Utilizing Private Online Poker Tournaments to drive RMP's

by mitchell posted Sep 15th 2005 at 22:00PM

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Hosting private online poker tournaments is one of the most under utilized features of many affiliates. Although not available on every site, it is a great tool for affiliates on the sites that it is offered.

Let's look at it this way. How difficult would it be for you to get 10 new real money players in a week by only having a flashing banner on your homepage and perhaps a site review. The amount of traffic you have to be driving to your site is pretty high to accomplish this. If you look at a 100:1 conversion ratio from hits on your banner to rmp sign-ups, you can see that you need to be driving well over 1200 hits to that banner in a week. In order to do this you probably need to be driving at least 5000 unique hits a week just to your homepage. Most poker affiliates are not in this ballpark when it comes to traffic.

Now to get back to the focus of the article. Hosting a private online tournament makes much more sense and you don't need nearly the amount of traffic to get results. Just displaying a general banner on your site or passing out general fliers around your campus are both going to have dismal results. When marketing an online poker room you have to get people emotionally involved and give them a REASON to sign up there and deposit money. Seeing a banner or flier does not accomplish either of these.

What I have done in the past with great success is to host an Online World Championship of Poker for a particular niche or group. Say you go to Notre Dame, build a simple one page website promoting the tourney and promote that instead of just something general in your marketing efforts.

This works because poker players have big ego's..........sorry but we do. Everyone thinks they are better than their peers and people love having the opportunity to prove it. Why do you guys play in the PartyRiches private tournaments? People love the chance to be a part of something and play with people they know. If I place a ParadisePoker banner on PartyRiches are you going to follow that link, sign-up and deposit just because.....probably not. Now if I host a $10 tourney and add some prize money or an Ipod...... are you going to sign-up?......maybe or maybe not, but the odds are much greater that I will capture you as a RMP at Paradise with this type of strategy.

Again, people love being a part of something and everyone loves playing poker with individuals they know or share a common interest with. Not only that but players are always looking for some sort of bragging rights with their friends. Even if you don't have a high traffic website there are still ways to accomplish this. If you play poker yourself, the odds are you know others that do as well.

Here is an example of how easy this is to do. I set this tournament up for a PartyPoker sub-affiliate of mine a few months back. The tournament was a success and he saw many sign-ups from this just by handing out fliers, talking to friends, and handing out fliers at his local bar. Here was his simple marketing page where he registered a catchy URL and had it masked and forwarded to Robs Poker Tournament.

Obviously you will not get as good of conversions to RMP's with a freeroll as you will a cash tourney, but it is a good way to get people involved initially. If you can get enough players however it is always advised to make it a cash buy-in to stimulate conversions.

If your a new poker affiliate and the results you are seeing are less than you had expected, I strongly encourage you to try a private tournament. Aside from SEO, I have found this to be the easiest way to bring in new players, especially people I know.

As always if you have any questions or comments feel free to email me or even better post in the poker affiliate forums.

Jeremy