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A Few Tips for new poker affiliates A great article by our very own DukePoker on how he started from scratch and is now living the good life as a super affiliate. A Few Tips For New Affiliates
I would like to personally discuss some of my experiences with affiliating at poker rooms and then give some advice to beginners. Like many other affiliates, I made the transition from a player to an affiliate because I disliked the unpredictability of poker, I am an odds person and I always hated losing when the odds were in my favor (which seemed to happen too often). I think we can all relate to this.
At this time, a friend introduced me to the affiliate program at PartyPoker.com. We were skeptical at first; however, we decided to give it a try. We both had about $500 in our poker accounts (we had started with $50 from a free 50 deal, and turned this into $500 each within a month). We were eager to make a huge profit quickly, and also eager to get very involved in something that we knew little about. We initially started with a free $50 program of our own (I know this was not a good strategy, but keep reading), we mainly referred our friends, but after a few months we started referring random people. This is when we ran into some trouble, we had made about $4000 in the first few months, but we lost $2000 when one of our payments was held. Still, a $1000 profit was not bad for two high schoolers (yes, I started affiliating about 3 years ago when I was 17). In fact, to this date PartyPoker has yet to pay the $2000 that it owes us, even though we have referred many more people to their site. As you can guess, we aren’t affiliates at party anymore.
Anyway, let’s get to the good part. How did I become such a successful affiliate today? I don’t like to give out my site’s names as many other affiliates here, however I will tell you that on an average month my LLC (which is basically me), makes about $60,000 gross income, net this is about $35,000 (yes, we spend a lot of marketing). In addition to this I wrote an ebook that I had on the market a year ago and will come back soon about affiliating, poker strategy, poker bonuses, and online blackjack. This did quite well and it grossed about $5000 per month (which is nice because after you write the book, you don’t have to do much more work). With these numbers, it is easy to tell that I don’t have to break a sweat to pay my bills from Duke. I will let you know however, that I made most of my money by promoting my poker sites offline, and I have found offline promotion to be much more effective. However with all of this said, you might be asking yourself, is he makes so much money promoting poker, why is he writing articles at someone else’s site? Good question, and I think that I have a good answer. This is one of the few sites that I know of that has an established community of affiliates, and simply because I have been successful in the past, doesn’t mean that I know everything. I hope to be able to learn from this community and I hope that all of you will learn from me.
I will give some good general advice in this first column, and hopefully I will be allowed to follow it up in the next few weeks with more specific advice. As we all know, there isn’t one specific formula to becoming a successful affiliate, everyone does it differently. With that being said, while you should take advice from more experienced affiliates and consider their strategies, I would never totally copy someone else’s idea or invade their niche (unless you know you can do a much better job than them). For example, making a generalized poker site now is almost useless, to be a successful affiliate, you much find a specific niche. I see that many affiliates are doing that here and this is good. For example, Jeremy’s PokerBulls site is a perfect example of this. Another example of a great site belongs to another member of this forum. As soon as he heard that Courtney Friel would be the new host of the world poker tour, he made the site http://www.courtneyfriel.net. This site is now listed second in google, and if Courtney gets half as many searches as Shana Hiatt did, it will be sucessful.
Secondly, I know I am repeating the forum, but I simply can’t stress enough how important content and having a lively forum is if you are promoting online. It will bring many more hits from search engines and create a community dedicated to your site. Also, never try to take the easy way out in affiliating. Every good affiliate knows that to become a successful affiliate it takes a lot of hard work and realistic
expectations; no one can come in and immediately make tens of thousands of dollars.
Another good tip is to only mainly promote 1-3 sites. If you promote more you will over stretch yourself and you wont get nearly as many sign ups as you would if you really focused on 1-3 sites. It is okay to have good reviews of many sites; in fact, I encourage this, just mainly focus on a few sites.
This next tip is one of the most important. Invest in your affiliate program! Many of us probably invest in stocks, and with stocks we may get an average rate of return of about 10% investing in companies that you know nothing about. I guarantee you that if reinvest all of the money that you make into improving your affiliate program, you will make 20% more money. I Guarantee this! Also, you will be investing in the person that you trust most in the world, yourself, not a random company that you don’t know much about. Use the money you reinvest to buy signs, banners, posters, business cards, shirts, and anything else that will promote your site or help you make more money. Then, use these tools to their maximum potential; this is where most offline marketers fail. For example, rather than simply passing out fliers or putting them in shops, talk to the people you give the flier to and establish a relationship with them, this will increase the chances of them signing up exponentially. Offline marketing is very hard, and that is why many affiliates shy away from it and claim that it isn’t effective, when in fact it is much more effective than online marketing if you know what you are doing.
As I stated earlier, becoming a successful affiliate takes a lot of hard work, and there is really no one sure way of becoming a successful one. However, if you work hard and come up with creative promotional ideas, I can assure you that you will be successful in the long run. I know this article was basically a repetition of many things said in the forum, but I can assure you that in the future my columns will be much more specific.
DukePoker |
Jun 17, 2008
