Providing Value as an Internet Marketer

The article below was provided by Michael Wittmeyer, a longtime Internet marketer and co-founder of JMBullion.

In 2012 and beyond, I think the most important task an Internet marketer can focus on is providing value to both your visitors and your partners. This article is going to discuss certain affiliate strategies that have worked well in the past, but are in danger of going “extinct”, as well as how you can ensure you are always providing value to your partners, and thus putting yourself in a position of power.

Stop Leeching

A prime example of Internet marketers who might be doing well now, but aren’t really providing any value, are affiliates who leech off the brand names of the programs they promote.

The most prevalent example of this is affiliates who target key phrases like “XYZ Poker Download” or “XYZ Poker Bonus Code”. Key phrases like these are extremely attractive, as they have pretty good search volume and convert like crazy, but I don’t really think they are worth pursuing anymore.

My reasoning for this stems from two observations:

1. Affiliate programs are much less likely to bump your commission rate or provide you with special promotions if all you are doing is referring them players they would have gotten anyways.

Affiliates may argue, “Well, I am re-assuring them of the poker room’s legitimacy as well as pushing a bonus that will encourage them to deposit.” Regardless if this is true or not, the affiliate programs see these commissions as wasted money, as the player was already in the process of signing up or was ready to download the software.

2. By investing time and money into SEO for brand-specific key phrases, you are putting yourself into the position of least power. If the poker room you are promoting realizes that they are paying you for players they would have gotten anyway, and decides to cut your CPA or shut down your affiliate account, what can you do? It’s not like you are going to have much success pushing Poker Room B when your traffic is coming from terms like “Poker Room A Download”.

Also, the above neglects the fact that by targeting “Poker Room XYZ” key phrases you are almost always breaking the affiliate program’s terms and conditions, and if you are doing it using the poker room’s name in your domain name, you are playing with an even hotter fire and risk immediate closure of your affiliate account.

Although many affiliates (including myself) are certainly making good money ranking for poker room brand phrases, I don’t think this will be a viable option in the future, so this year I am focusing all my effort on providing value to my partners.

How to Provide Value and be in a Position of Power

The best way to ensure you are providing value to your partner is to take a step back and look at it from your partner’s point of view – do they really need you, or are you just another affiliate?

Affiliate programs are in place to bring new traffic streams to the brand – not to pay affiliates for leeching onto existing traffic streams.

One example of a “new traffic stream” would be a major content provider like PocketFives or TwoPlusTwo that can drive a lot of poker players who have never heard of Poker Room XYZ to their website.

Another example might be a smaller SEO-driven affiliate site that ranks for general key phrases like “best poker sites” or “where to play poker online”. This affiliate would be bringing fresh poker players to the poker room’s website – players that would have never heard of the poker room without the affiliate’s efforts.

These are the sort of websites and affiliates in which poker rooms are interested, as their affiliate dollars are going towards new players and new exposure, not to affiliates driving players the room would have gotten anyways.

Not only will affiliate programs pay you more for these sorts of traffic streams, but you will also be in a position of power. If Poker Room A decides they don’t want to pay you a $200 CPA, you can simply swap out Poker Room A for a different poker room that will pay you what you want. Since your traffic is general, as opposed to brand specific, you can plug in whatever poker rooms you’d like (or whoever pays you the most).

Moving Forward

Although a lot of what I’ve discussed in this article has been brought up elsewhere on the Internet, I feel there are still a lot of affiliates blinded by the cash they’re currently raking in from brand-related key phrases.

Even if you are doing well now, I’d start putting my effort into other key phrases and other traffic sources, because at some point the affiliate programs are going to “wake up” and realize how much money they are wasting by paying big CPAs for players that were already in the process of signing up naturally at their poker room.

(^^This is already happening too – every other month or so there is a new post on PAL about affiliate programs cutting commissions or closing accounts strictly due to what has been discussed in this article.)

By putting all (or at least some) of your effort this year into building new traffic sources that aren’t attached to any particular brands, you can ensure you are in a position of power regardless of what the future brings.

Hiring Writers the Right Way

This is a guest post from my good friend John who runs a site dedicated to motocross gear. It’s about his recent attempts to hire freelance writers.

As an internet marketer, one of the most important parts of growing your business is hiring out work. For affiliates, the most common task that is outsourced is writing. This was something that was very easy for me to take on, since I am a very lazy person by default. When I was focusing on OnlinePoker.org as part of poker affiliate business, hiring writers was as easy as heading over to PAL and finding a writer on the forum. Through my contacts I could ask around and find a great writer to help me with different projects. But as I worked to jump into other industries, it became harder and harder to find good writers that wouldn’t flake on me.

