In profile: Andy Edwards

The Mad About Bingo founder talks SEO, the importance of brand building and his plans for expanding into new verticals

In 2012 online bingo affiliate marketer Andy Edwards was faced with a crisis of a potentially monumental proportions. A month after receiving the dreaded unnatural links email from Google, the search engine giant began to roll out its Penguin algorithm update, and 90% of Edwards’ traffic was wiped out overnight.

But while many egaming affiliates were left licking their wounds following Google’s war on SEO techniques it deemed were artificially increasing search rankings, Edwards refused to sit still for long. Instead, the Mad About Bingo founder marched onwards with a strategy designed to diversify his business into the lucrative casino vertical and to become one of the first affiliates to make a concerted push into the B2C side of the industry.

It’s a strategy that’s clearly paid off. Today, the majority of the revenue for his Mad About Media business is derived from profitable white labels, which has enabled him to renew his investment into his affiliate portals. “We currently have four white labels and this is soon to be five in partnership with Progress Play which will be the big one and the one that pays my mortgage,” Edwards admits. “It’s given us a bit of money to go back into the affiliate side so we’ve come full circle again.”

From the beginning of his career in egaming affiliate marketing, Edwards has placed an emphasis on developing a brand-led strategy based around the ‘Mad About’ concept. The MadAboutBingo.com, MadAboutSlots.co.uk and MadAboutCasinos.com portals are just the beginning as he eyes a 2016 move into the sports betting affiliate market under the ‘Mad About’ banner.

And although he remains cautious in his approach, Edwards is clearly confident of success in this vertical. “We’re going to launch an odds comparison site Mad About Odds next year but we need to do that properly or not at all,” he says. eGR Digital Marketing spoke to Edwards to find out more about his future plans and how he achieved such a remarkable turnaround.

eGR Digital Marketing (eGR DM): How did you become an egaming affiliate?
Andy Edwards (AE): I used to be a business analyst for Argos and Homebase in the early 2000s but the money wasn’t very good and I quickly realised the only way I’d ever get promoted was if my boss leſt which was never going to happen. After playing poker for a few years I won a lot of money which was enough to launch the original Mad About Bingo website, which I started with my brother [and fellow bingo affiliate] Trevor back in 2006. Like typical brothers we used to argue a lot and have a competitive brotherly rivalry, but we get on better now we have our own separate companies and we still work closely together.

eGR DM: When did you realise that you could make a career out of this?
AE: Although I was working every night on it I originally just used the affiliate work as a part-time job to make a bit of money to top up my wages. I remember jumping up and down when I got a cheque through the post for about £50 back in 2006. It wasn’t until around 2007 – 2008 was when I first really started to make a good bit of money. In 2010 Trevor wanted to go to the London Affiliate Conference and he paid for me to go, which gave me a bit of a kick up the arse. And the rest, as they say, is history.

Andy Edwards

eGR DM: How easy was it getting Mad About Bingo off the ground?
AE: It was kind of set-up as a joint-venture but only really lasted a couple of months as he started doing his own thing with Sunlight-bingo.co.uk and we would argue over how many hours we each put into it. He went on to start Rovertmedia ltd, and was doing it full-time straight away, whereas I continued part-time for many years. So by 2009 he was a couple of years ahead of me, but I thought if he could do it then so could I. After going to LAC in 2010, I made a conscious effort then to leave my day job and become an affiliate full-time. I quit my job in October 2010, trained a replacement up and leſt on 26 January 2011.

eGR DM: How big is the Mad About Media operation today?
AE: There are five full-time staff members and we also use freelance article writers from Crystal Content and freelance web designers. We’ve talked about taking another person on in January and the way things are going with the white label sites we’re going to have to increase the staff. If we do Mad About Odds we’re going to need someone who’s a bit of an expert on the sports side of things. Finding these people is the hard part, especially being based up north [in Widnes, Cheshire].

eGR DM: What’s it like having your brother work in the same industry?
AE: We do actually get on, it’s just brotherly rivalry and we agree to disagree on stuff. From an affiliate point of view it’s good anyway because all these brands try to palm us off against each other and what we do as brothers is try and get the second and third spot slots and share the revenue between us. So we kind of tag team up in a way but we still have our own separate businesses. I’ll also help him out with the SEO side of things and he’ll help me out with information about new sites launching. Trevor is also going to be a 10% partner in the new PlayCasinoGames.com site I’m launching.

eGR DM: As a poker player, did you ever consider doing that full-time or becoming a poker affiliate?
AE: When my kids were born I didn’t really have time to play all the big Sunday tournaments or sit at my computer screen for hours playing non-limit Hold’em all the time. Bingo seemed more of a soft sell and because I was already doing it part time with Trevor, it just seemed like the right way to go. When I saw how much money some people were making from it I started working on the site a bit more, began advertising and swatted up on SEO. Poker ultimately just took a back seat. However, we do own MadAboutPoker.co.uk and MadAboutPoker.net but they are just sat there collecting dust because there are not enough hours in the day. We were already well-known for Mad About Bingo and that’s what was making the money.

eGR DM: What did the online bingo affiliate space look like when you first launched?
AE: To be honest, you could blag it in many ways. There were some affiliates at the time that were leading the way like Rob Hutchinson – he was like the WhichBingo of the day and the one we were all trying to outrank. There’s a friendly rivalry with the bingo because although it’s competitive it’s not as cutthroat as casino or poker and no one is trying to black hat your site or do anything untoward. We all made a killing until Google moved the goalposts. However, there will always be affiliates that just build a site for £100, black hat it to death, make about £2,000 or £3,000, it gets burned and then they just build another site. For me it was always about building a brand and I’m on record as saying that I want to build an award-winning affiliate site in every single niche.

