Interview with Mr. Dragomir Ivanov – The Creator of Elegance Design
WorldStreet sits with Mr. Dragomir Ivanov, Founder of Elegance Design, one of the leading affiliate website design companies in the world today.
In the lovely town of Veliko Tarnovo, right in the middle of Bulgaria, we visited the head offices of E-Legance. We were warmly welcomed for a visit and an insightful conversation with the company founders. The growth of the company is visible everywhere. The office is perfectly converted into a modern working place, with all amenities for developers and designers looking for long term careers in the business.
The trick is to turn beautiful designs into super-fast responsive web sites that work perfectly on every device. Dragomir Ivanov
We wanted to discuss the design and making of the much-demanded affiliation sites that have exploded in popularity in recent years. Key points that we got were.
How to Make a Great Affiliate Website? 7 Key Factors to Consider.
1. Choose Your Market Niche Carefully
5. Be Social and Become Recognizable
Dragomir was kind enough to elaborate in detail on each of his key points:
1. Choose Your Market Niche Carefully
This is the first thing you should consider before starting your affiliate project. Here are the first five steps to follow when choosing a niche:
a. Popularity
Choose a niche that is in high demand, with a large number of potential players and a growing market.
b. Competition
Consider the level of competition in the niche. If already many established websites exist, gaining a foothold may be more challenging.
c. Profitability
Research the potential earnings in the niche, and consider whether it will be a sustainable source of income.
d. Knowledge
Choose a niche that you have knowledge about and interest in. This will make it easier to create content and promote the website.
e. Legality
Ensure the niche is legal, and check if your target countries are legal. Otherwise, you might end up with a blocked website for entire GEOs or, even worse – a sentence.
2. Choose the Proper Technology
It’s also super important to stand on a robust and scalable technology stack from the beginning. This will save you a lot of hustle once you get bigger.
a. Platform
Choose a platform that is easy to use and allows for customization, such as WordPress (for iGaming, Financial, VPN, or hosting affiliation) or Shopify for eCommerce affiliation. These platforms have a wide range of templates and plugins available, which can help you create a professional-looking website quickly and easily.
If you are going with WordPress or Shopify and can afford it – hire someone professional to create a custom theme that fits your niche’s exact needs. Don’t just go with a 50 bucks starter theme.
b. SEO
Look for a platform that is built with SEO in mind and allows you to cover all recent SEO minimums like:
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- Meta tags.
- Dynamic sitemaps.
- Schema for all rich snippet support.
- SEO-structured source code.
c. Mobile-friendliness
Make sure the platform you choose is mobile-friendly and responsive, as more and more users are accessing the internet via mobile devices. In some markets & niches, the mobile traffic is 90%+.
d. Speed
Website speed is essential for SEO and user experience, so choose a platform that loads quickly and is optimized for performance.
Few vital factors to keep your speed score in the green area (90+ in Google Speed tests):
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- Use fewer plugins that reflect on your front end. Better to keep all those in the theme.
- Use server-side caching as much as possible.
- Use a CDN service like Cloudflare.
- Use modern & optimized formats for images & videos.
- Try to lazyload & pre-fetch as many assets as possible.
e. Analytics
Make sure the platform you choose has built-in analytics or easily integrates with third-party analytics tools to help you track your website’s performance and make data-driven decisions.
3. Be Unique – Content-Wise
If you are planning to run an affiliate website, this means you will be doing content marketing, and as you know – content is king.
If you have done your research already, you’ve probably found hundreds of websites in precisely the same niche & market that you are planning to go to (if not, you have found a gold mine).
No matter if we are talking about review pages, comparison charts, video reviews, or infographics. Whatever you make – make sure it’s unique and gives value to your visitors.
Writing a 500-word blog post or a review that rank is no longer working in any niche and market. Either 5000 words with “walls of texts” is no longer a solution.
You should craft each of your pages (whether it is a review, a comparison, or a blog post) with an extreme amount of value that engages visitors, meets their needs, and answers their questions.
Prepare your content in a way that you will be proud to share in every social media. Don’t create content for google only.
4. Spend the Extra Mile
Here are some great tips before you plan your work:
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- Don’t be average.
- Don’t make what everyone is making.
- Check what the “big guys” are making in your niche, and plan how to improve it. How to make more of it. Since the start.
- And this is not always about money. It’s about creativity and consistency.
5. Be Social & Become Recognizable.
Social media is frequently neglected when it comes to SEO marketing. However, if you want to have a strong presence on the market, you should keep your social media channels up to date.
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- Try to find the best social media channels that fit your audience in their market.
