Critique these Poker Dealing Banners for Affiliates

I am in the process of having banners created for our texas holdem dealing course and wanted to get some feedback. This is the 1st revision of the banners. I can’t change up the text as what it says but I can revise the images the colors and things of that nature. They are designed to grab the attention of the poker player and show them an opportunity to make good money doing something they are interested in already. Feel free to post your thoughts in the PAL thread requesting a critique of these poker dealing banners.

My thoughts are that pretty much these are about what I expected and I’m fairly happy with them. I think they will flow from the banner through the landing page fairly well even if the green colors are a little off. I think they should stand out being something a little different, they are not ‘too annoying’ but should get noticed. I think I need to change the roulette background image to something more poker dealing related…

What do you think be brutal, I have 5 free revisions I can work with so I would love feedback.

After awesome advice and critique from the members over at the PAL Forums, I revised them and they turned out like this: Poker Dealer Affiliate Banners

Texas Holdem Dealing Guide

I wrote up a basic guide to dealing texas hold em poker. It’s just the basics and mainly a way to try and help my landing page rank better for and get traffic for people looking to learn how to deal texas holdem. The texas holdem basics course makes sense to have a page about how to deal texas holdem and I could use some rankings for that search traffic anyway. I’m actively planning a huge revamp of a big site will slowly building out the smaller sites that we plan on keeping anyway and this was a piece of content that made sense to publish.

I am always looking for innovative ways to use content to not only drive traffic to websites but to also work off of one another and create synergy across the network of websites, products, services and offerings that in turn earn income for the business. If you are struggling to send traffic to online poker sites, or if you are having a hard time finding alternative offers to put in front of your traffic (how many pokerstars banners can they see anyway, right), consider promoting Dealer-Training.com for a 50% CPA deal all paid through clickbank.

Sportsbook.com Affiliate Program

This post was inspired by Prenut’s post about the sbook/playersonly affiliate program and if anyone had experience working with Sportsbook.com and Players Only affiliate program. I started to write a reply there and drop my affiliate link but instead of doing that I figured I would write this post here and snag the google traffic. Being a markerter and being lazy means if I’m going to take the time to write something this long and designed to rank for people searching for answers about the Sportsbook poker affiliate program then I may as well do a full blown post here and try and keep the cobwebs off of this site. I got a third kid on the way and daddy needs some new shoes!

Sportsbook.com Affiliate Program – Refer Your Players to Sportsbook

In 2006, when the UIGEA first went down (and ironically today is the day it is supposed to be enforced) I was invited to be one of the first affiliates of the new Sportsbook.com site and I jumped at the chance. You can sign up at commissionaccount.com or Sportsbook.com affiliate signup here. I’ve been working with the account manager back from the Paradise Poker days, one of the very first online poker rooms to offer real money poker and I recommend them to most affiliates I network with.

The Sportsbook.com brand has consistently converted as well as any of the major online poker rooms listed on the site, and better than most.

This is due in no short part to their credit card processing, which is second to none and super important or the conversion rate if you are sending recreational players (which is what the rooms want!).

I’ve sent a bunch of affiliates who are quite happy that they began promoting them and many have them as their number one room. Join the healthy group of high quality sub affiliates and together we can accomplish more. Plus you’ll get Stephen for your affiliate manager and he is one of the best in the biz.

In the 5+ years I’ve been doing business with them, he has always been professional and spot on. We have not in that time seen any player issues from poker and sportsbook traffic. However I know some respectable old school affiliates have major negative issues with the long time ago parent company and I respect that. In my own personal experience, the affiliate program at Sportsbook has been a quality, reputable organization for both affiliates and players. I would deposit my own money there.