eGR DM: Do you think the online bingo space is in a healthy state today?
AE: I think it’s quite saturated but there are still some gaps in the market which is why MummiesBingo is doing so well. Everyone’s become a bit complacent and the mentality has been if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, but I think you need to bring something new to the table. On the affiliate side, it just seems to be the same people from the early days who continue to do well. The one to beat now though is Phil Fraser’s WhichBingo.

eGR DM: Were you prepared for the introduction of the Point of Consumption tax?
AE: There were quite a few of us who buried our heads in the sand with the PoC tax even though we knew it was coming. For us, we lost a bit of traffic with Mad About Bingo and we diversified by creating some white labels so that we weren’t so reliant on the affiliate income. We’re looking to give Mad About Bingo a bit of a redesign before Christmas and get rid of some third-party partners. We have our primary partners such as Gala and Mecca, secondary partners and then those we meet at conferences and just add to the site but don’t actively promote.

eGR DM: Do you work with the majority of operators?
AE: I tend to pick and choose. I’m more of a people person, so if I get a feel for somebody we will often undercut ourselves whereas some affiliates will charge for things like banner impressions. A lot of the new affiliates demand the earth and don’t give anything back. It’s all about experience and I think you need to be so many years in to understand how it all works.

eGR DM: Does that make industry events really important for you?
AE: I talk at a lot of the egaming and SEO conferences now and sit in on some of the panels. When you get to a certain level you become well recognised, but you’ve got to show your face at these events as most of the deals are done via networking and over a beer rather than via email. When I first started out I had to put my suit on and do my sales pitch. People knowing who you are is good in a way because you can just be yourself and not pretend to be someone you’re not. With
new affiliate programmes I’d probably be the first to be a guinea pig and try them for a month to see if it works, but at the same time let them know that we have primary and secondary partners and that they’d obviously be the latter. For them to become a primary partner they need to show that they can convert the traffic we’re sending them.

eGR DM: What’s the secret to a good relationship between affiliates and affiliates manager?
AE: With my white labels I’m in a unique position now where I’m sat on the fence and I can see the affiliate and operator sides. The affiliate managers that are most approachable are those that want to work with you, understand it’s a partnership and that some things are often outside of your control with the likes of Google. Some of the up-and-coming affiliates could be next year’s super affiliates and they need to work with every single one, while at the same time giving preferential treatment to the already established super affiliates because they will be their bread and butter.

eGR DM: What prompted your move into the B2C side?
AE: I’d like to say it was to capitalise but it was actually out of necessity. We got hit hard by Google aſter losing 90% of our traffic back in 2012 when Penguin first came out and all the old school SEO that used to work suddenly didn’t. I’d just signed for a new office, had recently took new staff on and had all of my eggs in one basket with Mad About Bingo. I realised I had to get some money in quickly so we looked at white labels and that’s when we launched Mad About Slots. We could have gone down the bingo white label route but I thought it was a bit of a saturated market with too many Dragonfish skins; it was just difficult to think of something to bring to the table that hadn’t been done before. For a lot of bingo players, 90% of revenue was coming from the side games and slots anyway. Mad About Slots has since done really well and we’ve drip fed some of the money back into Mad About Bingo.

eGR DM: And you’ve continued to expand into B2C ever since?
AE: Yes, aſter launching MadAboutCasinos.com so that we weren’t so reliant on the bingo affiliate programme for revenue we had a talk with Cozy Games based on Trevor’s recommendation. The resulting product, Mummies Bingo, is now doing really well. Nektan then offered us a skin as they wanted to work with people they’d worked with in the past, so we launched TouchMobile.co.uk in February. We’ve recently been approved for an Irish and a Swedish licence and we’re now geo-targeting those markets with TouchMobileCasino.com, although I’m currently focusing more on Sweden because the Irish market is so similar to the UK. Finally, I was contacted by Progress Play and we decided to launch PlayCasinoGames.com and wait until next year to work on Mad About Odds properly.

eGR DM: Is this the first time you’ve looked beyond the UK egaming market?
AE: I kind of just stuck to what I knew. It’s got to the stage where, without blowing my own trumpet, I can get a site ranking within six to 12 months if I wanted to. Mummies Bingo just turned over £380,000 net gaming revenue in its first year and that’s with a 5% conversion rate. But if we can make that kind of money at 5%, imagine what we could do with a site with Progress Play that converts at 20% to 40%. I also think we’ll do well in Sweden because there doesn’t seem to be a lot of competition at the moment.

eGR DM: How much as a percentage of the overall business is B2C?
AE: To be honest the affiliate money we make is change compared to what we make as operators. When you get to a certain stage as an affiliate you realise that you’re only ever going to get a flat 30% or 40% revenue share, whereas as a white label partner for Mad About Slots and MummiesBingo.com we get a higher revenue share. Normally it’s a default 50/50 split, but that’s 50% revenue share off our own brands which we can advertise through our affiliate channels and cut out the middle-man to make a lot more money.

eGR DM: You’ve focused a lot on SEO in the past, have you thought of diversifying into new channels?
AE: I kind of stuck to SEO because I understood it so well and Mad About Media was always a long-term venture and never just a quick win. I always believed SEO, building brands and getting established was the way to go. I’ve never used anyone else’s money or had a venture capitalist backer – it’s always been my own money so it’s always been my blood, sweat and tears that’s gone into it. We did look at TV advertising but we never had the budget. Although a few bingo affiliates have done it in the past the cost is just stupid and you’re competing with operators with bottomless pockets. It’s the same for PPC – the prices are stupid as some of the casino terms are £40 or £50 per click. At the minute our traffic is predominantly SEO, followed by the social media and fan pages we have.