Affiliate Interview Series: Mathew | windrawwin

**GPWA Aaron** · 11 September 2013, 2:00 pm

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Age: 37
Hometown: Berkshire, U.K.
Living in: Berkshire
Favorite Food: I am not a big foodie, but I like to try anything new.
Must Read Book: Any good autobiography always intrigues me. [I]The Railway Man, by Eric Lomax, sticks in my mind.
Sites:
windrawwin.com
predictz.com

Both of your sites ?WinDrawWin and PredictZ ?offer free football tips, cover more than 100 worldwide soccer leagues, have tremendous followings on Facebook and Twitter ?and both sites pull in some serious traffic. To what do you attribute their popularity, and how would you describe the differences between the two sites?
If I had to attribute just one thing to the success of both sites then it would be pure hard work. Having only dedicated my time to the business full-time since October 2011, prior to this I had a full time job and therefore worked every spare hour I had on the sites during evenings and weekends. There are not many, if any shortcuts to success in the affiliate business anymore.

With regards to the sites themselves, I set up WinDrawWin back in 2003 and its age and organic growth are something you cannot buy or produce overnight. Both sites?popularity is due to solid organic growth and content that people want to come back and see each day, which have both in turn built a strong user base that trusts our brands and websites and more importantly finds them useful. Think of the sites you use yourself ?how often do you visit a banner farm versus another site that has solid, useful and dynamic information you want to read? Our sites are popular because of their content ?across both sites we displayed a page to a user 52 million times in 2012.

The sites are meant to have distinct objectives and differences. On first impressions WinDrawWin and PredictZ look similar ?they are not in reality. At an objective level PredictZ aims to provide more detailed analysis and statistics ?you can view over 100 leagues and five seasons of history for every team in those leagues (and we will be adding a lot more soon). There is still a long way to go, too ?we have loads of ideas and projects to expand this data. WinDrawWin is more about current data and was set up at the time to bring together current information about upcoming football games that would help punters in analyzing one team playing another. We try not to overcomplicate or over-engineer what we present to users, giving them quick and easy access to information that will help them in making their own decisions on what they will bet on in the next day or two. I remember doing the football pools when I was younger and trawling through the 60 or so fixtures on the coupon alongside the newspapers and league tables and trying to pick out potential draws. Consolidating all the potential information behind these fixtures into something you can review in 10 minutes is what drove me to develop WinDrawWin into what it is today.

Talk a little bit about using social media to help your sites become a success. It’s something many webmasters struggle with, yet you’ve seemed to succeed. What do Facebook and Twitter bring you, both in terms of community and traffic? Which have you found more useful? Or are the two audiences different?
The popularity of our sites and our loyal user population are a good fit with Facebook and Twitter. Conversely, if you have a website where only 20 percent of your users are return visitors then you may also find it difficult to get them to stick on Facebook and Twitter.

To be honest I do not think we have scratched the surface on Facebook or Twitter. Our first post on Facebook was November 2010, so we have not been active for very long. Like many webmasters my view on it at the time was “Facebook is a waste of time,?“Facebook will not be around in two years?and “Why would I spend loads of time posting on a website outside of my own website??However, my partner, Claire, who also works in the business, convinced me that it was something we could not afford to ignore.

Webmasters must recognize where and how Facebook and Twitter fit into their business ?they are not one and the same thing. Twitter is much more instant and what you post appears in people’s Twitter feeds immediately. If your followers also follow a thousand other accounts then your tweet may only be seen for a few seconds, if at all. Facebook is more communal in my experience. People can post on your page and you can get a discussion going. However, both Facebook and Twitter provide an invaluable way of getting your website recommended to other people. Personal recommendations are invaluable in any business. I like to view social media first as an outlet for my useful content, and the traffic growth and revenue will naturally come from that.

You have to approach social media with caution, though ?I think many websites use it primarily to push advertisements to their followers. Followers soon get bored with this and there is definitely a balance to be achieved between content and advertisements. Again it comes down to that common rule when operating websites ?think organically and sustainably. If you post too much content that people are not interested in you will soon get more unfollows than follows.

