Industry veterans will instantly recognise the name of Phil Fraser and associate him with the birth of online bingo and affiliate marketing. With that in mind over very own, Becky Liggero Fontana took a stroll with Fraser down memory lane to speak about the evolution of online bingo and affiliate marketing in this week’s episode of The Long Con.
Fraser cut his teeth at William Hill putting together the British giant’s first online casino in 2000, when the topic of ‘online bingo’ was discussed with William Hill bosses. According to Fraser, “it was a product that would take your comfort zone with a different target audience.”
The presentation to William Hill turned out to be the ‘light-bulb’ moment for Fraser – he saw potential in online bingo. “Why am I telling people about this if I’m not going to do something about it.” That was the moment that Fraser decided to launch the first online bingo site in the U.K.
“As part of the background to this presentation, I’d set up a very simple directory, which listed all of the bingo sites at the time. There were about a dozen of them they’re all new in the U.S. and at the front of it, I had done a very simple very basic pop-up asking demographics about bingo players, so age, sex, spend, how many times he played, frequency, that sort of thing, just to pull some data together. Then some of the American bingo sites started to contact me asking to advertise on the site, and that’s how WhichBingo was born.
Fraser believes a simple old school approach can be used to maintaining momentum for affiliates:
“I started learning how to stick banners on pages and my background was advertising sales so I used to sell into magazines. I just used that model of okay I’ll put your ad on this page for a month and you can pay me 200 pounds and people started to get results so they came back and then other people came back.”
Fraser pointed out that growth for online bingo affiliates required some amount of luck. “When the whole industry left America and came to the U.K. we had this website ready going, ‘Here we are!’ So again, lucky in that way and we rode the wave and we were fortunately right place at the right time.”
In the full interview, Fraser goes onto to offer advice to affiliates on launching within the industry and talks about his journey in further detail. Don’t forget to subscribe to the CalvinAyre.com YouTube channel to see all of our new videos as they go up, and if you prefer to get your Long Con in a podcast format, you can always subscribe on Google, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify.
As mentioned in the interview, if anyone needs Phil’s services as a Business Sounding Board see www.philfraser.co.uk
