It’s the summer of 2007 and I have made the decision to go back to school and finish my college degree. I started out with a small schedule and added a few more classes by spring semester. I was getting solid grades and getting closer and closer to the almighty college degree when I started having some problems.In addition to my schooling I am a full time rakeback affiliate. It’s how I pay my bills. I have a decent base of a few hundred players. I quickly found myself falling behind on statistics updates, payments, and general customer service. It was clear that I needed help but I didn’t have enough money to actual pay someone else to do my work. I started looking for solutions.In came Chris Carlson and his team at Poker Affiliate Solutions. Chris helped me convert my site over, while maintaining its unique visual feel. The transition was seamless for my players. I no longer had to worry about updating stats, payments, and even customer service. Poker affiliate solutions solved all of my problems at once.The job of a professional rakeback affiliate requires a lot of hours. It really is a full time job, and I didn’t have full time hours to give. Poker Affiliate Solutions delivered exactly what I was looking for and more.- TimRakebackAces

Whether you are a newbie rakeback affiliate or a baller looking to expand your existing business, the tips below WILL increase your site's brand, traffic, and revenue.- Write rooms reviews from a players perspective. Listing deposit methods, rake calculations, games offered, and bonus details are important but put your own signature on glance pages by writing a personalized room review. If you haven't played at a room, ask around. Google is your friend. Find a forum like TwoPlusTwo and open a thread asking about the PLO 6 max games on Merge. Whatever you do, please please Don't Be Ordinary with your room reviews.- Concentrate your initial SEO campaign on niche keywords. Trying to make it above the fold for "Full Tilt Rakeback" will prove to be an uphill battle. Target niche phrases where there is sparse competition. Some of these keywords will bring you higher value players than generic searches will. "Aced Poker Rakeback Deductions" > "Best Rakeback"- Form a partnership with a reputable training site that is not already promoting rakeback to their players (there are a ton out there). Offer the webmaster a revenue share of the players he or she refers to your rakeback site. This can be done via a Refer A Friend program such as the one we offer PAS Publishers. Go into the partnership with long term plans and goals for both parties. Create a custom referral tier for the partnering site that involves increasing rev share percentages at specific MGR levels.- Insert content on glance pages asking players to contact you if they already have an account at the room they are attempting to sign up at. Don't let your players give up. Find out what games they play and find the player a room or network that caters to their playing schedule and limits. More on this below.- I can't stress enough how important it is to have individual contact with your players. This doesn't mean you have to be on IM with them all day. Rather, make note of what games and limits they play. Find out what times they play at. If they are in the UK, find a room that has good traffic during your player's peak playing hours. Peak traffic times at the Boss Network may not align with a UK player's schedule. Refer to Poker Scout for Room/Network traffic statistics. Keep your ear to the grindstone. Where are the fish swimming these days? Give your players options. Sure they may love the software at Full Tilt, but their hourly rate will increase exponentially with rakeback and softer games.- Running a forum can be a huge time commitment. Partner with existing forums to offer rakeback to their player base. Pitch the forum's owner on a lifetime revenue share of the players they refer. Make the deal appealing enough to the webmaster so that he/she is invested in the partnership just as much as you are. Paying for ad space is fine. But it doesn't add another member to your sales team like rev share partnerships do.- If you have friends who are poker players (I am assuming the majority of you do), set them up with a referral account on your site. Tap into their friends (player base) with a life time rev share agreement for every player they refer to you. Have business cards made (they are very cheap) and pass them out to your friends who play live poker. Write the friend's referral code on the back of the card so they get credit for players they refer. Live poker is boring. Give your friends something to do at the tables Tony

This week is payment week for players and publishers. Player payments went out today, publishers will have their balances available tomorrow. It appears that by tomorrow all payments will be made and it will be another smooth month.Everest Poker is now available for PAS publishers. The offer is a bonus and VIP offer. Down the road we expect to be able to do points for cash as well once we build some volume. Since we do not get individual stats on players there are a different set of instructions for adding Everest Poker to your PAS site. Please contact Tony at publishers at pokeraffiliatesolutions.com for these instructions.See you next week!

