Poker Webmasters - Affiliates This section of the site is about how to make a lot of money as a poker webmaster. I'm sharing solid tips and strategies I've personally used to make a full time living from home as an affiliate webmaster in the poker industry.

You can use multiple strategies to make money as an online poker affiliate. Brief overviews of some of these strategies can be found below.

Poker Affiliates

An affiliate promotes a product online for a commission. In the poker industry, commissions take one of two forms: CPA or rev share.

CPA

CPA stands for "cost per acquisition" or "cost per action".

A CPA poker affiliate gets paid a flat fee for each depositing player she refers to the poker room. CPA amounts in the poker industry vary from $75/player to $500/player. The higher CPA amounts are achieved by affiliates who generate large amounts of volume.

Rev Share

Online poker rooms make their money by charging a rake, the same as a brick and mortar casino. The rake is a percentage of each pot that the cardroom keeps in exchange for providing the table. A poker webmaster who is receiving a rev share gets a percentage of their referred players' contributions to the rake, usually in the 20% to 30% range, but sometimes higher based on volume of players sent.

Webmasters who work on a rev share business with a cardroom want their players to win. If a poker player is winning, then she is continuing to contribute to the rake, because she keeps playing. Losing poker players quit playing because they eventually go broke.

Players who don't play don't make the revshare poker webmaster any money.

Hybrid

A hybrid affiliate deal involves a CPA + rev share, or a guaranteed flat amount per month or commission, whichever is higher. Most poker affiliate programs don't offer a hybrid deal to just anyone, but affiliate webmasters who can send a reasonable volume of players can negotiate hybrid affiliate deals. Some webmasters charge a one time slotting fee in advance in order to add the poker site to their listings, then receive commissions as normal.

Advertising

Poker Affiliate Tips Another way to make money as a poker webmaster is to sell advertising for a flat monthly rate. (Or you could sell advertising on a per click basis, or per impression, or via any number of other advertising models.) This is a less common strategy among smaller webmasters, because most poker sites don't want to buy advertising unless they're guaranteed results. But a well-trafficked website can command terrific amounts of advertising revenue.

Referring Players

Most people will make money with their poker website through some kind of affiliate model. And to make money this way, you'll need to be able to refer depositing players to the poker room. There are multiple ways of doing this, but they all involve getting people to visit the poker website first.

Offline Marketing

This strategy doesn't work for all affiliates or all poker rooms for multiple reasons. Poker affiliates who use offline marketing distribute business cards and/or flyers, or run ads in newspapers or magazines, to either drive traffic directly to the poker site or to the webmaster's poker portal. If you're driving traffic directly to the poker site, you'll need to work with a room that offers bonus codes. A bonus code is a word that the player inputs when signing up that flags that player as one of your referrals.

If you're just driving traffic to your own site, you'll be provided specific URL's to link to by the poker room which will flag any referred players to your account. (A tracking code is embedded in the URL.)

Pay Per Click Traffic

I started in the poker webmaster business buying pay per click ads on Google and sending the traffic directly to the poker rooms using my affiliate URL. I was buying traffic from Google for 25 cents per visitor, but I was making $2 per visitor in commissions. Needless to say, this was a great and easy way to get started.

Unfortunately the big pay per click advertising companies, Google, Yahoo, and MSN, no longer accept advertising for poker or gambling websites. This leaves an affiliate who wants to use pay per click traffic to get players with 2nd tier pay per click engines like 7search and Enhance. Conversion rates from sites like these vary dramatically, but they're usually awful.

Search Engine Optimization

Running a poker information website that receives organic search engine traffic is a common and profitable strategy for driving players. Using this strategy effectively means learning how to optimize a website so that it will rank well in the search engines.

Rankings outside of the top ten will receive almost no traffic.

Some webmasters prefer to try to rank for hundreds or thousands of low demand and low competition keyword phrases rather than shooting for rankings for high traffic and high competition phrases. Plenty of money can be made with this strategy, but someone with a little ambition can certainly rank for a phrase like "online poker". A combination of targeting high competition phrases along with low competition phrases works for me.

How Much Money Can a Poker Affiliate Make?

I know poker affiliates who make six figures a month. But there is room in the business (at the time of this writing) for any webmaster with any size goal to make money. Some people with a full time job that they enjoy might only need a few hundred or a couple thousand dollars a month to be happy. Other people who are really excited and motivated might not be willing to settle for less than $1 million a year.

The nice thing about this industry is that those kinds of numbers are achievable.