Having a list of your visitor’s emails is a great way to market to them long after they have left your site, and gives you the opportunity to get some extra RMPs under your belt. This means that even if a visitor to your site decides not to sign-up to an online poker room on their first visit, you will have the opportunity to turn that visitor into a real money player if you can just manage to get a hold of their email address.

Newsletters (Autoresponders)

The best way to get your visitor to give you their email address is to set up a newsletter (also known as an autoresponder) on your site. This will mean that you will have a small box that will allow your visitors to submit their email address, which will then be collected and stored somewhere for you to email them later on down the line. So to be able to collect of these email addresses, you will need to invest in some autoresponder software.

There are a number of companies on the web that will allow you to set up autoresponder on your site, but unfortunately some of these will not allow their autoresponder software to be used on gambling-related websites. However, there is a superb autoresponder that you can use called Aweber, and they are more than happy to allow gambling affiliates to set up an account with them.

The cost of using Aweber is $180 per year. This may seem quite steep, but it is definitely worth the money you pay for it. If you talk to any gambling affiliate about autoresponders, there is a very good chance that they will recommend that you use Aweber. It really is a very powerful tool to market to visitors of your site, and can be found on all of the top poker portals on the web.

If you think about it, if you manage to get just 2 RMPs from using the autoresponder alone over the 12 month period of using it, you will already have made your money back and more. So it really is in your best interest to go out and spend a little money to set up and autoresponder for your site; you will thank yourself for it later on.

Capturing those emails

When you have your autoresponder set up on your site, you need to be able to persuade your visitors to sign up. You could just let it sit there saying “Sign up for our monthly newsletter”, but it is likely that the amount of emails you get by doing this will be very low. The best way to get your visitors to give you their email address is to offer them something valuable in return.

A simple yet effective way to entice a visitor to sign up for your newsletter is to offer something like a poker eBook or a handful of interesting articles for just signing up. This is possible by configuring your Aweber account so that after every sign up, an email containing your eBook or articles will automatically be sent to the address the visitor signed up with.

The eBook or articles do not have to be huge pieces of work; they just have to be something useful that you can offer in return for your visitor’s email address. However, the more interesting it sounds, the more likely it is that visitors will sign up.

As a tip, you should offer information that would sound useful to the majority of your visitors. So something like “Sign up and get your free copy of the ‘7-Card Stud Mathematics’ eBook” wouldn’t really make many of your visitors want to sign up (unless you had a Stud site of course). So try and write something generic yet interesting, like an eBook on “The Top Secrets to Beating Online Poker”, or maybe something a little more inventive. Just make it something that will look useful to the majority of the visitors to your site.

A great example of how you can offer an eBook in return for your visitor’s emails can be found at www.sitandgoplanet.com (see the ‘A Comedy of Errors’ newsletter box).

Summary

It really is worth investing in an autoresponder if you haven’t yet done so. It may be a bit of an expense at the start if you are a new affiliate, but it will almost definitely be worth it in the long run through the extra money it will make you. The autoresponder allows you to catch those visitors that do not turn into real money players upon visiting your site, so that you have a second opportunity to get that extra CPA or the extra player on your MGR deal.

Effectively, you will be able to market to your visitors both off and on your site, which should dramatically increase your overall earnings at the end of the day.

So check out Aweber and see what you think, it’s probably one of the simplest business decisions that you will ever need to make.

If you have a lot of people visiting your site, you want to squeeze out as many real money players as you can, leaving no stone unturned when it comes to conversion tactics. So here are a few top tips to help you convert your traffic into actual real money players.

Use calls to action in strategy and news articles

Just because your strategy or news article is not based around a particular room, it doesn’t mean that you should miss out on the opportunity to try and persuade the person reading the article to try out some online poker site. As you should already know, you should place calls to action throughout your review pages, like “sign up and play now” or “download here” to help entice a visitor to sign up for the room. You can do a similar thing to this on your strategy or news articles.