I went to visit my father's side of the family in Chicago over the weekend. On Saturday, my dad and I took a ride down to the neighborhood where he grew up. We ended up stopping by an old building my grandfather used to own. My grandfather's parents immigrated from Italy around 1920 and made their new home in an Italian neighborhood in Chicago. My great-grandfather was a fruit peddler who struggled to provide for his family during the Great Depression.My grandfather dropped out of high school to work for his father selling fruit at the downtown markets. He eventually saved up enough money to buy a decent sized commercial truck. He parlayed that truck into 4 larger trucks and his own trucking company. Not bad for a guy who had little education and parents who spoke minimal English.With earnings from his trucking company he bought a two story building in Cicero, IL (just outside of Chicago). He rented out the top floor to Italian immigrants who were looking for cheap housing. The bottom floor was rented out to a liquor store, a dentist office, and a tailor. The surrounding neighborhood was mainly inhabited by first or second generation Italians. My grandfather sold the building before his death in 1976. He owned the building for 20 years and had many of the same tenants over that time period.Fast forward 30 years. My father and I are standing outside of the old building taking pictures. The first thing we noticed was that the parking signs were translated to Polish. Also, the tenants and neighboring businesses were Polish owned and catered the now mainly Polish Community (Polish sporting good store, Polish Market, Polish restaurant).Chicago, like many large US cities, was the new home to thousands of European immigrants from the 1900's to the 1950's. The Irish came first, then the Germans, the Italians, then the Polish. Over time, these groups would move farther and farther away from the city. So how did existing businesses like my grandfather's tenants adjust to this phenomenon? One day they are catering to an Irish community then 5 years later their store is smack dab in the middle of Little Italy.I am guessing they assimilated to their new environment or went out of business. Language barriers and culinary tastes are the first obstacles that come to mind. I am sure a few of the businesses packed up and moved with their neighbors but I doubt that was the norm. I wouldn't be surprised if one of the local Polish markets was owned by an Italian or Irish family.Environments change and we have to adapt as marketers. Especially on the Internet. You can't exactly pack up shop and move.We are on the cusp of a possible environment change in the online poker industry. Recent legislation in California and Minnesota will be the catalyst for future bills in other states and on Capitol Hill (the issue in MN is not a bill but rather an order from the MN Dept of Public Safety). Current and future legislation will change the way the game is played for online poker affiliates. We must plan ahead and put our companies in the best position possible if legislation does in fact pass.The future landscape of our industry may be determined by outsiders. State governments are finally realizing how much money they are leaving on the table by not taxing online gaming. Whether that means they open state run card rooms or regulate existing operators, your guess is as good as mine. There are pros and cons for affiliates with both scenarios. However, we can still make money as marketers with either sequence of events. It's all about putting yourself in the right position to evolve with the changing market. Many affiliates see legislation as a giant hurdle they would rather not think about.Entrepreneurs salivate at the chance to exploit new trends caused by outside entities. Whether it's regulation of the current operators, blocking certain state's players, or the opening of state/federal ran rooms, there is an opportunity for affiliates to be first to market.What are your plans if legislation impacts our industry in the coming year?Tony

This has been quite a week at PAS. Not only is it time to gather stats and get payments ready for our players and publishers but we have some big announcements to make. We will now go to weekly payments on all Full Tilt Poker accounts effective immediately and we have added importers for quite a few poker rooms so that we can better serve our players and publishers. I'll start with Full Tilt Poker payments.We have made the transition over to weekly payments at Full Tilt Poker. All players will have their final monthly payment made at Full Tilt within a week. This Friday all players will move to weekly payments as the payment on May 1-4 will be made. Then every Friday players will receive rakeback for the previous Tuesday-Monday. Negative balances must be carried over from week which will make a few players unhappy. Also players must now receive their rakeback to their Full Tilt account without exception. While these will make a very small percentage of players unhappy as a whole this is an incredible marketing and retention tool. One of our most asked support questions is "Where is my Full Tilt payment?". This change affects all Full Tilt accounts that we service.To better serve all PAS players and publishers we have added quite a few new importers for rooms that were monthly reporting rooms. Poker rooms that will now report daily are Fortune Poker, Poker Heaven, Action Poker, GoalWin, LuckyAce Poker and Carbon Poker. This will help players see how much they are earning which should motivate them to play more to obtain rakeback goals improving everyone's bottom line. This will also cut down on player support issues and tracking issues since players on these rooms will be able to see their stats much sooner to ensure they are tracked.