Choosing Poker Rooms to Promote

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"]