Around 2 years ago I met the person that introduced me to what an affiliate was. He owns his own branded rakeback site and is doing very well. I kind of worked for him recruiting players and would get a percent of every player I brought to him. I realized how much money was to be made so I tried creating my own site, but that didn't work out too well. I didn?t know how to get a sign up page on my site on my page etc., and I couldn't keep up with the other rakeback sites as they offered huge freerolls and rakeraces, and the other sites had better percentages to offer to their players. After failing a few times I spent some money on a domain, www.viprakeback.net, and set out to look for a designer. The only problem was a designer could have cost thousands of dollars. This is when I found PAS. I didn't need to spend thousands on a designer or I didn't need to work out deals with the poker sites which would have been a pain. Making my website was very easy with PAS. All I had to do was point my domain to their name servers and in literally 2 minutes I had a very nice branded rakeback site. Once the website was up it was very easy for me to make changes in my back end to make my site look better. PAS also makes it very easy to do SEO in your back end. Another main reason I went to PAS was because they offer MASSIVE rakeraces and freerolls. This creates huge incentive for players to sign up. When using PAS you can track all your players and how much you are making daily. PAS really made it easy for me to finally own a nice professional looking rakeback site.Thanks,VIPRakeback

In my last two blog posts I went over the importance of meta tags and original content. There are several other simple items a webmaster can do to do improve their performance in the search engines. These actions will take you just an hour or so a week.One of the things that go into your score at search engines is the age of your site. If you are a new site there is nothing you can do at first to help your score here. There is something you can do to help though with another part of this score. Search engines also often look at how long your website’s domain is registered into the future. Considering your domain is less than $10 a year in most cases make sure your domain does not expire in the next 5 years. The consensus is that Google respects a site that appears to be in it for the long term over a site that has yet to renew its domain name. A site with only a few months left in its registration isn’t going to get much respect at all. This is on top of not wanting your domain to expire because you forgot to renew it.Another item is having an up to date website. Not only is quality original content important but keeping it fresh is as well. Go through your site often to make sure your content doesn’t mention a promotion from 6 months ago. Also check the promotions pages of the poker rooms you offer often to look for ever changing offers and promos. When the Googlebot visits your site he will be happy to review your site again instead of leaving immediately. The Googlebot knows if your site has been updated or not and if your site appears stale he will leave and if it continues to stay stale it will hurt your overall performance and could lower the number of future visits from him.Another important item is links. This does not mean go out and get a link to your site on every link exchange page or pay for those link services. In this day and age those don’t work. What you need are link backs from quality sites. These will come naturally over time if your content is of high quality but you can do a few things to try and speed it up. Although not as important as they used to be blogs are a great starting point. Take some time at least once a week to write about your poker life. Talk about that great bonus you cleared, how you just moved up in limits or how rakeback helped you break even this month. Link a keyword in your blog to your site every now and then. Not every time and no more than once every three paragraphs as nobody likes a spam blog. Over time you will get readers, back links and hopefully some visits from the Googlebot.In my next blog post I will write about other ways to get links.

