Do you know about affiliate marketing? One party (the affiliate) does marketing or advertising for another party. This usually works best if the affiliate has their own website with multiple sources of engagement, meaning, blogs, poker site reviews, educational guides, and more.
So, what is the affiliate in poker?
Online poker sites need affiliates to spread the word and attract players to their platforms. By signing users up, affiliate sites collect a small commission. Essentially, that’s how affiliate marketing in poker works.
Poker affiliate marketing requires a large audience across multiple countries.
We’re going to explain everything you need to know about poker affiliate marketing.
How Does Affiliate Marketing for Poker Sites Work?
With an audience around the world and thousands of players watching an affiliate site, we can guide players to poker sites and generate income for platforms.
The way affiliates make their commissions can be different for each poker site. The affiliate might receive a payment or a percentage of a player’s rake.
As long as the affiliate is promoting a trusted site with a stellar reputation, everyone wins from this relationship. Poker players avoid shady or untrustworthy platforms and the affiliate collects a small fee.
A mobile poker club can also have an affiliate agreement with agents and club organizers. As they attract players to the poker club, the affiliate can collect a commission.
The best poker sites are heavily promoted by affiliates. These usually include long-running poker rooms like partypoker, 888poker, PokerStars, ACR (Americas Cardroom), GGPoker, and several others.
One of the largest platforms, 888poker, has paid over $207,000,000 to poker affiliates since the program started,
To create more reasons for their audience to sign up, affiliates offer special deals and bonuses.
Benefits of Affiliate Marketing for Online Poker
The revenue doesn’t start right away and may take time to build up.
Aside from the profits you can generate from being a poker affiliate, you can also take pride in promoting trusted sites and helping players boost winnings.
When you have a great poker room, affiliate marketing is guilt-free and rewarding. You connect the audience with a great online poker experience and get paid in the process.
As we said before, becoming a successful affiliate takes time. You’ll have to experiment with different techniques before you find a strategy that works for your users.
How and When Do Poker Affiliates Get Paid?
There are two main kinds of payment structures that poker sites usually offer their affiliates.
- CPA – Cost Per Action
- Revenue Share
CPA or Cost Per Action agreements mean that someone needs to complete a specific action. In most cases, this means a player must sign up and make a minimum deposit. For a few CPA deals, it might only require a player to create an account and start playing.
Revenue share agreements give you a percentage of the rake a player generates. Online poker sites get most of their profit from the rake, which is a small commission taken from the poker tables. Some poker sites might offer you up to 30, 40, or even 50% of this rake. As long as the player stays on the site and continues to play, you’ll continue to share the revenue with the poker site.
Sometimes, you’ll get a CPA + Revenue Share agreement, which is especially lucrative.
If any of this isn’t clear, we are happy to answer your affiliate questions.
- Increased rakeback and personal bonuses
- Help with deposits and cashouts
- Access to mobile applications
- Solving problems with accounts
- Technical support
- Questions about the site and forum
What Kind of Websites Can Be Poker Affiliates?
Poker blogs and forums are great places to start affiliate marketing. The audience is already focused on poker and probably plays online too.
There are estimated to be 100 million online poker players around the world, meaning there’s probably some overlap, even with unrelated niches.
Poker affiliates usually have a demographic of young and middle-aged men with some disposable income. Based on those metrics, tech, automotive, casino, sports betting, and many other website niches will have an overlapping demographic.
https://www.gipsyteam.com/pokerrooms/partners
The Ethics of Poker Affiliate Marketing
Poker affiliate marketing is slightly different from other forms of affiliate marketing.
When you encourage players to sign up for a poker site, you’ve got to be sure that the site is trustworthy and hosts fair games. If the affiliate doesn’t fully understand the company they promote, they can get customers into tricky situations.
It’s important to mention that most of the popular poker sites in operation today protect their players with security and bot detection programs.
Affiliates also need to be sure that poker rooms are handling player deposits and withdrawals without delays. Failure to withdraw player funds is unacceptable, meaning that sites like this shouldn’t be marketed by poker affiliates.
It can seriously damage the affiliate's reputation if the poker site they promote goes under or engages in shady business practices.