What tips can you share from your social media experiences that other affiliates and webmasters will find helpful?
You just cannot afford NOT to have a social media presence these days, even if you think it will not make you any direct revenue at first. Customers will look for you on Facebook and Twitter, and if you do not have a presence and your brand becomes popular then you can bet that someone will register your name or try to impersonate you, like I found! Someone e-mailed me asking me whether a URL was my official Facebook page and it turned out to be a scammer taking payments for football predictions!

Ban and report the spammers and scammers on your Facebook and Twitter accounts. Do not just let everyone and anyone follow you (I would probably have at least 10-20 percent more followers than I do today had I not banned and blocked unscrupulous followers). Initially you will get a whole host of scammers coming out of the woodwork, viewing you as a fresh new account that they can follow and ultimately scam your followers. If you follow this policy the scammers will soon learn that it is wasted effort trying to scam you. I see Twitter accounts with thousands of followers but when you look into them you find they are mostly people trying out scams, offering ways to get x thousand new Twitter followers, and followers who are obviously not interested in that Twitter account content and are just following everyone and anyone to try to boost their own profile. There is an art to getting the right number of followers compared to the number of people you follow yourself. As always, organic, real growth is key. It is crazy that people buy Twitter followers to try to boost their image and profile. It is a case of Groundhog Day in my opinion ?remember all the people who paid for backlinks two or three years ago, and they are now getting hammered by Google on ranking? I have heard stories of people now paying for poor backlinks to be removed because they are damaging a site’s SEO!

Other advice I would give would be to weigh up how much effort you are going to put into social media. I have worked for companies that dedicated up to 10 full-time people to social media! That is a bit over the top in my opinion. It is difficult to build a viable business case for spending time on social media, but it is one of those intangible business benefits that you cannot easily measure through revenue. Having worked as a business analyst in the aviation industry for 12 years I know a lot about doing speculative projects that do not have much direct immediate revenue benefit! But sometimes you have to look beyond revenue and think about other benefits.

You clearly spend a lot of time on content. Some of your content takes the form of news. Some of it takes the form of predictions. How much time do you spend on updating content? Do you spend more time on the predictions or the news?
Yes, our vast array of content is something that makes us stand out ahead of the competition in my opinion. If you are just starting to put together a new affiliate website then it is so easy to throw up a load of banners and hope for the best, but if you want to grow a large and successful website you have to have unique and useful content. Our websites require full-time attention to publish and keep the content up to date. There are no easy shortcuts to producing websites with good content ?many people reproduce free news feeds or replicate content from elsewhere on the Web. This is bad for SEO and in today’s Internet world will be found out by the likes of Google and ranked down accordingly. If you have the time and the motivation I would always recommend putting together your own content.

News is a new thing for us. I want to do a lot more in that area. Again it is one of those things that takes a lot of time and you start to think that it does not generate enough revenue or benefit to outweigh the cost of doing it. However, good content is invaluable and although one news story in isolation may not generate the revenue that outweighs the cost of writing it, the side benefits of having that news story on a website compound over time.

With regards to the predictions, while working on my Master’s degree I obtained a PhD-level background in statistical analysis through choosing all the really tough statistics classes (!), so that really helps on the predictions. I knew there would be a use for it one day! We have therefore built up tens of thousands of lines of code over the years. This enables us to automate a lot of the content in that respect although the predictions model itself does require manual tweaking and input to get the very best out of it.

You have a pretty impressive compilation of statistics. Where do you get the information? And how do you manage it?
We pay for a small amount of base data (fixtures and results) from a sports data provider. Everything else you see on the sites is calculated and produced by us. Many people pay for feeds of this type of information, but if you have a good coder in your business and someone who understands a little about statistical analysis then you can produce it yourself. We probably have double the amount of statistical analysis you see on the websites hidden away behind the scenes and ready to be used once we have made it user friendly. There is no point in displaying data that users do not use and quite often anything you display on a website is best done right the first time, rather than putting something up that is inefficient and then corrected at a later date.

