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!

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.

One of the things I struggle with as an affiliate is staying organized because I don’t just have a work computer in an office. I have a desktop computer, laptop and iphone that at times become my work computer depending on where I am. This means that I have website files spread across my computers and makes being organized almost impossible along with not having files when I need them constantly being an issue.

This is where Dropbox makes life easier, it is a “cloud” hosting service that allows you to store all of your files in a directory that all your computers have access too. Each computer will store a local copy of your  files and if you change or add a file on one of them each of the computers you have using the service will be automatically updated. So if I take my laptop on a trip and work on a website and end up changing some files as well as adding others when I get back my desktop will have all the changes automatically.

Dropbox also allows you to have access to your files when you aren’t on your computer with access on your iPhone. The App was released yesterday and is one of the better apps I have and is free! You can also access your files on a computer that doesn’t have dropbox installed by logging onto the website where your files will also be stored.

Dropbox is also great for backing up important files. I am always paranoid about a hard drive failing so I currently use raid (two hard drives linked that are exact copies of each other) along with an external hard drive that I back up to every now and then (not enough…usually every couple of month). I have been looking for a better solution that is off-site and something I don’t have to think about, with dropbox being automatic and off-site it solves the issues.

Dropbox works with box Mac’s and PC’s which is nice since I use both. So do you need more convincing? Well, dropbox is free for your first 2gb’s. After that they have really reasonable pricing starting at $6.99 for 20gb, $9.99 for 50gb and $19.99 for 100gb.

Dropbox also has other features including being able to share files but I haven’t used it yet but the option is there and no doubt will end up being useful.

I wish this was my product because I can see myself not being able to function properly without it and I have told a couple other people about the service and it basically sells itself once people realize what it does.

Oh also if that’s not enough, they have a viral referral program that allows people to give out their referral link: Dropbox Sign-up and every person you refer gets an extra 250mb of storage along with the person that sent them.