I didn’t want to write anything about that bullshit because it is unbelievable and a shame that this industry seems to be retarded and is not able to learn from mistakes from the past. But a few hours ago I read the story at 2+2 written by a sponsored professional player that lost a lot of money to say the least.
I’m feeling very sorry for all the people that experience problems caused by this bunch of crooks. But what really pisses me off is the following: It seems that every crook can run a pokerroom if he has some money. If you want to open a pokerroom the first the sales manager asks is how much money you have. I mean how dumb is that? Money is no factor if you’re able to run a successful poker business or not! Sure, if you can’t pay the setup fee and other costs you can go home. But everybody who asks to create a pokerroom should know what it costs and should already have the money to set it up. I like the example of a TV channel that could reach millions of potential poker players every day. I tried to work with them and wanted to setup a pokerroom. They were unsure if that really has potential because they had no clue about poker. So they were not ready to raise a couple of million. However, they wanted to push the room hard with media campaigns (worth a couple of million). But none of the potential networks was ready to talk about it in detail. “If you don’t have 0,5 million we don’t need to talk about it!”
Here’s what I think about this situation. They are not interested in potential. Most of them just look at new costumers with a lot of money that have no clue and pay for any stupid service there is. A known disastrous room from Austria bought additional German support for 4000 Euro each month because they had no clue about anything. That’s a cool costumer isn’t it?
This isn’t that bad. But what is definitely a disaster is the fact that some networks let the room manage payments and player bankrolls. That’s a huge no go in my opinion and will always cause problems. I mean how attractive is it to take costumers their bankrolls? Way easier money than trying to market a room and earn 5 % on MGR generated (in fact most rooms don’t earn more than that…).
From an affiliate perspective I would not promote any room where player and affiliate bankrolls are not managed trustworthy enough. That means that some publicly traded company has to be responsible for that stuff. But not a bunch of crooks!
Just my 2 cents.
Posted in PokerAffiliateCorner News.
Tagged with affiliates, bankrolls, betonbet, disaster, eurolinx, microgaming, networks, player.
By admin
– September 1, 2009
In the largest poker affiliate community, pokeraffiliatelistings.com a fellow affiliate posted a very nice story about an affiliate manager at red star poker. And it is really hard to believe! This manager was asking if he wants to promote red star poker. So far so good. But he already promoted rakeback there through a sub affiliate network. He already told it a few times and after the affiliate manager wasn’t willing to recognize he asked if they can write a review for him. Actually they did but it was a complete ripoff from another site. This is really, really sick and quite frankly I can’t laugh about that. It shows that this industry has some problems with quality progresses. I understand if affiliate management was not that important five years ago. Party Poker could have given a damn about affiliates and just pay some standard scheme. But now the situation changed and poker rooms have to realize that they should take affiliates seriously. They are the most powerful distribution channel and you should pay attention to them every time. Don’t make them laugh with stupid spam emails or reviews you found and copied from other sites.
There’s an experience I appreciate very much: Being an affiliate besides of my affiliate management acitivity at TrickyPlay.com. Some may think that this ain’t good but the big advantage is that I’m an affiliate myself and know what they’re looking for. So you can expect that I’m working WITH affiliates rather than try to sell anything to them. At least I would never copy reviews from other sites and give it affiliates to put it on their sites…
Posted in PokerAffiliateCorner News.
Tagged with affiliate, industry, management, manager, poker, red star poker, trickyplay.
By admin
– August 12, 2009
I remember when a few poker affiliates were very enthusiastic about a new “trend”. The thing is called FOREX and could be the next big thing. A lot of poker affiliates doubt that and there are good reasons for that. I don’t want to explain them in detail here. The interesting question is: will FOREX be an interesting market for bored poker players and can poker affiliates make a lot of money with it?
I think: yes, indeed! There’s no doubt that you can make a lot of money as an affiliate with forex players. It’s pretty much the same. The important point is: will FOREX ever be as interesting as poker? Never ever! But that doesn’t mean that you should not care about it and give it a shot. I’d see it as a niche for “more analytical” poker players. It’s not interesting for gamblers even though it’s gambling if you have no idea what you’re buying or selling. And most of the poker players are gamblers, not winning players!
FOREX is definitely a new emerging market you should be aware of as a poker affiliate. It surely is a great way to diversify. One problem is that you need some trading knowledge which is harder to gain than poker knowledge. Creating content should be very, very difficult for poker affiliates. And that’s a big disadvantage, no doubt about that!
Posted in PokerAffiliateCorner News.
Tagged with affiliate, casino, content, forex, market, poker, trading.
By admin
– July 22, 2009
When poker affiliates talk about unique content they mean that it’s not duplicated. True, when you write content on your own there won’t be exactly the same content already online. But is this the right definition for unique content?