We know from experience that managing a forum is hard work. What do you like most about managing your forum? What do you like least? And how much time does it take you to manage it daily?
Our forum has a large number of users, but it is not as important as Facebook or Twitter. I am starting to think that forums are a thing of the past now, and I am not sure that Google and other search engines are not starting to look down on some low-value content that is produced via forums or published using content management software such as Joomla! or WordPress. Do not get me wrong, these methods of producing Web content can provide some excellent websites too, but in my experience a lot of what is written on forums is low-value content, badly written, incorrect and misleading, difficult to navigate and sometimes uncontrolled, not moderated and ultimately spammy.

The thing I dislike about running a forum, or any form of user interaction with a website, is that it opens you up to spam, and spam means more work for you. If you are going to run a forum make sure you have a good administration page that shows you all the posts that are being made. This will allow you to quickly moderate anything you do not like. Forums, or any method of user interaction (for example, the ability to comment on content and the ability to communicate with other users), open you up to spam and initially you may spend half of your time just banning the spammers who post trying to sell fake handbags, advertise their own websites, and the multitude of other types of spam. Get some good forum software, or write your own code to detect spam by keywords and phrases or outward links. Ban the users and their IP addresses. Take a hard line on any spammers because if someone is going to spam or be abusive to other forum posters then they are just going to cause you trouble, and effort, in the future. I have seen websites completely ban all IP addresses from certain countries because those countries generate the most scammers (projecthoneypot.org is a great resource). If you do not make any money from that country, and website users from that country cause you more work than it is worth, then this may be a viable option. There are probably better ways these days of building a community or communal feel on a website if that is your objective for a forum.

How important is the sense of community you’ve developed to the success of your sites?
In my opinion a sense of “community?equates to visitor loyalty, trust, feeling of belonging or membership, familiarity and ultimately all the things that lead to visitors coming back to your websites. For sure, you can run a website without this, but if you do you will face a constant battle (and probably some quite large advertising costs) to try to gain new visitors if you do not attract a good amount of repeat customers. Seventy-five percent of our traffic is return customers, and every day if just a few of those people tell their friends about our websites then they will grow. The more people trust and value your website the more likely they are to tell their friends about it. When people talk about “community?I do not think of it as all of my users getting along together like one big happy family. Again, I think of it more in terms of trust, loyalty and familiarity ?a “communal?feel. For example, people might go to the same pub every weekend for years, not because they know all the people in the pub, but perhaps because they like the sense of familiarity and know what they are getting.

Both of your sites do a good job in featuring matches that are being live streamed online. Why did you choose to emphasize this? And has it been a successful strategy for you?
Live streaming is important these days ?but expensive for bookmakers to obtain the licensing for; hence only a few bookmakers have really monetized this well. Something like 40 percent of all betting is now done in-play.

Not many operators offer live streaming, and for those that do it is difficult for the affiliate to target this information to the correct visitors who can actually view those live streamed games because not all games are available to watch in every country due to licensing rights. However, live streaming is a useful addition to our content.

The problem I expect a lot of operators have is competing with the likes of the illegal streaming sites. One downside to advertising live streaming is that you might find the majority of your website users disappear at 3 p.m. on a Saturday to go watch 90 minutes of football! Also, compared to other types of links to advertiser websites, live streaming advertising is more difficult to convert into revenue ?most bookmaker sites have only a small requirement for customers to have funds in their account to allow them to watch live streaming. It does not necessarily lead to large conversion rates, playing players, or long player retention.

What events do you find punters really enjoy betting on? What events do they least enjoy betting on?
The big events are always popular ?Champions League, FA Cup, English Premier League ?but strangely enough a lot of our users come to our sites because we offer such vast coverage of worldwide football leagues. If you want analysis on the Iranian Premier League ?we’ve got it! Many of our customers look way beyond the English Premier League and look for odds value in the lower leagues where the odds pricers may have had a little more difficulty in setting the right prices. People e-mail us or tweet us telling us about some eightfold accumulator they have won from following our Slovakian predictions!

With regards to the least popular events, I think people tend to stay away from competitions such as the Europa League and the lesser cup competitions like the English League Cup. With good reason, too ?it is difficult to predict these games until you know the team news before kickoff as many teams do not take the competitions seriously.