Sportsbook Affiliate Program Benefits

• Regular on time payments every month
• Multiple payment options (wire, check, ewallets etc)
• Convert like gangbusters – seriously these guys are always ahead of the credit card processing game – vital for the recreational player
• Healthy CPA’s – however the attached sportsbook and casino + ease of deposits mean MGR should be a serious consideration
• Read More about the Sportsbook.com Affiliate Program

If you do not have US or Canadian traffic, you can pretty much not bother promoting them as the players they accept is restricted to those two North American countries at the moment. As far as choosing between MGR and CPA, you have to decide what makes the most sense to your business whether you take MGR or CPA but you can negotiate both but be prepared to begin with MGR if you are an unknown / new / unproven affiliate. You will get a fair deal and once you prove your player value you can then consider negotiating for a CPA deal if you wish. CommissionAccount.com is the direct link to sign up.

Testing Price Points of Poker Dealing Course

So for the past five years or so, our home based poker dealer school, (a private website with information worth paying for) has been sold at the price of $197.00.  The strategy was that we would prefer to sell fewer at higher price points than more at a lower price point.  Many reasons for this was that first we wanted to try it out to see how it sold, the original process was a bit janky and the verification of payment sucked balls.  This was all before we switched over to Clickbank.

Plus, the course justified it’s higher price, it does kick ass and we really do have a Bellagio dealer as the instructor and in the videos.  GoodKarmaKid has probably sat at her table many times!

Yesterday, I lowered the price down to $77 from $197.

After clickbanks fee’s, I have to sell 2.5 for every 1 sold previously at $197 to earn the same amount of money on the traffic. It will be interesting to see if the lower price point generates a high enough conversion rate to justify the lowered price.  We also run a few times per year a 4 day email campaign to anyone who signs up to our email list who has not purchased the course yet with a big discount so at this price point if we ran that email campaign again the discount is not as large so that will need testing as well.  Another thing to watch is email sign-ups and if they go up or down noticeably.

If anyone has any links to info or if they sell products like this and want to share some insight into how to properly price your ebook I would love to hear what kind of results and insight you might have.

Finally, if any PAL regular is interested in promoting the course to your traffic, just send me a PM with what you will do and how you plan to promote it and I will send you a free review copy no problem.  You can read the Dealer Training affiliate program details here and get a few banners if you wish.

4 Day Cash Machine Email Series Starts Today + Aweber Shortfall

About twice per year we run a 4 day sale on our digital product designed to teach people how to deal poker like a pro. It’s the only internet based poker dealing school on the market and it normally sells for a hefty sum of $197.00. What we do is for four days we offer a blow-out sale for either $77 or $49. We’ve been harvesting email addresses of people interested in the course since we first launched the product back in 2004. Now, I’ll admit that we changed email providers over to aweber a two years after we started collecting names and more or less had to start out list over from scratch which sucks but aweber rocks and you can’t just enter email addresses, people have to opt in. Getting an old list that you haven’t emailed in a while to re-opt in isn’t bloody easy so my advice there is to stay in contact with your list even if on a very limited basis (something we are working more on as well).

This sale is for $49 or as I like to say, about two and a half ounces of silver.

Anyway, on to the 4 day cash machine emails…

If you are not familiar with the 4 day cash machine its essentially an email series that is set to go out for four consecutive days. I’ve created 4 emails that go out over the course of the next four days… starting today on 4/20 (smoke em if you got em) and ending this Friday. Pretty simple.

I wanted to split test a series of emails against one another and see which one out performed the other. My actual idea was to offer up a challenge to some of our marketing interns (or some PAL members) to write their own series of 4 emails and put their results head to head against mine to see who’s sold the most and award the winner a $$ prize but I found a limitation with Aweber that I really hope they will fix.

You can not split test an email series, only individual emails. I

If you got the 1st email from “Series A” you would get all “Series A” emails and no “Series B” emails, and vice versa. Unfortunately you can’t do this in aweber, you can only split test individual emails. I could try two different emails for each one in the series but there is no way (that I could figure out) to make sure that someone who got email a1 would also get a2 and a3 and a4. You can segment your list, but I could not find a way to randomly segment the list into equal parts, only ways to segment your list based on time frame of signing up or some other factor that will not randomly split the group in order to do a proper test.

