Becoming a Poker Affiliate: Steps 1-5

When I’m talking to someone about being an affiliate, the conversation always ends up the same: “Okay, I’m in. How do I get started? What do I do next?” It can really be tough to get started too, there’s a lot of things that you should be prepared for, and so I’ve written up this step by step guide on how to get started as an online poker affiliate, so lets get to it. Please note that this guide is aimed towards people who have very little, if any knowledge of the affiliate and poker industry, so I’ll be covering a lot of basic advice that experienced affiliates most likely know.

There’s a lot of detail here – so I recommend printing this out, and studying it offline, so you can make notes while you read. I’ve also written up a cliff notes section at the end to summarize everything, but I highly recommend reading through it all.

1: Understand what an affiliate is. A lot of people come into this without fully understanding what an affiliate is, or what their job is. You may have a vague idea, so I’ll explain it fully. The short answer, is that you earn money for referring players to poker rooms. If a player inputs your bonus code or uses your affiliate link to sign up and play money for a poker room, you’ll earn money for that player.

To get a bit more detailed – there are two types of payment methods, CPA(Cost Per Acquisition) and Revenue Share. For CPA, you will earn a flat fee for every player that you send to a poker room that meets certain requirements. For example at Pokerstars, once a player earns 100 FPP(Frequent Player Points), you’ll earn a fee of approximately $75. For revenue share – as a player plays at a poker room, he generates rake for the poker room. If you look at a tournament for example that costs $10+$1 to enter – the $1 is the revenue/rake that the player has to pay to play in that tournament. The poker room also takes a percentage out of a pot in each cash game. This is how the poker room makes money, and is known as the rake. If you are on the revenue share plan, you’ll earn a percentage of that – at least 20%, and often as high as 40%. So in essence, your sole job is to get players playing at poker rooms under your tracking link. You can read more about CPA versus revenue share here – you’ll most likely have to be on revenue share at most poker rooms, but when you have the choice, a lot of it depends on the site you run, or the players you are marketing towards. If you’re marketing towards high rollers for example, you’ll want to be on revenue share as there is more rake at the higher limits. If you’re marketing to beginner players, considering the failure rate of them is high when it comes to maintaining a bankroll, CPA is the better option.

2: Come up with a website idea: Or rather, a marketing idea. It doesn’t have to be a website – it could be a newsletter, an offline marketing campaign – anything. However for the simplicity of this article, and as 99% of you will be focusing on a website, we’ll go with the idea of creating a website. Perhaps you already have a unique idea, or maybe you just want to follow in the footsteps of other websites and copy their ideas. There’s nothing wrong with that – if someone is successful with one site concept, it just makes sense to copy it so you too can be successful.

If you’re having trouble coming up with an idea, here are some popular ones: site dedicated to various poker rooms with reviews of them all; site focused on poker rooms bonus codes; site dedicated to a particular player or poker room; site dedicated to a specific game ie: No Limit Hold’Em, Razz, Omaha; site focused on a specific format of a game, for example tournaments or cash games; site aimed towards players of a particular skill level; site talking about the latest online poker gossip; site focused on online or offline poker news; site with tournament updates; site focused on many different plays; and of course, blogs where you, as a poker player, provide a diary of your online poker play. These are just some, of the many generalized site ideas you can come up with.

Overwhelmed by that list? If so, it’s understandable. However I just wanted to show you the amount of possibilities there are out there for sites. There are hundreds of site ideas out there. If you’re not sure at all – use yourself as a demographic, and focus on building a site around what you know. Are you just a casual player, who plays tournaments now and again for fun? Or someone who has watched poker on TV, and wants to get in on the action? Think about what drives you – what makes you interested in poker, and then start a site around that. There are plenty of web resources that will help you get going, and I’m always available to help out and help you brainstorm. You know the old saying – If you build it, they will come. As long as they’re looking for it, they’ll come.

Coming up with a website idea is a fairly simple concept, but the difficulty is in the next task….

3: Figure out how your site will make you money: Out of all the steps that will be listed in this guide, this is by far the most important one, yet one that so many affiliates look over. Many think that all they have to do is build a site, throw up some banners, write up some content and just wait for people to come. Wrong. There is just so much more to it, and you really must have a clear marketing plan before you continue from this stage. For example, there was an affiliate who came up with a unique site idea – it’d focus on offline casinos, and rumours of the casinos being haunted. I like this idea – it’s thinking outside the box. However he didn’t have a marketing plan for it – he didn’t understand how to turn a site idea like that, into actually making money, and the site closed after three months.

Once you’ve came up with a site idea, the first thing to do is think about your demographics. You can’t just give a blanket estimation like “poker players”, you have to be a lot more specific. If your site is about Phil Ivey, then you’re going to be marketing to people interested in Phil Ivey. If your site is about freeroll tournaments, then you’re going to be marketing to players with small or no bankrolls, looking for some basically free cash.