How did you become involved in the industry, and what did you do prior to becoming involved in online gaming?
I have always been interested in IT, but my background is quite varied. I have an undergraduate degree in Environmental Science, and a Master of Science in Parks, Recreation and Tourism Management. I lived and studied in the USA for three years, but I finally found my way back to the U.K. to work for a large worldwide airline. I worked my way up from a programmer to a lead business analyst, facilitating multi-million-pound projects. In 2003 while still working as a programmer I took an interest in Web development, picked up a book on coding and started to knock together some ideas at home. I did not have any initial goals of setting up a huge worldwide website at the time ?I was more interested in gaining the Web skills for my CV. As I was interested in football I started to put together Web pages based on my interests and it started to grow and grow. I then realized that you could make a bit of money from affiliation so signed up to a couple of programs and at least made a small amount to cover my hosting costs, and it grew from there.

As with most people you speak to who run a business, I had tried and failed with a number of other ideas before finding my way in football related sites ?I developed shopping- and travel-based websites and numerous other ideas. I quickly found that the business models were not going to work for various reasons and cut my losses and started on new ideas. I have at least three mothballed websites at the moment that I am trying to work out what to do with. Some may evolve into new websites, and some may just become another idea that sits on the scrap heap.

When did you launch your sites?
WinDrawWin.com in 2003 and PredictZ.com in 2009.

How long did it take for the sites to start earning money?
They made a little money within months. To be honest, though, working full time and managing a website meant that I neglected it a little at times. I was actually more focused on growing the content and the sites themselves than making money, which sounds bizarre but in turn worked out well. I suppose that is a result of having the luxury of an income while you are building a website ?you do not have to worry on day one about where your next pay day is coming from; instead you can focus on building strong content and a good website that grows organically. It would be the same with setting up an offline business ?I would always prefer to ease into that while maintaining other income sources if I had the choice.

How have your sites changed, and how have your players changed, in the time that has passed since you launched the sites?
Our sites have changed a number of times and evolve every month. Take a look at the archive. Some of the design we were putting out back in 2003 kind of looks embarrassingly amateur now and old-fashioned, but then again take a look at photos of yourself wearing that knitted Christmas jumper and sporting a dubious hair style 10 years ago and you will probably think the same! My point is, the Web (like fashion) moves on so quickly and you have to keep up with the latest developments. It is difficult to keep up, but as long as you are doing something to evolve all the time then you are probably ahead of most of your competition.

I would not claim our sites are the height of Web design at the moment or “bleeding edge,?but they work, and there is a place for well-structured content and sensible design that our users want to see and find easy to use. It is important to develop websites slowly and to not distract users, especially when you have a strong, loyal user base.

In terms of our players or customers, the biggest change over time has been our global growth. At first our websites primarily focused on the English leagues and our previews were handwritten each week and mainly attracted U.K. visitors. We now cover more than 120 worldwide leagues and we get traffic from almost every country in the world. Take a look at our Alexa rankings ?we are in the top 500, if not the top 100 websites in some countries. Some of this traffic is low value, but if you are going to develop a popular website with worldwide appeal then you are going to have to accept you will get traffic from all corners of the globe.

What traits do you look for in an affiliate manager? How about in an affiliate program?
This is the most important question in this interview and the most important thing for any affiliate to consider!

In an affiliate manager, communication and a willingness to work with you are key to success. I do however acknowledge that affiliate managers do not have the time to work closely with every single affiliate as they are often managing thousands of affiliates. I do have some sympathy for affiliate managers because I know how hard they work and how many people they try to keep happy all the time. So, when I see affiliates complaining that their manager did not get back to them for a week when they e-mailed them, then I can sort of understand. But it is frustrating when you have a question and cannot get it resolved. In the spirit of the direction that SEO practices and Google are moving towards these days, perhaps each affiliate program needs to run some sort of community or forum where affiliates can get issues and questions resolved (even by affiliates talking to each other) rather than 40,000 affiliates all firing e-mail to one or two affiliate managers.

