlisted candidates!

On the same date prior to the event, Team NetRefer will be exhibiting at the EGR B2B conference also held at The Atrium, Wembley Stadium.

Do not miss the opportunity to meet our team, who will be glad to have a chat with you! Come by and visit us at the  Stand 36

Due to the steady increase of sophisticated DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks that are becoming more prevalent on web commerce sites, NetRefer has stepped up its IT infrastructure to offer protection against the detrimental and costly consequences of suffering such an attack.

IT professionals will appreciate the need for such a service and may already have some form of security in place protecting your domains. Until now, this protection did not extend to your affiliate management system.

NetRefer‘s Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) protection compliments the recently introduced ‘Services+’ range.  Supported by Rackspace, the world’s leading managed hosting service provider, DDoS protection is targeted at safeguarding against any potential attacks aimed at an online affiliate marketing solution (Admin, Affiliate interfaces and Ad server).

This additional layer of DDoS protection is managed by precise monitoring of web traffic patterns, which triggers an alert when any anomalies to the traffic patterns are detected. NetRefer has worked closely with Rackspace to ensure that traffic patterns are carefully studied and frequently profiled so as to ensure accuracy and understanding of legitimate traffic.

Julian Buhagiar, NetRefer’s Malta CEO commented: “This new service is essential to counteract the increasing threats to our clients’ affiliate ecosystem. This is one of the many NetRefer services to empower our clients with better security, protection, and above all, performance.”

For complete end-to-end security, NetRefer advises its esteemed clients opt in for DDoS protection service. Get in touch with our Client Services team today to learn more about our industry-leading web protection.

NetRefer, the leading provider of affiliate marketing software, is proud to announce the latest release of its award-winning platform. The main feature of this release is related to Geo-Targeting which enables new advanced advertising campaigns that target a specific country, region or even city. This enhances already available functionality that targets adverts according to the customer’s browser language and locale.

This release follows the success of version 4.2, delivered in September 2011. Since then, team NetRefer has worked relentlessly to provide its clients and their affiliates another set of useful updates to meet the requirements of an ever evolving market.

Team NetRefer would like to thank all its clients for their feedback that greatly contributed to the content of this release. This invaluable input empowers NetRefer to keep its position as the leader in the provision of affiliate marketing software.

NetRefer, the twice awarded Affiliate Software Supplier of the year, has launched a new initiative to its expanding range of Professional Services.  Dedicated Account Management (DAM) will compliment the current suite provided in helping to leverage clients Affiliate Programs in the ever expanding and fast paced field of Performance Marketing.

In addition to covering the basics, ensuring optimal configuration and use of the NetRefer software, DAM aims to help in aiding business and marketing decisions based on the analytics of the clients data held within the NetRefer system. A choice of three separate packages have been created to cater for various business scales and array of clients needs comprising of 10 value added components which include a reduction in add-on costs, consultancy service, detailed reporting on client set KPI’s and BI, increased levels of support, project management and regular onsite client meetings.

Team NetRefer is confident that this value added service will perfectly complement the variety of benefits that the leading affiliate marketing platform already has to offer its clients.

For more information on Dedicated Account Manager please contact support@netrefer.com.

In Following on from the themes explored in the last issue, it seemed prudent to further pursue  our understanding of Russia’s search market in relation to gaming by looking at some key tips and pointers for SEO.

According to the facts we highlighted previously, when exploring a complex market such as Russia, it is very important to consider its specifics, thoroughly understand the technology development and Internet penetration rates along with an appreciation of the cultural and linguistic aspects that heavily influence the environment within its social media channels.

These are just some of the many trends and tendencies  one would need to consider when assessing one’s entry into Eastern European’s biggest market space. Here, we will talk about the popular search engines and iGaming products which appeal to the Russian audience.

Russian search engines and the specifics of indexing

It is not a sensational  discovery to learn that Yandex.ru is the most popular search engine amongst Russia’s web users (Figure 1). According to a number of leading sources, its share is around 62 percent with the remainder split between the likes of Google, Rambler and Mail.ru.

Nevertheless, latest statistics indicate that Yandex’s dominance of the market is being challenged by Google, as the search giant continues  to claim a higher percentage of the Russian audience. Rambler’s position (the search engine has recently resigned itself to its two percent, being so far adrift of its main competitors)  is about to be taken over by the Mail.ru free email service which currently holds the remaining one percent of the top search engines. Indeed, the significantly reduced popularity of Rambler provided the stimulus for its holding company to enter into a recent partnership with Yandex.

According to Lenta.ru, Rambler Media Group’s official publication, Yandex search will be used in Rambler.ru as base technology; the latter is planning to enrich with its own services such as news, weather, cinema schedule, website rating, and more.