Unique means that there’s nothing similar to it. But is this the case for hold’em rules or preflop strategy? Definitely not!
Content for search engines is ok because it might bring some visitors. But content is only interesting if it generates links and if visitors tell other players about this content. And so on. But in order to accomplish that you have to offer very, very good and unique content. Something that other webmasters don’t offer.
But that’s the hard part and I can’t help you creating very unique content. The first step however is to recognize what content is all about - real uniqueness!
Posted in Affiliate School.
Tagged with content, duplicate, google, poker, rules, strategy, unique.
By admin
– July 14, 2009
It’s obvious that the poker boom is over and there’s not that great of a development any more. Now, the focus should be to conquer new markets and gain new costumers. But this is a slow process. The main problem right now is that there’s not enough new money in the system. There are not enough new player that deposit 1000 Dollar and don’t give a damn whether they lose or not. And even micro limit players have a educational opportunities right now. They can browse through the internet and find plenty of useful strategy articles and how they can improve their game. Overall, it’s getting tighter and even professional players that used to make good money can’t play profitably any more! A great example is iPoker. It used to be one of the fishiest networks and a great place to make money. But now it’s filled with grinders and winning players that have to share the losses of some donkeys.
To make the story shorter: Free bankroll models don’t work any more although they had some great success in the past. For example Pokerstrategy.com only grew through this free bankroll and free poker education model. Now it’s one of the biggest, if not the biggest affiliates in the world. The main reason for this success is a free bankroll model with a good ROI. PartyPoker spent $ 50 + 100 in free poker cash. The PartyPoker players were bad enough that you could make a lot of money with very simple strategies. Even with a simple starting hand chart you were able to make some money at the micro and small stakes. Overall this model showed a nice profit and a small percentage of those players are making thousands of rake each month right now.
But in this current situation it is more difficult. They have big problems with fraudulent activities. Full Tilt also provides this $ 50 free bankroll for Pokerstrategy members. And they abandoned this deal in certain markets like Russia already!
So a good business model turned into a bad one within a few years. It’s a bit sad but I’m sure it still works in a small circle. You can’t make an international site where millions have access to this deal and can abuse it. You just have no control over that. But you can keep it small and stay in touch with your players and most important: add value they don’t find somewhere else!
Posted in PokerAffiliateCorner News.
Tagged with free bankroll, full tilt poker, model, party poker, pokerquiz, pokerstrategy.
By admin
– July 12, 2009
It’s a bit funny when you hear that some more or less succesful gambling companies want to take over the German market and think that it’s just a matter of money. Meh, not really. Germany is one of the markets where gambling companies already lost a couple of million trying to conquer it. You can’t really say that Full Tilt is one of them. Without a doubt Full Tilt spent plenty of millions to step into the German market. I don’t say that it was a failure but they are not confident on a ROI perspective. Sure, they are one of the market leaders in Germany now but that was very expensive.
Right now I suggest that every company that wants to become active in Germany should have a German consultant that knows the market very well. If you hire a German country manager that has to obey foreign managers you simply won’t succeed.
One big factor why the German market is so different is the mentality. Germans don’t like to gamble. It may have historical reasons. It’s a simple fact that Germans are more like investors than gamblers. If they think they can make millions playing poker online, they think that they are investing their time to read strategy articles and such. Pokerstrategy.com follows this business model and they are pretty succesful to say the least. They started in Germany and their $ 50 free bankroll and “becoming a poker professional quickly” model fit perfectly to the German mentality. If you offer $ 50 and a professional poker education to an average Polish player he will sit down at a NL 100 table or play roulette to try to get rich. The German player will read the articles first and will play cautiously on the suggested small stakes. He tries to avoid every risk, plays tight and follows this strategy. So Pokerstrategy did not throw money out of the window. The $ 50 were a good investment and a major factor for their success.
While the German risk aversion is great for some business models, it’s bad for others. That’s something you should consider before entering this market. And my personal tip: talk with me if you think about it: info [at] pokeraffiliatecorner.com
Posted in Affiliate School.
Tagged with enter, german, german players, insights, market, mentality, poker, pokerstrategy.
By admin
– July 3, 2009
It’s very sad to hear that but the poker client of the well known Metro Casino has to close down. A friend of mine worked as affiliate manager there and I’m feeling sorry for him. He’s a great guy and spent a lot of efforts. The sad thing is that it’s a stupid licensing conflict with Boss Media and not liquidity problems or something like that. It’s not the first time that Boss Media acts a bit unpolitical and I lost a bit of confidence.
Posted in PokerAffiliateCorner News.
Tagged with boss media, casino, close, metro, shutdown, triopoker.