A friend of mine said I should try out the jobs.problogger.net job board, and he said that he had posted jobs with great success. To make a long story short, I soon had an inbox full of resumes and I was overwhelmed. I spent hours sifting through them, and I spent days trying to communicate with the prospects. In the end, I had about three that I thought would work out. They all flaked on me within a week.

What Went Wrong?

The truth is you can’t help it if someone decides to quit. We work on the internet via email and IM, and people vanishing is nothing new. The best thing you can do is not waste hours and days of your time hunting these writers down. Here are a few tips I’ve found help with the writer screening process.

#1 Include as much information in your job posting as you can. This will save you a ton of time later. Be sure to include pay, subject matter, expected time frame, word counts, payment options, and anything else you can think that someone may ask you in a follow up email.

#2 Have them follow specific instructions when submitting their resume. In a recent job post I did, I asked them to place a specific phrase in the email subject. I also asked them to answer a few questions that would help me determine if they knew anything at all about the topic.

#3 Use an email filter to only pull the emails that contain the proper subject line. Discard all the rest. If they didn’t take the time to read your listing thoroughly, chances are they are going to burn you later. Also, at this point anyone who screwed up the questions is out as well. No sense in wasting time on writers who aren’t knowledgeable on your topic. Obviously you will want to discard any with typos, poor grammar, and spelling mistakes. No excuses for that.

Conclusion

With these simple steps you should be left with a handful of qualified leads to then interview further. I’ve found it best to just go ahead and send them a few topics to get started on and see which ones come through. Just be sure not to send 20 topics to someone. They could take forever and have those topics tied up while they string you along with their excuses. Good luck!

New Venture: BoardShorts.com

The online gaming industry has taken quite a few hard hits since Black Friday. So, I think now’s a good time to start looking to diversify. I probably should have done it sooner but it’s hard to walk away from an industry that I have spent more than 5 years working in.

I’ve been doing a lot of keyword research looking for another industry to devote my time. I looked for an industry where items could be purchased online and if it needed to be shipped, it could very easily. I also wanted it to be something that I was familiar with myself.

So, that’s how I ended up buying Boardshorts.com.

I don’t know how interesting the boardshorts market is, but I know that I wear O’Neill boardshorts so at least I am a comsumer. Also, the action sports market is always growing and boardshorts are sold for both men and women. According to a boardshorts wikipedia article, they are even a popular choice for MMA fighters.

The business model for the site hasn’t been determined yet. I could try selling boardshorts myself, which would mean keeping an inventory, shipping..etc. I think that it would be a nice change to have my own customers and be able to control my company more than I can as an affiliate. Obviously, the downsides are that it can be very time consuming and I’d need a lot of upfront capital.

A good option would be for me to be an affiliate for sites selling boardshorts. I live in California so with the new sales tax laws I wouldn’t be able to promote Zappos which would be my first choice. Although after doing some research, I could sell them through PacSun and a couple other clothing sites that offer affiliate programs.

I could also do a combination of those and team up with a larger online retailer and sell their inventory through my site. This could be a good option depending on the deal I could get.

There are many things to decide on the site and as you can see there isn’t much content on the site right now. The Boardshorts logo has been created and a couple articles about the different surf brands that sell boardshorts. I have a temporary design up but know that I need to decide how I’m going to monetize before I create a permanent design. At this point, I’m still working on my gaming sites but I allocate a couple of hours every week on the site to begin to diversify.

Toronto UFC 129 Bodog Trip Report

Recently I went to UFC 129 in Toronto and had an epic weekend thanks to Riyaz and Bodog. As an affiliate, if you are ever asked to go to a Bodog event it should be an easy decision. Bodog does not disappoint.

Ritz Carlton Hotel in Toronto

We stayed in the ultra-classy Ritz Carlton that opened 2 months ago in Toronto.  They upgraded our rooms to a corner suite with 2 bathrooms (one had a tv in the mirror), a living room and a bedroom. We also had free room service breakfast, which were some of the best breakfasts I have ever had. The location was in the middle of downtown Toronto and they had an awesome indoor pool and hot tub…basically you couldn’t ask for more from a hotel.

On Thursday I met up with Riyaz and we went out with a couple other affiliates Graham, John, Nick and a couple of their buddies. They showed us some cool bars including one with $3 dollar drinks before 12.  So at 11:59  someone ended up ordering about 10 of them and we had a mountain of drinks for the rest of the night.

On Friday night they had welcome drinks  & food at the Ritz Carlton hotel lounge. They gave us a duffel bag with bodog gear including a jacket, hockey jersey and a hat. It was a good time but everyone was pretty tired from the night before so we took it pretty easy.