- Show yourself, show your expertise and keep reminding them daily about you.
6. Experiment, Measure
As an affiliate/content marketer, you will primarily rely on big traffic channels like Google, Facebook, Youtube, Linkedin, etc.
a. Experiment: You might already know the key tactics to follow for each traffic source. But probably, there are even more tactics that you don’t know about because you have not tried them yet.
You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.
b. Measure: One of the most extraordinary things that digital marketing allows us to do is measure everything. Set your KPIs correctly and find the proper way to measure them.
As top KPIs, you should always have the following:
- Incoming click cost
- Outgoing click value
Try to divide those in:
- Traffic channel
- Geographically
- Content-types
Then you will clearly know what works best for you.
7. Repeat
- Repeat everything from points 3 to 6. Daily.
- No one becomes successful overnight (especially with SEO).
- You should be patient and consistent with everything you do with your affiliate business.
The Interview
Dragomir has led a fascinating success story in online entrepreneurship. Polina Dimova from WorldStreet asked him these exciting questions:
How did you start the company Elegance Design?
– Dragomir: When I was 13 years old (in 2003), we had a graffiti crew called Zonar Brothers by that time. I was looking for a way to create a website to showcase our graffiti to the world, so I found a fancy technology for the time (Macromedia Flash) and made our first website.
Then I started participating in IRC tech groups and forums and started getting some freelance work to cover my teenager costs. I remember the first website I built for a customer and got paid 50 Leva (which is ~25 Euro). I was the richest kid in school for a week!
Then with the years, it became a business, so then I started hiring people and slowly growing the company.
Interestingly, my first in-house employee from 2006 is still in the company.
What are the key advantages of Elegance Design on the market?
– Dragomir: We’ve been serving customers from the iGaming affiliation market since 2012. Since then, we have launched over 120 affiliate projects in different verticals and GEOs. So I would say our most significant advantage is the experience in the industry.
What makes an online casino affiliate site successful?
– Dragomir: Read the first 7 points in my presentation above 🙂
What are the costs of making an excellent affiliate site?
– Dragomir: It really depends on the needs of the project. Technology-wise – you can start with €200, €2,000, or €20,000+. Depending on how far you’d like to go and how unique you’d like to be.
Where is the Casino Affiliate industry going in the coming years?
– Dragomir: In my eyes – it’s still a growing industry. Growing and changing on a daily basis. Casino affiliates are facing regulation, competition, and SEO (google updates) challenges. What is for sure – it’s getting harder and harder for new iGaming affiliates to get traffic. So the best time to start was yesterday.
Why should affiliate companies use professional help?
– Dragomir: Half of our affiliate customers used to be in the “one-man show” business. For years. At some point, you should focus on growth and leave different departments of a business to professionals. I’m not only talking about it tech-wise but in all aspects.
Please describe the essential services that Elegance provides to clients.
– Dragomir: We cover the spectrum of affiliate websites’ needs in design, development, and content management.
Most of our customers are hiring us for the following:
- Branding/logo/concept designs.
- UI/UX design.
- Custom WordPress theme development.
- Custom CMS/ERP platforms.
- Casino Operator projects.
- Content management.
- Speed optimization
What we don’t offer as a service (yet) is content creation and link building.
Plans for 2023 are to grow in-house projects and products like CasinoFeed.net, Casino Operator CMS, and some others.
About Elegance Design
E-legance creates some of the most successful affiliate websites in the world. E-legance is a trademark of Elegance Design Ltd. Located in one of the loveliest Bulgarian Towns of Veliko Tarnovo; the company sports a great team of creative web developers, UI/UX designers, marketing, CRO, and e-commerce specialists.
Dragomir is often to be seen in all major affiliate conferences around the world like SIGMA, iGB – London, iGB – Amsterdam, and others.
Elegance Design Client Portfolio
An impressive portfolio of some of the finest casino affiliation brands worldwide, including:
- NeilPatel.com
- CorrectCasinos
- CasinoWow
- CasinoTopsOnline
- CasinoRank
- Casinoble
Elegance Design Business Card
You can contact and follow E-Legance here:
- Elegance Design Website: https://elegancedesign.net/
- Elegance Design Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/elegancedesign.net/
- Elegance Design Dribble: https://dribbble.com/Elegance
- Elegance Design Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/elegancedesign_net/
Concluding Thoughts
E-legance is an amazing success story that we are proud to share with our readers. We are grateful for this insightful interview. In our honest opinion, Dragomir should be invited as a Keynote speaker at the key affiliate conferences, as his understanding of the industry is profound. Best of luck from WorldStreet.
