In the world of poker affiliatemarketing, there are several affiliates who do an extraordinary job of driving targeted traffic to their sites. Unfortunately, getting the traffic to your website is only half the battle. Remember, as a poker affiliate you don’t get paid on traffic. You get paid when your visitors click through to a poker site and deposit.
It would be great if you could just put up a website, add content and banners and then watch the sign-ups roll in. In the old days, this may have worked. Not anymore though. Think of your website as a virtual sales person. Your website needs to be captivating and give visitors a reason to actually click through from your links or banners. In other words, your virtual sales person has to close the deal.
It is very important that you have a comprehensive overview and understanding of your traffic. You should know what pages get visited the most, as well as what search terms each page is being found for. If you can arm yourself with as much information as possible about your traffic, converting that traffic to depositing players will be much easier.
If you are not using Google Webmaster Tools, you should be! The amount of information you can extract about your traffic with the analytics is amazing. Another helpful tool is CrazyEgg. This will give you a comprehensive overview with a heatmap of exactly where your traffic is going and clicking on your website.
Once you understand this information, you can start optimizing each of your pages content with calls to action that will give you the best chance of conversions. A call to action is simply a sentence, statement, or creative on your website that entices a customer to do something. The most popular call to action in online marketing is “Click Here Now”.
Amazingly in the poker affiliate market , we do not do as good of a job with effective calls to action as other internet industries. I can’t tell you how many times I have read an article or review on a poker site and never even saw a text link enticing me to click through to the actual site being reviewed.
An example of an optimized call to action would be as follows. Let’s say you have a page that ranks very well for the term “online seven card stud“. Of course your going to have content about seven card stud on this page, whether it be seven card stud rules, strategy, or news. Focus in however on what your traffic is looking for. Sure, your page might be about something to do with seven card stud, but your visitor is more than likely looking to play seven card stud online! Give them an obvious call to action somewhere on that page before they click the back button.
If it were me, I would have some sort of text on the top of the page that boldly says something to the effect of “The Best Seven Card Stud Poker Games On The Internet – Play Right Now By Clicking Here!”. I would then have a few more calls to action peppered throughout the content. And of course if your reader makes it all the way to the end of the article , I would close them with another strong call to action.
Although I’m sure your review or strategy article is great, often times this is not what your visitor is looking for, nor is the content itself going to put any money in your pocket. The key is getting that visitor to click off your page. Having strong calls to action can be difficult, but once mastered will greatly increase your conversions. After all, remember you are essentially trying to get your visitor to interrupt the task that delivered them to your website in the first place.
There are some great books and material out there on calls to action. By understanding your traffic on each page of your site, and then optimizing those pages with the proper calls to action, you will without a doubt see much higher conversion rates.
Another piece of advice I’d like to share is that you shouldn’t fixate too much on which banners to put on your site. Banners may look pretty to you, but over the years studies have shown that web surfers develop “banner blindness”. Web surfers have gotten so used to seeing advertisements and banners that they mentally don’t even look at anything that appears to be an advertisement anymore.
When building your pages and writing content, you will get much higher click through rates with text links than you will get with banners. The worst thing you can do is overload your site or page with too many banners.
There is one exception to this however that I will share. Traditional banners whether 468×60, 120×90, 728×90, etc. seldom convert well. One interesting conversion tool that has worked very well for me is the peel away ads. You can see a sample of this in the upper right corner of PokerAffiliateListings.com. The click through rates on these have been incredible across every poker affiliate site I have tried them on. I think the reason the CTR is so high is because the ad itself is non-intrusive and looks genuinely interesting to your visitors.
If you can place a strong call to action or something exclusive behind the peel away ad, you will not be disappointed.
Converting your traffic to real money players at online poker sites is not as easy as it may look or sound. However if you understand each of your pages traffic and attempt to “close” each visitor, you will certainly increase your chances of conversion. You should end every article, news story, or review with a strong targeted call to action.
