Free Bankroll Thoughts

[legolasma]

Hi everyone, im new here, and im thinking on starting a free bankroll affiliate program (i giving money not from others like YPC or Pokerstrategy)...

But with all of yours experience what are the thoughts about giving free bankroll?

What are the obstacles to overthrow? Frauds? Get Traffic? Credibility?


Thx!

[ak]

Hi everyone, im new here, and im thinking on starting a free bankroll affiliate program (i giving money not from others like YPC or Pokerstrategy)...

But with all of yours experience what are the thoughts about giving free bankroll?

What are the obstacles to overthrow? Frauds? Get Traffic? Credibility?


Thx!

Avoid using poker strategy in your domain unless you enjoy fighting cease and desist letters.

[Catfish]

Don't waste your time with free bankroll marketing. Been there, done that and wasted more than one year trying to make money with it. It only works if you do it at a very large scale (meaning at least 1000+ players) and if you have a way of keeping players loyal (which is extremely difficult).

Player value will be extremely low, you will see affiliate programs not paying you your CPA due to low player value etc. If you go for MGR, you will probably never make a profit

Your time is better invested in doing what basically everyone here had to do at some point:
Find a niche
Learn SEO
Write content
Build links

(all of which, btw, you will have to do anyway, because even if you give away money for free, you still need to drive traffic to your website. And believe me, it is NOT easy to rank for terms like "free poker bankroll".)

[stillshadow]

You're about 6 years too late.

[Catfish]

You're about 6 years too late.

Yes, that too...

[MilkFish]

Don't waste your time with free bankroll marketing. Been there, done that and wasted more than one year trying to make money with it. It only works if you do it at a very large scale (meaning at least 1000+ players) and if you have a way of keeping players loyal (which is extremely difficult).

Player value will be extremely low, you will see affiliate programs not paying you your CPA due to low player value etc. If you go for MGR, you will probably never make a profit

Your time is better invested in doing what basically everyone here had to do at some point:
Find a niche
Learn SEO
Write content
Build links

(all of which, btw, you will have to do anyway, because even if you give away money for free, you still need to drive traffic to your website. And believe me, it is NOT easy to rank for terms like "free poker bankroll".)

Good post imo.

I think it would be very hard to try and start with free bankrolls for your first site with no existing player base to market to. Free bankrolls are already pretty well covered so as catfish said, your time would probably be much better spent on something else.

[legolasma]

But if i had an nice network with players, and gave it at least to make an money at first, them try to reinvest all on another program?

Or it can be acused of fraud traffic?

Like 500 players i can bring with free bankroll.

ps: sry for my english!

[Prop]

You'll be far better off affiliating the existing programs than doing this on your own. The challenges are massive. If the players are coming from Brazil you're going to have even more challenges - as the traffic often gets accused of fraud and the sites don't pay the commission. If you do decide to try it, then make sure the poker sites you're affiliating are clear what you're offering, you stay in close communication with them and all deals are agreed upon and open. Starting small and trying it out is best as this is a high risk business model. I do know a few people who make a few hundred dollars per month doing not much at all, while affiliating the free bankroll sites via their blogs they do for entertainment purposes - so obviously there is some money in it. The companies doing this however have 8 figures a month worth of people raking under them (most not via free bankrolls) and this is a small percentage of their overall business. Doing this as a start up is tough and most lose attempting it get their affiliate accounts cancelled and deal with non affiliate payments or slow pays on a regular basis. If can be done - yes there are ways to profit from it.

[Lutz]

Your biggest concerns are going to be fraud and player value. Fraud obviously also harms the player value.
It will only work if you manage to keep fraud under control - i.e. by only offering it to people you already have in your database.
The latter could also help you target the offer to those players you know will either be grinding the micros profitably OR follow the free bankroll up with their own deposit. Because that's the two ways it can work:
(a) players depositing.
(b) players beating the micro limits on their free bankroll.

(b) is hard without the right target group, and ultimately you will also need enough players of type (a) in your mix.

Of course it's an option to do it through other offers such as us; I think overall we have a pretty neat offer for our affiliates:
Invite Friends: Why refer people?

Even if you don't consider affiliating with us, you should study our model. As far as I know, we're the only free bankroll site that really works sustainably across many geographies, including Brazil (as I agree to pokerprop that Brazil is not the easiest country for that model).


p.s. @pokerprop: the vast majority of our today's rake is generated by initial free bankroll players - so what you say about free bankrolls being just a small part of a business at least would not hold true for us.

[Catfish]

the vast majority of our today's rake is generated by initial free bankroll players - so what you say about free bankrolls being just a small part of a business at least would not hold true for us.

That's probably correct, but isn't the main part of your business trying to bully affiliates into giving up their domains?