🎙️ Behind the Betting Business: PlaySlots4RealMoney.com & Aleksandr Tihhonjuk Discuss Growth Strategies! 🚀

In this exciting episode, Brian sits down with Aleksandr Tihhonjuk, a renowned entrepreneur in the betting industry, to discuss their journeys, challenges, and strategies for success. 🌟 Aleksandr shares insights into building platforms like Top Betting Sites Nigeria and Canada Betting. Learn how these experts leverage innovation to thrive in the online betting space

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Transcript

Brian Jeacoma (00:00)
Welcome to the Play Slots For Real Money.com podcast. I am your host, Brian Giacoma. Today we're gonna talk to Alexander Tiwinczuk. Let's get started.

Brian Jeacoma (00:11)
Alright, have you done a podcast before?

Aleksandr Tihhonjuk (00:13)
I've done one, but it was work related, not really an affiliate or anything of that nature.

Brian Jeacoma (00:25)
I'm just going to start off with that, all right? How'd you get into the affiliate business?

Aleksandr Tihhonjuk (00:31)
Well, really it was just a combination of things that aligned at the same time. So until I started creating my first website, I didn't really know much about it. Then I overheard people talking about web design and how you could go the easy way or the difficult way. The easy way being mentioned is WordPress where

It's like a no code solution and you can actually do a lot of things without having extensive knowledge in that, which kind of sparked my interest seeing that I didn't really think about it all that much before, but that was about it. And then probably a few weeks later, I had a chat with a friend who worked at a casino and he, he was telling me how they have affiliates that bring in players and they get paid commissions and

Brian Jeacoma (01:20)
Mm-hmm.

Aleksandr Tihhonjuk (01:29)
how he checked out their websites and how it's easy to make one and how he's planning to make one. And it was like he was kind of my gym buddy at the time. yeah, was on my way back home. I was like, all right, that's pretty interesting. The fact that it's, you don't really need to invest a lot, at least to like create something. And then the only real thing that you need to put in is time.

Brian Jeacoma (01:40)
Mm-hmm.

Aleksandr Tihhonjuk (01:59)
in the beginning. Obviously there's much more than that but there you go that's how it started and probably a week later I created my first website which well obviously did not do anything. had very poor content, looked bad, loaded slowly and it was wrong in all the wonderful ways it can be wrong.

Brian Jeacoma (02:13)
Yeah.

So how did you start Canada-Betting.com? mean, what really inspired you? How did you start that journey?

Aleksandr Tihhonjuk (02:30)
that's yeah, I can probably start from quite far, because, the, the first website I started was, targeting Nigeria. And since I, yeah. And since I work in iGaming myself and mostly in betting, I kind of had some insights on how the Nigerian market betting wise looks.

And then also checking how the affiliate situation there is. I saw this as a sort of low hanging fruit to start getting actual clicks from Google. that was an accurate guess in a sense that with Nigeria, there's a, or at least at the time, three or so years ago, probably still the same.

It's a relatively low entry barrier to actually start getting depositing and registering users. The catch there is that the player value is extremely low. So even though you can get those depositing and paying users, they won't generate an awful lot of money or any for that matter at all, because they don't, especially on the sports side, they don't bet a lot.

But when they do bet, they win with like some crazy accumulator, like accumulator combination. Yeah. So they either lose small or they win big. And that often leaves you with a pretty big minus on your affiliate balance. And also the brands there, you don't really know, this like a legit win of a player or is this just somebody adding

Brian Jeacoma (04:02)
Okay. Like parlays? Okay.

Alright.

Aleksandr Tihhonjuk (04:26)
minus to your balance on your affiliate account. Yeah, it is definitely. You never know. It's like there's literally

Brian Jeacoma (04:28)
It's hard. It's still hard today.

Some companies we've

worked with for like over 10 years and some other ones, the new ones, any question?

Aleksandr Tihhonjuk (04:43)
Yeah, true. So you have that and you have low player value, which altogether adds up to not making an awful lot of profit off of Nigerian players. there's a good side to that. So first of all, the website does have decent traffic numbers, which means that it attracts advertisers. It attracts people that want to purchase guest posts, purchase links.

