[Nick997722]

Hello, I am an avid amateur poker player and have been thinking about starting an affiliate site for some time now. I have very little knowledge in this area however so am hoping I may be able to get a little guidance to some basic questions I have. Thanks in advance for any responses!

1) My number one question is whether trying to break in as a poker affiliate is realistic / worthwhile at this point in time. I ask this for two reasons; one – there seems to be a boat-load of poker affiliate sites out there, is the market already saturated? The second concern I have is the recent legislation that passed in the US. Although I live in Canada any legislation that potentially limits the ease for American players to play poker seems like it would have a negative affect on affiliate sites.

2) My second question is in regards to domain names. How important is it to have a catchy domain name and secondly from a search engine / ethical standpoint is grabbing a domain name similar to an existing domain name a bad idea? Obviously many domain names are already taken, if for example someone wanted to use: pokerplayer.com for their domain but it was taken would using something like poker-players.com be a bad idea?

3) Are there any good books / resources on becoming an affiliate besides forums? Jeremy from this forum forwarded me his old book but I believe the server it is hosted on is no longer active as I get a http 500 error whenever trying to access the book. Is it worthwhile looking at non-poker specific affiliate books? I came across an online book called ePokerAffiliate, has anyone read it, is it any good?

4) Finally a more general question about site layout. I notice many affiliate sites have a fairly what I would call “busy” home-page, lots of links, links to articles on the site etc. Is this just the personal preference of many affiliate sites or is this done for search engine optimization or other reasons?

Phew, sorry for the long-winded post and thanks for taking the time to read through it!