For example, there is no reason why you can’t have a simple link like “play at the top online poker room today” at the bottom of every article you write. You can see this tactic being used at http://www.thepokerbank.com/the-check-raise.html. Even though the article is not directly related to signing up to an online poker room (check raising strategy in this instance), you can still offer a visitor the opportunity to sign up at a great room, which should help soak up the extra conversion here and there.

In addition, you can help improve your chances of converting players on certain articles by tailoring your call to action based on the content of the article. For example, if you have an article on Stud strategy, you can place a link like “X Poker Room has the softest Stud competition – sign up today”. This is just a basic example, but it simply shows how you offer your visitors something valuable, even if they may not have been looking for it before reading the article.

It’s always better to give your visitors the opportunity to sign up, rather than not offer them anything in the first place. They will be happy to see your recommendations (as long as you are being honest of course).

Use customised banners or banners related to content

Web surfers see advertisements and banners so often these days that they have become blind to all the banners on websites, and just simply ignore them, sometimes without paying them the slightest bit of attention. This is because they rarely display anything unique, other than some overly persuasive text along with a few flashing images. It just doesn’t do it for people anymore.

However, if you can get your hands on a few customized or related banners you should be able to improve your chances of getting a conversion. If you have a page about big multi-table tournaments, then a banner about a room that offers multi-table tournaments is always going to do a lot better than a random bonus banner.

In addition, if you can get your site name to be displayed within the banner somewhere, it will help the visitor to see that there is a relationship between your site and the room, and so they will put more trust in the room being promoted.

Related banner example: http://www.thepokerbank.com/poker-strategy.html
Customized banner example: http://www.thepokerbank.com/poker-mathematics.html

It is possible to make your own banners if you are savvy with design work, but if not, you may have to ask your affiliate manager for customized banners if possible. However, you may have some difficulty getting AMs to make you customised banners if you are yet to bring in any RMPs, so you may have to work on sending more players to rooms before asking for custom banners for your site unfortunately.

In general though, text links always seem to have a much higher click through ratio than banners. So I wouldn’t be overly concerned about getting those customized banners; just stick with the related banners that you can work with around your content.

Rank your poker rooms

Ranking the poker rooms you display on your site will help visitors identify which rooms are better than others. If you fail to rank the poker rooms on your site, your visitors may find it difficult to decide which room is the best for them, and they may well decide to look elsewhere for more conclusive information.

However, if you only promote a small number of rooms, not ranking the rooms shouldn’t cause too much of a problem. This is because your visitors won’t need to make a judgement based on a wide variety of options available to them, but instead on a smaller number, which will make things a lot easier.

For more information on this idea, you can check out the article on writing poker room reviews.

So what should you do with your affiliate payments? For some of you this is going to be a simple question; head to the bar and get a load of drinks in with your friends. After all, you did work hard for this money, so why not treat yourself? This is a top-notch idea, because affiliating is not about all work and no reward, so treat yourself and look forward to the following payment the next month. However, aside from the first payment (if you choose to treat yourself with it), what should you do with the rest of the money you make from being a poker affiliate?

Some people will decide to carry on treating themselves and buy stuff they don’t really need, but these types of people are normally in the poker affiliate business to get a quick $100 or so, and they will never make it far in the poker affiliate industry. But if you want to continue as an affiliate and try and double the amount you make the next month, you should reinvest the money back into your site. Now if you really have a love for your site and have the desire to make it as a big timer one day, making the decision to reinvest your money is not going to be hard at all.

What can you reinvest your money in?

After deciding to use your earnings for the benefit and development of your site, where exactly are you going to ‘reinvest’ this money? Well, there are a number of ways you can improve your site with the use of your affiliate payments. One of the best ways to reinvest your money is to buy some content from a solid player that writes poker articles. You can normally find someone who does ‘ghost writing’ on a forum if you do some searching around, and this extra content will help to expand your site and provide another point of entry from the search engines if you SEO the page well.

You can also use the money to buy some advertising on other poker websites. If you search around, you will notice that a number of poker sites offer advertising spots to other webmasters, where you can pay a certain amount per month to advertise depending on how popular the site is. This will help you to get more traffic and get your site recognised a little more in the big world of online poker websites. As a tip, search around for sites that will work best with your website banner on them. Always ask yourself “Would a person visiting this website be interested in clicking on a banner to visit my website?” If the answer is no, then you should shop around for something a little better.

