The Webmaster’s Poker Affiliate Guide:
How to Build a Profitable Poker Website

Poker, and online poker, has grown incredibly popular throughout the United States and other parts of the world over the last couple of years.  And you can take advantage of this poker explosion and cash in by building your own poker presence on the web, and leveraging the multitude of online poker affiliate programs available on the internet. By becoming a poker affiliate yourself, you can start earning your share of the pie. This article will serve as an introduction to the the poker room affiliate programs, and what to think about as you get started.

If you are new to the world of poker affiliates, the online poker room affiliate programs provide huge potential to make serious money. If you can attract the traffic, and then move that traffic to the online poker rooms, you have a great chance of signing up new online poker players and getting paid generous commissions from those poker rooms.

For example, if I have a website about the World Series of Poker that attracts some decent traffic, I may want to sign up as a PartyPoker affiliate. What this means is that I would register with PartyPoker here: . It doesn’t cost me anything to register with PartyPoker and become a PartyPoker Affiliate. Once registered, I would receive my special PartyPoker affiliate link that I may use throughout my website. This special link would send traffic from my website to PartyPoker, and would also let PartyPoker know that this particular visitor came from my website. Then, if one of my visitors clicks on that link, and then signs up to PartyPoker to play for real money, I will get compensated by PartyPoker.

Depending on the online poker room, you may get paid a flat fee for every new, real money poker player you refer (CPA plan), or you may get paid a percentage of the player’s rake every month for several years up to the life of the player (rake plan). The rake is the amount of money the house (or online poker room) is earning from that player. Depending on the poker room, you may have to choose which compensation method you prefer at the time of signing up to the affiliate program.  The CPA plans range from $50-150 per player, and the rake plans usually range from 20%-40% of the player’s rake.

Although I belong to several of these poker room affiliates, it’s very difficult to determine which is the overall best option for you to choose. I personally have a mix between CPA and rake affiliate programs on my personal poker website. Testing on your website will ultimately give you the best information, but to start with, you may be able to guess which method would be better for your website based on your poker concept. For example, if you are building a website dedicated to taking advantage of the online poker room bonuses, you could probably expect your referred players to stay long enough to earn that bonus, and then move on to the next poker room. This type of player will not generate serious rakes at any particular poker room.  On the other hand, if you build a website focused on developing casual poker players into serious ones, then these referred players may more likely stay at a particular poker room, work on developing their game, and end up generating larger rakes at that poker room.

If you are planning on generating some of your website revenues from the online poker room affiliate programs, I highly suggest you establish a Neteller account if you do not already have one. Many of the checks being issued from these online poker rooms are from foreign countries, so the turn-around time for collecting your share can be painfully long.

For example, let’s say my poker website made $500 from a particular poker room in the month of July. It’s not uncommon for that poker room to wait until the middle of the following month to recognize those revenues and cut me a check. And, then, since the check is travelling across the world, it usually takes another 3-4 weeks to arrive. So, the money I actually earned for the month of July, I may not receive until the middle of September. Add in the number of days it takes my lazy ass to deposit that check into the bank, and well that’s just way too long to realize that cash. However, if you establish a Neteller account and set up your affiliate program to pay you via Neteller, which most affiliates do offer, you would receive those funds into your Neteller account almost immediately. Add 1 day to move the funds from Neteller to your checking account, and instead of waiting until mid or late September, you’d have those funds in your bank account in the middle of August.

Ok, so now you can see how the online poker room affiliate programs are a great way to make money from your poker website, and why it’s important to have a Neteller account for your financial transactions. Neteller is safe, efficient, and will make your life so much easier as you begin to add multiple affiliate programs to your poker website.

Now, the next section will introduce you to the best online poker room affiliate programs on the internet and provide information on how these programs operate.