On Saturday we had a limo ride to the UFC Fan Expo. They had a lot of booths with fighters signing gear although to get a signature you had to wait in crazy lines. The line for Silva was probably about 2 hours long…and he was only signing for an hour so don’t know how that would worked out. Tess and I ended up staying for about an hour and we left and walked around Toronto before the fight which was about 5 hours later.

View from the Bodog Suite @ UFC 129

Bodog had their own suite at Roger’s Stadium where UFC 129 was held. They had free food and a bartender who served complementary drinks. It was an awesome time and it seemed like every Canadian had GSP penciled in as the winner which he did. However, the fight before between José Aldo vs. Mark Hominick was my favorite fight. Aldo was really owning Hominick (from Canada as well)  for 4 rounds and then in the 5th round Hominick turned the match on it’s head and started to dominate. It was too late for him to win the fight but the crowd was going nuts as Hominick had a huge swelled up hematoma on his forehead after being hit by Aldo but that didn’t stop him from wailing on Aldo for a round. Riyaz mentioned that it wasn’t fair at that point because it was 2 vs. 1.

CN Tower

The trip was awesome. I had a great time and will definitely visit Toronto again. Thanks to Riyaz who in my opinion is one of the best affiliate managers in the industry. Also thanks to Oren & Jessica from Bodog who helped us through the trip.

If you aren’t already promoting bodog then definitely check them out the bodog affiliate program.

Complete Guide to Newsletter Marketing for Affiliates

This article was written by Michael Wittmeyer – a longtime poker affiliate and www.BusinessCards.org webmaster.

Newsletters are something that every poker affiliate either currently uses or wants to implement in the near future. The barrier to entry for most affiliates is the fact that newsletter marketing can be a little complicated until you get the hang of how to run things. This article is going to explain how to set up a newsletter marketing campaign, specifically for poker affiliates.

NOTE – This article focuses on using AWeber’s newsletter service, but the steps should apply to any newsletter service if you choose a different provider.

Step #1 – Choosing a Newsletter Service

Your first step is to choose a newsletter service. There are several good newsletter services out there, including AWeber, ConstantContact, FeedBurner, IContact, etc, but almost all affiliates prefer AWeber for their simple interface and gambling-friendly stance.

AWeber costs $194/year, and there are monthly charges starting at $10/month once your newsletter reaches 500+ subscribers. That may seem a little steep, but usually just one email blast will pay back the entire year’s service costs. You can get started by signing up at AWeber.com.

Step #2 – Set up an Autoresponder

Once you sign up for AWeber, your next step is to create a list. AWeber guides you through the initial list creation process, which makes it easy to get going. Once you have your first list created, Step #2 is to write your first autoresponder email.

An autoresponder email is the first message that new subscribers receive as soon as they sign up to your newsletter. Your first message should be non-promotional, should welcome subscribers to the list, explain what sort of messages they should expect, and what they shouldn’t expect (“we won’t email you more than once a week, we won’t stuff products down your throat, etc”). Here is a good example:

Hello First Name (use AWeber’s personalization features to add the subscriber’s first name here),

Thank you for joining the MyPokerSite.com Newsletter! We aim to provide you with useful poker tips, up to date poker news, valuable promotions, and the occasional product recommendation. You can expect to hear from us once or twice a month, and you don’t need to worry about spam as we keep your email address 100% secure.

Talk soon!

Mike from MyPokerSite.com

Basically, at this point all you have to do is not mess things up by stuffing a promotion down their throat immediately.

Step #3 – Choose what to Promote (and Schedule your Emails)

Once you have your first autoresponder ready to roll, your next step is to decide what you are going to promote. There are basically three options for newsletter monetization:

1. Promote online poker rooms.
2. Promote digital info products.
3. Promote poker membership sites.

The first option seems like a no brainer, but really, promoting online poker rooms to an online poker newsletter doesn’t work that great. Almost all of your subscribers will already have online poker accounts and probably won’t be interested in switching sites for a sign up bonus or a freeroll. I recommend staying away from this unless you have a poker league going or some other real reason for them to switch sites.

The second option of promoting digital poker products has definitely worked well in my experiences. To find good products to promote, go to Clickbank.com and search “poker” in the marketplace. Look for products with high Gravity, good sales pages, and good affiliate commissions. Once you find promising products, get in touch with the authors to see if they have any promotional emails ready to roll (this saves you the time of writing a custom email for each product).