Brian Jeacoma (05:04)
Mm-hmm.

Aleksandr Tihhonjuk (05:13)
So with the Nigerian website right now, well, also it started because over time it built quite a large player base. It did start working on that front too, but I'd say it started bringing, it started generating income with links and with SEO related things a lot sooner. And that was another thing that I was.

completely unaware that it really exists because I was buying links, yes, but I never thought that you could actually sell them or resell them to an extent where that would matter and that turned out to be the case.

Brian Jeacoma (05:53)
Do you feel that was negative

on your SEO?

Aleksandr Tihhonjuk (05:56)
Yes, that's being frowned upon quite a lot whenever I talk with people. No, whenever I speak with people about this, if it's on like an event, like an industry event or like a conversation like this one, I never shy away from saying no, I have not ever seen any negative effect of that. Quite the contrary, some of the paid content on my website ranks well and generates traffic.

Brian Jeacoma (06:22)
Good.

Aleksandr Tihhonjuk (06:23)
Not all, obviously sometimes people send a really low quality article to be published. I ask them if I can alter it, if they don't mind, I do. If they do mind, I still publish it, whatever. But quite often the content that is getting submitted has some keyword research put into it. So people target a certain keyword and they...

place that content on my website. I kind of get traffic and maybe later on I can ask if I can sort of put some bits of my own onto that page. Sometimes that works together. So to create some sort of a synergy or something similar to that. So yeah, I know I haven't noticed any negative effect of selling anything really. Probably there might be some downsides to that if that is the only thing you do, but

Brian Jeacoma (07:17)
Yeah.

Aleksandr Tihhonjuk (07:18)
But that's not the case. I I always create my own content. always publish things that I legitimately write myself and research myself. there's a combination of that which I think helps to alleviate the negative effect, there is any.

Brian Jeacoma (07:37)
Yeah, no that's good. You have any, you got a lot of guides on your website? You have a form?

Aleksandr Tihhonjuk (07:44)
Yes, I actually tried a of things, a lot of different things there. tried to... I also have a YouTube channel for the Nigerian website, which doesn't have an awful lot of subscribers. I think it's like 700, but there are videos with like 30,000 views and more and they keep getting those views and I think that it's also a good option to actually get players because I was...

The videos that I create, they're kind of complementary to the content on the pages and they're really simple. I didn't think that would, that people would be interested in like watching it or searching for it, but it turned out to be a pretty helpful and videos like how to register on insert brand name. It's a pretty obvious thing. It's like, you don't really need to be a genius to register somewhere, but

the video still gets views and I can see people going from that video onto the page and then using either the promo codes or the links. So that does work and that does also help get some exposure. That's, and I don't put a lot of effort in those videos. Those are pretty much just screens, screen records. Obviously, I guess if you put more effort, then that is even better. I just don't have.

the time for that or maybe the will to do it. With forums, I have tried to create like a community page which existed for a little while, but I did not really get that off the ground. did, because I tried to kind of promote it very actively for about a few months. And while I was doing that,

Brian Jeacoma (09:22)
Mm-hmm.

Aleksandr Tihhonjuk (09:39)
I did get users, did get some discussions, some real discussions there among all the kind of bots and everything else that started spamming it. I, yeah, so I didn't really see any return or any traffic being generated other than the one that I kind of generate myself by promoting it everywhere.

Brian Jeacoma (09:50)
Yes.

Aleksandr Tihhonjuk (10:09)
So I tried to see if it will keep on existing without me pushing it. It didn't. So it just died. Maybe that's something that I'll try later on again, because I think there's potential in that. But just not now, because I'm somewhat focusing on other things. You also asked about pages with guides, and I do have some.

Brian Jeacoma (10:38)
Mm-hmm.

Aleksandr Tihhonjuk (10:39)
Actually, I have very few guides because I did not see them to help convert users, viewers to depositing players and getting traffic with guides and things like that is also a bit tricky because it is over saturated and

I mean, that's just that. It's always over saturated and there's a lot of them and I don't think that I could bring anything new to the table with guides and with things like that when there are specialized people. Yeah, exactly. And there are people and companies and websites who specialize only on that. So I have mine just for courtesy and that's about it. But

Brian Jeacoma (11:24)
There's thousand.

