Customer Story – Sports Betting Directory – Emblem Directory Theme

Introduce Yourself & Your Site

My name is Gerasimos Kamplies and I am the owner and founder of bet-gate.com.

Bet-Gate is an online gambling directory in English language located in Greece. Here you can find many remarkable websites related to sports betting, casino and poker, submitted in proper categories and sub categories.

There is also a specific category with gambling affiliates programs for those webmasters who have owned a gambling website and want to gain some extra income from it.

In September of 2005 I created my first website bet-gate.gr, a greek sports betting directory. About 15 months later added categories with casino and poker links. The website was fully translated in English but as it was growing rapidly I decided to create a new gambling directory in English language with it’s own domain name. And then was born bet-gate.com in 2008.

Few years later me and my team decided to make a renewal in our websites. We wanted a new website more professional, modern looking and friendly with mobile devices. After an extensive research on the internet I found the Emblem Directory theme from templatic and I think that it was what exactly we were looking for. We built our Bet-Gate website on Emblem theme and bet-gate.gr on Emblem Directory theme.

What are the challenges you had to overcome while developing the site?

The first challenge we had to face was to transfer successfully all our existing listings of our directory and to enrich them with additional details because the previous format of our directory was simple enough. That was the most difficult and time consuming part of our work. We had to add screenshot images to every single listing whilst we added many additional listing details such as e-mail address, facebook-twitter-google+ profiles, videos and others in several particular listings.

One more difficulty we faced was to manage the price packages for sponsored listings. We hadn’t offered this option before, so we had to specify parameters as price, duration and payment method. We had some complaints from customers who faced problems in payment procedure, but we took care to restore any malfunction on this topic.

Best Emblem Directory theme Features, well used:

• Bulk upload : To migrate data from old site to new site
• Category wise listing submission: To display different listings on different category pages
• Additional Custom Fields : To add more information about listings
• Price Packages : Manage how the users pay for submitting the listings
• Dynamic Widgets : To change appearance and position of the site contents
• Text Widget :  To display advertisements and offers
• SEO by Yoast : To optimize the site for search engines
• Akismet : To make the site more secure
• Table Press : For nice and feature-rich tables
• WPML : To translate the site in multiple languages

Third party plugins which worked great with Emblem Directory

Some of the most important plugins we use are:

• WordPress SEO by Yoast
• Akismet to protect the site from spam
• Dynamic Widgets which allows us to show different banners and widgets on different pages
• Google Analytics by Yoast
• Reviewer for insert reviews and comparison tables
• TablePress for nice and feature-rich tables
• WPML Multilingual CMS for translations

I have to say that Dynamic Widgets plugin is one of our favorites because we have many banners from several affiliate programs which we need to be shown on different pages, listing and post pages and this plugin make the job perfect.

What is the monetization strategy for your site? And Tell us how Emblem Directory theme helps Bet Gate find success?

This theme includes many options which are very important for our business. We can create new tabs with details for our listings, add additional custom fields, add logos and images, publish good looking blog posts with gambling offers, promotions, news and others.

Emblem is a great directory theme with many features, which helped us to create a powerful gambling directory and gave us the opportunity to increase our website traffic and our incomes. The monetization options is another one great feature coming with this theme. We have the chance to create our price packages with many options to be offered to our visitors and many payment methods available.

Also the various email notifications we receive for different events, inform us for any listing submission, comment posted, post submission or contact e-mail received from our customers.

Is there a particular feature you’d love to see in Emblem Directory theme in the future?

Reviews are very important in our job, so I would love to see in the future a page for reviews in Directory. A particular reviews page which would be fully customizable.

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Thanks Gerasimos for your honest answers and for taking the time to provide this insight.

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