[Graham]

Originally Posted by Nick997722

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.

There is always room for another site, I think the key is to come with something that hasn't been done before, or go for a specific target of players. If you do everything properly and read up a lot on SEO and have a nice design it is very possible. It may take a lot of hard work before you actually see any reward, but the things you will learn from being a poker affiliate are priceless and can be applied to many different online markets. Even though I have only been doing this for just under a year, I have probably learned a ton of things that will help me out a lot in the future. With regards to the new legislation I think it will definetly have a negative affect, but in time it will correct itself out. I am sure a lot of affiliates will drop out due to the new laws which will create openings for new ones.

Originally Posted by Nick997722

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?

Domain name can be pretty important. I would try to keep it as small as possible, and target whatever target market you are going after. If it is going to be a site for poker players from China, it would probably help to have both "china" and "poker" in the domain name. I don't know how much it matters, but it will probably have some affect. I wouldn't worry too much about having a similar domain to another site. As long as you aren't stealing their content, or trying to impersonate them, then you shouldn't have anything to worry about.

Originally Posted by Nick997722

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?

I would learn as much about SEO and online marketing as you can. I am not too sure of any really good books off hand, so I can't add much more to that.

Originally Posted by Nick997722

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?

I think the number of links depends on what the goal of your site is. If your site is an "Everything about Poker" kind of site, you will have many more links than a site that is just about a poker league, or a single player. I try to keep as few links as possible, but sometimes its hard to pick one thing over another.

Hope some of these things help, and good luck with the site.