I started in the online poker and gambling webmaster business by running pay per click ads on Google Adwords back when they still allowed such advertising. It was profitable. I could buy visitors searching for phrases like "partypoker" for between 25 cents and 50 cents and make $2.00 for every visitor I sent their way.

I'll trade quarters for dollar bills all day long. Every day.

Google changed their policies related to allowing gambling sites in their pay per click results though, so that ended, and I had to learn other strategies and try other pay per click engines. Some ppc engines provided good results and conversions, while others sucked. I've included my observations about some of the various options available to pay per click marketers who are interested in promoting poker below.

Promoting Online Poker on Google Adwords

If you try some searches for some poker related terms on Google and look closely at some of the ads, you'll be able to figure out what strategies still work with Google Adwords. Often these strategies consist of slipping past Google's detection (which is always temporary), or offering informational type products. The poker information products invariably offer affiliate links within them to various casinos and/or poker rooms, and sometimes these ads hit as soon as you hit the thank you page after signing up for a free email newsletter.

I haven't pursued this strategy at all, so I can't speak to its effectiveness. My guess is that the margins are pretty slim, since you're having to take such a sideways approach to marketing your affiliate links.

Google also recently announced that they're going to become even more restrictive about approving any kind of gambling-related site in their paid search results.

Some people actually sell their own poker information products too. I haven't looked at all of them, but I would imagine that some of them incorporate affiliate links in their content and some of them don't. Again, I don't have any knowledge of what kind of margins you could get using this strategy.

Keep in mind that if you try to get around Google's policies, they can and will kick you out of their advertising program.

Internet Gambling and Yahoo Search Marketing

Yahoo Search Marketing (formerly Overture, and GoTo.com before that) doesn't allow any type of online gambling related ads in their paid search results either, with an exception. In some foreign country versions of their product, they do accept advertising for online casinos and online poker sites. (In fact, Casino Cash Journey is #1 in a search for "online casinos" in the Overture UK results.)

I haven't pursued this strategy either, but I've heard feedback from other webmasters who have, and they were pretty disappointed in the conversions rates they saw from Overture UK traffic.

The information product strategy I talked about for Google Adwords is also commonly used with Yahoo Search Marketing. I have the same reservations about this strategy on Yahoo - margins have got to be really low.

Another tactic I've seen on Yahoo's paid results are sites which offer "free casino game" downloads that actually generate a download of an online casino. This is a direct refusal to follow Yahoo's policies, but it works, at least sometimes. I know at least 1 webmaster who has been kicked out as an advertiser too though. He was making money with this strategy though, advertising for specific games.

At one time I did use this strategy with some success, but I stopped doing it for a couple of reasons. One is that it was becoming competitive. Another was that it was a pain in the ass to manage. Yahoo has tough editors who love to say "no" to your listings for the keywords you submit. And the actual interface over there is just terribly inefficient to use.

Yahoo recently changed their ranking system, so it's no longer possible to see what people are paying per click for phrases. At one time casino related phrases in the UK market were selling for at least $7 or $8 per click though.

Coming soon - 2nd tier PPC Search Engines for Poker Affiliates.