Offline poker affiliate marketing is one of the most overlooked venues for potential player conversions. In some cases affiliates can make more money marketing offline than online. Whether out of fear, laziness or simply not knowing - few people attempt to market poker in their everyday life. If you are the type of affiliate struggling to convert players online, maybe it is time to try the live approach. With a little hard work offline marketing could give you a nice player base to get started.

Networking is not only a great way to find a job, but also a way to recruit new poker players. Many avenues of our daily social life bring us face to face with potential new poker conversions. Offline affiliate marketing doesn’t have to be about door to door solicitations.Think about all of the places you go throughout the day where you naturally interact with other people. Maybe you go to get your haircut at the local barber shop, or maybe you are a frequent drinker who likes the local sports bar. These are great places to start an offline marketing campaign.  Affiliate marketing doesn’t have to be fancy at all. It can simply be interacting with people throughout your day and dropping off a few business cards. Here are a few great places to start offline affiliate marketing.

Shopping Malls

People tend to be very open to solicitation at shopping malls. Chances are if they are already shopping, they are more open to a poker proposal. They might naturally let their guard down and listen to your poker proposal or accept your business card.

Barber Shop

Drop off a handful of business cards wherever you get your haircut. If you don’t feel up to talking to people directly, stash a few poker business cards in the front page of a magazine or leave them on a counter.

As you might already know, the top ten results in search engines get nearly all of the traffic. Going one step further the top six places get most of the traffic. Web surfers rarely go past the first page search results. They usually don’t need to because the first page usually has the answers they are looking for. Secondly, most people are lazy or simply don’t look at the tabs on the bottom leading to a second or third page. This makes ranking on the first page absolutely necessary if you want large amounts of traffic. So why do you need to rank in the top six places? Well if you understand page breaks and scrolling you will see that the top six search results are usually above the page break. Meaning search engine users have a tendency not to use the scroll bar to view the bottom results of the first page of search.

Search engine optimization describes the process you must go through as a poker website affiliate to make your site rank high in search engines. One of the main components of search engine rankings is known as backlinks. These links are brought about when someone puts your link on their site. Everytime someone does this your site gets a vote of confidence. Search engines recognize backlinks or link exchanges as tiny endorsements. When a site has a lot of backlinks, search engines believe that website is worthy of high search rankings.  Search engine algorythms calculate the relevency of your site based on keywords and backlinks.

So now that we have established the importance of backlinks lets go a step further. Backlinks as described above are tiny endorsements given by other sites. So getting a lot of back links is all you need to do right? This couldn’t be any further from the truth. Who endorses your website with a backlink is more important than how many people have your link on their site. Lets use an easy to understand scenario to help you understand.

Imagine you design a hot new golf shoe and want to promote it. Would you rather have one hundred unknown golfers promoting your shoe or one famous athlete like Tiger Woods wearing your golf shoe? The answer is obvious in Tiger Woods giving your shoe an endorsement. Backlinks work much the same way. The quality of the backlink is several times more important than the quantity. The quality of a website is measured and scored in what is called "pagerank".

Another major factor in ranking high for keywords is the title of the backlinks you receive. Say for example your poker website address is 101pokerlist.com. When setting up a link exchange you want the title of your link to be the keyword  phrase you want to rank high for. This is also called "anchor" text or titles. Instead of this website using PokerAffiliateship.com it uses Poker Affiliate Programs as its anchor text. This way the site will hopefully receive a higher ranking for the search term "poker affiliate programs" in the future.

So how exactly can you secure quality backlinks? The best part about link exchanges is they are completely free. However, getting people to agree to an exchange can be difficult at times. Most people only want to exchange links with websites having high pagerank.  The trouble with this is google and other search engines update and tweek pagerank algorythms all the time, so rankings are constantly changing. Secondly, new sites often start out with a very low pagerank since they have little content and backlinks. Although these sites start off small, they can grow into some of the best websites on the internet. Be sure to actually check out the websites you plan on doing a link exchange with. If the websites have killer designs and fresh exciting content, consider exchanging links immediately. That is your opportunity to get in on the ground floor.

• Blog Comments
• Message Boards
• Article Databases

To get you started, free and easy places exist to gain quality backlinks. First off, read blogs and websites and leave comments on those sites with your link at the end of the comment. Be careful to actually post quality comments so you don’t get marked as spam. Another method is posting in forums and message boards with your poker website link in the signature block. Lastly, you can submit articles to ezine and other article databases with your link inside the article. Don’t forget to include the proper anchor text in all your links!  Try to get a few link exchanges per week if you can - it will certainly add up over time and so will your search engine hits.

People play poker for a variety of reasons, but people become poker affiliates for only one reason. People choose to promote poker to make money. While a successful poker player can make a lot of money, a successful affiliate can make several times that. Some of the top performing poker affiliates are making six figures annually. Affiliate revenue doesn’t have swings like the game of poker does. Income is based strictly on the amount of players referred. Whether you choose the flat commission or percentage revenue plan, your long term affiliate earnings will be based on the amount of people you refer. It doesn’t get any clearer than that. Now that you know why people promote poker, here are some reasons you should sign up.

Pad Your Bankroll

Most affiliate earnings are released through player accounts. Meaning, poker sites deposit your affiliate earnings directly into your poker account. You can either cash these earnings out or play poker with it. For poker players wishing to pad their bankroll, they can use affiliate revenue  to play.  For beginning players with small bankrolls, affiliate commissions will definitely become useful by allowing you to play at higher limits earlier. Instead of grinding away at micro limit games you can move up levels using your affiliate commissions to make even more money.

Promote the Game

Although monetary rewards are the main reason people become poker affiliates it never hurts to promote the game you love. Referring fellow poker players helps the strength of the industry, ensuring that you will have people to play against for years to come. You may even make money off of one of your referred players in a live game.  Poker promotion also helps grow the games popularity and acceptance in society. Lets face it, recent legislature by the federal government has threatened the survival of online poker. Building the volume of players helps ensure the games existence in the future.

Free and Easy

Becoming a poker affiliate is both free and easy. You don’t necessarily even need a website to get started. Poker affiliates can use bonus codes and tracking links to get credit for players they refer. They can also use mailing campaigns or pass on information by word of mouth to friends and family. Poker affiliate programs are completely free other than the time you invest in working on promotion.

Growing Industry

Online gaming is a growing industry. With the widespread popularity of the World Series of Poker televised, more and more people are giving online poker a try. The movie, "Rounders" has also inspired thousands of people around the world to play texas holdem poker. After a recent setback resulting from harmful federal legislature, poker seems to be making a comeback.  As more people log on to the internet, poker should grow in popularity. Already a multi-billion dollar industry, only gaming will only increase. This is your opportunity to get in on the ground floor and make some serious money.

Promoting online poker is a great way to make supplemental income. Whether you are new to the poker scene or a seasoned player, you can make money promoting online poker. Poker affiliate programs are 100% free and easier than you could imagine. You have absolutely nothing to lose since these programs cost nothing - other than potential profits you could be missing. Get started promoting poker today and check out featured poker affiliate programs.