The first email starts going out today (4/20) after lunch. The actual emails are a bit on the ‘hard sale side’ if you ask me but the emails we sent out in our previous 4 day cash machine email campaigns that were more hard sale / direct to the point converted better than our softer sale approach. We will see what kind of results we have this time and report back.

We are sending out the blast to a lower 4 figure email list. Show me the $$$.

I’ll update how it went.

Another Test Post For Aweber

This is just a test post for aweber, bear with us.

I line break / hard return above.

Bingo Bonus Site Wont Index

Ok, this is pissing me off. Normally all it takes to have google index your site is to put up a few links to it but I seemed to have done something out of order for google this time. They won’t index my friggin bingo bonus site where I hope to rank well for terms like us bingo sites and us bingo bonuses. I’ve gotten some really high quality links pointing in to it as well. I posted a blog entry at PAL with a link right in the text to the site, I’ve gotten a link from SlotsGeek because I actually played bingo online and not just pretended that I did, a high ranking portal focused on online bingo halls has linked to me, I put a link up in my forum, did a blogspot blog post still google refuses to index me.

A couple of things, newer wordpress installations come with the privacy setting set to block search engines but allow normal people. While I thought I checked this, about a week ago I realized that it was still clicked on and I fixed that setting. If you’re launching a new wordpress site you need to double check this variable for sure and make sure you set it to allow search engines.

At one point while checking to see if google had indexed it, the results showed the home page only but just the domain address and no desc or details of what was on the site. This was during the time that the block search engines was checked as on I believe. I had also installed a different sitemap plugin that pinged google to visit the site while they were blocked so that probably had something to do with it as well… google came, saw that we said ‘fuck you google, go away’ and did so. I’ve also checked my robots.txt file to make sure se’s are not blocked and they are not.

Frustrating.

Domain Name Resources

I love hunting for domains, many times I spend too much time on it but then again, not really if you find good domains it is very similar to investing in real estate. I’ve found a handful of useful resources that help you find a domain name for sale, or even an unregistered domain name. Plus, a friend of mine just purchased an incredible exact match two word poker domain, and he probably bought it at a prime time with the struggling economy… anyway it makes the hunt for good domains fun, and I enjoy the hunt.

Favorite Domain Name Tools

• DNForums – domain name forum, hundreds if not thousands of domains are listed for sale every week
• Name Pro’s – another domain name forum with tons of domains for sale
• Sedo – another domain name sales forum
• SnapNames – domain names that are dropping or in auction
• NameJet – domain aftermarket
• NameBio – see what domains sold for over time.
• Godaddys domain auctions – tdnam to those who’ve been around.
• Bustaname – finds combos of unregistered domain names available, type in your keywords and it arranges them in all ways possible up to 3 words, plus options like hyphens and more
• TLD counts – how many domains are purchased across many different extensions (like .org/.net/.us/.bz/.ca etc etc. (shows from 2009)

If you guys have any other useful domaining tools feel free to leave a comment and a link to the resource, I’m sure there are tons more out there.

Skill Games Like Rummy

As primarily an online poker affiliate, I am constantly trying to diversify into other markets. One of the markets is that of other skill games like online rummy. This is a card game that can be played online for real money. They offer CPA’s and revenue share, similar to poker. In an effort to get a foothold, or just a headstart on this niche, we put up two sites in the rummy niche. The focus being on the site that teaches players how to play online rummy and obviously we are trying to rank for the phrase(s) play online rummy and play rummy online and variations.

So far, the results have been less than stellar. Actually, they’ve been horrible. Not a single real money player.

Obviously we’re not doing it right.

Totally admit that the site is still basic and not very conversion driven. The content is all unique and quality information… but other than putting up the site we have done absolutely zero to market the site. It’s really just to get the site some age, trust and authority while we continue to focus on other sites.