When my business partner and I started my poker training site a few years ago, we had no idea how to monetize it. We knew that we could find an audience, and we knew that we could teach them how to play, but those things don’t pay the bills. We tried affiliate programs and discovered, like most webmasters do, that most players are worth a few dollars at the most when they just click on a banner and sign up.
We eventually started to make a few dollars by charging a yearly fee, but it takes a lot of $50 yearly memberships to turn in to real money and it was just keeping us afloat. Our membership grew, but we had no idea that having access to hundreds of serious poker players was worth anything other than their membership fees. Until I met Beanie.
Beanie is a controversial figure, but love him or hate him, there can be no doubt he was one of the pioneers of the business of offering rake back, and he was a big help to us when we first got started. Before I met Beanie I had never even heard the word rake back, and after hearing about it we still had trouble getting it moving.
Our first problem was our lack of traffic. Back then, and often still today, affiliate managers will check your URL in Alexa to see how much traffic you have. If you don’t have a large amount of traffic, you don’t get a good deal, and you end up with rotten percentages or you aren’t allowed to offer rake back at all. Those of us who promote rake back know that one serious grinder is worth hundreds of casual low-limit players, but many affiliate managers are still clueless.
I hunted around for good rake back deals for weeks, fighting with sites about percentages, being lied to by affiliate managers, and listening to the sites offer me a percentage that was lower than the big rake back sites were offering to their players. Trying to compete against the big sites and establish enough connections to be able to offer reasonable rates and still make a profit was a constant hassle.
After a month of fighting with different poker rooms I was able to get the same deal that everyone else had on Full Tilt. Finally a level playing field! We promoted Full Tilt almost exclusively for six months or more, telling all of our members that they could get rake back there, and getting everyone signed up. Full Tilt was rewarded with a bunch of new players and a nice increase in rake, while we started to make enough money to make the business worthwhile.
We tried having a friend create a web site that would track and pay all of our players automatically, but those of you who have been through that can probably guess how it went. We spent more time fixing glitches and answering customer support questions than we saved, and the software was scrapped when the designer disappeared on us.
We make some money once we got rolling with Full Tilt, and a trip to a Casino Affiliate Convention (CAC) was great for finally making some connections and getting the same rates with most sites that other larger affiliates were getting, but that didn’t make us rich or help us manage the large customer base that we were dealing with.
Things didn’t get easy until we found PAS and they took over our rake back program. When they told me that we could just promote and they would handle our customers and pay us I couldn’t believe it. The solution I hoped for all along! We no longer had to run a rake back program, fight with affiliate managers, worry about customer support or any of the other hassles involved with running our own rakeback site. Now we just promote pokerwhip.com and progrinders.com and cash the checks.
The arrangement works so well for us because each of us is working within our area of expertise. The PAS folks are running a rake back site and we are teaching people to play better poker and finding new customers who need rake back. When people focus on their strengths it’s hard not to be successful.
Chris "Fox" WallacePokerWhip

On Friday I had a chance to check out some of the development pages for PAS 3.0. While the project is still in its beginning stages, I was blown away by the work that Craig and our development team have achieved thus far. Since I mainly deal with servicing our wonderful publishers and marketing the PAS brand, I do not attend our daily development meetings.The company's vision for a fully integrated rakeback solution has definitely evolved over the past 9 months. While the current CMS is sufficient for content customization, SEO, and design, we feel there is room for improvement. We envision a CMS that allows users to maximize their talents in design, SEO and marketing. The updated PAS will also enable our publishers to market traditional poker affiliate offers (CPA, Rev Share, and Hybrid) to their player base. While rakeback can be a very profitable venture, it is also a niche market. (Albeit a growing niche in poker affiliate marketing). We want to give our publishers the tools needed to market to the "non-rakeback player".As someone who spends 10-12 hours a day on websites I have become quite the UX (User Experience) snob. Navigating your way around portals can be an exhausting task if webmasters haven't take into account what their viewers want in a webpage. Having an interface that allows our publishers to easily navigate their Admin Area and grab the data they want from a centralized location is the optimal solution. The development pages I viewed on Friday blew me away. Craig has done a tremendous job of laying the UX groundwork for our development team. We would love to hear your suggestions for PAS 3.0 on the PAS Support Forum.Tony

Effective January 1 2009 Ultimate Bet has started paying affiliates for their player's tournament entry fees. This means that affiliates and players alike now benefit from playing tournaments on Ultimate Bet as players now get rakeback on these fees as well. For years this has made Ultimate Bet a tough selling point to some players as there are quite a few players out there that play tournaments for most if not all of their action. If those types of players already had an account without rakeback at Absolute Poker this meant they could not play on Cereus and get rakeback on their play. This is huge news for all affiliates that promote Ultimate Bet as well as players looking to get rakeback on tournaments on Cereus. This has already been added to the PAS News Feed and default review pages for PAS sites but if you have not opted into the news or write your own content make sure to find some ways to get this news to your players. This leaves Merge Gaming as the last rakeback friendly network that does not pay rakeback or MGR on tournaments.