Many people new to the poker industry instantly get put off after they have no luck getting their first sales. Over the years I have come accross and read several ideas which I haven’t put in to action but theirs no reason they won’t work.

Top #1 - Go Local
If you live in a medium sized town why not trying starting a local poker league (online or offline). Register a domain such as www.yourtownpoker.com and install some forum software. Then try and spread the word by handing out leaflets, sponsoring local events, T-Shirts, Car Stickers, NewsPaper Ads etc. One you have people active in your forum you can start to offer freeroll or paid poker tournaments. Sites such as Cake Poker allow you to create private tournaments. Although this costs money you can quite easily build up a descent active poker community. If this works why not expand, www.mycountypoker.com. This could also work for sportsbooking if you have the opportunity to sponsor a local event you could redirect your domain to any sports betting companies website. Remember to check the legality of doing this in your area before hand!

Tip #2: Viral Marketing
It’s hard to go a day without hearing of sites like Digg and Deli.cio.us. Viral marketing is now a huge tool which can be taken advantage of by marketers. This method is by no means easy or guranteed to work but can produce a ton of traffic. If you have a wacky sense of humour and wild imagination then this could work for you. Try and think of something quirky or humorous (picture or video) to your target audience and then create and adapt it untill you think it’s something you would forward to your friends if you got it in an email. Such as this image http://www.thewsop.com/PokerPriceless.jpg. Once you have done it then submit to everywhere, digg is the obvious place but also trying and post on related forums (not to spammy) but send them to the digg URL so they end up digging it giving it more exposure. If your idea was genuinely funny you could see a flood of traffic who will see your image/video and ofcourse your related adverts.

Tip #3 - Giveaways
Everyone likes a freebie including gamblers. Why not buy a load of branded pens or even better, mousemats and give them away. Get users to fill in a form (with the option of subscribing to your mailing lists) When you send out the freebie try and include a CD from a poker room and casino which you will then ofcourse be credited for. This works in 3 ways. 1) You get new subscribers to your mailing list. 2) Users have a mousemat with your site URL which will always be next to them at the PC. 3) They also have a CD for a poker room with your affiliate ID attached. Most affiliate programs will be only to happy to send you CDs with your aff ID embeded. However the cost of mousemats and delivery will probably end up costing you around £1.20. Therefore you want to target your giveaway by posting it on poker forums and blog posts, or if you have a lot more money to invest submit it to the 1′000s of frebie sites out their.

Tip #4 - Forum Promotion
This is a simple one. Signup to a couple of affiliate programs that offer good cash bonuses to players. Then signup to various poker forums that allow links in the signituares. Then you obviously add the links to your sig with a title such as ‘$500 signup bonus at blah poker - Plenty of fish here’. Try not to post junk just to get your sig noticed otherwise you will get banned. Try and post 10-20 posts per forum per day and assuming your posts are of good quality you will get more noticed as a respected member and as such your links will be more respected. This may take a lot of time to do but it’s Free and a source of very targetted traffic.

Tip #5 - Poker Tools
Poker tools are now being seen as a vital ingredient to poker play as opposed to some random gadget. Poker tools can range enormously from %Calculators such as Poker Stove to hand Convertors. To start of with I would suggest creating something like a hand convertor (a user would simply copy and paste hand historys and the hand convertor would convert it to an easier to read format with graphics etc). When a user converts a hand they post it in forums and on blogs, the hand output should ofcourse contain a link to your sites. However there are several sites like this already so you have to think out the box. Why not create a hand for hand replay in flash making it even easier for the viewer to see how the hand went down. Maybe introduce more sites which aren’t support anywhere else, then once word spreads you can take on bigger sites. Ofcourse this takes money (unless your a programmer) but you can outsource this sort of work to cut costs down (see sites like scriptlance). Their is always room for expansion with poker tools (just do a search) Why not try something not related to poker, how about a blackjack hand converter which tells the player the strength or their hand and wether they should hit, split etc. This could then be intergrated to online casinos and come with your branding and a link to your site which would have links to loads of other casinos. However creating the software to read blackjack hands takes a lot more time to program and as such would cost more to produce. Other good poker tools are sharkscope.com where users can search for other players at their poker table to checkout their form (wether they are a winner or looser) If you come up with a unique idea for a poker tool which is actully useful then word will spread (viral marketing comes in useful again)

Tip #6 Tournament Sponsorship
Get in contact with some poker forums (or popular poker blogs) and offer to sponsor a poker tournament . Get the players to signup to the poker room under your ID. In return you offer up $500 or so in prizes. OK so this is another paid idea and you might have trouble finding a forum owner willing to do so, but you get some new players (hopefully some RMPs) and if the players that actually got to the money they will probably stick around and play some real cash games giving you some rake. This one could quite easily be a hit or miss but is a good way to build up a player base.

