Many online poker affiliates have offered live support to their players. Whether an affiliate is large or small there are pros and cons to offering live support. There are few online poker affiliates that offer live support even though many more have tried it. There is a reason for this.

Positives to Offering Live Support

There are many positive reasons to offer live support to your players. The biggest reason is from a sales lead point of view. If you have a link on your site to live support, and a qualified person is there to talk with the player, the chances of closing a lead increases substantially. The best qualified person is going to be the site owner but a partner or employee with the website that is very familiar with the offers and the online poker industry will be just as good. If a player can get their questions answered thoroughly and quickly they will be much more likely to trust the site and sign up for an offer. The player will have the security of knowing that if there is a problem you are there solve them.

Players will also have questions after they sign up. These questions will include whether a player is tracked, suggestions about a new poker room to try, payment questions or general poker questions. The more a player knows that their affiliate is there for them, the more loyal they will be. This type of player will tell their friends how great the support is and refer other players. Support is important to many players, especially newer players that can grow to become high volume players. There is a big advantage to being on a first name basis with your players and potential sign ups.

Live Support Options

If an affiliate decides to offer live support they have several solutions. They may choose to use a chat program such as MSN or Skype. An affiliate could use a chat program to also accept calls from potential clients. While this is a free solution, there are some downsides. The first issue is that it is difficult to manage any kind of volume on these chat programs. It is difficult to manage multiple conversations without forgetting about a client waiting or making an embarrassing error. Another problem is that spammers will attempt to contact the affiliate on the chat programs and it will be impossible to filter them out since the support person will have to accept all chat requests in case it is a player.

Another option is to rent a live chat software package. These are very efficient for higher volume affiliates. The software keeps good logs and keeps player in a queue to avoid any problems such as confusing multiple conversations. If live support is not available the software will take a message that is forwarded to the affiliate's email address. The downside of this is that the live chat software packages cost about $100 a year. They can be two or three times more for bigger affiliates that need more advanced software solutions. Spammers can also be a nuisance on line chat support as well.

Some live chat companies also offer support services to take the place of having to do support yourself. This is a terrible option. These support people are often outsourced. You will be paying for a service that will be subpar. That is because these support people will not be knowledgeable about your website. The support staff could handle hundreds of different websites. It would be easy for them to make a mistake and confuse one website with another.

Negative With All Live Chat Solutions

The negative for all of these options is that it will eventually become abused. Not only will the spammers become extremely annoying, but the clients may become a problem as well. Many poker affiliates that have attempted live support run into problems where players will ask very basic questions that can be found in the FAQ because they become accustomed to going directly to live support with every easy question. Some players will also vent their bad beat stories to an affiliate if they are available and there is nobody else to online for them to vent. This can become a major time drain and burden when every time a player gets drawn out on they complain on chat programs. After a few "Online poker is rigged" chats with players an affiliate may start to get second thoughts about their choice to offer live support.

Live Chat Policy Suggestions

If you decide to offer live support I have a few suggestions. One is not to use your personal chat accounts. Set up a Skype or MSN account specific to your website. That way you do not ruin a personal chat account with spammers and bad beat stories when you are not working. You should only offer live support during set hours instead of having the chat program open every time you are online. This way a player knows when they can find live chat online and the affiliate is not tied down to live support at all hours of the day. Players can always leave a message, create a support ticket, or send an email if live support is not available.

While many poker affiliates, especially big ones, have abandoned live support there are still many affiliates that choose to use it. If you decide to try live support you should be prepared for some of the issues and the time it will take out of your day. You may greatly increase your player sign ups and retention. You will just need to decide if the loss of productivity is worth it.

This is an interesting topic for me to write about for an industry blog. I have sold original content to many affiliates. The key word there is original. There are problems with buying content from a third party versus writing your own original content.

When you write your own content you learn about the product that you are promoting. When your customers ask you questions about the product, you are able to answer the customers immediately. The more you understand your product, the better your conversions will be. When you outsource your content writing you can run into problems.