While Yandex is maintaining its leading position, webmasters  should adopt their site codes and practices to ensure  higher exposure amongst the local competition  in the Russian market place.

Yandex ranking specifics and link building

As with most search engines, Yandex ranking is based on the number of relevant external and internal links to the web resources. Link quality is defined by the ranking of the external linking source which, thematically, should be as close as possible to the linking website. This is a very important factor webmasters should consider when linking to third- party resources.

Below are some key points worth  considering  when aiming to increase your Yandex ranking:

• Share or outsource interesting website content to other high ranking, thematically similar websites.

• A less effective but common  practice is participating  in the link exchange networks, particularly suitable for rookies.

• Link buying using specific link exchange sources is an additional way of helping a website’s Yandex ranking and increased website traffic. It’s generally a pay-for service with monthly repayments  made to the third-party source placing one’s website links.

• An important thing which separates Yandex from Google is that Yandex doesn’t index forums, free advertising boards, guest books, e-newspapers or social networks, thus, linking from any of the above sources will not positively impact ranking in Yandex.

• Yandex ignores links on free-hosted and third-level domain websites; linking from websites not indexed by Yandex is also ineffective.

• The more external links placed on a page along with your link, the less weight this link carries with the indexing search engines. The presence of a single link on a website page significantly increases its weight during indexing.

• Last but not least, any type of link exchange has to be made with Russian resources as Yandex does not account for links from foreign websites. Conversely, link building with foreign resources may result in increased rankings in global search engines.

Gaming trends and keywords appealing to the Russian audience

Each country’s gaming market has its specifics and trends, particularly when it comes to the keywords people use to search for information. A detailed analysis of the user behaviour of Russian gaming consumers will help you to identify the keywords to target.

According to Yandex statistics, poker is the most searched for gaming product with over 570,000 monthly searches. Online Poker is extremely popular in Russia, having briefly been classified as a sport before the government  rescinded the classification. It became popular in 1998, when the first poker website, Planet Poker, was launched. The next year, its first competitor appeared on the market with the opening of Paradise Poker. Poker’s popularity and the relatively low market competition  was soon picked up by foreign poker sites, with PokerStars entering the Russian market in 2001 followed by PartyPoker in 2003.

Fast forward to the present day and, needless to say, that targeting the keyword ‘poker’ (Cyrillic spelling: ‘Покер’) is extremely hard given its overwhelming high monthly search volume.

As evident from Figure 2, sportsbook (searched as ‘букмекерская контора’) is the second most popular keyword with over 350,000  monthly searches. This product’s popularity is growing day-by-day with more and more Russian users opting for online betting, particularly due to the recent legislation restricting all Russian land- based gaming to four remote zones.

Figure 2 also indicates that roulette, currently placed third, is nearly as popular as sportsbook with monthly search volumes nearing the 350,000 mark. This game’s historical popularity across Russia has transferred to the online space, and is now enjoyed by a new generation of gaming enthusiasts.

Closing the top four list is casino, with around 200,000 monthly searches. Casino became particularly popular online after the liquidation of the land-based networks of gaming outlets. This is a great opportunity for the online casino product particularly as broadband  adoption continues  to spread across the country.

It’s apparent from Figure 2 that online bingo is not yet commonly practiced in Russia. However, the product could see good growth potential if it is integrated with online casino or skill games offerings.

Summary

For the operators exploring Russia’s complex marketplace, it’s very important to learn its specifics, regional culture and to have an in-depth understanding of the environment to ensure  any product offering guarantees  ROI. Webmasters willing to exploit Eastern European’s biggest market must adopt the best practices and key skills to optimise their businesses for Russia’s key search engines, paying particular attention to the search principles, specifics and trends. In return,  this will ensure  the target audience is reached.

Traditionally, the end of January is a busy period for the Igaming industry, with two major events taking place – ICE Totally Gaming and the London Affiliate Conference.

Most attendees agree that both ICE and LAC  were very successful this year. With thousands of participants networked under one roof, these two conferences were most definitely the largest industry events of the year.

NetRefer exhibited at both ICE and LAC events where our team had resounding success. We would like to thank everybody who stopped by our stand. Have you not heard from us yet? Rest assured that we are busy following up on all communication and you will be contacted shortly. If you didn’t get a chance to meet us at the venues, please do get in touch with our Sales team.

Team NetRefer would also like to take this opportunity to congratulate one of our esteemed clients, Comeon! who won the IGB Affiliate Awards trophy as the Best Newcomer Affiliate Program. We are delighted for your success and wish you all the best!