Top 25 Mistakes by new Affiliates

Originally posted by Jeremy@Jun 27 2005, 05:00 PM
Lets keep this thread strictly for affiliate mistakes and do the site reviews in the general area.

Sorry, I was more looking to see if anyway can point out my mistakes

[MrMcGee]

Spamming.

It's sad, but a good portion of the spam posts made on my message boards can be attributed to members of this forum.

[ICISIC]

No what were to happen if a player you have signed up, decides he wants to let other people know about ur offfer. He decides to spam some forums, what happens to you? Do we as affiliates have any control over this?

[Cashmirrors]

My first post and I'm going to take issue with one of the founders. Yeah, I play nicely with others. :unsure:

Jeremy said:

3. Playing poker with affiliate revenue's

is one of the top mistakes of new affiliates.

The grammar-nazi in me wants to point out that revenues is the plural and revenue's is the possesive (for some reason I hate misused apostophes). Sorry, that's just the way I am.

Anyway, my view is that it's only a mistake if you're not a winning player.

There's no reason that a winning player shouldn't invest his / her affiliate revenue into his / her poker bankroll.

Back in the day, I used Party CPA payments to boost my bankroll from $0 (I was a moron and had most of my bankroll in a site that collapsed and then had a downswing) to $260. At the moment, my bankroll is ten times that, and I've pulled out ten times that amount over the last year or so.

Your Mileage May Vary.

Sure, if you're trying to make a living from affiliate revenue and are not a decent player, then this is a mistake. Although if you're going to play poker anyway, using some of your affiliate revenue is a covenient way to do it.

Um, assuming I haven't got myself banned yet, I'm glad I found this site and hope I can contribute in future.


BTW - there's already at least one chip trick site out there, but they're mostly trying to sell their own DVD I think. If anyone's looking for a niche, chip tricks might be it - especially if ESPN show a lot of them this year.

I would do it, but I can barely count out a raise with one hand.

[tomysole]

disagree with that post. Screw grammer, no one gives a damn. I hope my grammer is bad, helps let people no I'm human. Anyways, I think that keeping your business away from gambling is a very good idea. Even if you are a good player, you are never too far away from loosing it all in one bad beat. Just my opinion though.

[PPP]

Bad presentation will kill you. If you can't be bothered to make a content site with decent grammar, then everything you have on the site comes into question, and should.

Sloppy presentation shows a contempt for your audience. Bad grammar, mispellings, typos, these are all human mistakes and are forgiveable by a user, but when the mistakes are the norm, a user will look at that and say "I can't trust this".

Copyediting is just one of the things that makes you a lot of money in a very unsexy, hidden way. Or more exactly, it is something that keeps you from not making less money (if you know what I mean).

Interesting that you guys brought this up. I have a literature degree, and I consider myself a reasonably good writer. Recently I wrote and submitted ahastily-written article to a fellow webmaster. The article had several mistakes and wasn't very good. I was surprised when the webmaster sent it back to me with several corrections and a "Do better next time." note. That's when I realized my writing has gotten sloppy.

Turns out this particular webmaster was a former newspaper editor. You never know who's going to be reading your site, but if you're targeting a presumably affluent audience, then you're also targeting a presumably literate audience. (If you're targeting people with no money, then this might not be the right industry, since gambling is more profitable when your customers have money.) And a literate audience will definitely begin to question your credibility if your writing is rife with errors.

[tomysole]

was talking about posts here on the forum, not on my website, duh!

[DukePoker]

I would have to say that the biggest mistake that a new affiliate can make is to expect too much too soon, and expect to make money without doing any work. This is exactly what I thought when a first started a while back, I thought that I could make hundreds of dollars without doing any work, but as the months and years passed, I realized that to make money I had to work really hard. Then, the profits started off small, but then got bigger and bigger...

Also, another common flaw that I find is relying too much on online promotion. We know that the internet is already saturated with promotional codes and poker rooms reviews, and it is hard to start a site from the ground up. It is much easier to promote offline first with friends, family, and other people, refer them to a site, and build it from the ground up.

Thinking outside the box is key as well, and not many new affiliates do this. This means targeting specific groups of players, a specific niche if you will and only promoting at certain sites. Jeremy is the perfect example of thinking outside the box, with his pink bunny, ipods, and money other great ideas. It is necessary to be different and stick out from the thousands of other sites and affiliates that are promoting sites.

[Cashmirrors]

Originally posted by tomysole@Jul 5 2005, 01:56 PM
disagree with that post. Screw grammer, no one gives a damn. I hope my grammer is bad, helps let people no I'm human. Anyways, I think that keeping your business away from gambling is a very good idea. Even if you are a good player, you are never too far away from loosing it all in one bad beat. Just my opinion though.

1) A surprising number of people give a damn.

You'll never know just how many people you would otherwise have converted are turned off by simple mistakes like "no" instead of "know", or simple spelling mistakes, or whatever and leave the site to find one that doesn't look like it was written by a moron.

You gain nothing from poor English and might lose plenty.


2) If you're a good player, there's no way in hell you're losing it all to a bad beat.

If you're a good player than you understand bankroll management and don't put all your money on the table at once. Unfortunately most people who think they are good players are not.

It also makes no difference if you lose $200 of your existing bankroll or your $200 monthly commission. If you're not going to play poker because you might take a bad beat, then you're a very strange person.

If you meant that you might lose your month's commissions to a bad beat, then that is entirely possible, but if you were buying into an NL table for your whole monthly commission, your poker bankroll is several times larger than your commissions, so you're probably making more money from being a player than an affiliate.

The only way that playing poker with affiliate payments is a mistake is if you are a bad player.