Promoting Smaller Poker Sites

........Blowing the dust off my blog.

I know I need to get jeremyenke.com back up and running. You'd think just having to remove a 301 wouldn't be that hard! Nonetheless this is on the agenda in the next week or so. I just need to get some content up so it's not 1 new post followed by five 12 month old posts.

Anywho, I was having a conversation with MJ this morning who promotes almost all the smaller rooms with great success and it really got me thinking about a few things. Especially because I have fallen into an amazing local opportunity lately.

Long story short, there is a local charity poker group that has been around for years in Chicago. They host 250 events per year with and average of 400 players at each event. (All real money players) Until now, their online strategy has been pretty much non existent. So we are going to come in and begin monetizing their database of 40K+ real money players. Hell, I'll probably get a trade show booth and set up shop at the events signing players up for rakeback, free poker cash, and even better, online winter leagues, etc.

With that we have to look at what rooms to work with. Sure, the easy ones come to mind that take U.S., FT, Stars, etc. But when dealing with real money players at live events, you really do run into the issue of 50%+ of these players already playing at these rooms. For rakeback that's fine. But for a league with hundreds of players where we are adding big money, it is disheartening to see half the field already signed up.

With that I have been speaking with a few different operators, and I can say that working with the smaller operators or "skins" has been a pleasure. Here are 3 reasons:

Flexibility: When dealing with a smaller rooms, they genuinely want to earn your business and instead of saying, "we don't do that", they say, "yea we can find a way to do that".

Conversions: In a league situation like I am organizing, people are going to play regardless where it is hosted. It's nice to know that my conversion rate is going to be 95% for the players I refer.

Service: Similar to number 1, the service you get can often be much better since the A.M.'s know you can send players and know that you have lots of other choices. It's nice being treated as a valuable customer versus an expensive liability of the overall marketing department

In the end I am moving forward with Riyaz at OnlyPoker for the first league event because he is easy to get a hold of and flexible in our needs. But I'm sure I'll be working with more smaller sites as the online strategy gets going.

One thing I would suggest is that if you're not currently working with at least one newer room, expand your horizons and pick one to work close with. As frustrating as it is now days with some of these top 5 rooms, it has been a pleasant experience working with some of the smaller operators who genuinly value affiliates.

If you need some suggestions of new rooms to work with, shoot me a PM or skype and I'll get you an intro and good deal. Or even hit up MJ for that matter. He knows all these guys.

On a side note, I hate to end a blog without a picture. Props to MediocrePokerRadio where I found this fine specimen.




I miss blogging just for the pleasure of google image searching each day.