After being live for about 8 months so far the site is starting to rank for some of it’s key terms. We’re hovering around the 2nd page of google for it’s main phrase so if anyone is feeling generous and would like to give us a link to the site, that’d be awesome. Something like play rummy online or play internet rummy.

Here’s some stats for the Rummy site

• July 09 – 391 Unique Visitors (through the 20th)
• June 09 – 517 Unique Visitors
• May 09 – 411 Unique Visitors

So as you can see, there is nothing ‘gangbusters’ going on here but the traffic does seem to be climbing. The site was really just designed to begin aging and starting to gain trust in google. Which is a fairly common requirement now, unless you can buy a domain with age and trust already, which is harder and harder to do unless you’ve got deep pockets.

In a new niche like this, I didn’t feel it was necessary, especially since it is an unproven market, but rummy is a popular game. Well, the short answer is don’t feel like you need to rush out and get into the rummy market, at least not according to my results. I do think there is some promise in this niche though so I’m not ready to dump the site at digitalpoint yet.

We’ve got a few other sites in some other skill niches but so far, nothing stellar to report.

Anyone out there with a rummy site showing success? I know some of you guys have some rummy sites so what say ye? Leave a comment and I’ll leave up the links as long as it’s a real comment. But the spam gets deleted, fuck off spammers

Email Marketing Success 4 Day $$ Machine

Harvesting our email sign ups is something that we have not done very well over the past few years, we totally admit it. Although we have been collecting addresses since the beginning, we have let many of the lists sit without even a hint of an email, for years. And we also changed email list providers mid-stream… we went from a self hosted version called MailLoop (one of the late Cory Rudl’s products) to Aweber. Me gusta mucho aweber. If you don’t yet have it yet it is probably the easiest email auto responder / emailing program on the market today.

This past weekend, I tried out an email campaign called the 4 Day Cash Machine. It is an extremely simple method, and it did indeed generate cash for four straight days. Rather than go through everything again about what it is, just reference the blog post I made over at PAL.

Results of the 4 Day Email $$ Machine Harvest

• Email 1 Wednesday at 4:20pm – 25.1% open rate, 6.9% click through rate (half to the buy now page and half to the sales landing page) – 1/6 conversion rate.
• Email 2 Thursday at 2:50pm – 13% open rate 5.6% click through (half / half to buy now page and sales lander) – 1/18 conversion rate
• Email 3 Friday at 2:10pm – 13.6 open rate 3.4% click through (all to buy now page, none to the sales lander) 1/4.7 conversion rate *wow!
• Email 4 Saturday 12:20pm – 12.3 open rate, 4% click through (3 to 1 visiting the buy now page) 1/4 conversion rate.

So all in all, this gives us a baseline to judge future events from. It looks like direct linking to the page where they can buy it right away might be a test for future campaigns as the conversion rate on email 3, that only linked there was through the roof (even if a low click through rate).

I would view this email campaign as a success, one of our first strong attempts to harvest the fruits of our labor with a very simple and effective email marketing techinque.

Downsides of Email Marketing

Ok, what were the drawbacks of this campaign. Lets see how many unsubscribed from our list.

Wow, i just checked and we had no one unsubscribe from our list… the day prior to the campaign launching we had 4 unsubscribers, lol. Anyway it hasn’t seemed that the email list is any worse for wear after this promotion. I figured we would lose some suscribers but they wouldn’t be likely to ever purchase anyway.

How Much $$ Did we Make

Without revealing exact numbers, we made four figures for about 2 hours of work. This is money that we wouldn’t have made had we not ran this promotion so it’s a no brainer. It actually makes me want to go back and try this with another list that subscribed to our dealer training newsletter back a few year ago when we were using mail loop. May try to get them to re-subscribe to aweber and offer this promotion to them somehow. Perhaps for another day.

If you are a poker affiliate and interested in offering a non-competitive poker product to your sites, we’ve increased the offer to 50% for affiliates share of the sales price of Dealer-Training.com the poker dealer school. Lots of people are looking for casino employment right now… something to consider.

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