Poker has become one of the most popular niches for gambling affiliates to promote. Poker as a general game has risen in popularity in recent years especially offline with many people purchasing their own poker sets and even go as far as ordering poker tables so they can enjoy poker nights at home with their friends and neighbors.
Live television has also made poker tournaments a form of live entertainment bringing the popularity of this fascinating game into our homes. All this publicity has had a positive effect on the online poker industry with new poker rooms coming online every week. Affiliates are never slow to take advantage of a growing trend and they can now choose from a wide range of poker affiliate programs to promote with the expectation of big financial rewards.
The reality of this is very different and like most other affiliate markets you will find again that it is only a small minority of affiliates who are making the majority of the commissions. Poker affiliates come and go but you will find the poker super affiliates have cornered the market and protect their business with gusto and who can blame them?
The poker affiliate programs will provide some general guidance by offering a wide range of banners and html mailers if you are lucky. But the facts are the affiliate needs much more than banners and general support to have any chance of success. Very few poker affiliate programs will provide any detailed marketing blueprints on how to successfully start a poker affiliate business from scratch. More often than the not the affiliate is left high and dry from the very beginning, not the best recipe for success.
What poker affiliates need are more personal guidance depending on their experience as an online marketer. Not all affiliates are equal and some are more experienced than others. If you are new to the game of affiliate marketing how can you possibly compete against someone who has 10-years experience in the industry? Many affiliates read the sign-up page and are mentally attracted and convinced that there is some easy money o the table. The truth of the matter is that there will be a very long learning curve for rookie affiliates so they need more additional assistance in the early days.
Many affiliates get impatient and the thought of a long learning curve before they see any positive results is just too long to wait. This is why many leave the business in the early stages. They thought it was going to be easy until the reality kicks in after a few weeks of hard work and they check their affiliate stats for the 100th time only to see that all the columns are still stuck on zero. This is the reality check and the point where many affiliate bow out to search for new lucrative and easier pastures. This is all great news for the poker super affiliates who see the competition come and go without having to put their foot on the marketing accelerator.
The main problem for affiliates is they enter the arena without having done any research into the market and no real plan of action on how they are going to promote. They build a web site with some general information, add a few banners, place it on some untargeted directory and submit it to the search engines. The only traffic they get is themselves revisiting the web site after they have checked their zero stats just to see if the web site is still live.
Affiliate marketing is like any other business in that you have to plan it out in advance. This may take a few weeks of your time though it is going to save you months of heartache down the road. If you set your business out as planned you can see from the start that you are heading in the right direction. Everything will fall into place like a huge jigsaw. You join up the pieces and after a while the bigger picture starts to emerge. Have you tried doing a jigsaw without having the finished picture to hand to give you guidance? This is why you need to plan first, to create the finished picture.
If you are going to build a poker web site then have a look at the competition to see what they are doing. Make some notes on the positives and negatives of the web site. If you join up all the positives from a wide range of other poker web sites then you have a solid foundation for a successful web site. This is all free information at your fingertips. Don’t just get your own ideas into your head. Look at what others are doing and do it better. This is the difference between ordinary affiliates and super affiliates. The willingness to learn and work harder than the next person in the same market. If you do those two things then the odds of success are very high.
Don’t be phased by disappointments. Everyone has them and you first have to learn to accept them and learn from them. If you have planned your poker affiliate business from the start you will have a clear picture in your head. This maybe a mental image of how your web site will look, it could be your web site at the No1 spot on Google for your chosen search term or it could be some monitory value connected to commissions. Maybe you had a financial target to be accomplished by a specific date. These are the type of targets you should set yourself and these are the real motivators that can bring your poker affiliate business into a highly successful and rewarding experience.
Mark Fynn has been a successful gambling affiliate for the last 7-years and provides gambling affiliate video tutorials, information and resources to all affiliates in the gambling industry.