The NFL season officially kicks off in September, but savvy sports betting affiliates have had the upcoming NFL season on their radar screen for months, if not, for the entire year! NFL season is the busiest and most lucrative time for any US facing online sports betting business and to make the most of it, preparing in advance and working closely with partners is critical.
Thomas Jenson of OddsPublisher.com, the company that runs Point-Spreads.com and Sports-Odds.com, has been in the sports betting affiliate business for years. For Jenson, the optimal time to start preparing for the NFL season is early summer.
“For sports betting affiliates, football season starts in June. We start seeding the search engines early with futures odds pieces including each teams odds to win the Super Bowl, Conference Odds, Divisional Odds then we break into individual team previews for both College and Pro Football”.
When it comes to some of the biggest US facing sports betting affiliates, preparation for NFL is a constant process, all year round. One of these larger affiliates stated,
“We follow player and front office movements year-round. Then when the
preseason comes it is about scanning reliable sites for information on the
team’s progress and injuries. There is a lot of reading. After that it is
about scouting tape and seeing how the teams appear physically and
mentally. We also do work breaking down schedules and we have a 15-point Statistical Indicators Checklist that we utilize to give us a read on which teams will be better than we thought and which will be worse. We compare that to the “word on the street” in terms of player and team expectations. Finally, we go back through last year’s picks and look at what we did right, what we did wrong, and what we need to improve on for this season”.
A strong working relationship between the affiliate and the book is also of upmost importance. The affiliate continued, “Basically everything we do is for our clients and if we do our job well then the affiliate relationship or advertising relationships we have with sports books just falls into place. By providing the best content possible it keeps eyeballs on our website and thus clicks to our advertisers”.
BettingPartners.com is an affiliate management program that represents several leading brands. The NFL season is a very important time for their clients and affiliates so Betting Partners does everything they can to plan ahead for the NFL football season.
Betting Partners said, “This year, for example, we held brainstorm sessions in late spring and launched our NFL preseason banners on July 30th. Regular season NFL and NCAAF banners have just been released and they will be followed by a number of creative refreshes throughout the year. We keep our partners in mind when planning and it’s important to us that they are happy with the promotional material we supply them with”.
The WagerWeb affiliate program led by Marty Davis has been busy putting together NFL promotional materials for their affiliates as they know September and October are the biggest months for acquiring new players.
Davis added, “Sports gamblers go into a frenzy the 1st week of September right as the first NFL game kicks off which means everyone should be feeling a significant sense of urgency right NOW! In the Affiliate Department we are swamped with Affiliates requesting banners, landing pages, XML feeds featuring live odds and HTML mailers for the upcoming NFL Season”.
If the books are seeing September and October as the biggest months for acquiring new players, their affiliates should also see a nice bump in commissions around this time if they’re doing things right. Jenson confirms this is true for his business and summarized with, “The work load is never ending but the reward from starting early in the summer is massive commission checks in October and November.”