So take a notepad, and write down your site idea, and then the demographics. You don’t have to get too detailed at this stage – as long as you have a general idea of the people that will be visiting your site. Once that’s done – the next step is important – how will these players make you money. Let’s use the Phil Ivey site as an example: it’s easy to get the people in, as there isn’t a lot of competition. With hard work, you should be able to rank #1-#3 for Phil Ivey in google. However this is a small market, and they’re most likely looking for information about Phil Ivey – not to play at a poker room. Sometimes, the ideas you have just won’t end up making money, so you have to go back to another idea. If I was running a site dedicated to Phil Ivey however, I’m confident I could make money from it. First, you focus on advising your website visitors that they can watch, and even play with Phil Ivey, at Full Tilt Poker. You monitor the tables, and when Ivey is playing you post it on your site, telling people to come watch him now, linking of course to Full Tilt Poker. That’s not all you can do – you need to come up with as many ideas, as many “hooks” as possible. If someone is interested in Phil Ivey, the majority of them are fans after seeing either his tournament game, or his high stakes reputation. Based on that you can advertise big tournaments on sites outside of Full Tilt, especially satellites for the World Series of Poker, because the majority of your readers will be “mainstream” fans of poker – people who have got into it after watching the WSOP on ESPN.

Sometimes it’s not as simple as this – there are many other methods. I’ll use one of my sites, Ultimate Poker Bankroll as another example. This is a site that targets bonus whores, players who move from poker room to poker room clearing their signup and reload bonuses. So all I have to do is write up that list and I profit right? Wrong. Many of the bonuses would result in negative MGR, or such a small amount that it wasn’t really worth it. You need to have long term plans. With Ultimate Poker Bankroll, it started solely as a bonus site, however the long term plan was to gain the trust of my readers, and move into rakeback. For example with the Boss Network. I would get the players to clear the signup bonuses at King Solomons Poker, Linesmaker and Sporting Bet. All three of those sites did not make me any money. However, I would then recommend the players stay at the Boss Network, and play at Fortune Poker under my rakeback plan. Boss Network is an excellent poker network with lots of fish, and after clearing those bonuses people are aching to stick around, and with the option of rakeback, I had an incredible turnover. To make matters even better, because I had helped these players build their bankrolls, instead of having $100 or $200 they were now sitting at about $3000, and were able to play higher limits, which means higher rake, and thus more money for me.

So take some time and sit down, and make sure that the site you’re going to be creating is going to be able to earn you money. Because if it isn’t, there’s just no point to even building it.

4. Design The Site: By this point, you have a general idea of what your site is going to be about. You also have a basic idea of the people that will be visiting it – your target market. So now is the time to come up with the design for a site. You’re not going to be getting into HTML or CSS yet though – you’re going to do a basic plan of your site. The way it will be laid out, possibly the colours and banner, content ideas, how users will navigate the site – this is your first real brainstorming session. I prefer to leave the computer for this, and be alone with my thoughts and without distraction, or even find a buddy that you can bounce ideas off of. For Poker Affiliate Bible, I filled up about 10 pages on my notepad. Here’s one page:

I filled up approximately 10 pages full of ideas. This involved going into more detail about the demographic, deciding on a name, making notes of things I should research on the internet, writing down clearly the process as to how I’ll make money, how the site navigation will work, and many other things. This really helped me get a clearer picture of the site, and helps when actually building it. Once I’d did that brainstorming session, it was time to move onto the next step:

5. Checking Out The Competition. One thing you should always do when starting a new site is check out the competition. I advise doing this after your first major brainstorming session, because otherwise you will find it hard to be creative, and will get an idea of what your site should be based on other sites, which isn’t always the best way to approach things. By checking out the competition, you’re wanting to see what these sites are doing, and if they have any ideas that you didn’t think of. Don’t be put off by the amount of competition out there – it’ll be rare that you find a a very unique niche which is also profitable – just understand that the reason for so much competition is because the area that you are involved in is profitable, and your aim is to do a better job than all of the competition. Look at the content on the site; view the source code and look at the meta keywords; put yourself in the shoes of the average web visitor that is being marketed, and see if there is anything on the site that would cause you to click through to a poker room. Is there? Then use that. Isn’t there? Then why not? And what would make you click through to a poker room from that site? By putting yourself in the shoes of the demographic that you are marketing to at this stage, you should be able to understand more exactly how to turn them from a website visitor, into someone that makes you money.

SUMMARY

• Understand as an affiliate, what your job is. It is to get players, via your tracking links, to sign up and play for real money at poker rooms.
• Come up with an idea for a website.
• Write down a plan as to how you’re actually going to make money from the site. What is going to turn your visitors into visitors that sign up at poker rooms and earn you money.
• “Design” your site. I don’t mean diving straight into HTML and CSS – plan out your site on a notepad. Draw a basic layout. Write down all the content that your site will eventually have. Plan out each section. Brainstorm, brainstorm, brainstorm. Get inside your demographics mind, and determine how best to market to them.
• Visit the competition. Find sites that are competing with your concept via google. See what they’re doing, and not only get ideas from it, but think about how you can do it better.

By the end of all this, you should have a picture in your head of what your site will look like. You should be aware of the majority of the content for the site, as well as have a solid marketing plan in place. You should know your demographic, and know how to market them.

This is the end of part one of this step by step guide. Part two will be up this weekend, where we discuss the design of a site, domain name, basic navigation, search engine optimization and more, as we get the website up and running.