LadyHoldem, SEO Marketer, Gambling Affiliate

This is my own personal formula for promoting a new poker affiliate program, I’m only JUST putting it into use all together, though I’ve used every piece of it individually and successfully. It’s my checklist for now, for my own accountability. If you use it, and it works for you, I’d love to hear about it, if you can add to it, I’d love hearing about that even more.

I’ll be blogging each step as we go here.

I’m going to use the process on my Full Tilt Poker and Absolute Poker reviews and see what kind of results it gets me. My absolute poker review is currently on the third page of Google 4 spots down. I found the Full Tilt Poker review the other day, let’s just say it was so far down there in the results that I don’t remember what place it was in, 100th or so.

I’m beginning with Absolute Poker, so we’ll likely talk about that one the most

If you’re an affiliate, or want to be, and are interested in promoting Absolute Poker, here’s my Affiliate Link. You don’t lose anything at all by singing up under another affiliate, I gain something, so there’s the option.

Both my Absolute poker and full tilt review pages are PR2, the Absolute Poker page gets quite a few visits daily, but they’ve also been in the news quite a bit lately.

I’ll be blogging the process as we go here. Should be fun (for me anyway :P)

Promoting Poker - Step by Step

1. Write a detailed review of the property. Now I can be a bit of a salesperson by nature. Y’know that cheerful girl, the one that’s always talking, always happy, smiling, sort of ‘bubbly’ well that’s me. I actually have to work at writing unbiased reviews - it’s just in my nature to say thing’s like Super! Awesome! Great! Amazing!

That’s going to be goal #1 here; to write a detailed, SUPER, AWESOME, GREAT, AMAZING, and unbiased review of Absolute poker, followed by a SUPER, AWESOME, GREAT, AMAZING, and unbiased review of Full Tilt Poker.

2. Talk About it! Next I will blog the hell out of that review. I’m going to target the words Absolute Poker. Normally I might go for something simpler, but since I seem to have a teensy bit of weight for that term already (that’s why we’re starting with it) I’m going to go for the gusto and start with those words. So, in my news posts, poker stories, 10 total posts, I’ll talk about and link back to my Absolute Poker Review from my website.

3. Network it! I’ve read that you can and/or will be ‘penalized’ by G for linking to sites on your own network. I’ve also read that if you have weight on one site, and you link to another site on the same IP the second site is also given weight, as though G trusts the second site by way of the first. I’m not going to debate that here.

When I say Network, I’m talking about all of the stuff you have built as a hobby, all the stuff that isn’t ‘your poker affiliate website’ Your MySpace, Blogspot, CherryTap, Angelfire, all of your profile pages, etc. Anything that is yours and is not owned by you, mention your site here.

4. Articles for Submission x 10 - Submission articles can provide you many backlinks. Write 10 solid articles, link your keyphrase within them, throw in an affiliate link wherever you can get away with it, and ship em. I usually try to spread my submissions out, one article every two weeks. No reason, I just do, if you have a winning formula, please do share. In addition to sending my article to article submission websites, I generally either offer it or post it in popular gambling affiliate forums.

5. Make it News X 5 - Press release it, press releases can be an invaluable source of backlinks, and you’d be surprised by what exactly might be considered news. I once hired writers that mistakenly published the competitions bonus codes on my customers websites.. but rather than talking about that embarrassing moment…

Many website owners RSS feed press releases, others rewrite the news within them, and more still actually just visit PR sites and copy the press releases directly. So even if your news isn’t front page stuff, it can still garner you a solid amount of fresh backlinks. If you use a spot like PRweb.com (popular amongst gambling affiliates) or pr-news.us (free) that gets included by Google news, you have a whole new source of RSS feeders and possible links, not to mention the traffic you can receive simply from the news listing.

Again I can be a random sort of girl, so I choose to do release about 5 stories involving my news. There’s no rhyme or reason to five, though I’d love to grab some input from the numbers junkies here

6. Blog Commenting - When commenting in other peoples blogs, you might want to keep in mind the fact that these are your peers, that said, blog commenting can be a great way to get backlinks. Especially if you keep on the look out for blogs that use the ‘top commentators’ or the ‘dofollow’ plugins. That means the blogs do not utilize the ‘nofollow’ plugin by default as naked word press installations do.

7. Directory Submissions - Submit your new article (the actual link to the article, not your domain name) to 20 directories, remember to link to your keywords. There are a growing number of gambling website directories out there, make use of those, as the value of a targeted link is huge in comparison to the random link dropped wherever it may lay.

8. Utilize a social bookmarking service. There are a few social bookmarking services advertised by respectable forum members in our industry, I’m sure there are even more still. If you can find a good social bookmarketer that offers a good bookmark/cost ratio, sign up!

9.Blog Reviews - Plenty of these are offered in poker affiliate forums, they are also offered at ReviewMe.com and SponsoredReviews Blog reviews are an easy way to gain both some linkage love as well as a bit of traffic. Look for blogs that are listed in Google blog search. Blogs with traffic, and blogs with PR. Especially look for blogs with more posts than reviews ;).

10. Social Networking Baby! Now I know we hired a service above, and we’ll blog the results, however… your friends and associates are more likely to support YOUR submissions. In short, my man will redigg my digg. My sister will stumble my stumble and my best friend will read’a my reddit.

So, spend a few hours socializing, and bookmarking your reviews.

11. Email Your Affiliate Manager - I can’t emphasize, and don’t do this enough. Once you’ve got your review up, it looks fabulous, your site looks good, you’re generating a buzz… Say hello to the affiliate manager! When I started in this business I quickly learned that affiliate managers can seriously generate some email! I blocked them all. I sent all their gibberish straight to the junk mail folder.

See the thing is, affiliate manager emails tend to look all ‘professional’ and therefore a lot like junk mail. These people are invaluable - Who Knew!

Face it, you’re not the only affiliate out there, and if you’re not generating a profit yet, I hate to tell ya buddy, but you ARE just a number. Your affiliate manager is your ticket to information, promotions, networking, insider info… press passes..

So why not shoot out a quick little email, just to say hello.

Dear Affiliate Manager Person,

Hi there! I’ve just begun promoting Absolute Poker and wanted to send you a quick email to introduce myself! I’m Cathy. I’ve just posted a review of your property on 4flush.com. Have a great day!
I look forward to a close working relationship,

Cathy R.

13. Other linking possibilities there are some other things to keep in mind that I wont go into in huge detail here, I probably will later as I tend to do that, but for now. Digital Point feeds blog post titles (kool lil way to keep the spiders coming)
- Lots of forums allow siggy links, many others don’t.
- Craigslist spamming is bad and wrong and you shouldn’t do it, though traffic can be gained.
- Asking for a review in a webmaster forum will get you a backlink, it will also likely multiply the amount of competition you face.

Care to help me out on my quest to promote Absolute Poker? Add a link to my Absolute Poker Review from inside one of your own articles!