The third option of promoting poker membership/training sites is another proven option. Sites like PokerTableRatings, BlueFirePoker, and CardRunners all offer affiliate programs which pay either flat rate CPAs on each paid sign-up, or MGR-like ongoing commissions based on how long the player stays signed up.

Since these products provide ongoing value to players, I usually like to take the revenue share option, as most players will hang around for a while. Again, the affiliate programs for each training/statistic site should be able to provide you with a prewritten promotional email to send to your list.

Once you have found a couple offers worth promoting, you should set up your autoresponder accordingly. Some webmasters like to just do occasional blasts to their email list instead of setting up an autoresponder schedule, but I find that if I don’t set up the autoresponder, I rarely end up emailing out on my own (and you can always do timely blasts in addition to the autoresponder).

A good schedule for your autoresponder might be to have the initial welcome email go out immediately, followed by a good poker strategy article three days later to build up a little trust (you can just send out an article from your current site, as most subscribers probably won’t have seen the article yet), followed by the first promotional email a week later, followed by another strategy or news article a week later, followed by the second promotional email a week later.

By setting up the autoresponder, you ensure that each subscriber sees at least two promotional emails within a month of joining, as opposed to letting them sit stale for 6-12 months before you get around to sending an email blast out.

Step #4 – Collect Emails

Now that your autoresponder and list are set up, your fourth step is to start collecting emails. AWeber provides an extremely easy to use form generator, which allows you to customize the opt-in form to match your website’s theme. I would recommend adding the form to your sidebar or header across your website – somewhere that gets a lot of exposure.

Another way to collect emails is by having a pop-up across your site that promotes your newsletter. I used to do this using PopUp Domination, which was a $47 script that could easily be added to WordPress as a plugin or to a static site as a small bit of code. Once I had PopUp Domination dialed in, I saw a significant increase in sign-ups to my newsletter versus the standard form in the sidebar method.

My final tip for increasing sign-ups is a bit of a basic one, but make sure to give your visitors a reason to sign up! By offering a free white paper (“Learn the 10 Strategies that Poker Professionals Use to Take Your Money!”), a free product (“7-Day Free trial for XYZPokerProduct.com”), or whatever, you can drastically increase your sign-ups versus a standard “Join our Newsletter Today!” message.

If you do offer a free white paper or something of that sort (it could even be an existing article from your current website), just add the link to the white paper in the first autoresponder you set up, so when people sign up you are completely hands off.

Step #5 – Test

Now that everything is live and functional, your next step is to test the data as it comes in. Try out different opt-in forms, different colors, different headlines, different subject lines, different ways of linking, etc to figure out how to improve your conversion rates. If you have a high-traffic website this is even easier, as you can get enough data in a day or two to make accurate conclusions. If you don’t have a ton of traffic this will take a little longer, but is still well worth it.

I hope the information above was useful. As long as you don’t run into any problems, you should be able to set up an entire newsletter and autoresponder series in a couple hours, which should bring you additional money each and every month going forward. Good luck!

My Next Project: OnlineBlackjack.com

For the past two years, I have been purchasing exact match keyword domains. I hadn’t found one that I felt was a really premium domain and would be worth while to create an authority site. That changed last week when I bought OnlineBlackjack.com.

The deal went very quickly and within 27 hours we had negotiated a price, I sent payment and then I had the domain in my account.

Currently, my focus for Online Blackjack is to get great content. I have a couple articles up and plan to get a lot more content shortly. The website is powered by wordpress and I currently have an ordinary template on the site but I will likely redesign after I have more content on the site.

I had recently developed a free blackjack game for another one of my blackjack sites but now will use it for OnlineBlackjack.com. One cool thing about the game is that it is flash free so therefore it will work on mobile devices (iphone, android, ipad) as well as any browser.

Update on Best Online Poker Sites

It has been exactly a month since my last post on changing the url from PokerSplendor.com to BestOnlinePokerSites.com.

A day after my last post, both sites disappeared from the index. Best Online Poker Sites then showed up a day later (poker splendor was taken out of the index) but was on the second page for “poker sites” along with most of the other long tail keywords. After a  few days the sites position improved but didn’t have the exact same rankings as before but was holding on to the 10 spot on the first page for “poker sites”.

It stayed at the 10 position for a couple weeks until Friday (6/18/2010) which was the first time I think google put the site back into it’s original position at 7.

Overall the traffic hasn’t changed much from before and after the switch. A lot of the long tail keywords followed the same path as the poker sites keyword. I would definitely forward another site if I thought I had a much better domain for a site. It was a bit of a hassle to email linking sites about my url changing but it didn’t take long.

Interesting to note that Bing still shows Poker Splendor while Yahoo has updated it’s index and shows BOPS.  To be fair, I used google webmasters to let google know of the site being redirected (along with the htaccess 301) while with bing I didn’t use their webmaster center.

