New affiliates who start out by promoting every room they can find with flashing banners and less than a full paragraph of text do not get conversions on their own. This is a blue print for failure. 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.

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 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 program to start with is Party 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. Party allows bonus codes and they work. 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 Party Poker, use bonus code kickass when you sign up. Party Poker will give you an extra $100 bucks on your 1st deposit." People remember it and it also brands our website, Kick Ass Poker.  

2 - Find a niche market.

Look for something that no one else is doing. There are plenty of things still available. Maybe you have a passion for playing step tournaments at Party Poker. Write everything you know about how the step tournaments work. Exactly how do the buy-in levels 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, 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.

If you are doing offline promotions a great conversation starter would be to talk about your experiences in step tournaments, especially someone who is leery 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 buy-in 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. 

3 - Look for a quality program that you trust.

When you are a poker affiliate, you must have trust in the properties that you promote. 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 recognized poker rooms. It is always a huge plus when the affiliate manager is an active member in forums such as the ones found here at Poker Affiliate World. In general you want a site that has accurate stats, a quality affiliate manager and brand recognition.

4 - Promote actively and often.

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

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 receive 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.