A Summary of Opportunities for Affiliates in the Online Poker Genre

Online poker represents a unique arena for affiliates.  On one hand, the competition is intense, with poker-related keywords and conversions contested at levels approaching pharmaceutical websites in some instances.  On the other hand, no other online industry offers the massive CPA payments and the opportunity for lifetime recurring revenue on referrals that online poker provides.

I was commissioned by a client to prepare a summary study on the various sub-niches existing in the online poker market and to compare and contrast these opportunities.  Once the report was completed, I asked for permission to represent, thinking new affiliates might find usefulness in this brief but inisighful anaylsis.

There are a few basic profit opportunities for affiliates in poker online.  I’m going to review each and give you a quick sense of the general quality, along with the overall potential, of each.  Hopefully by the end of this article you’ll have a better sense of what arena will work best for you.

More About: Rakeback

Rake back dominates the online poker affiliate landscape .  If you’re not familiar, rakeback is essentially the online poker equivalent of rewards points or cash back.  Rake is how poker rooms make their money – it’s the small fee attached to a tournament entry or the small amount of money taken out of most pots in cash games.  Rakeback is a promotional tool rooms use to attract and hold players.

As you might surmise, rooms are in no hurry to offer rakeback to all players.  The resolution is that they allow affiliates to offer rakeback, providing affiliates with an instant hook for visitors (earn thousands at this site!) without requiring any upfront expenditure.  It’s not a cost-free model, plainly – if you offer rakeback as an affiliate, you earn far less on the players you refer than a standard affiliate – and that long term cost (or profit ceiling, if you will) is rightfully a large disincentive to potential affiliates.

There’s also fierce competition for a limited pool of players in this market , and entry from scratch (especially with a small team or limited budget) will be a uphill battle for sure.   The search engines are all dominated by a cadre of established sites , and those massive players have also contracted with several rooms, using their leverage to secure exclusive promotions that make it even harder for a small operator to compete.

One potential point of entry : A small operator could gain a foothold by operating sites that focus on a smaller room and attempting to secure search engine positioning for those terms, as they’re likely to be less hotly contested than terms for major rooms such as Full Tilt Poker.  Don’t want to build a site from scratch?  Then an alternative is to identify a mid-tier room you’d like to work with and search for rakeback terms related for that room.  Go through the results and attempt to identify sites with decent ranking that appear to be abandoned projects and solicit the owner for purchase.  You’ll get an aged domain with a few backlinks and will save yourself a ton of work and trouble.  For example, a quick search for Carbon Poker Rakeback (a medium sized room on the Merge Network returns several sites that appear to be no longer maintained or updated, much like the linked example above.

Conceivable Affiliate Opportunity:  Poker Software and Data Products

Online poker has really developed as an industry , and as the market has matured, so has the sub-market for ecosystem products (currency trading, software, support, training and so on).  What’s more, with the low production price of many digital products , the affiliate cut is often quite generoussignificant relative to the product price.  One top manufacturer of poker database programs offers affiliates as much as $38 per sale on a $90 product – not bad for a top-flight product that coverts easily.

Identifying the proper product niche can be frustrating, but the popular niche in online poker at the moment is data.  Hand histories, opponent data, tournament data, you name it – if it’s a piece of data related to poker, players want it, and they want as much of it as they can get.  Sites such as Pokerlistings offers substantial affiliate commissions on data sales, and are a low-effort avenue for entering the market.

The tough pill to swallow here is that making money with an small average commission of a few bucks per sale requires some serious traffic to generate any kind of serious income.  If you don’t have a model that will produce such traffic, or at least convert at a unusually high rate on a smaller traffic base, you might want to try a different opportunity

Poker Affiliate Opportunity: Free Gifts

The third popular model for profiting as an online poker affiliate is through a free gifts set up.  The model is elementary: rooms pay you a certain amount for referring qualified players, and you return part of that payment to players via a system that allows them to claim various gifts (or cash) depending on what room they sign up at.  In it’s most complex form, this system essentially translates user sign ups into a currency that users can then redeem for various items.  In a simple form, the system simply ties specific gifts to specific actions.

This affiliate model is quite popular in other arenas but especially so in online poker.  While there’s certainly a real appeal to this specific niche, that appeal is somewhat mitigated by the serious competition at present.  One idea is to operate as a second-tier affiliate, attempting to monetize traffic by referring visitors to the top free gifts sites.  The other option is to operate a hybrid free poker money site that combines internal offers and some external offers, and to let that site develop slowly, using the data to evaluate where your efforts are best spent.

This final opportunity is probably the superior choice for affiliates just testing the online poker waters, as it requires little specific knowledge and allows you to push the tough work off on the major affiliates in the genre.  You can simply focus on your core skills at content management and SEO, skills that translate well from one arena to the next, and outsource or ignore the more specialized aspects of the market.

This is by no means a comprehensive summary, but ideally it has provided potential affiliates with the broad strokes of the market, and provided them a starting point from which to plan their entry into this fiercely competitive, yet richly profitable, affiliate marketplace.

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