Beyond losing the educational value of writing and researching your product you may not always get what you paid for. Some content writers have been known to take money upfront without fulfilling the contract. Other times a content provider will sell the same content to multiple buyers. In rare instances, rogue content providers will steal content already published that was written by other webmasters. Recently I was the victim of the last one.

I wrote an investigative report about a gaming related company. It was a popular article and received links from several large online poker media companies. I discovered the article was stolen word for word by a Danish poker forum. After going back and forth a couple of times with the forum owner, he admitted that the work was purchased from a third party. He took the work down as well as many other articles that were taken word for word off of other media websites. Even though that was a week ago, the stolen article on their site still ranks higher than the original one I wrote for my site on Yahoo even though it was deleted. My site could be forever penalized because of the possibility that Yahoo thinks I am the one that copied the content. If you buy content that turns out to be duplicate you could end up with the same problem, either legally by damaging another person's business or by getting labeled as a content thief by the search engines.

I am not trying to say buying content is always bad. There are many great content writers out there that are worth every dollar spent on them. There are just items that need to be verified before making such a purchase.

Always make sure to buy from a source that you are confident in. Is the seller a well known forum poster? Is their forum post in the same language that you want the content to be in? If so, is their forum post advertising their content grammatically correct? How much do they want upfront as a deposit?

Ask the seller for references. Go to those websites and then go to Copyscape.com. Make sure those websites do not have content that was scraped from other websites. Once the references pass that test it is time to verify the article you are about to buy is unique.

When you receive the content, take several of the paragraphs and go to Google. Copy/paste sentences into Google and make sure that content does not already exist on the internet. Once you are satisfied that the work that you purchased is unique get the seller to agree that you are the only buyer for that work.

Sometimes content must be purchased. Large affiliates do not have the time to write all of their content, or maybe a new affiliate is still learning a niche. Buying content can be a great thing if you are careful to make sure that the content that you are buying is unique and on topic.

The Cake Poker Network is now the largest U.S. friendly online poker network. The Cake Poker Network is not only the biggest U.S. facing online poker room but it is also a great option for players outside the U.S. The network offers great promotions for players that reside in any country.

U.S. players still have several deposit options on Cake Poker. Players can deposit by credit card, cash transfer and MoneyLineWallet. U.S. players can cash out by paper check. Players outside the U.S. have many deposit and cashout options. These include Neteller, Moneybookers, credit cards, PaySafe Card and Ecocard.

The Cake Poker Network has some very unique promotions. The promotions are based on Gold Cards and Gold Chips. A Gold Card is released when $20 has been raked from the pot. The card is rewarded at random to the player holding the card that was drawn. Gold Chips are also rewarded based on points earned during real money play. Gold Cards and Gold Chips can be used to enter freerolls and to purchase prizes such as bonuses. Players can also trade Gold Cards in the Cake Poker Network's Gold Card Exchange. The Gold Card Exchange gives players the opportunity to turn their Gold Cards into cash and gives buyers the opportunity to buy into tournaments at a discount.

PAS offers Cake Poker, Power Poker, Red Star Poker and Broadway Tables to our publishers. Cake Poker and Broadway Tables accept U.S. players. Red Star Poker is aimed at Russian players although players from countries outside of North America are welcome. Power Poker is EU licensed which can be beneficial to European players in a country that taxes gambling winnings. Cake Poker, Power Poker and Broadway Tables offer players a 110% up to $600 first deposit bonus. Red Star Poker offers players a 250% up to $1500 first deposit bonus. All players receive 33% rakeback paid every Thursday for the previous Wednesday-Tuesday play. The Cake Poker Network is also the last rakeback friendly network that uses the dealt rakeback method. Another great selling point is that nothing is deducted from player's rakeback.

With U.S. players looking for a new place to play online poker this is a great time to add to your Cake Poker Network content. Players will be looking for a reason to sign up for an account on the network and just adding a little content about the great promotions, bonuses and the fact that nothing is deducted from rakeback could be the selling points that bring in new players.