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5 tips for aspiring new poker affiliates.
Te top performing online poker affiliates make a lot of money. Top poker affiliates are pulling down 6 figures a month. Yes you read correctly, per month. This is not the norm but many poker affiliates are making substantial incomes. If you have a passion for poker and if you are self motivated you can succeed as a poker affiliate with programs like the Full Tilt Poker affiliate program.


Five Beginning Poker Affiliate Tips

1 -Pick three & only three poker rooms to start out.

Don't think by having every poker room as an option that you are going to give your visitors a choic of whatever it is they want. While this sounds good in theory, it doesn't work this way. If you give too many options then people don't know what to pick and remain indecisive. Instead, focus on fewer sites that each offer the user something unique.

So, start out by picking three rooms. If you are in the states, no brainers are the Full Tilt affiliate program and the PokerStars affiliate program. To make it easy, I would sign up for the Poker Affiliate World Affiliate Network and have access to many of the rooms at the higher than advertised rate that you'll get from the rooms themselves for CPA.

Don't waste your time signing up for every poker affiliate program under the sun because if you promote everything you will have no focus for your players and it will be way to much for you to manage. Pick a limited number and start out with your promotion. This will make your promotions more focused and most importantly give you a more clear cut direction to start promoting. New affiliates who start out by promoting numerous rooms with flashing banners and less than a full paragraph of text do not get conversions on their own, trust me, that game is long, long gone.

Instead, focus your attention to a smaller number of properties. Another reason to focus your efforts is because the more players you send to a particular property the more likely you are to reach a higher payment threshold. If you refer 20 real players in a month to one particular property you are going to make substantially more than if you send 2 players to 10 different sites.

2 - Find a niche market
Look for something that no one else is doing or that they are not doing that well. There are plenty of niches within poker that gets traffic, every day. Find something you have an interest in and write about it. It could be that you have a passion for playing step tournaments at Party Poker. Write everything you know about how the step tournaments work. Become the authority for anyone looking to play step tournaments and keep players up to date with the different step tournaments available. Exactly how do the buyins work? What kind of experiences have you had playing at the different step levels? Write about the best times you've found to play in the steps and the best levels to try and buy in at. What are some good step tournament strategies and why? Talk about what it takes to play in your first one. Write a blog about your experiences.

This is a niche, and it would probably convert well.

There are tons of them. Find yours and write everything you can think about it. Some great niches are your professional group. If you're a salesman then get together with your network of sales people and challenge them to an online poker tournament. A number of sites are now offering private poker tournaments that you can set up free of charge and that you can invite people in via password.

3 - Look for a Poker Affiliate Program quality program that you trust.
When you are a poker affiliate, you must have trust in the properties that you promote. A greate place to start is the Poker Affiliate Forums led by Jeremy Enke. Today that is at Poker Affiliate Listings (where I'm one of the Mod's) but that could change in the future (inside joke rimshot). Then it's great to take a look over at the affiliate guard dog forums and make sure your program is not on any of their shit lists. You rely on the poker room to accurately track your visitors and give you credit whenever you send a real money player. You have to find a site that you deem trustworthy. I think it is vital to only work with the top quality and recogonized poker rooms. It is always a huge plus when the affiliate manager is an active member in forums such as the ones found at PokerAffiliatePrograms.com, Poker Affiliate World is a great resource for all of the major poker affiliate listings and a very active poker affiliate forum.

Key things to look for are accurate stats, a quality affiliate manager and brand recogonition.

4 - Promote a Call To Action on your Website.
If you are an online promoter and you run a website you have to do more than put up banners provided by the poker rooms. Banner farms don't work, don't waste your time. As a matter of fact, unless you are constantly adding content, poker room reviews themselves will not generate sign ups. You need to give your traffic a clear call to action, such as sign up here and you will get X, or the absolute best place to play omaha high low for $1/2 stakes is PlayersOnly.com. There are so many review sites now that a site giving a review and a bunch of banners has been done ad nauseum. Don't waste your time if this is your only strategy. If you have a content driven website then you will see conversions on your room reviews if they are well done. Banners can be used for brand recognition, but don't count on them for your clicks and conversions.

