Lots and lots of people dream of a passive income. Making money by showing ads online can be a very good way to do that. Running a poker site is somewhere in between a passive income and really hard work. If you succeed you can make big bucks without working hard but it can be a lot of work to actually get there. We want to give you a few pointers in how to succeed as a Poker Affiliate.
Forget about it
To start with you need to forget the idea of a passive income, save that for later. When you start out you need to work hard, really hard. There are thousands of sites telling people everything they need to know about poker, there are thousands of forums and blogs dedicated to poker. If you want your site to take off you are going to need to spend lots and lots of hours writing good content and promoting your site.
Getting started – setting up a poker site
First of all, you need a site. There are a few affiliates that make it without sites but you can count them on your indexfinger. You need to build a good site, with real quality content. The usual stuff about how you play Texas Hold’em just won’t do. You need a way to attract visitors, you need to offer something. There are lots of things you need to think about when you start a poker site and we’ll look in to a few of them.
You need to decide if you want to target the US market. This decision is not as easy as it looks. The US market is the biggest market for online poker and if you manage to hit it off there you’re made of money but there are two problems. The competition is killing, it’s extremely hard to launch a poker site targeting US or in English in general. The other problem is that Online Poker is banned in the US. Most poker rooms don’t accept players from the US so affiliate deals might be a bit scarce. There is always the off-chance that if you go to the US they’ll want to arrest you if you promote online poker.
Another thing to think about is whether you want to offer rakeback or not. Rakeback is a good way to attract the really good players and with revenue share and good players you can make a lot of money. The problem with rakeback is that most networks has put a stop to rakeback. The reason is that it’s not really profitable for the poker rooms to hand out rakeback.
Next step - Promoting your site
There are of course a lot of ways to promote a site, no matter if it’s a poker site or any generic site. Search engines are usually a good way to start promoting but when it comes to poker sites you are somewhat limited. Google for example does not accept advertising for poker sites. You just can’t get those adwords if you deal in poker. You can of course turn your face to SEO to hit it in the organic results but lots and lots of good search engine optimizers work with poker sites, the competition is massive. Ordinary banner ads can be a start but in the long run it’s very hard to get profit from buying traffic like that and try to sell it to a poker room in the other end. The advise here is to get creative, do whatever is necessary to get people to start noticing your site. You can start competitions, arrange live tournaments or you can try to convince your buddies to walk around in your branded t-shirts.
One of the best ways to attract visitors is to offer something someone else offers. Give everyone that signs up on one of your poker deals a free pizza or visit every one of them. You can even try and give your visitors an experience they didn’t expect, try setting the world record in most burgers eaten during a single poker tournament. The key here is to get creative.
It takes time to attract visitors. If you don’t hit it off in the first 6 months you need to give it 6 or 12 more. Keep up your advertising, force your friends to keep the t-shirts on for at least 6 months before you decide it didn’t work. As they say advertising is 10% creativity and 90% sweat.
Making money – Get good deals
You have probably seen most of the offers the poker rooms give to future affiliates, you’ve been checking out the deals and think they look pretty slick. $60 for a player signing up and depositing looks good but it’s not. Don’t fall for the standard deals the poker rooms offer to anyone. Talk to their affiliate manager and get a better deal. There is quite a lot of room for improvement on a $60 deal, I’d even stretch and say that if you sign up for that one they are making a fool out of you. I wouldn’t send a player anywhere for less than $140 and that’s when I’m feeling really nice.
One way of forcing the affiliate managers to give you that extra cash is to make them come to you. I they find you in Google they’ll be prepared to give you more money than if you mail them and tell them you want a deal. See if you can get a few articles hitting the search results on a few of the less competitive keywords and then just sit back and wait for them to send mails and ask you if they can give you free money.
Revenue share or CPA
Most of the poker rooms offer revenue share or CPA. This is no easy decision. CPA will give you the money as soon as the player deposits. Revenue share will give you a percentage of all the profits from the player in the future. If you have really good players, revenue share is the key but if you have average or bad players; go with CPA. If you don’t know if you have good players you usually don’t, go with CPA.
That’s all for now, hope you enjoyed the guide and I wish you good luck with your future affiliate business.
The poker network Ongame Network use the selling point “