I have worked with a lot of really good affiliate managers who, looking back, spent a lot of time working with me on getting things done. I have to therefore give big mentions to Adam Webber, formerly of bet365 and now Wagershare.com, who has exhibited the gold standard in affiliate management since I have worked with him. All the affiliate managers at bet365 are excellent, to be honest. Other excellent managers include Garry McGibbon and Simon Dackombe at StanJames, Graeme Hoyne at Blue Square, Adam Kalmanson and Aaron Yarm at William Hill, Craig van Flute at SportingBet and Elina Basheva at 10Bet. I have probably missed a huge number of other people from that list who have helped me, so I apologize in advance if I have! In contrast, I have also worked with a lot of affiliate managers who just blanket e-mail everyone asking for top position x on your homepage and hope for the best, which is not as effective in my experience.

It is also important to be able to meet your affiliate manager once in a while. I am based just outside London so it is easy for me to go to the various affiliate social events and conferences throughout the year to meet face to face.

With regards to affiliate programs ?they must be as transparent as possible. I am happy to push any suitable brand for a few months that fits our website content, and to be patient in waiting for that advertising to generate a return, but only if I trust the affiliate program. It is surprising to read on the likes of the GPWA, Affiliate Guard Dog and other forums that many affiliates are quite untrusting of affiliate programs, so I feel this point is probably echoed across many affiliates.

I have far too often found that tracking links do not track; they disappear or become disabled over time. Thousands of clickthroughs strangely do not turn into signups, and hundreds of signups do not convert to depositing players. These and other problems have led me to question whether the effort we are putting in is being optimized and rewarded. For example, if you have sent 30 signups to an advertiser and you have achieved only one new depositor then alarms bells should be ringing on both sides ?for both the affiliate and the advertiser.

More recently I have been on an efficiency drive to analyze and create a lot more transparency in my own affiliate statistics. I would recommend that affiliates benchmark their own statistics across their advertisers ?know how many clicks it takes for you to achieve one signup with a good advertiser, how many signups it takes for you to get a depositor, how much turnover and revenue you generate per player, and compare this to everyone else. You can then make informed decisions about which advertisers work well for you.

We are actually now slimming down on inefficient, nontransparent and unfriendly affiliate programs. These are programs for example that do not make us enough money for our clicks compared to efficiently converting programs, or ones that are starting to change their terms and conditions so that they are less in favor of affiliates. That is not to say we might not switch back and advertise them in the future. Keeping advertising fresh helps conversion.

On the positive side the good affiliate programs provide trustworthy stats, reliable affiliate systems that are available throughout the year and do not have downtime or data errors, and programs that pay promptly. The ability to form a good relationship with an affiliate manager is essential. I have actually promoted programs for months without making a single penny but have continued to work with these programs primarily based on the willingness of an affiliate manager to work with me and stick at it. Over time the conversions have eventually materialized due to hard work and perseverance.

One thing that really encourages me to advertise a program is a good set of advertising media. When you log onto an affiliate system and you see tens of thousands of banners that are all miscategorized and out of date it does not give you much confidence in advertising that company.

Mobile gaming and social gaming are attracting legions of new players to online gaming. What if anything are you doing to bring these people to your sites?
We are looking at mobile options at the moment. We get a significant proportion of our traffic from mobile devices. However, my train of thought is that many of these mobile devices have gone full-circle now with regards to Web usability.

We have gone from PC-based customers using Web browsers, to people using tiny screens on phones, to now where people are mostly carrying around a PC in their pocket with a screen resolution larger than most people had 10 years ago anyway! For those people surfing on a new Samsung S3 or an iPhone 5 our sites render pretty well on those screens, and anyone with a tablet can use the full website anyway. I would advise anyone to dig a little into their Google Analytics and actually see which devices are being used to view your websites.

We are not complacent, though. It is not to say we do not have a need for mobile; we do already optimize advertising to our mobile users.