Another way you could improve your site is to get some graphics or logos designed. Images are a great way to personalise your site, and make it stand out amongst the crowd if you can get a good designer to work for you. You will be surprised at how a good image in an article will help to break the page up a little and make your content look that little bit more interesting. For example, if you look at www.thepokerbank.com/poker-mathematics.html, you will see that there is a clipart style image in the top right corner. Without this image the page would be okay, but with it you can see that the page automatically looks a little more interesting, and so visitors will stay on the site a little longer to read the article.

For those that have been making a steady income from affiliating for a while, how about using some of that money to start a new project? With the money you have coming in and the new knowledge you have about making websites, why not try making a new site in a different niche? If things don’t go to plan and you decide that you are not interested in running the extra site any more, you can always sell up the site and get your money back (or probably more). But the experience you gain from developing a new site is only ever going to be beneficial, there’s no two ways about it. A good point to remember is that it’s much easier to make $1000 from ten sites, than it is to make $1000 from one.

There are a number of other things that you can purchase for your site, but it always depends on your needs at the time. I for one have a little notepad file in the corner of my desktop listing all the things I am looking to buy when I get the money. These can sometimes be expensive, but at the end of the day I want to do what is best for my site, and I know that all the money that I put into my site is going to be returned to me many times over in the following months and years. So the next time you come across something that you feel would help with the development of your site, jot it down somewhere and think about it the next time you get your affiliate payment through.

Just remember, reinvest for future success!

So what should you be looking for in a domain name? You obviously want to find something that you are completely happy with and can work with in the future, so here is a quick guide to finding the domain name that is going to work best for your poker site.

Branding

When people visit your site, it’s great to have a domain name that is easy to remember and will stick in people’s minds. Some of the best domains involve 2 words together (e.g. cardplayer.com, cardschat.com, everypoker.com), with some superb domains just using one word. However, the chances of getting a good one-word poker domain in this day and age are pretty slim, so you are more than likely going to need to shoot for a domain with 2 or 3 words in it.

The best kind of domain to get is one that is memorable, yet still contains keywords for your site. However, this is not always going to be possible, so you have to make a compromise in some area. You can still rank well if you don’t have your keywords in your domain name, so don’t be too afraid about sacrificing a keyword to help keep your domain short and sweet.

If you are pushing to 4 words then it is less likely that your domain is going to be very memorable, and on top of this it’s going to be a pretty long domain name. The same idea applies to the use of dashes (-) in domain names. If you use too many, it’s not going to make your site all that brandable. Many people would say that you should stick to 2 at most, but in my honest opinion I don’t think you should use more than one.

So as a general rule, go for something short, sweet and brandable rather than getting an overly busy domain name just to try and fit your keywords in. Imagine how hard it’s going to be for people to say “Hey I found this really great site the other day… its: Holdem dash strategy dash tips four (the number not word) dash poker”. It doesn’t really have much of ring to it now does it?

.com .net .org?

When you have found your desired domain name, you have a choice between a number of different TLDs (top level domains). The obvious choice would be to use the .com domain if possible, because it is much more familiar to your visitors to have a .com at the end of your domain and it helps your site to sound more reputable.

The other two are also fine to use, and they should not pose any problems if you are forced to use a .net or .org when it comes to ranking well in the search engines. I would choose .net over .org, but that is just a matter of personal preference. However, I wouldn’t stray away from using a .com, .org or .net domain for a poker site unless you are targeting a specific country and using a domain like .co.uk or .ca. If you are using something like a .tk domain, people are going to think, “If this is such a great site, why didn’t they get the .com domain instead?”

So stick with the ones that people are familiar with.

Domain name tips

When you register a domain name, try to avoid names that may be trademarked. A good example of this is using ‘wsop’ anywhere in your domain. This is because ‘wsop’ has been trademarked, and you can easily be asked to take your site down and transfer it to another domain if you get spotted. Another example is anything ending in ‘rus’, as ‘toysrus’ tries hard to prevent anyone using this particular trademark. But I wouldn’t imagine you would want to use this in a domain name as a poker affiliate anyway.

