Here are a list of my top gambling affiliate programs (their are no affiliate links this is my honest opinion)

Ladbrokes Affiliates
A well respected brand name with fantastic reporting tools. Payments are prompt and commissions generous (up to 35% of net loss) There are 4 products to promote (poker, casino, sportsbook and bingo)
http://www.ladbrokes.com/aff_man

Referback
Offering up to 35% on net loss, Payments done within 12 days of the next month. Great range of casinos to promote and good reporting software. They also regularly keep in touch with affiliates offering new deals and incentives. Great program if your mainly involved with online casinos
http://referback.com/

Virgin Games
Virgin have always been a weel respected brand name in my eyes, as both an AM and a consumer. Virgin Games offer affiliate the chance to promote their Casino, Poker Room and Bingo Room. They payout 35% of net profit and have very good communication with their affiliates
http://www.virginggames.com/affiliates

32red Affiliates
32red Casino was probably the first casino I ever played on and still do to this day, so it comes as no surprise that I would want to promote them, as a player they offer me good loyalty bonuses and friendly customer support which is why I would recommend them to my visitors. They offer a couple of online casinos and poker rooms to promote paying 35% net revenue (40% on poker room rakes for a limited time)
http://www.32redaffiliates.com

Casino Rewards
MY favourite thing with this program is the fantastic stats system, most programs only seem to show the amount of traffic you have sent and the revenue generated where as casinorewards display much more in depth stats such as the players age/sex/country as well as the sort of games they like to play, this helps to target your advertising a lot more.
http://www.casinorewards.com

Party Partners
Home to one of the biggest online poker rooms - Party Poker. Party Partners are without a doubt one of the fastest paying affiliate programs around (paying on the 4th of each month) and some good tracking options (such as offline tracking so you can advertise poker rooms on posters with your promotional code) They have recently launched a sports betting site and a casino to go along side their array of party gaming sites.
http://www.partypartners.com

Vegas Affiliates
Probably the most controversial in the list. Over the last 6 months or so communication between affiliates and vegas affiliates has been poor and even non-existant. Also payments can take over 1 month. However they have the best player retention over any other program I have worked with. Some of my players still play 3 years on, and they are big players! Although payments take longer than a majority of program they do still pay without fail.
http://www.vegasaffiliates.com

What I’m drinking now - “A free bottle of wine from iPoints”

Remember to switch over to bbc 1 tonight at 9pm for what promises to be another fantastic episode of the appprentice. Last weeks episode followed the teams as they attempted to run a busy pub kitchen for a night each choosing a special theme, the girls glided to the victory despite the boys making more (but ultimately spending more)

This weeks episode sees the team opening a photography business in a busy shopping centre as they try and attract random shoppers to get their photos done.

What I’m drinking now - “Olde English Cider”

This might be useful for a few of you. This is a list of tools that I have found usefull when doing affiliate marketing.

StatsRemote
This piece of software allows you to check your stats on literally hundreds of programs. Many people spend way to much time during the day on logging in to sites and checking sales and signups etc, statsremote automaticly gathers your stats and shows the amount of clicks/sales day by day. It can also workout how much your spending each day on google adwords etc. It costs $29.95 a month but you can get a 3 day free trial and they offer discount on longer pre-paid options.
http://www.statsremote.com

Digital Point Keywords tool
Keep track of your search engine positions can be time consuming and tedious. This tool makes it a lot easier to keep track of an unlimited amount of keywords and URL. It will check up to the first 200 results on Google, Yahoo and MSN. Once you are all setup you simply login to your account and click ‘check all’ and the script will then run through all the keywords and track their positions on the search engines. You can then view your positions and how they change over time as well as create a graph showing the fluctuation of your positions.
http://digitalpoint.com/tools/keywords