Tip #7 - Don’t just target poker players
In general poker players are male, aged between 18-40 and are fairly heavy internet users. Although this is still a broad audience you can target further by going for wealthier people who are also heavy and experienced internet users. Try advertising on forums such as something awful or sites like fark. You couldn also try sposnsoring a freeroll on one of these sites although the average player might not be to good and not stay around to long.  Also if you are in to bingo promotion try targeting female based forums, bingo is a very socialable game so if you get the right type of forum/site to sponsor you can get a lot of very active and repeat customers.

Tip #8 - pagerank10.co.uk
Pagerank10 is a very established site (in googles eyes) You can pay £2 and get a page there for your keyword for 2 months. Most pages generally end up getting listed in the top 20 for the keyword of your choice. You simply selectyour keyphrase such as ‘cake poker bonus code’ and add content to the page (it’s best to write as much as possible, then wait. You will find some pages don’t get much traffic at all but others get a lot. I have got almost 100 bingo players from just one page on pagerank10.co.uk within a month. Remember to try and target a very specific keyphrase, for example broad keyphrases such as ‘online poker’ will have way to much competition to compete with. It only costs £2 to get started so it’s certainly worth giving it a shot.

Tip #9 - Blogs
If you are a poker players yourself (or play at online casinos/bing rooms) start a player blog. Log all of your play and give out tips on your blog. You will find  players will read a blog that is written by an actual players rather than someone who is just in it for the money. You can then generate revenue by linking keyphrases to various affiliate sites, for example if you mention full tilt poker you can link the name to the actual website. Players will be much more likely to click thru and play if the see other players having a positive time at such a site. Wordpress is a good solution to start your own blog (see wordpress.org)

Tip #10 - Ebooks.
Write an ebook giving out information about a strategy (this can work for poker and blackjack rooms) then submit it to as many free download sites as possible. Also make a torrent and submit to as many sites as possible. You will get a lot of new poker players download the guide which will ofcourse contain affiliate links to online poker rooms/casinos.

I decided to run a small mini project. With $100 I intend to create a site from scratch and get enough traffic naturally from google to make a constant £20/month ($40). Now £10/month certainly isn’t much but for a site that only costs $100 thats a 480% profit in the first year. If I can make the site earn $40/month then whats stopping me from building 10.. 20… 100..?

Costs:
Software - I will be using affilistore to create  the site (see affilistore.com )
Domain - $9 from namecheap
Hosting - I use servage so I can host unlimited domains, but for the sake of it I will say $4
Logo Design - Cheap outsourced logo $8
Directory submissions - 1000 submissions for $40 on digital point market place
Social Bookmark Submissions - $25 for 100 submissions

Total $87

Total time for me will be about 2 hours to install everything and do some small customisations on affilistore.
I will also spend about 4 hours gaining reciprocal links from other sites (affilistore has a links manager built in)
Obviously by now this sounds like an advert for affilistore but it is great customisable software with some good built in seo features.

For the merchant I have decided to promote alcoholic drinks (suprise)

I will update this project as it comes along I will also include monthly earnings from affiliatewindow and Adsense.

After much waiting and excitement the new series of the Apprentice started on the BBC last night. The apprentice takes a mix of 16 people from diferent backgrounds i.e. sales people to lawyers and divides them in to two teams. These teams are then sent tasks each week to compete.

The task this week was to sell fish out of a van at one of 4 london markets where the ‘all girls’ team took victory after making a pitiful £160 (as opposed to the boys £50 or so). They started of with £600 of fish, so when you take in to account the hours involved (about 8 hours) and the amount of people (8 per team) it works out that the boys made about £1 per hour.

In the end Alan Sugar fired ‘Nicholas de Lacy-Brown’ a rather snobbish stuck up lawyer whos claims to be best suited for the job merely because he has a degree and a posh name. Which as any apprentice viewer would know Alan Sugar just doesn’t care about, after all Alan Sugar started of Driving delivery vans and has no degre.

All in all it’s a very interesting mix of people on the new series, with clashes of personality almost straight away. This was mainly down to the fact that the boys couldn’t price their fish properly despite having pictures and names of all the fish.

Thankfully it hasn’t quite gone the way of the American series which was so incredibly over the top, as you would expect (I seem to remember several segments where Donald Trump would enter the rooms with several trumpets playing for him like some sort of royal event)

Next weeks episode looks to be promising with each team having to start and run their own laundry business.  - BBC2 pm wednesday.

What I’m drinking now: Can of Lech beer (from poland I believe)

This blog is intended for me to ramble on about anything and everything to do with Affiliate Marketing (mainly in the online gambling industry).

I First started online about 10 years ago with my first site but have only recently gone full time. My main areas of interest are Poker and Casino Marketing. However I have also expanded in to Bingo and retail sales and as you can guess by the title of the blog - BEER!!

While many popular blogs like to write about what song they’re listening to or what they are feeling, I will attempt to expand my taste pallet and hopefully the readers by informing them of the beverage I am drinking. (although to be honest it will probably just be stella)