Converting Poker Traffic Basics
March 3, 2008 | Marketing
One of your first goals as a new poker affiliate is to get as much traffic as possible to your site. So I’m assuming that you will have been working hard getting as many links as possible to your site and writing lots of quality content to help bring in those visitors from the search engines. However, although bringing visitors to your site is a lot of work, it’s only half of the battle. When the visitors get to your site, it’s now in your hands to convert them into real money players.
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.
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