Roboform
A very usefull tool which does two things.
1) Keeps track of all your usernames and logins for all sites. It will also log you in to the sites at a click of a button
2) Automaticlly fills in forms with your details. IF your like me and can’t stand filling in form after form, roboform will automaticlly match your details to the form details on which ever site your visiting.
The software acts like a toolbar on top of your browser (similar to google toolbar etc) to give you quick access to whichever sites you wish to access.
You do have to pay to get the most out of this software but it is very cheap.
http://www.roboform.com

Nameboy
Finding a descent and memorable domain now-a-days is getting harder and harder, nameboy is a type of search engine which seeks out the best domain names which are available using your keywords. It can sometimes pull up some very good domain which are still avaiable. Well worth a bookmark!
http://www.nameboy.com

FireFTP
FireFTP is an FTP application that utilises tabbed browsing in firefox. Instead of having to run a separate application you can now use a fully functional FTP client from within firefox!
http://fireftp.mozdev.org/

Blogs and forums
Yes, this may be an obvious one, but forums and blogs gives users an invaluable amount of information for free. If you are looking to promote a new niche that you aren’t 100% familiar with you can get an incredible amount of highly useful info from related forums, a research tool full of your target users which is 100% free!!!

Please bookmark this page it will be updated, also feel free to comment with more tools and usefull sites

Last nights episode of ‘The Apprentice’ was as entertaining as ever. The challenge was to start a laundry business frin scratch and the team to make the most money wins.

The girls team started of terribly trying to sell hotel laundry washing at £4.99 a piece, they did absolutely no research and just guessed a price. The look of shock on the hotel managers face was priceless. The boys team however done their research and found it cost something more like 40p a piece and ended up agreeing to do 1000 pieces for £200 as opposed to the girls who wanted almost £5,000!

The girls later went on to mix up most of the laundry garments when returning them only to then beg people for tips!

Needless to say the boys won. Another great episode!

The UIGEA hearing which could determine the future of online gambling transaction in the USA is underway. Watch it live here.

This obviously affect all online gaming affiliates as well as players and is well worth watching.

After checking my stats at some random affiliate site it occured to me just how little information there is.

The online gaming industry is obviously a huge market worth billions so why can’t some affiliate programs invest in some decent stat report systems. The biggest offender in my opinion are sites like Vegas Affiliates (although it’s a very good program) the stats are displayed day by day showing how much commission you have generated and how many clicks sent, this is all well and good but it doesn’t offer much insight in to the sort of traffic you are sending. Casino Rewards on the other hand show information about all the players including Age, Country, Games Played etc this is incredibly usefull info which allows you to further target your audience. I don’t think it’s to much to ask for an affiliate program to include the follow:
Day by day stats of traffic sent.
The refering URL of every sale so you know which of your pages actually work.
Data about your players such as the sort of game they are playing.
Custom campaigns, much like showing the refering URL it’s very useful to find out where your active customer come from.

Other things I believe a good affiliate program needs.
Specific Payment Dates - This is certainly more specific weithin the online gaming industry. Payment dates are all over the place especially for the previously mentioned Vegas Affiliates. Programs on the retail side of things often give specific dates that you can expect payments (i.e. affiliate winow)
Multiple Payment Methods - This isn’t to much of a concern as most programs now offer bank transfer. But sites simply offering a cheque option often leads to extra charges (thanks to hsbc) as well as a very long delay if the cheque is in $USD and I’m converting to £GBP
Fast support.  Anything over 24 hours to respond to an email is just to long. Also how hard is it to have telephone support??

What I’m drinking now - Pint of icey cold stella

As per usual on the 1st April all hell breaks loose as various websites try and fool their readers.

A couple of favourites today are:
The BMW ad which automaticlly shocks dog that attempt to urinate on your car.
BBC and theur flying penguins News Clip
News in the mirror about greyhound racing on ice (I wish this was real)

Some not so good pranks would be on johnchow.com, although I have respect for anyone making money in affiliate marketing and someone who is also good at SEO, he linked to a page which hijacks your browser plays a music videos and makes it impossible to close, as a firefox users the only way to close it was to CTRL+ALT+DEL therefore loosing all my work in other tabs

What I’m drinking now, orange - Bit to early for beer still.

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)