Aleksandr Tihhonjuk (11:38)
The things that I really capitalize on are region-specific. Region and maybe even city or province, country-specific things, which I saw always work and which are easier to compete for because the websites that I have, let's say the Nigerian one, it's a Nigerian domain. It's a .ng website and everything that I cover,

is specifically for Nigerian players. So even the sportsbook review pages, they are tailored for Nigerian players and all the kind of all the videos, all the screenshots, all the guides, all the descriptions and all the content is generated based on me viewing the Nigerian version through a Nigerian VPN and testing it out and

Also, in terms of the currencies and the available payment methods and all of that is also viewed from a perspective of a local player. So that is the thing that often lets you rank better than the more authoritative websites that kind of try to capture a general audience.

Brian Jeacoma (12:59)
Gotcha. So you had said that the helpful content update helped you.

Aleksandr Tihhonjuk (13:04)
Yeah, it did. I don't know how, I was actually reading the 20, uh, 2023 one. I was reading that people were complaining quite a lot about it, that their ranks dropped, their impressions dropped, their clicks dropped. And I, I didn't really even want to jinx it. So I didn't, I didn't kind of start any threads about it, but it kind of doubled everything for me. Yeah.

Brian Jeacoma (13:15)
Huge.

Really?

That's fantastic because the majority of people got obliterated.

Aleksandr Tihhonjuk (13:35)
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So I was really surprised to see I at first I heard about the update. I saw it's like how wonderful it is. So I wanted to go and read how good it is for everyone else, but turned out to be quite the opposite. And it kind of it really stayed almost the same with some fluctuations since then. The latest update, though, again, with some fluctuations, but I did see quite a substantial drop for a week or

even more than that. Now it's creeping up again.

Brian Jeacoma (14:09)
You're talking about the spam or the core update in December?

Aleksandr Tihhonjuk (14:12)
the core update in December. Yeah. So... Yeah.

Brian Jeacoma (14:14)
Okay, that was a big one too. I actually benefited from that. I did not benefit

from that helpful content update. One of my sites went down big time and I had good content on it. So I was definitely on the losing side there. But what else do you do to get traffic besides the YouTube and the SEO?

Aleksandr Tihhonjuk (14:21)
Mm.

Really just the two things, like, buy links, I guess. try to... The thing is with like... Again, I used to be... I used have this kind of a bit of a naive approach that it's like maybe people want to exchange or maybe like if not exchange then maybe if I create something really wonderful and write it up and add images and everything that people want to post it...

Brian Jeacoma (14:42)
Okay.

Aleksandr Tihhonjuk (15:07)
along with a bunch of links to me with specifically selected anchor texts that I would want but obviously that's not the case. I do exchange with other webmasters who it makes sense to exchange which we don't who I'm not competing with and who we are in the same niche so it's

it's fairly easy to find those and you can reach out and see if they want to exchange often they do sometimes they don't then maybe you can consider buying or or no another thing that I often do is I browse expired domains because yeah I've actually just recently acquired a couple really really great ones for

Brian Jeacoma (15:51)
Mm.

That's good.

Aleksandr Tihhonjuk (16:01)
for really nothing, that's like $15, $20 when their actual value is quite a lot more than that. So that helps as well.

I guess a jackpot if you find an expired domain of a really nice affiliate website, which I have also found, or other domains of operators that are out of business, of sportsbook operators that are out of business. That's an easy target. Just need to double check whether they're really out of business or not, but if they are, then by all means.

Brian Jeacoma (16:37)
Awesome, that's great. So just thank you for having me, having on and you want to give your socials. wants to get in touch with you.

Aleksandr Tihhonjuk (16:48)
I don't really, I'm not really a social media person, but you can find me on LinkedIn. don't know if, you can probably see my name here. So you can find me on LinkedIn by my name. And that's really the only social media I'm on right now.

Brian Jeacoma (17:03)
Nice, thank you for being on I appreciate that

Aleksandr Tihhonjuk (17:06)
Yeah, thank you for your time. Thanks you too.

Brian Jeacoma (17:08)
Alright. Have a good one.

You too.