How much time do you devote to SEO and/or social networking in order to drive more traffic to your sites?
SEO is a natural, ongoing process for us. We do not set aside a certain amount of time to it. As for social networking we do try to post on social media every day, so perhaps 30 minutes to an hour on average. Some days, however, we might spend five hours hitting Facebook and Twitter ahead of a busy weekend or popular sporting event.

If you had to pick five keys to success as an affiliate, what would they be?

Hard work ?there are no shortcuts to building a good affiliate website.
Prioritization and being objective ?if you are not careful you can spend all your time doing worthless tasks.
Choosing the right advertisers, working with those that perform well, and ultimately moving on from those that do not perform or fit with your website content and visitor profiles.
Understanding your visitors and their needs ?this will help you optimize your content and ultimately your revenue.
Be open minded ?being able to put aside your own biases and how you use the Web and assuming everyone else is just like you! And be open to new ideas.

What prompted you to join the GPWA? How has it helped you?
I had been meaning to join the GPWA for a long while. The GPWA is an essential for any affiliate and going to the conferences may be, for many affiliates, the only chance they get to meet the companies they advertise. LAC is great, and Barcelona had its advantages too, being a smaller get-together. I only started going to the conferences last year, because I thought it was time to network and expand my horizons. Since running the websites on a full-time basis they have now become a serious business rather than a sideline hobby, so the GPWA and industry events are essential.

If you could change one thing about the industry, what would it be and why?
Make it more transparent. There are loads of things advertisers could do to make the industry more transparent. I am not saying the industry is largely unethical, but when you do not have as much transparency as people expect then people start to doubt, rumors spread that can sometimes be misleading or incorrect, and in general mistrust sets in.

I would love to see better ways of tracking rather than the cookie-based tracking we all rely on today. Privacy laws, toolbars that try to protect the user, antivirus programs and anti-spyware programs, and the way new browsers are being designed to protect privacy are all the enemy of affiliate marketing. There must be a better way to do things than cookie tracking, and those advertisers that are leading edge and the first to introduce better ways of ensuring clicks are tracked will steal a march on other companies. Cookies can remain but I would like to see other safety nets introduced to ensure affiliates are rewarded for their efforts.

A truly independent way of tracking and publishing affiliate statistics and earnings would also provide ultimate transparency. Some affiliates I have spoken to do not advertise certain companies because of their mistrust ?sometimes misguided and sometimes not ? in affiliate program statistics. Some affiliates perform tests on their links that sometimes prove that tracking and revenues are not representative of what is really happening for whatever reason.

One easy solution to resolve this lack of trust would be a sort of “secret shopper?type approach. For example, every advertiser could suggest to affiliates that they are open to the affiliate putting through test accounts through their links at random times. These test accounts and revenue generated could then be validated in affiliate statistics as long as account-level information is provided by default in affiliate systems. I feel that any affiliate program that introduces something like this will do very well with regards to gaining more advertising exposure with affiliates if the changes lead to more trust being gained from affiliates.

What surprised you most about the industry?
Well, I must say the girls dressed only in body paint at LAC last year did surprise me ?a lot! ?but I believe they are not allowed this year. I am always surprised at how many new companies keep popping up at every conference you go to. I am also surprised how much money some affiliates can make from this industry. Many affiliates are large companies now and produce a surprising amount of turnover per year from affiliation.

What do your family and friends think of your work as an affiliate?
Some of my friends think I roll out of bed at 11 a.m., have some lunch, check the websites are still up and running, then spend the afternoon watching Deal or No Deal. I try to tell them that running two large websites is certainly a full-time job, and more (have you seen the bags under my eyes lately?), but some still do not understand that this is the case.

How long do you give yourself for answering e-mail? What e-mail tips can you offer?
It is difficult to keep up with everyone. When affiliates complain their affiliate manager did not get back to them, then just think about your own e-mail inbox and whether you would reply to everyone if you had several hundred e-mails coming in each day. I do try reply to the important e-mail within the day, if not within an hour. I also try to keep my inbox to one page. If you have not addressed e-mail from two weeks ago then revisit it, assess whether you need to reply, and file it if you do not.

How do you manage your “to-do?lists? Do you use any special software to help you out?
Whiteboard and marker pens! I have a lot of experience in working with the Agile methodology in IT software development so a lot of how I manage my time and projects for the websites is driven by that past experience.

