Which is the best poker room to promote?
In the introductory post The complete guide to make money promoting Online Poker Rooms I discussed the basics of Online Poker Room promotion.
In this post I would discuss which poker room to promote. There are literally 100+ online poker rooms spread across the globe and even have presence in USA despite the ban by USA govt. It would be a tedious task to narrow down on the good poker rooms which you can promote and earn money. There a number of criteria to consider for selecting online poker rooms.
1) Reliability
The first and foremost criteria is Reliability of the online poker room. you don’t want to start promoting an online poker rooms which mushrooms overnight and disappears next day only to leave you a big hole in your pocket.
How do you find out which poker rooms are reliable or not? The best way to find this is to search on Internet, check the poker room reviews websites, poker affiliate forums and not to mention keep tuned to this portal where I can keep providing honest and unbiased reviews of various poker affiliates.
2) Commission
The next important criteria is commission plan. You obviously need to get the maximum commission RevShare or CPA deal. Make sure that you have read the terms and conditions of the commission plan.
Some of the poker sites impose a min deposit amount criteria on new poker players in order for you to qualify for the CPA.
AFAIK there are no such criteria imposed on most of the RevShare plans.
One question you would ask is about the maximum RevShare/CPA amount which you can bargain with poker rooms. It entirely depends on your poker website’s traffic and conversion ration. In the beginning you might not have good chances of getting any higher rate but if you have send good amount of new poker players then you might be in the position to bargain for a good deal.
Some of the poker rooms offer higher RevShare deal in the first few months.
3) Marketing Materials
Believe me or not this is one of the most important aspect of selecting poker rooms. Most of the poker sites would provide ample amount of banners but some are just nasty and they wouldn’t give any consideration to the marketing materials and expect you to promote them. I’ve come across one of such big poker room which couldn’t provide me enough material and expected me to promote them. Banners are important to get hits and in conversionm you just can’t get conversion from text tracking links.
If poker room is multilingual and you wish to get banners in other languages than English then it is also going to be problematic.
Asking poker rooms to design banners for you wouldn’t be entertained at all, take my words I’ve tried it with all poker rooms and their simple answer is they will get it striated as soon as their designers are available but they will never complete it.
The simple solution to the banner problem is to get them designed from a good banner design company.
4) Affiliate Reporting
Don’t ignore it and don’t take it for granted that affiliate tracking system would be perfect. Once I was promoting a not-so-well-known poker room and found that most of the time their tracking is not working. I’ve been working hard to promote this poker room only to know that all my effort has gone waste as they couldn’t track many of my new poker rooms.
It also happens with the popular poker rooms, some of them have very bad tracking systems which remains down quite often.
You should also check if the affiliate tracking system provides impression and click tracking or not.
Generally playtech based affiliate tracking systems are good. Sometimes few options wouldn’t be enabled so you will have to ask them to enable it.
5) Conversion
Well to be honest you have very little scope to improve conversion. A not-so-well-known/new/crappy poker room is not going to get you new poker players that is the reality. There is another extreme side of it as well, the most popular poker rooms are not going to get you new players either and the reason for this is that most of players would already have accounts on them..
The best poker rooms are those which are neither new nor too well known and which are just emerging and getting themselves known in the market. Such poker rooms are the best ones to get good conversion. These kind of poker rooms are very aggressive in promotion and would be helping you all the time.
6) Support
Before you join any poker affiliate they would chase you as you chase your girlfriend for dating before marriage. Once you have joined them they would ignore you as you ignore your wife after marriage ;)
It is simple fact better accept it and you would be a happy webmaster. Don’t expect them to be there answering your questions all the time. Once they got you they move on to find next webmaster.
So to avoid the ignorance problem is to get all your queries sorted out before you join them.
Another solution is to keep in touch with them on chat from time to time, a good and healthy relationship always pays off.
7) Payment
Last, but not the least and most important, is the payment. Most of the Poker Affiliates have a fix date for the payment which is normally 10-20 days after the end of the month. Until n unless you are in some kind of special agreement with them the payment should go through at the specified time. They also have min threshold for making a payment. If the amount earned is less than the threshold it would be rolled over to next month.
You should immediately stop promoting a poker room if you don’t get paid by the specified time. A delay normally brings trouble for the poker room and chances are they might be closing down. You should not even listen to them if they promise to pay you, lets say, after 1-2 months.
8) Payment options
Majority of poker affiliates offer payment through Paypal, Moneybookers and wire transfer so it wouldn’t be a problem for you to accept payment as long as you have got a bank account. Go for the Bank Transfer option, it might have some delay in the process but it avoids the charges involved in Paypal/Moneybookers.
