Strange Question: How to get affiliates?

[Grinderschool]

So our site is a bit unique and we're just starting to go after the poker affiliate side after outsourcing it for several years. I am able to use the poker videos as an asset to increase conversions on the affiliate side which I'm thinking in time will provide more income than a subscription based service (at least given our rates and the current state of the poker training market).

But on that end I am unsure on how to get affiliates to promote the training side of our business? I checked out clickbank and felt a little scuzzy while checking it our; I like the idea but there has got to be a better way. We have a referral system set up that, although a bit archaic, works and we send out a small amount of affiliate payments each month. Most if not all of the referrals are poker training review sites that came to us organically.

I think it goes without saying that if I can get sites to link to us for our training then I'll get traffic for the rakeback side too.

Perhaps an idea is in exchange for blog posts provide affiliate links rather than pay cash? I'm very interested to hear what you guys think and I'm stoked I finally have an avenue for my many affiliate and marketing questions.

[makeitso]

Maybe I'm misunderstanding exactly what you are looking for, but you want affiliates to send you training clients and then you can convert them as a regular poker affiliate would, right? Which is a great idea, but as an affiliate, that's exactly the reason I don't want to send people to training sites.

[parttimepoker]

Getting people to promote training sites can be pretty tough because of the reluctance described by makeitso above. It's a totally rational reluctance and there's no much you can do to overcome it.

I'd start by finding all the sites I could that offered training site reviews and contacting them, as they will be more likely to be an affiliate. You could also offer affiliates a very generous cut of whatever rakeback / CPA / whatever other revenue their signups generate (in addition to whatever you pay for the training referral).

Offering your members free months - and a lot of them - can be a more effective way to get referrals, as current customers are just going to be so much more effective than a link or banner on some site.

...

If you're willing to spend money to acquire players through affiliates (which is essentially what having an affiliate program means, although it doesn't require an initial outlay), you might want to consider spending that money on some other acquisition channel like CPC or search engine optimization. You'll have to spend some of the money upfront, but it might ultimately be a much lower cost per subscription than offering the pound of gold you're going to have to hand over to just about any poker affiliate to advertise your site.

[Grinderschool]

but you want affiliates to send you training clients and then you can convert them as a regular poker affiliate would, right?

Yes to both questions but its not that cut and dry. We want this side of the site to really build traffic and continue to self-sustain itself and whatever costs we have are fixed. The poker affiliate side right now is a side income and side project with the main goal to build training memberships. Like parttimepoker said your reaction is understandable and we have turned down some proposals in the past to possible competitors too. Developing a system where its win/win for everyone is ideal but obviously the hardest.

I'd start by finding all the sites I could that offered training site reviews and contacting them.

Yep I'm in agreement here. We're on about 7 of the top 10 training site review pages and have contacted the rest of them; a zero response rate so far. As I'm sure you are aware its a big hassle just to get the review updated once a year even when you provide pretty much all the info needed (how sick would it be to just have the poker training site update their own review??).

Offering your members free months - and a lot of them - can be a more effective way to get referrals, as current customers are just going to be so much more effective than a link or banner on some site.

We've done different options with this and for some reason word of mouth is extremely difficult. We first did the 1 free month when you refer a friend and right now we're doing $10 amazon gift cards when they refer anyone. I don't know if its because its hard to find or not advertised right but we get 0 takers on this too. I'm not sure how many free months per 1 subscription referral we could possibly do and how much of an impact there would be. But yeah we're definitely down to giving away free membership in exchange for additional revenue (which is essentially what we do on the poker affiliate side).

The gift cards thing led us to a possibility of doing CPA of $10/member; we're considering doubling our affiliate % and we're considering a % of subscription fee for CPA too.

I'd be willing to have a "sub affiliate" system set up where the poker affiliate gets 20% of all revenue brought in from the subscriber which includes if he's tracked under us from our poker site. Heck if it means additional revenue I'd be down for many options.

Your CPC idea is a unique one and have never thought about that. Do you have any links that I could look at to see if this is a better option? We plan on doing the SEO work ourselves but its the task that gets pushed aside the most; all money that we've spent in the past has gone to waste when trying to hire it done by an outside firm.

[parttimepoker]

With CPC you'd pretty much have to do the keyword research yourself and then try a handful + see which convert. Be sure to establish a way to at least loosely track conversions so you can accurately establish an ROI for these efforts.

AdWords Beginner's Guide - AdWords Help

You'll need some kind of budget, but not as much as a typical CPC because it's not a hyper-competitive niche.

With SEO you're probably best off hiring it out to someone who is also a poker affiliate but in a non-competitive niche. If you keep putting it off, chances are you're going to keep putting it off. Avoid SEO 'firms' and work with people you know.

[Grinderschool]

I was under the impression that Google/Yahoo/MSN/Facebook all had a non-gambling outlook for ads and would refuse to sell them to US-based companies seeking to advertise gambling products. If that is not the case any more (I haven't checked in at least a year) then for sure i'd be interested in that.

[parttimepoker]

I see similar ads in google all the time, unsure of what loophole they're squeezing through.

[ak]

I see similar ads in google all the time, unsure of what loophole they're squeezing through.

Trial and error, redirects, etc etc

Very fruitful if you can get in, make sure the affiliate program is aware as most love the high conversion rate but some do not.

[breadroller]

Sounds like you may want to consider a program like Brian Clark's (aka CopyBlogger's) "Teaching Sells"

It works on the membership model, has specific instructions for how to leverage the concept with an affiliate approach (or a few other monetization models) and how you can incorporate joint ventures (along with an affiliate program of your own).

It's pricey and not even open right now but if you get on the waiting list, I think they send you promo material that you can actually start working with.

[Grinderschool]

Thanks for the link, probably a bit too pricey for us. We've done a lot of work with SEO the past 2 months and have redesigned a lot of our pages to make them more SEO and user friendly. That and with higher affiliate payments, a new affiliate back end on the way we're seeing additional traffic. Already up nearly 15% month to month so its definitely a step in the right direction.

I would still love to get in to a quality CPC but that will likely have to wait until 2012.