What’s the hardest thing about operating your sites, and what annoys or distracts the most when you’re trying to get some work done?
I am the sort of person who likes to do the tasks I am interested in ?that is a personal weakness I recognize, though. It is difficult to keep disciplined on doing tasks that make you money but might not be the most interesting. The most difficult thing about operating my sites is keeping up with advertising. The next person I employ will be solely dedicated to advertising tasks. There is so much to do all of the time to keep advertising fresh and targeted. The most distracting thing is usually the sheer weight of ongoing tasks and ideas. We probably have at least two years?worth of development projects ready to go for the websites. Prioritization and being objective are key to making sure that you can focus on the task at hand.

If someone were visiting you, what’s one place you’d definitely take them to see?
There are plenty of great places to visit around where we live (we are just about to move, actually) ?Ascot race course, Windsor Castle, Windsor Great Park . . . LEGOLAND! Depends on who that someone would be, really. There are also plenty of great pubs around us, too.

What’s your favorite vacation spot?
Road trips are my favorite type of holiday, in particular the USA. However, I would not recommend doing a road trip through Bosnia ?my experience of being robbed by the local police kind of put me off going back! As for the USA, Utah is an amazing place ?we were lucky enough to get to hike into Coyote Buttes the other year and also saw Antelope Canyon ?check them out on Google! A good road trip through California is a great option for anyone thinking of doing one.

You’re producing, directing and starring in a movie. You need a costar, and your significant other is either unable or unwilling to participate. Who should share top billing with you?
Depends on the type of movie. If we are talking comedy, then Jim Carrey is not everyone’s cup of tea but he would be great to work with. Apparently he is a perfectionist, though, and retakes every scene more than twice ?that would do my head in. As for female costars I would have to go for someone like Cameron Diaz ?she seems pretty down to earth and does not take herself too seriously and has done some great comedy films.

If you could invite any five people, living or dead, to dinner, who would they be?
The Queen, President Obama and the three highest eBay bidders for the other seats. I would become a millionaire overnight. Thank you very much, Your Majesty and Mr. President.

What are three things that nobody knows about you?
Well, there is not a lot that nobody knows about me, but many people do not know that (1) I spent three years out in South Carolina in the 1990s doing my MSc and teaching undergraduates soil science! I am still trying to find a niche website for that! (2) I had meningitis and spent 11 days in intensive care back in 1993. (3) I flew the Concorde to New York (as a courier!) before that aircraft was retired.

**IhreConsulting** · 13 September 2013, 5:06 am

Hi Matthew
Thanks for sharing more about you and your sites!
I personally love these interviews and learning more about the people we speak to on email.

Claire

**Marit VS** · 13 September 2013, 7:09 am

Haha!

I love your response to the dinner question!

"The Queen, President Obama and the three highest eBay bidders for the other seats. I would become a millionaire overnight. Thank you very much, Your Majesty and Mr. President."

How to make money out of any situation

**webanalysissolutions** · 13 September 2013, 8:24 am

Thanks guys, appreciate the feedback. This interview was actually published back in February I think in the GPWA edition that came out around LAC.

Both sites still going strong and expanding all the time. Have tried a lot of different advertising and affiliation, but as with all affiliates it's just a case of trialling things and seeing what works with your visitors.

Thanks Marit

Will do a little more promotion on Aff Republik brands - hard for us to convert as we're mainly sports focused, but we'll try again. I know we talked briefly at LAC - will probably catch up with you at BAC - I'm looking for some more tips on converting sports visitors over to casino.

Thanks Emma, I've already been in touch with Peter and we'll set up a meeting at BAC with regards to trying out a couple of brands on your list.

Cheers,
Mathew

**Afflabs** · 13 September 2013, 10:35 am

Haha

Whiteboard and marker pens!

**webanalysissolutions** · 13 September 2013, 10:58 am

Originally Posted by jamie.edwards

Haha

Whiteboard and marker pens!

and the majority of my to do list in my head

Who needs technology?

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