If you are an offline promoter, spread the word and spread your bonus code. A note about bonus codes, geographic bonus codes work well. If you attend a college, use the name of the mascot or even better, use a code mocking one of your rivals. We used bonus code "GATORSSUCK" in Athens, GA (home of the UGA Bulldogs).

5 - New content is key for website success.
Unless you just have a huge marketing budget or a domain name with a huge amount of type in traffic then you are going to have to count on search engines to send traffic to your website. Search engines like websites that offer updated, unique and new content. The more content you add to your site that is self generated and that shows visitors what they were looking for the higher your traffic will rise. The more traffic you recieve the more people you can promote your properties to and in return you should see more conversions.

This means one thing, more money in your pocket.


The 3 Best Poker Room Affiliate Programs...
Free to join and currently accepting new affiliates.

Poker Affiliate Resources and Final Thoughts

Before choosing your first poker room to promote you need to answer a few key questions.

First, how do you plan to promote the poker room? Are you going to primarly an online promoter, by building a website and driving traffic to that website or are you going to promote offline? Maybe you want to do both? You do not have to be a webmaster to be a successful affiliate, I know many very successful affiliates who do primarily word of mouth promotion and wouldn't know how to even register a domain name, much less build a website. If you are looking for good Poker Affiliate Tips check out Poker Room Affiliates which is more geared towards online promoters and email promoters. The best all around poker affiliate forum, by far, is Poker Affiliate Programs led by entrepeneur himself, Jeremy Enke, King of the Merfolk.

Before we get to the poker affiliate tips, we wanted to talk a second about becoming a poker affiliate in general. The truth is that most people who decide to become a poker affiliate never make any money. It's a pretty competitive environment and without a true passion for poker combined with self motivation most poker affiliates never get a single signup other than their dad and maybe a cousin or two. The initial money has been lost back in the same poker room that paid it out and the new signups are elusive. Interest is quickly lost and the idea is done before it get's started.


If you plan to promote poker offline it is vital that you find a poker room that offers a sign up bonus code that you can use to give to your friends. They can go straight to the poker room, download the poker software and while signing up they stick in your bonus code. You do not have to send them to a website where they can click on your customized link before you can get credit. Not all rooms offer bonus code tracking, so you need to do a little research.

Offline Promoters - A great affiliate program to start with is Full Tilt Poker . It's actually our 1st choice for offline promoters. Yes a lot of people already play at Party Poker but there are still tons that do not. FullTilt allows bonus codes and they work.

Plus you can set up private tournaments. These are key to converting your players to depositors. Create a private tournament, give your players the password and personally get them to join.

If you get enough players, you can offer bonus money for your private tourney winner and you can just transfer the bonus $$ from your account to the winners!

Make a flyer, post it and hand it out. Tell people about your tourney.

Try and make your bonus code unique to you so people will remember it. If your nickname is bakedpotato make that your bonus code. Our bonus code is KICKASS, it is short, easy and to the point. "Hey, if you ever decide to play at XXXX Poker Room, use bonus code kickass when you sign up.

If you are doing offline promotions a great conversation starter would be to talk about your experiences in step tournaments, especially someone who is leary of online poker (there are still plenty!). Tell them about the step tournaments and how you played in a 1 table SNG with a first place prize of $2500. As a matter of fact, your buyin was only $5 dollars online. Ask him if he wants to create a play money account and watch you play sometime. Give him your bonus code or get him to your website first. Talk to him via instant message while you play. You'll have a new depositor in no time.


Get business cards made up with your website and pass them out often. Whenever you talk to someone about poker give them a card. Maybe you deal poker at a home game a few nights a week and are constantly seeing new players who might want to play poker, sign up as an affiliate and get a bonus code. create a card that says "Thanks for Playing" and then gives them a code to use to get extra money when they decide to try out the step tournaments at Party Poker.

Oh, one last quick tip, don't try and scam the poker rooms by offering free cash to your buddies if they sign up and make a small deposit so you can get your one time CPA payment. The poker rooms know what is going on this does not work. Save your money because you will get burned. Don't scam the poker rooms.