Direct linking isn’t used often in online poker affiliate marketing, but in certain situations, it may be the perfect way to make more money online. Maybe you want to try out Internet poker affiliate marketing before you actually buy a domain name and set up your own website. Or maybe you already have an online poker site but want to set up some satellite revenue streams to try to drive some additional online poker revenue.

Although it’s only advisable for special circumstances, such as those I’ve listed above, it is indeed possible to make money as an online poker affiliate marketer without actually having your own online poker website. How can this be done?

Well, it won’t work for Google AdWords, which does leave out a huge online traffic driver. But with MSN adCenter and Yahoo Search Marketing, you can actually create ads that direct links back to sites that you don’t own. So, in essence, you can buy ads and get into the affiliate marketing game, or try to expand your existing affiliate marketing operations, without setting up a website.

This is called direct linking. Using this technique, you can join online poker affiliate programs and create ads for their sites, then send the click-throughs for your ads directly to their sites without creating an online poker website or portal of your own. When you get conversions, you still get the commissions.

“It eliminates the time, effort, and costs of building and maintaining web pages. The only time you’ll have to pay is when someone clicks on your ad,” Writes Allen Moon at Entrepreneur.com. “It allows you to do affiliate marketing without cluttering up your own site with links that might send potential customers away. You can keep your site clean and focused on its job of selling your product, but still make commissions off other people’s products.

“It eliminates an extra click for users,” Moon adds. “One click less for them means more commissions for you.” Moon also offers some more advice on the possibilities, and the restrictions, of direct linking. Read his article on affiliate marketing via direct linking here.

But be aware: Some in the online marketing industry frown on the practice of direct linking. That doesn’t necessarily make it wrong, but some do find it to be a nuisance, a way of “cheating”. Whether or not you agree with that is a matter of perspective, of course; still, with this reputation, it’s best to approach direct linking cautiously and use it only as an online poker affiliate marketing tool if you know exactly what you’re doing.

How to do that? For starters, create your own ad copy; don’t just copy the text from the site you’re linking to. (This happens a lot in direct linking, and it’s a prime reason why many in the Internet business world consider direct linking to be so disreputable.)

Another way to approach direct linking from a positive angle is to try to advertise the online poker website in niche keywords, rather than competing directly with the site itself. For one, most online poker rooms have pretty strong SEO performance as it is, so competing directly with them on their home turf is going to be tough. Secondly, a lot of companies get annoyed at direct linking affiliates who compete with them and therefore drive up their cost-per-click (which happens most often when a direct linker uses the same ad copy as the poker site he or she is promoting).

More negative aspects of direct linking that you should understand before using this affiliate marketing tool can be found here, at Search Engine Land.

So take care and approach direct linking responsibly, respectfully and creatively — and it can be a powerful revenue driver, either a great way to introduce yourself to the world of online poker affiliate marketing or an ideal chance to raise the stakes on your current Internet poker affiliate marketing game.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 4th, 2010 at 8:04 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.