Internet Poker Affiliation Tips
This is a short article about becoming a poker affiliate marketer since it seems to be a popular subject and just so happens to be my job. As you can see I am a poker affiliate and this is what I do for a living so I’ll give you some insight into what life is like and how to get started. Also, we give new and seasoned affiliates our poker odds calculator for free if you want to put it into your website. Email me at info AT compatiblepoker.com for the code.
Getting Started as a Poker Affiliate
There are literally hundreds of poker rooms out there to promote and market to players. Lots of affiliates start out with Party Poker because they are the easiest to promote and offer good commissions. If you already have a high traffic website you could try slapping up a banner to get some signups or create a page with something like a Pokerstars marketing code on it that gives players bonuses to create accounts. This can be highly competitive.
Honestly, a well positioned text link will give you 10 times more revenues than any banner would. Once you get the hang of how to generate players only then should you expand into other poker sites.
It’s Hard Work
First I want to tell you that poker affiliating is not easy. People tend to get the wrong impression when the idea dawns on them to become an internet poker affiliate. They type in online poker, see a couple mediocre looking sites and say, “Man my website would look ten times better than that. I’m going to be rich.” Jeremy Enke is a good friend from forums and he actually knows more about poker affiliation than probably anyone. A good place to learn what you’re getting into would be his poker affiliate blog. Super affiliates and newbies follow this blog as he gives out some great tips and inspiration.
Contrary to what you may believe it’s not about how your website looks in this business. That might be why so many people jump head first into building a nice looking site and soon realize they can’t get anyone to visit their portal. I would rather have the ugliest, plainest looking website on the internet that dominates the search engines with good marketing techniques than a site that took $50,000 to build and is not even listed in Google or Yahoo. Some sites become popular and spread virally, sharkscope.com for example, but for the most part the money is made in search engine ranking.
It’s all about search engines in this biz and if you don’t know how search engines work you better start learning. Start out at seochat.com and then once you understand the basics a more advanced seo forum is webmasterworld.com.
Successful Poker SEOers
A very new site was opened called poker-seo.com. The owner is the author and creator of playwinningpoker.com probably the most successful “SEO’d” site on the internet for poker. At first glance it might not seem so, but when you really analyze the rankings he holds for Google.com, Google.fr, Google.de and all the others you start to realize how well the site is doing. When you can rank for keyterms “poker” or “online poker” in multiple languages you’re doing something right. Steve Badger’s site has been online since 2000 and as you will soon learn, age and trust of a site has a lot to do with his rankings.
Indeed it is hard work but is well worth it. It’s great not having to work at a 9-5 job everyday. You can work from home or whenever the hell you want. Owning your own internet business is the greatest job in the world in my opinion.
What the Heck is SEO?
The first thing any internet affiliate should do is join an SEO forum. SEO stands for search engine optimization. It seems complicated as hell but it’s really not all that difficult when it boils down to it. Randy, a friend from pokeraffiliateworld.com put up a site called poker-tomorrow which has some seo marketing tips for poker sites. Randy has a lot of credentials and even worked with PokerStars to dramatically increase their SEO.
SEO is the art of getting places like Google, Yahoo, and MSN to rank your website at the top of search results. For example let’s say you went to Google right now and typed in “Poker Guide”. You’ll probably get results for PokerListings or Pokertips.org. These are the big guns in poker affiliating. They dominate just about every search engine and are rewarded very heavily by doing so.
How much can these guys make? You probably won’t believe me but there have been rumors that PokerListings brings in about $1million per month in revenues. Bear in mind that they have 70 employees working round the clock to make sure their website is up to date and full of useful content. They also spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on SEO experts to get them to the top and more importantly keep them on the top.
I just started writing a paragraph about SEO but had to delete it. It would take me way too long to discuss all the intrinsic concepts about SEO so you’re better just going to a place like SEOchat.com where everything you’ll need to learn is right there. Summing it up in a couple details here is what I would say about SEO.
Get Links to Your Site
Get other poker related websites to link to your site. Do this by offering them articles and news pieces in exchange for links within the text to your site. This is a great way to build one way link exchanges. Google loves any link to your site that is wrapped in content and is not a reciprocal link. A reciprocal link exchange is when you participate in a link partnership with another poker related website. The basic “I link to you, you link to me” strategy. It works but not as much as it used to. Try to stay away from this type of linking.
Search Engines Love Content
So after you’ve mastered the art of SEO or at least understand the basics start building content for your website. You’re going to need a ton of content to start getting decent traffic. Poker is highly competitive so go after small keywords that are rarely searched for. If you try and rank for words like “Party Poker” or “Online Poker” you may never see a visitor. Those keywords take years to obtain so start off small. Write content about new things and especially new poker rooms. These keywords will be low competing and you will very easily rank for them.
I’d say to get a steady amount of traffic, say 200 visitors a day, you would need at least 300 pages of written content and at minimum 50 links pointing to your site. Once you get this much traffic you should start to see a couple players signing up for play money accounts. On occasion you’ll get a real money depositor and make some cash.
Join a Poker Affiliate Forum
Poker affiliate forumsare full of useful information and tools. It’s a place where internet poker affiliates network and become friends. These forums are extremely important in becoming successful and staying motivated. Plus the forums are generally a fun place to hang out and get link partnerships and such.
One place I would recommend is Pokeraffiliateworld.com or if you are a casino affiliate then join Casinoaffiliateprograms.com. These are both the top resources of their kind. Jeremy is the owner of PAW and ”The Professor” is the owner of CAP. They are both really good people and will help you along your journey. My screen name is “abc-R” on both of those sites if you ever need a helping hand.
It’s a Niche World Now
Niche markets are where it’s at these days. I’d rather target 100 keywords that only get 10 hits per day than go after a keyword that gets thousands of hits and no sign-ups. Just think if you find one keyword that is guaranteed to give you 1 sign up per ten hits then you’re golden. Target ten of these easily accomplished keywords and all the sudden you get 10 real money players a day. It sounds easy but these types of keywords are really hard to find. By the time you discover them they are usually already discovered and in this cutthroat business they don’t last all that long so enjoy and save while it lasts.
The Long Haul
Depending how much you work at it you probably won’t make any money at all until after 1 year. In fact you’ll probably spend hundreds of hours working on your site and thousands of dollars before any capital gains come your way. It’s something that doesn’t happen overnight and I can’t stress enough how you must prepare for this. Almost every new poker affiliate gets their website up and running, throws up some banners and expects to be a millionaire the next day.
Honestly, I wouldn’t even put up an advertisement until after a couple months. Get some quality link exchanges, see some traffic from Google and for God sakes make your site useful to visitors. If it is useful they will come back and make you money soon enough.
Making Money Quick?
Now that I just told you it takes a year to begin making money I’m going to say that’s a lie. There are ways to begin making money asap but as the saying goes, “Loose lips sink ships.” Sorry but it took years of research and money to figure how to do as little work as possible and put up big numbers and I plan to take those tips to my grave. 
Sum It Up
For you lazy people I’ll sum up the most important parts of becoming a poker affiliate in these bullet points
1. Learn SEO
2. Higher a good website builder
3. Join an SEO and Poker affiliate forum
4. Write articles and press releases for links and visitors
5. Avoid pay per click campaigns
6. Prepare for a long journey
7. Don’t give up and you will make plenty of money
8. Put any money you make back into the website
Again these are just basic tips on starting out as an internet poker affiliate. I could literally write 100 pages on how to become a successful internet poker affiliate but that’s not the nature of this site. If you are interested you could always contact me for more information or do as I said, join a poker affiliate forum.
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