I’ve seen many posts around forums claiming that it’s impossible to be a successful poker affiliate. When looking at their site, it’s easy to see why: 1-3 page sites that have no keyword or content strategy and are just a pile of affiliate links. To succeed in this environment, you have to have a strategy. Once we go through the steps, you’ll realize just how open the poker environment is!

Here are the different questions you need to ask before devising a content strategy:

1. What are we offering?
2. Who would want this?
3. What are they searching for and interested in?
4. Why would they come to your site?
5. Why would they take your offer?

First, you have to think about what you’re offering and who would want those things. Let’s start with rakeback offers, but this process could also be done with free bankrolls, sign-up bonuses, deposit bonuses, free poker coaching offers, etc. Each type of promotion will have different features, and may appeal to wildly different groups of people.


What are we offering?

a. Rakeback

Rakeback implies continued participation with a site, which also means the player signing up has to be or think they are at least a break-even player. Rakeback is also a complicated idea that’s different from site to site and often depends on other promotions, and many times not fully explained.

Who would want this?

a. Winning or break-even players (or people who think they are either)

Winning and break-even players obviously want rakeback as it gives the largest returns for continued play, but these people typically only need one or two rakeback deals at their top sites. It’s a small group that really won’t reconvert, but people focus on this group the most! Let’s instead focus on the people who don’t really know what rakeback is: it’s a much larger demographic, and it’s very possible that these people will be interested in other offers when they bust or move sites, allowing you to double-dip by re-converting the same traffic again!

What are they searching for and interested in?

a. To the keyword tool!

Let’s see what comes up for “rakeback”:



This snippet of the results is very indicative of what I was saying: these searches imply knowledgeable users who know exactly what they are looking for. Also, “poker room name rakeback” terms are very competitive. Cue the doomsayers: “SEE? It’s impossible!” But we have another type of user in our demographic: the player that doesn’t really know what rakeback is. You can start by trying “what is rakeback”, but let’s try a more creative approach: ”can you make money online poker”. This searcher probably wouldn’t know what rakeback was, is probably new to online poker, and thus doesn’t have a rakeback deal yet. Keyword research takes a bit of creativity and experience, so don’t get down on yourself if you can’t find a good idea in a few tries (I’ve been doing this for a while!).



Bingo! We’ve found traffic around people who aren’t certain it’s possible or who want to make money online playing poker. Moreover, look at the sites in these search results. They aren’t big name sites, don’t have good PageRank or Alexa rank (which is an overly simplistic way of saying they probably aren’t very competitive). These types of search terms are one good area that we’ve found, and I can tell you there are many others.

Why would they come to your site?

a. To find out how to make money at online poker

Here’s where the content comes into play and most people drop the ball. It’ll take more work than simply throwing up affiliate links and calling it a day. Become an authoritative source on the topic. In this case we want to be an authority on “making money at poker online”. This means that you have examples of players who have become successful (and how they did it), tips and advice on how to replicate that success, resources (even off your site!) to help the user, tools like odds calculators, links to books/blog/twitter/facebook accounts of professionals, etc. Offer your unique take on players and situations: there’s never only one side of the story, even in science. Compile a feed of the best current poker tweets/freerolls/news. Once we had a direction (giving people ways to make money at online poker), coming up with content ideas for your site is super easy. The content ideas listed above will easily give enough content for the lifetime of your site.

Notice that I didn’t include hardcore strategy ideas for players: that’s probably not included in this demographic. People interested in that kind of thing probably already have rakeback deals. Just letting them know what’s possible and general guidelines to success is better than getting into the nitty-gritty strategy for this segment.

Why would they take your offer?

a. Because you’ve made yourself an authority on the subject

By giving the user descriptions and links to the tools, you’ve guided them down a path. In that path, simply place descriptions of rakeback offers (with affiliate links!) and how this helps them make money online. Don’t force-feed them only affiliate links, and don’t be afraid to link off-site. If you’ve created good rapport with the user, they’ll come right back.

It took 30 minutes for me to go through that thought process and find an unexploited niche in the poker affiliate space. 30 minutes! This is after poker affiliates have been flooding the internet with new sites for half a decade! With all of the other types of promotions and demographics out there, I’m sure you can find a spot where you can become successful as well.