800K -> 2M+ Uniques a month...now what?

[PartyForFree]

Folks,

I'm in an interesting position here, where a company want's help in bringing some additional revenue from their website.

Currently, they get about 800K unique visitors a month. In their peak months (Jan-Mar) they get over 2M uniques a month. 80% of their traffic is 18-45 years old, and its a 70-30 male/female split.

It's a sports based website, dealing mostly with hockey, soccer & lacrosse.

Their traffic is 90% membership based. They're not relying on SEO for traffic.

With that said, how do you think its best to maximize poker/gaming revenue, considering I can't really do much with the content on their site.

I'm trying to talk them into a poker section with the typcial lessons, strategy articles, etc....but that might not be possible.

I'd like to come up with something not so intrusive that their site simply becomes one trying to shove gambling down their members throats, but at the same time more engaging than simply throwing up some banners.

Off the top of my head, a poker league seems like a good fit.

What would you do with 1M uniques a month, on a non poker related site?

[PartyForFree]

It should be noted, that I have no intention whatsoever of giving them all $50 free!

[PKing]

Any amount of money made by promoting poker on this site would be dwarfed by the money that could be made selling direct advertising to businesses in this niche, IMO.

Considering how targeted their traffic is and how much traffic they receive, a motivated person should be able to generate tens of thousands of extra dollars for this site on a monthly basis by selling direct advertising.

Just my opinion.

[Jeremy]

I think the idea of a poker section is great. But if they won't do that I would set up a poker league of some sort for this company. Then I would build a splash page on another domain like thatwebsitepokerleague.com

Make the page very simple and easy to understand with dates, times, and sign-up instructions. Then incorporate some sort of easy to use leaderboard software.

Now all you have to do is ask them for a sticky in their forum and a banner or two to promote it.

Then if you really want top capitalize, sign them up for the PAW affiliate program, negotiate a good deal for them. Oh and of course make 5% of the revenue yourself for referring them.

Regardless of if you were to use PAW or not, that is what I would do in terms of monetizing that much traffic in that demographic. And I agree with Pking, that much traffic makes every inch of space on their pages expensive real estate.

[Graham]

I think the league idea with some sweet prizes (hockey/soccer/lacrosse related) and some general poker tutorials (for those who don't know how to play) would be a good way to go. Work out a really good deal with one of the sites for a nice high CPA (or hybrid) + cost of prizes (in exchange for advertisement of their site (good placements for entire league season) plus all the players you will bring) and host all the events there (per season of the league - maybe swith to a new one next season).

[PPP]

Poker King is probably right, but creating a thissortssite.com/poker/ section would no doubt be able to generate some significant revenue.

[mfosouto]

If the company is worried about their image, you could probably make a new website in other domain and use something like "Check our new poker league, run by our partner xxxxxxxx.com"