Multiple Streams of Poker Affiliate Income

by inga posted Oct 12th 2005 at 22:00PM

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What does diversification mean to a poker affiliate? What are some other ways of making money from your poker site besides sending players to online cardrooms?

Diversification is a word used in finance to refer to spreading your money around different investments in order to prevent one downswing of bad luck from wiping out your savings. I think it applies to being a poker webmaster too. Don't put all your eggs in one basket.

What does this mean to you?

It means you should have multiple websites. If you only have one website, and it gets nuked by the search engines, where are you going to get your revenue?

It means you should have multiple streams of traffic too. If all your traffic comes from one keyword phrase or one page, and something happens to your ranking for that, what's going to happen to your revenue?

It means you should have multiple streams of income. If you only rely on one affiliate program for your commissions, what happens if that affiliate program decides to shut down their program and stop paying commissions?

8 Potential Revenue Streams

Most revenue-generating opportunities on a poker website are not going to be as profitable per customer or even per visitor as signing up poker players at online cardrooms, but some of them might be more profitable on a monthly basis overall. I've listed a few ideas for ways to get revenue from a poker site to complement the revenue you're getting from poker affiliate programs below:

1. Casino Affiliate Programs - I'm amazed at the number of poker webmasters who don't do a thing to cater to online casino player. Some estimates evaluate casino players' average values' as being 8 times the value of a poker player, so I think this is a revenue stream that you can't afford to ignore.

A caveat though: don't spend so much time and effort on your poker website promoting online casinos that the theme of your site becomes confused. It's a peripheral, complementary revenue stream if it's on a poker site. (Although you might consider starting another site devoted exclusively to online casinos or even online bingo.)

2. Travel Affiliate Programs - If you have content on your site about land-based cardrooms, a travel affiliate link on that page might generate nice revenue for you, especially if you're able to link directly to a specific property's booking page. I have a review of the Excalibur Poker Room up at one of my websites; I should definitely add a "book a room at Excalibur now" link to that page.

IAN.com is one good choice for a travel affiliate program. World Choice Travel is another.

3. Downloadable Products - Did you know that you can sell Jeremy's ebook about being a poker affiliate and get paid for it? There are other poker-related ebooks and other downloadable products available that you can promote on your poker site for additional revenue streams. (There was a guide to Pokertracker available in ebook format that had incredible conversion rates out there somewhere; this is a stream of revenue worth looking at too.)

Clickbank is one of the better known affiliate programs for downloadable products.

4. eBay, Amazon, and other Traditional Merchants - People buy regular books, poker chips, poker tables, and poker software on the internet all the time. Why shouldn't you get a percentage of that action? The revenues might be smaller per customer, but why turn that revenue down? Especially since some of the keyword phrases for these traditional merchant products are probably non-competitive and easy to rank for.

eBay and Amazon both offer what I call "smart" creatives, or banners which display available products for a certain keyword phrase. You can see an example of this on a video poker site that offers a guide to buying video poker machines. The eBay ad on that page is showing actual auction results for the phrase "video poker machines", and putting it up there was as simple as cutting and pasting some code.

WeDoItAllVegas also offers a tremendous amount of poker and gambling related products that you can earn commissions on.

5. Your Own InfoProducts and Services - Consider writing and selling your own ebook. If you can't write, hire someone to write it for you. Heck, you could even pay someone to design an entire ebook about poker for you to sell on your site.

Other infoproducts you could sell include poker coaching and poker teleclasses. (Teleclasses are conducted over the phone on a bridge line, and you can charge for them.)

6. Dating Programs - Do you have a page dedicated to poker babes or girly pics? I've noticed that this is a more and more common tactic to get traffic, and the idea seems to be that poker players are overwhelmingly male. Maybe that's so, maybe not.

But if you have such a page, maybe promoting Adult Friend Finder there might make you some additional revenue. Especially if the traffic to that page comes from people searching for "jennicide pics" or "jennifer tilly photos".

7. Selling Text Links - You can broker your own text links or go through a text link broker and let him sell them for you. I know one webmaster who has entire sites that receive all their revenue from the sale of text links.

The only way to make this profitable is by having a site with lots of traffic and link popularity. You'll need those two factors to make a profit from any website though, no matter what your revenue streams are.

8. Selling Advertising - You can sell your own advertising on a banner basis too. Or you can hire a broker to sell that advertising on your behalf.

Gambling Ads is a great service run by a terrific gentleman named Michael Bluejay. He sells advertising for gambling sites via auction, and his clients include the Wizard of Odds.

Google Adsense buys advertising on a per click basis, but you can't run any advertising for online gambling on a site where you're also running Google Adsense. But poker related keywords still bring significant per click charges to publishers, so it's not a revenue stream that should be ignored.

Where To Go From Here

You could probably easily come up with a list of 8 more potential revenue streams if you did some brainstorming. I know that a lot of people go after recruiting sub-affiliates, and that's a popular additional revenue stream. You might be able to promote sportsbooks in your area too, and that's another place you could make money. The possibilities are endless.

But the point is that you can and should have other ways of making money from a poker website than just referring players to online cardrooms, even though that's probably going to be your primary source of revenue.

A final thought: I think it's foolhardy to promote only one poker room on a website. You should give your readers a choice. At my site, Unknown Poker, I feature reviews of diverse poker rooms, everything from Absolute Poker to Bodog Poker.