Another tip is to choose a different company to register your domain name with than you use for your hosting. This is because if there ever happens to be any trouble with your hosting, there won’t be any trouble with switching from one host to another and retaining your domain name at the same time.

The problem with finding a good poker domain is that all the best ones are taken. There are literally thousands of websites already out there, so it can become a pretty difficult task to still find some half decent ones that might be left. So the idea is to compromise a little, but don’t go over the top just to try and get a few keywords in. At the end of the day, something short and memorable like knowholdem.com is going to work much better than holdem-strategy–texas.net.

Ready to register a domain? Check out the top domain registration sites

Search Engines

Search engines are a great way to get a steady flow of visitors to your website. If someone types in a search term into a search engine like Google, there is a chance that Google will put your site in the results pages if the search term that person used is related to your site in some way. If that person then sees the information they are looking for, they may click on the link to your site, and you are provided with a visitor.

Subsequently, if your page ranks highly in the results pages, such as near the top of the first page, you are likely to receive a lot of traffic from people using that particular search term. Therefore, if you have lots of pages that can rank highly in Google and other search engines, you will have a great constant supply of free traffic that can bring in many potential real money players (RMPs).

The key to ranking highly in the search engines is search engine optimisation (SEO), which is basically modifying your pages in such a way that Google can easily recognise the information contained within them, and so they will be more inclined to rank them higher in the results pages. SEO isn’t too difficult to learn, but it is something that all good affiliates do, as it brings a vast amount of traffic that can be converted into RMPs. For most poker affiliates, search engines will prove to be the #1 source of traffic.

Advertising

Another option webmasters have to gain traffic is to advertise on other people’s websites. This is a good way to gain targeted traffic, as you can find numerous poker websites that will allow you to advertise on them, and you can be sure that the traffic will be targeted to your niche. For example, its unlikely that you are going to get many RMPs if you get traffic through advertising on a religious website, but if you advertise on another poker related website instead you can be sure that your visitors are interested in poker.

The only downside to advertising is the cost. The more popular the website, the more it will normally cost to gain an advertising spot on the site. Similarly, the best spots for advertising are not going to be cheap, and so you have to weigh up whether the amount you make from the traffic will be more than the amount you spend on advertising. This may be a little tricky for new affiliates, so its not recommended that you spend much on advertising until you gain a little more experience and have more money to spend.

Signature Links

This is essentially another form of advertising, but it is completely free and can also bring you some quality, targeted traffic. Some forums will allow you to place links in your signature to your website, so that every time you post, a link to your site will appear at the bottom of your post. Therefore if you post frequently, you will have lots of links pointing to your site that people on the forums can click on to visit your site.

Although this will not bring you an immense amount of traffic, it is a great way to get traffic, especially at the start of your poker affiliating career where things may be a little slow at the start. Just be sure to make quality posts and don’t abuse the privilege of being able to add links to your signature. If you make poor quality or spammy posts, it is likely that you will be banned from the forum, and you will not be making a good name for your website.

Link Exchanges and Directories

If you do lots of link exchanges with other poker websites, there will be more opportunities for visitors across all of the sites you have exchanged with to click on a link that points to your site. Although links are most useful for SEO purposes, they can also provide you with a bit of traffic. However, the amount of traffic you get from link exchanges will normally be relatively small compared to the amount of traffic you can get from search engines and advertising.

Similarly, you can submit your site to lots of free directories. However, just as with link exchanges, the real power of these links comes through their SEO benefits, but it does not mean that you won’t get the odd click through from time to time.

Getting Links>

So these are the top ways in which you can get traffic to your website. The list pretty much goes in order of which will bring you the most traffic; with the search engines almost always being at the top, and links from link exchanges and directories being near the bottom. It is highly recommended that you aim to get as much traffic as possible from the search engines, because this is going to be your main money-earner. So you should try hard to learn about SEO, and give your pages the best opportunity to rank well in the search engines and bring you that all-important traffic.