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.

Knowing what poker rooms to promote can be tough for most affiliates. Should you promote the hot, up and coming room or play it safe with well known poker sites? These questions will significantly affect your profits over the long term as a poker affiliate. On one hand you want to get in on the ground floor with a start-up poker site - on the other you want to play it safe and make sure you get credit for your hard earned referrals. Balancing your poker promotions is key for long term affiliate success. This article will help you understand how to best choose a portfolio of names to advertise on your affiliate website.

Best of Breed
In the investment world "best of breed" implies the strongest companies in each industry. Some metrics for measuring strength include product quality, financial viability, brand and market advantage. Applying this to poker we can conclude that best of breed applies to poker rooms with the most players. Poker sites with massive amounts of players aren’t likely to fold up without notice leaving you high and dry. They also shouldn’t have a hard time paying you the commissions you have earned. Furthermore, the top names in poker have a lot on the line - they probably aren’t going to risk hurting their business by scamming you. Finally, you conversion rate will often be higher with the top few poker site since they have traffic, name recognition and professional endorsements. The majority of the poker sites you promote should be among the best of breed.

Affiliate Programs
Full Tilt Poker
PokerStars
Bodog

High-Flyers
These are the poker rooms that are start up or second tier rooms. They are often hard to promote since they are relatively unknown and unproven. New rooms are sometimes diamonds in the rough, but promoting a start-up poker site allows you to get in on the ground floor. Taking a chance on a new site could be a great thing if it takes off. Now here comes the bad news. New poker sites often fail to pay affiliates on time or outright cheat affiliates out of valuable commissions. Countless cases of poker room cheating occur via tracking or financial fraud. If you are involved in a revenue sharing poker affiliate program with a new site beware.

Affiliate Programs
Cake Poker
Carbon Poker

Quantity
There is no limit to how many poker rooms you can promote, but why promote rooms that don’t convert well. Stick with the top performing poker rooms and focus exclusively on those. Devoting all of your time and resources into a handful of poker rooms is more profitable than promoting across the board too thin. If you want to take a chance on a few new rooms with exciting bonuses or attractions that is great. However, zone in on a core group of poker sites before you expand any further. If you can’t get conversions with the most popular sites chances are you won’t be able to promote the less known ones either.

Rate Negotiation
Successful poker rooms have quality affiliate programs. Poker sites won’t last long unless they can keep a fresh crop of players depositing money and playing poker. After the boom in early 2000, online poker has slowed down a little. Poker rooms are fighting tooth and nail in competition for players. If you think your website can bring in a steady number of players per month you can negotiate a CPA rate that is higher than advertised. Volume is key since you only have negotiating power if you can prove that you refer a large volume of people. If you feel like your site is deserving of a higher than advertised rate, negotiate with multiple poker rooms to see which one will give you the best deal.

Offer enough of a variety of poker rooms that you can create effective comparison, but not so many that you can’t cover each of them efficiently. A good rule for new affiliates is to promote their top three poker sites before increasing the amount of poker rooms covered. Full Tilt Poker has a great revenue sharing program while Pokerstars has a solid cost per acquisition program. Rooms like Cake Poker and Carbon Poker offer hot new start-up site opportunities for those who want to take on more risk. Overall your promotional portfolio should be balanced between risk categories. Target a handful of well known poker sites and then mix in some of the newer names in the industry.[poll id="1"]

While the percentage revenue plan (PRP) on various affiliate programs seem nice, hidden fees exist that will negatively affect your earning each month. Keep in mind that poker rooms like Full Tilt have frivolous fees that subtract from your monthly MGR totals. It is even possible for players to earn negative revenue each month. Poker affiliates have been fighting with sites like Full Tilt for a long time over such petty fees on PRP accounts without any luck. Before you sign-up under the percent of revenue generated plan realize that you are likely to be penalized beyond belief on a monthly basis. This article may even convince you that a cost-per-acquisition plan is the better choice. Here are a few affiliate terms and associated penalties you will run into as an affiliate.

Player Rake - Rake generated by the player in ring or cash games. This is what MGR & PRP affiliates make profits off of. This is also a major determining factor in the amount of rakeback a player receives.

Player Juice - Tournament or Sit & Go fees player has paid. If a player enters a tournament that costs $20+$2 an affiliate will be credited with $2.00 worth of "juice".

Fraud
When you refer players to a poker room and they become involved in fraudulent play you will get charged for it. Full Tilt and other card rooms are tracking game play for fraud. Collusion and outright cheating that results in a player winning a large sum of money will be reversed. As a poker affiliate you will suffer the most if the cheating player signed up through your affiliate link. Things could be going well for a month and then suddenly you get slammed with a fraudulent player and lose most of your revenue. Fraud also applies to deposit and withdrawal transactions. Stolen credit card deposits and phony withdrawals caught by a poker site will also penalize your affiliate revenue.

Bonus
One of the more common and understandable ways affiliate get penalized is through bonus redemption. A referred player who takes advantage of a deposit bonus will be penalized on your MGR as they clear their bonus. This is usually a one time monthly charge, since players only qualify for one bonus in most circumstances. Bonuses are a good thing for MGR and PRP affiliates since players usually play even more poker with the bonus money they have earned.

Player Added
This hidden fee is also one of the most difficult ones to explain. It involves the amount of additional money added to a tournament that the player plays in that isn’t covered by the collective total of players who entered. Added Money tournaments, Guaranteed tournaments and Freeroll/Promotional tournaments all qualify under "player added" fees. This is another ridiculous affiliate fee poker rooms add in.

Transaction Fees
Depositing and withdrawing money in and out of a poker account costs money for the poker room. Transaction fees are probably the most frivolous of the penalties associated with being an affiliate. Poker rooms should be thankful they can even get people to deposit money on their poker site. Affiliates shouldn’t have to be responsible for transaction fees - besides 90% of the people playing deposit money and never withdrawal from their account.

Used Points
If one of your affiliate referred players makes a purchase from the Full Tilt Store using "Full Tilt Points" (FTP) then the value of each point used gets deducted from your rake. The present value of a FTP in the store is .005 of a dollar. Full Tilt points are earned by players when the house takes rake out of a pot or tournament entry cost.  Let’s say a player under your affiliate account decides to spend 80,000 FTP’s in the Full Tilt store on an IPOD - as an affiliate you would be penalized (0.005*80,000)*27%=108$

Before deciding what affiliate payment option to use consider the fees listed above. While collecting a percentage of revenue for the lifetime of a player may be enticing, you can certainly get yourself into a big hole if the quality of your players is poor. A one time flat payment may be a much better alternative and save you a lot of headaches down the road. On the other hand, if you are able to land talented players likely to play for a long time, it would be wise to utilize a percent revenue plan.