Niche Marketing as a Poker Affiliate

by inga posted Oct 19th 2005 at 22:00PM

This is a great article by John Molnar from FifthAlarmPoker.com about how he incorporated a niche he loved into big $$$'s promoting online poker.

Niche Marketing as a Poker Affiliate.

John Molnar

www.FifthAlarmPoker.com

If you do a search on Google for affiliate program, you get about 53,900,000 results.

You can sell or promote anything from ant farms to storage sheds to even poker, enough to drive you crazy.

Well that was my situation when I wanted to start an online or e-commerce business….. but what type of business did I want to start?

One day it hit me! I love to gamble, so why not promote gambling on the internet? That’s how my niche began.

Now the hard part….. I chose to promote Poker and just like many other gambling sites there were millions of results.

How I am going to compete against this many sites? What is going to make my site different?

Why are people going to come to my site over any of those other sites?

The answer…….Finding a niche!

The definition of a niche is a special area of demand for a product or service.

Finding a niche within a niche is what could be the difference between just making it and “really making it”.

I strongly suggest that whatever your niche is you enjoy reading and writing about it. When you start seeing money roll in it will start to consume your time, so make it enjoyable for yourself.

In my situation I am a firefighter and there are a lot of firefighters who like to gamble. That is how fifthalarmpoker.com was born. I had a huge advantage here, I believe as a fire fighter I had a lot of research already done. Marketing ideas, my customers habits, what things attracts them and what would not.

I contacted a reliable source on this site (thanks Jeremy) who recommended a web design company. After my site was completed it was on to marketing which in my situation was all offline to begin with.

There was a huge 5 day firefighter convention in Baltimore .

So after making my travel arrangements, getting business cards, poker chips and a banner made it was off to the convention.

For the first 3 days we handed out business cards and networked with as many people/companies as possible and on the last day I rented booth space.

I brought my laptop, purchased a 20inch screen and had a booth where I could sign up potential league members.

In the one day alone I signed up 52 people in 6 hours and by the end of the week had 78 sign ups and am now over 150 in almost 3 months.

Every week the real money sign ups are trickling in and my mgr is up every month. Now I am promoting my second poker room.

The importance of the niche cannot be over looked here. Remember it is better to be a big fish in a small pond then a small fish in a big pond. Here is a picture of my booth at the expo. The hot chick sitting there is Mrs. Fifth Alarm Poker also known as my wife.

John Molnar