Starting a Player Forum Part 1 - Finding a niche

by inga posted Oct 30th 2006 at 22:00PM

http://digg.com/submit?phase=2&url=http://www.pokeraffiliateworld.com/affiliate-resources/starting-a-player-forum-part-1---finding-a-niche&title=Starting a Player Forum Part 1 - Finding a niche

Drawdead.com V.P. of marketing Sarah Freeman discusses the logistics of starting a players forum in part 1 of her 3 part series.

Starting a player forum - Finding your Niche
Part 1

by Sarah Freeman

DrawDead.com V.P. of Marketing

One of the best ways to attract new players to your online poker site, I’ve found, is to open a player forum or community. Whether you’re trying to find a niche player group or you want to open your community to anyone, start the player forum is easy. Now, getting traffic and members to your forum and finding good moderators is another issue entirely, which will be discussed later.

So, you are looking to market to a certain group of players, say low limit players. In that case, you will need to keep that in mind when choosing your ‘approved sites’ and private games, should you choose to host them. Find sites that offer a good variety of low limit games, and that keep those games close to full. You don’t want to send a player to a site that has a couple low limit tables running with one or two other players at any given time.

Since the forums I host are focused and marketed toward players interested in freeroll games, I tend to look for online poker sites with promotions that give my community members the best and easiest to obtain bonuses. We have also developed strong relationships with several online poker sites and affiliate managers that offer us freeroll games with either little or no out-of-pocket fees for me.

If you are looking to attract and market to online tournament players, find sites to promote that offer several tournaments with varying buy-in amounts throughout the day. Naturally, with players who enjoy tournament play, you wouldn’t want to heavily promote a site that only offers 5 tournaments a day. Look for sites that also offer MTT and SNG games.

If you are interested in forming a player community that is open to all players, you may have a harder road to travel. I have found that it is easier to focus on a certain type of player who wants certain types of games. The all-inclusive poker player forum, for a beginning forum host, is a lot to deal with.

There are literally hundreds of player groups to target. Some examples of player niches, not previously mentioned, are; high-limit players, those players who enjoy other poker game variants other than Texas Hold’em, like Omaha or Stud poker, also the Mac users and of course the players that are geographically linked, like California Poker Players, for instance.

Once you have established your niche and what online poker sites you want to focus your promotional efforts on, your next step is getting your forum running, adding new members to your community and keeping information that pertains to your player niche available and up to date.

Look for those topics to be discussed in Part 2 “Jumpstarting Your Player Forums”.

Sarah Freeman is an experienced poker webmaster and has successfully started numerous poker forums. She currently hold the position of V.P. of markting for one of the internets premier freeroll forums at www.DrawDead.com