Soccer Fan Plays The Odds; Earns Affiliate Commissions

This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.

[Music]

Hello, hello, greetings. This is Chris Guillebeau for Side Hustle School. Countdown continues 12 days to go until the Side Hustle book is out. But until then, of course, we've got a lot of great stories coming up, one every day. Today, let's talk about blogging as an affiliate model.

So setting up a blog or website in which you are an authority, sending people to some other site, usually a company that pays a commission for you sending visitors that become customers. We've talked about this in a couple different ways in previous episodes. In fact, going way back to the beginning, episode number two of the show, "The Fish Tank Guy," the guy who set up a blog about fish tanks several years ago and is still getting paid $700 a month from Amazon for that neglected site. But also episode 188, which featured AutoSlash, this guy who created a company that ended up disrupting the carbonyl industry, eventually went on to make hundreds of thousands of dollars. But of course, it started as a side hustle.

Well, today's story is about sports betting, specifically football or soccer in the UK. You'll hear about a guy for whom watching soccer has been a lifelong passion, now he's figured out a way to turn it into cash. This is also a very new hustle, just started six weeks ago, but he's already seeing some pretty great results. I'll tell you all about it right after this. [Music]

Her marketing manager, Henry Francis, soccer, known as football in much of the world, has always been a big part of life.

Like many people in the UK, he grew up watching his favorite players on the big screen, playing in the schoolyard, and turning out for his local team. And that's why as an adult, he found himself spending a lot of his spare time watching and talking about the sport with his friends. He was also familiar with the casual sports gambling culture in the UK, where it's not unusual at all for people to spend a small amount of discretionary income betting on their favorite teams. Henry noticed that some people were profiting from this, and they were called tipsters. A lot of these tipsters are active on social media, and Henry spotted an opportunity.

He was already the go-to person in his group of friends for betting tips, and he figured if it was good enough for them, maybe the rest of the betting public, or at least some of it, might be interested too. So Henry created a brand called Today's Football Tips, where he recommends bets for willing punters to wage money on. We won't get into the technical details of this, partly because I don't understand them myself, but what I do understand is that the site mostly recommends high-profit bets called Accumulators, where gamblers can bet on multiple teams to win big cash prizes. Henry does research, talks to other tipsters, follows his own intuition, and publishes a list of suggested tips every day. His day job skills as a marketing manager helped him get this business off the ground.

He invested around $330 into a WordPress site and used a free theme to give it an easy-to-read style. He knew at this early stage he didn't need the best-looking site, he just needed something that provided easy access to information. So that's what he tried to create. Now, because of the nature of this business, there's also some specific legal requirements that he has to follow. Casual sports gambling is open and accepted in the UK, but the laws are stringent.

He has to be sure to display all of the correct legal documentation on his site. He also had to place links to gambling care and addiction sites and clear view on the site as well. Henry genuinely wants his customers to do well, so he was happy to do that. All right, so how do you make money telling people where to bet on a blog? Well, this is where affiliate marketing comes in.

Bets are placed through a business called a bookmakers. And when Henry recommends a bookmakers with the best odds or that has an offer for a free bet and the willing gambler signs up and makes that bet, Henry earns a commission. And not only that, he then continues to make a commission through all of the bets that gambler makes in the future with that bookmakers. This means you could potentially make money from one person for several years to come, which would of course be passive income. To maximize his profit, Henry has relationships with several different bookmakers.

He researches the best place to pick up a free bet for his loyal readers each week. This also allows him the opportunity to make multiple sales from one customer for almost the same product, since he's referring them to different bookmakers every time. Now this is a brand new side hustle. It is just six weeks in. In the first month, Henry made $520 in commission.

Now we are halfway through the second month and he's already beat that. So if you factor in the $330 startup costs, he's already made a $700 profit that he's gonna invest back into the site. In terms of marketing, Henry spends a lot of time on search engine optimization or SEO. In fact, he says he spends 80% of his time working on this hustle, trying to grow that website's authority in Google, especially ranking for the terms football tips and free bets. He still has a way to go with this strategy.

Right now he's just on the seventh or eighth pages for those terms, but he's got an action plan and he hopes to move up. A lot of people would think that the only way to make money from sports is to be an athlete. And Henry is ambitious. Even with this clear early success, he says he won't be satisfied until he's broken $5,000 a month with this hustle. That is of course a big goal, especially just six weeks in.

But hopefully he'll report back to us and let us know how things go. He's also gonna use much of his profit for the next few months to invest in improving the design and usability of the site. Now, nothing is guaranteed in life. So I don't know if I would bet on his success, but I certainly wouldn't deal him out either. [Music]

Here's this old joke.

How do you make $100 at the casino? Start with $500. You might say the same about sports betting, especially as a career or a direct source of income. But in this story, Henry has found a risk-free way to make money based on his love for soccer and his knowledge of all the different teams. So this is brand new, just six weeks, as I said.

I really like what he's done in terms of working with multiple bookmakers. I think that's smart, not only for the chance to make more money with multiple commissions, it also means he's not dependent on any one affiliate relationship. I've had a couple of affiliate projects myself that have gone well, but they've been highly dependent on one source, one company, one merchant, or maybe two. And it's a lot better if there are several competitors in an industry or several opportunities of companies that you can partner with. It was also interesting to me that Henry spends 80% of his time on SEO.

I spend 0% of my time on it, but for his strategy, it seems like it's a lot more important. He's also paying close attention to how people engage and how he can better serve those people to receive more commissions. As I said, we will track this new project and see what happens. As always, inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is so much better. Today's show notes are at sidehustleschool.com/250.

That's right, 250 episodes so far and counting. Friends and listeners, always bet on yourself. This is Chris Guillebeau for Side Hustle School. [Music]