I am A Newbie and will thankyou for your help.

[pokernoker]

HEy GUys! and Gals!

Let me just say well I am glad to be here. I did an online search and was lucky to find this forum.

Let me start with explaining some little things about what I have done.
I am a university student in Canada and ofcourse a poker addict and lover.
Overall, since my 2 yrs of play I am up a 900$ US ( managed it in a spread sheet) and so not one of the BIG players out there. However, with the growing popularity of poker, I thought I did try out the affiliate business. I searched a lot of affiliate programs out and ofcourse as a beginner I didnt want to take any HUGE risks. So I am currently a PARTYPOKER.COM affiliate and this is my first month. I setup a website with them to give free $75 to bring in members like many sites do. I have got 13 people that I have given this too and thats the most I want to go this month for its my money going to those players which partypoker will pay me back in a month. Not to mention, I am a little skeptical about it too as well.

Anyhow if it is all real under the CPA plan, I am expecting to receive about $ 1000 this month and man I wished I could have become someone sub affiliate and got them to give me 10 % of the 20 % they would have earned of me. ANyhow its life and we move on.

Now the real reason why I am here is to ask for help? ANd since everyone here is so kind enough to take a few minutes to reply back I appreciate it in advance. Here are my questions?

• Are there any other poker rooms with the same promotion? You get CPA without a minimum hands requirements?
• How do you know which plan will work out better - CPA and MGR since you dont know what kind of players are signing up and there are no guarantees they will play there?
• How come if there is so much money to be made in affiliate programs, Why do so many poker players dont know about it?
• If you dont mind, could I add some of your guys on msn, and ask you to be some what of a GURU to me in this business?
• Any other comments and help is appreciated.

Or add me on MSN -

Website : www.pokernoker.com
Please feel free to check out my website but do not signup yet. I am still try to figure out some details and logistics.

Thanks again
Vik

[Georgia Poker]

If you're doing this under their CPA plan you'd better hope that your players play enough hands for Party to release payment to you. Do a search of the forums here and you'll see that a few people have had issues with this in the past.

If you want to do the free 75 on Party you should go on a MGR plan to avoid this.

[SunPoker.com]

How do you know which plan will work out better - CPA and MGR since you dont know what kind of players are signing up and there are no guarantees they will play there?

You will just have to test this out on your own. Different sites have different demographics. I would say if you are attracting a lot of bonus hunters, CPA would be the way to go, but it will be harder to work with an affiliate manager under these circumstances. Other than bonus hunting sites, in the long term, I believe MGR to be the best way to go for affiliates.

Sunpoker offers CPA, but you will need to meet some requirements for CPA.

Best Regards,

Mark

[pokernoker]

Thanks for the responses.

What do mean by problems if my sent players don't play enough hands? I dont remember seeing this in anywhere on affiliate agreement? ALso well the rule of numbers say that well close to 1 in 10 I refer will come back to play, then why do they worry?

where will I find the cases where poeple had problems and how did they solve this? And Mark what are requirements for CPA and MGR for Sunpoker? Can you please help me out.

Thanks guys.

[Jeremy]

CPA is a great decision for some people, in fact I am even starting to migrate towards some CPA deals.

However many new affiliates make the mistake I will outline below and then get pissed when the poker site doesn't pay them at the end of the month. You have to think of it like a business and not a quick hit & run to the poker sites.

If there's one sentence you take away from my post remember this "Poker Affiliate Programs pay us to send them poker players, not sign-ups"

So here's the mistake the typical new affiliate makes on CPA deals. Let's say you are on a $100 CPA for round numbers sake. You go to all your buddies you can find, most have never played a hand of real money online poker in their life. You ask them to deposit $50 at XXXXpoker.com and tell them to play the lowest limit possible, but make sure they play at least 250 raked hands.

Hell, you even offer to give them the $50 back that they deposited so they can freeroll and see if they can make any money. (You still make $50 this way on the CPA)

So the new player gets to their minimum hand requirement playing .10-.20 limit hold em and decides "what the hell", it's free money and takes a shot at the 2-4NL game. Within 10 minutes they are bust, and chalk it up as a fun time with free money.

Looking at the way they were reffered, more than likely this player will delete the software from their PC and never play again. From a business perspective if you did this with 10 different players, the site now owes you $1000 at the end of the month on players that have more than likely raked less than $100 collectively.

Sure maybe one will stick around and deposit again, but poker sites are not gonna pay you 10 times more than your players have raked for the month. That's just bad business and if I was consulting for a company that did this, I wold tell them their getting rolled.

If you are an operator it is very easy to tell which CPA affiliates are using a business model like this versus the ones that are actually sending quality players. Hence the reason you hear about $300+ CPA's. The affiliates making this kind of CPA send a large amount of players, and their players are poker players in every sense of the word.

So the bottom line is to remember being a poker affiliate is all about sending players to poker sites, not just raw sign-ups. Perhaps all your guys are big players which is great, but then you should question if it would make more sense to be on a mgr plan.

CPA is great for large sites that know they will have traffic and sign-ups for many months to come. But in your situation you're gonna get that one time CPA payment and then back to square one. Hence if you are sending good players who are gonna stick around for a while you may want to think about building a residual income through mgr, until you have that steady flow of sign-ups.

[pokernoker]

Thanks Jeremy. That explains a lot. Maybe I will add you on msn if you dont mind and try to talk some more.

Thanks to everyone else as well.
Cheers

Vik

[pokernoker]

Hey guys,
I have another question - agreed that it is not good business practice for Partypoker to freeze affiliate accounts for the free $75 if they are dont get players who play. However, why dont they say something like this in their policy? Also are they not required to give us a notice or to inform us that they will make this months payment but after that the affiliate is not allowed to do that promotion?

pLEASE advice for I don't want to get screwed.
Cheers
Vik

[Jeremy]

The best course of action is to open up a dialogue with your AM before starting the promo. This way together you can monitor your stats and if you're not hitting your numbers you can potentially re-negotiate moving to an mgr plan versus cpa.

In my experience as long as your AM's are in the loop with what you're doing they are not going to freeze your account. Instead they will work with you to get those numbers up.

The value of having a good realtionship with your AM's is very important in this industry and cannot be stressed enough.

[pokernoker]

thanks jeremy for the advice

I will try my best to keep a healthy business relationship with my AM.

Also asking the members here on what is the best way to get players to deposit. I mean I have tons of friends that love to play at other pokerrooms but I have a hard time convincing them to switch poker rooms if I don't do a free promotion as such as this.

It is ofcourse much easier to get hit and go players then. However, what do you guys think is the best way to get players to invest their own money and earn under the MGR program.

Also Jeremy, I will love it you can add me on msn.
its Vik - .

And I am going to add you right now.
Hope you don't mind.
Cheers and Thanks again
Vik