PokerSplendor.com is now BestOnlinePokerSites.com

I decided recently that I was going to move Poker Splendor to a new domain. When I created Poker Splendor I wanted to make it a bit more interesting then just another poker portal. I added a couple eye-catching pictures and made a couple sections that were different from the norm including the Las Vegas section.

Though, recently I decided that I liked the site but would rather have a domain that had keywords that I am targeting. So I purchased the domain Best Online Poker Sites and on Monday (5/17) switched the site to it via 301 redirects.

Google has already cached the new site and has 40 pages in the index. It also still has the Poker Splendor cache so I am still getting the same amount of traffic to the site. I have a feeling over the next couple days the Poker Splendor cache will disappear and hopefully my new domain will take it’s place. Though, I have heard that for a bit I may lose some of my serp positions as google makes the switch.

I will make another post in about a month with an update to how the 301 redirect went and if my traffic levels and serp positions changed.

Planning a Site Launch

Guest post written by Mike Wittmeyer. A successful online gambling affiliate who has created many successful sites.

This post is going to tackle the act of planning out and launching a new affiliate website. Some affiliates dive in immediately without any thought towards site structure, link-building, or exit strategy. If you use the tips in this post when you launch your site you will make things much easier for yourself down the road.

Step #1 – Plan Your Site Structure

Although your site may evolve or veer from the original plan down the road, it’s a very good idea to map out a site structure when you start out. This will help you do a few things:

* Plan a well balanced, hierarchical site structure. If you dive in with no plan for hub pages or article organization you might end up with certain directories with only two pages while other directories have 100+ pages. Having a well balanced, hierarchical site structure will help you spread PR more effectively.
* Stimulate ideas for content. When you sit down for an hour or two and do nothing but think of topics for pages on your site, you will be able to get the creative juices flowing and build a massive list of pages.

By the way, when I say, “site structure,” I mean the organization of folders and pages that will go on your website. I usually use a pencil and paper for this, but if your site is going to be really big you may want to use a Word document. Here is a screenshot of how a site structure plan could look:

The site structure above is obviously very basic as it is only one folder deep and there are only 29 pages listed, but you can use the same format to organize 100 page, 200 page, or even 500 page websites. If you plan on doing more than 100 pages I recommend you use Word for your final product, because things will get too cramped on one piece of paper.

Step #2 – Plan Your Link Building

Once you have mapped out your basic site structure, your next step should be to make a list of potential link partners or one-way link sources. Nowadays I don’t bother writing these down because I know plenty of poker/casino people I can link with, but if you are operating in a new niche (not gambling) or are new to gambling you might want to take a look around to make sure you will be able to build links successfully.

I recommend looking through your competitors back links to see who’s linking to them. If there are lots of one-way links from off topic sites, you can assume those are purchased links that you can buy as well (if you so choose). Also, if you see a lot of reciprocal back links from top poker sites, that’s good news, as you can assume that you will be able to trade links with those sites as well.

By making a list of potential link sources you will be able to confirm that there is a link building opportunity in the market before you put all the effort into building your site.

Step #3 – Think of an Exit Strategy

This step isn’t as big of a deal as the first two steps because you can figure it out later if you need to, but you should always have an “exit strategy” in mind for your project. This doesn’t mean you should be planning to sell the site or anything like that, but you should have some idea of how you can take yourself out of the day-to-day operations. In the future you will want to launch new sites which will be much easier if you aren’t working four hours a day on the old sites.

I recommend finding someone to write daily or weekly news posts on the site with in content links leading to other sections of the site. This can be set up easily with WordPress and an auto-linking plug-in, so your writer doesn’t even have to think about doing it. That will ensure you have a stream of fresh content without taking any time out of your day.

Holidays and January Trips

Hope everyone had a good holiday.

I want to thank Bodog for sending me 3 bottles of wine & CasinoCoins for sending me a Bose portable iPod speaker. 2009 was the first year that I received holiday presents from programs and they will likely get increased exposure because of it. Though in 2008, Aced.com paid for a Las Vegas trip…which was a sick trip and is by far the best thing I have received from an affiliate company.

January Trips

January is a busy month, it started with celebrating New Years in Tahoe. Then January 15-18th I will be in Las Vegas at an annual MLK trip with friends.  On January 25th I will be leaving for Europe and attending the London Affiliate Conference as well as doing some traveling in Europe after the conference. On the flight back from Europe I will be stopping at Washington DC and will spend 3 days there and will be back in Santa Cruz (my home town) on the 7th of Feb.