By admin
– June 30, 2009
SEO is a pretty young science. And I didn’t find a way to measure the work of a SEO. Everybody can call himself a SEO guru and claim to work for some very well ranking companies (but you can’t name them because it’s secret). I’m doing it myself and am SEO consultant. I’ll never be called a SEO guru. I’m only working part time on my SEO and only with solid knowledge, nothing special or groundbraking. I think basic SEO is pretty easy to learn and you can gather experience very quick. For most sites it’s well enough and you can succeed for some niches and long tail keywords pretty fast without that much effort. But if I was head of the PartyPoker SEO team or something like that it’s a very tough business. Because small losses in search engines can mean millions of losses in profit. And you have to put much more work in it. That’s not something I’m looking for.
But if everybody can consider himself a SEO: what is a good SEO? Can you simple measure it with keyword rankings? Is a SEO good if he ranks well for terms like poker or online poker or can a SEO also be good if he ranks first for long tail keywords and getting 50 uniques/day through Google.
I think that it’s a tough question. Certainly a SEO who ranks very well for highly competitive keywords MUST be a good SEO. He can be lucky but not with these tough keywords. If some sites rank well for certain niche keywords, it can be luck. If you take a look at their sites SEO it sometimes MUST be luck. There’s no simple explaination why some sites rank well. Sometimes you find sites that have a completely different main topic but some dude makes a forum post about the keyword you’re looking for.
You can’t claim that those sites are good in SEO because they rank well for some keywords (although they have no idea why). I think it’s the overall and long term results that distinguish good from bad SEOs. If you have one site that ranks well, you’re not a SEO guru. But if you have ten sites that all rank well for determined keywords you can’t suck at SEO.
Posted in PokerAffiliateCorner News.
Tagged with good affiliate seo, keywords, long tail, niches, poker, seo.
By admin
– June 27, 2009
Again Google updated the Toolbar Page Rank. One month ago they updated it ahead of the usual 3 month schedule. I thought it might be some kind of special update, a test or whatever. But now they updated it again and it seems that it’s gonna be updated on a monthly basis. This is pretty cool because you can make a lot of shady things in 3 months intervals. There are some crooks out there that buy a few links for a few months before a update, get PR 4 or whatever, exchange or sell links, lose their backlinks and fall back to PR0 or so. There are a lot more tactics I don’t want to explain. This is one of them and the rarer the updates the easier it is to exploit Googles PR system.
So I think it’s a very cool thing for all the white hat SEOs and poker affiliates like us. And it’s very nice to get a feedback of link building work much faster. You don’t have to wait 3 months until you see the changes and improvements.
Posted in PokerAffiliateCorner News.
Tagged with google, monthly, poker affiliates, pr, update, white hat seo.
By admin
– June 24, 2009
Every time I talk about new projects with new people I can see the same tendencies. They want to establish a new brand and expect to see a lot of revenue and signups early on if they work hard enough on it. But that’s almost always a failure. Sure, you have to work hard and the harder you work, the luckier you get and of course: the more signups/revenue you can generate. But people almost always don’t understand the importance of a brand. Obviously if you buy handkerchieves almost nobody really cares about the brand. If you buy bad ones you won’t buy them again and lost one or two dollars. So you won’t even care. But what if you’re depositing 100 Dollar at an online poker room. You will care about the security and if you get robbed or if this is a serious company that ensures you to be able to withdraw or not.
And here’s the point where you need a strong brand to accomplish that. People will trust PokerStars more than the most other rooms. Not because they are more liquid or market leader. They have the strongest brand in this industry and that’s the reason costumers trust them. So what some people in this industry don’t understand is the fact that the brand is very important and you can’t create a strong brand within a few weeks. Time is the most important factor besides market spendings, which is too obvious to mention. If you can pay Tiger Woods 100 Mio/year to wear your cap he may think about it and help you building a strong brand in this segment.
There’s a pretty good example with one of my poker sites. We invested a lot of money in software development to build a poker community. The first year it was a big disappointment. The traffic was tiny and users disappeared quickly. So we didn’t invest a lot in SEO or any marketing campaigns. But after two years the site grew extremly fast and there was no good reason for that. We talked with some of the users and the result was pretty clear. They heared about the domain and that it’s a great site and took a look at it and so on. You also saw it on Google Analytics. If people google for the brand it’s always a good indication that they recognized it and wanted to take a look at it. If you see an increase in traffic from those keywords you’re on the right track to establish a great brand.
One of the key factors is patience. If you want to create a strong brand you have to be patient. You can’t build it within a few weeks. It’s a matter of years even in this fast living industry!
Posted in Affiliate School.
Tagged with brand, casino, create, industry, market, poker, poker community, poker sites, seo.
By admin
– June 19, 2009
