Let's look at the difference between a successful poker affiliate and an unsuccessful poker affiliate.

The Making of a Successful Poker Affiliate

     What separates the Super Affiliates from the majority of poker affiliates struggling to make a few hundred dollars every month?  I get asked this question often by many of the newer affiliates.  Quite honestly, it is not a science and there really is no magic answer.  Like poker itself, every situation is different and the atmosphere is constantly changing.  To further compare being an affiliate with being a player, the successful ones are not afraid to invest some money or to take a few risks along the way.  The most successful players in the world do not play like the other millions of players out there……..neither do the most successful affiliates.  Think about that for a minute, it’s very powerful.
     There is nothing wrong with only making a few hundred dollars a month in this business if that is your goal.  However with a little hard work and some basic knowledge making a few thousand dollars is completely attainable.  I am going to attempt to show two sample profiles.  One will be of the struggling affiliate and the other of a “future” Super Affiliate.  Ask yourself, which affiliate do you resemble.

Affiliate #1

   We will call Affiliate number one Henry.  Now Henry is an avid online poker player and like most players he believes he is a winning player.  However at the end of the month when he looks at his stats, he has made far more deposits to the poker rooms than withdrawals.  So Henry decides to become an affiliate and supplement his depreciating bankroll.  Excited about this new opportunity, Henry gets signed up for every affiliate program out there.  He then picks up some “web site creator” software at Best Buy.

   Henry gets a simple site built with several of his new banners from the various affiliate programs he has joined.  He also sets up his hosting with a free service such as Tripod.  Henry is extremely excited, now it’s time to make some money.  Henry buys 500,000 hits to his website from an Ebay auction.  He also submits his site to all the major search engines through a free search engine submission web page he found.  Next Henry finds a deal where he can post a hundreds of links to his site through an FFA submitter.

   After the first two weeks Henry is a little disappointed as his 500,000 guaranteed hits failed to produce any real money players.  Henry then decides to get his name out there by spamming a couple of message boards.  Although he gets kicked off a few, his stats are actually showing a few real hits coming from these boards.  In the meantime Henry also does a couple link exchanges with a few other sites.  He then hands out business cards with his bonus codes to all of his friends and family.

     
     Henry also plays online almost every night.  Often to promote he will minimize his SnG tournaments and send emails, request links, and spam message boards to take full advantage of his extra time at night.  Usually however Sam gets caught up in his game and realizes he didn’t get done what he initially wanted to.

   Holy cow, one morning Henry checks his stats (as he religiously does every single morning) and he sees 2 total players and one real money player.  Continuing with his existing marketing strategy Henry is able to bring on 10 real money players within the first four months.  Pretty soon he is making a whopping $250 a month in revenue.  One problem though, instead of reinvesting it in his business he typically moves it to his online poker account and loses every penny of it in a few hours.  All that hard work for 30 days is gone in 2 hours L

   Henry finally gets frustrated that his monthly gross revenue is stagnant and he just doesn’t understand why he is not getting more traffic and conversions from his site.  After all he is constantly trying new banners and colors on his site.  After four month Henry decides promoting online poker is not all it’s cracked up to be.  He continues to work his $30,000 a year job and remains a losing a poker player.

Affiliate #2

     We will call Affiliate number two Sam.  Now Sam is also an avid online poker player however only plays occasionally and has decent bankroll management skills.  Sam is very driven and business oriented.  After seeing the rapid commercialization and popularity of online poker, Sam decides that he would like to capitalize on it by promoting via affiliate programs.  Sam makes the decision to become an online poker affiliate.  Sam spends the next several days researching the industry and speaking with affiliate managers about their respective programs.  He quickly learns that although there is a great deal of money to be made as an affiliate, there is also a great deal of work involved.

     Because Sam works a full-time job he decides he will dedicate four nights a week between the hours of 9 P.M. and 1:00 A.M. to work on his new business venture.  Although there are nights when he has prior responsibilities, Sam decides to commit to a minimum of 12 hours each week working on his new business.  Sam also cuts way back on playing online poker as his time is better served starting his business.

     After choosing three solid poker affiliate programs, Sam is ready to get going.  Before building a website and signing up at these affiliate programs Sam joins a few forums and begins to make some key relationships with other successful poker affiliates.  He even begins speaking on the phone with a few people who over the course of time become great mentors to him.  Because Sam signed up as sub-affiliates from these people, he has been able to extract tons of great advice.

     Sam quickly realizes that in order to be successful with online promotions he will need a professional website and a business plan.  Sam tries to build a site in Microsoft Frontpage but soon realizes he lacks web design talent.  At the referral of one Sam’s mentors he hires a professional web designer to build him a content driven site that he will be able to modify and add new fresh content too.  He is a little concerned about his initial investment, however Sam wants to “do it right” the first time.

     Sam decides he is going to target one individual poker group.  He decides on college players.  Once his site is done Sam begins learning all the aspects of Search Engine Optimization.  He learns many little tricks from a few of his mentors, but realizes the most important aspect is getting quality back links and fresh content.  For the first month Sam’s site is pretty slow.  However every day Sam writes and posts a new article on his website.  Some of the articles feature different college players, poker on different campuses, ect.  All of the articles however have to do with some aspect of poker and college.  In the meantime he is making great contacts with many other college webmasters and his site is beginning to show up in the search engines, but no good rank for any quality keywords yet.  Because Sam also wrote his own first person reviews of each poker site he promotes, he is also starting to get a moderate amount of sign-ups.

     Sam tries several different offline promotions as well, some successful and some miserable failures.  Nonetheless he is always thinking of something new.  He also hosts a semi-weekly poker tournament for his buddies.  When hosting this he introduces all of his buddies to online poker and gets them all signed up through his link.  The following week he hosts a private online tournament or these same friends and adds a little money to the tournament to wet his buddies appetite for online poker. 

     Within three months Sam has also found a few webmasters that want to syndicate his daily articles via RSS feed.  Fantastic, he has almost 50 articles posted on his site!  Before too long, Sam realizes because of his fresh content he was getting several repeat visitors to his site and the search engine spiders are starting to find much of his unique content.  All the while Sam still is constantly thinking outside the box on how to promote his site.  He is also constantly in contact with his affiliate managers and mentors sharing ideas and getting feedback.

     Okay, now the question becomes who do you resemble, Henry or Sam?  Although these are very general examples, they hold true to many affiliates.  Ask any affiliate manager and they will tell you that 10% of their affiliates are making 90% of the money.  In the competitive marketplace that online poker is currently experiencing, promoting will take much more than a simple banner driven site with affiliate links to drive results.  In the current landscape Content is King!  Are you really adding any value to your visitors by flashing a few banners in front of them and hoping they click on one.  Likewise are you giving your visitors a reason to bookmark you or return?  Being an affiliate is essentially like being a salesperson for the online poker room.  With that said, banners don’t sell anything.  In fact statistically speaking text links will give you better conversions.

     As I mentioned in the beginning of this article, there is no science to becoming a Super-Affiliate, but trying new things and not being afraid to take some risks will certainly make you a more profitable poker affiliate.

Jeremy