That much is fairly obvious, even to the beginners. The bigger question is, how can you leverage your poker affiliate site from the beginning to best make use of poker CPA? What poker affiliate programs offer the most money via poker CPA, and how can you effectively market those affiliate programs to start your new poker affiliate marketing website off with a bang?

That’s a common question among new affiliates, and it can be tricky even for veteran affiliates to get a handle on. We’ve recently explored the issue of online poker CPA vs Revenue Share here at the PAP Blog; but today, I want to more closely look at some important factors to consider when deciding if a poker affiliate program’s CPA is going to work for your Internet poker marketing plan in the beginning, and whether that plan should change as your site evolves.

Online poker CPA is a good affiliate marketing tool for new affiliates because it allows better freedom of choice. By that I mean, if you’re new, you’re probably going to want to experience with various poker affiliate programs in your first few months, and certainly in your first few years, to get a good idea of what kind of programs work best for you.

So, finding programs with a high online poker CPA is better for the short term. After all, spreading out your online poker commission with revenue share is best designed for a years-long affiliate marketing partnership. And that’s fine — in fact, you should be actively seeking affiliate partner programs with whom you can build those long relationships.

But at the beginning, CPA is more important. Since your earnings are more immediate, poker CPA is the perfect way for new affiliates to rake in those initial earnings that it takes to get a site started successfully. That’s money you can reinvest in your site, building it up even further.

Poker CPA is also more important for beginner poker affiliate marketers because gives you a good (though of course, not ironclad) an idea of how trustworthy your affiliate partners are. If, at the beginning, the Internet poker CPA deal you agree to is honored by your new poker business partners without any delays, problems, or “miscommunications”, you know you can trust them with a more drawn-out revenue share partnership down the road.

So what kind of poker CPAs can you expect in this industry? Though poker CPAs can reach as high as $200, they’re usually around $75-$100. And that figure is usually even negotiable, as the Poker Affiliate Bible points out here. For example, with the poker affiliate programs here at PAP, Big Bet Poker lists their poker CPA as “contact us” and Red Star Poker’s is listed as “negotiable”, meaning that these poker affiliate programs want to discuss a mutually advantageous figure based on your specific position as an online poker affiliate marketer.

Many other poker rooms don’t straightforwardly list their poker CPA, but rather state “upon request”. This is for a number of reasons: One, because these poker CPAs may be negotiable. Two, because they may be willing to offer poker CPAs on a sliding scale, meaning that what’s available for one affiliate may not be available to another, based on that affiliate’s marketing reach and SEO power.

(Is that fair? It’s hard to say that it isn’t. Since the whole point of online poker affiliate marketing is for these rooms to acquire new players, they can set their own prices for how much to reward affiliates who best accomplish that goal for them. It’s their market, after all.)

Of course, when your site passes from the beginner to the intermediate status, it may be time to re-evaluate these plans. If your poker affiliate program partnerships are longer-term, and your players tend to stick around with them for a while, then you may actually start to lose money with CPA, and it’s time to focus on more of a revenue share poker commission model. More on that next time.

But online poker blogging can be tricky. At the same time, it’s both easy — writing in your own natural voice about the online poker information you already know — and not quite as easy as it seems. It’s a competitive segment; so, although it may not, in theory, be that difficult for you to start an online poker blog and start communicating your online poker secrets, or whatever your topic of choice, it may be hard to get that blog noticed amongst the glut of online poker blogs already out there.

The biggest advantage of blogging for Internet poker affiliates is that it complements affiliate marketing perfectly. The best way to get visitors to click on your affiliate marketing ads is to write blog posts explaining the benefits of the poker rooms you’re advertising. (Remember, though, that U.S. law now states that you must disclose whether a program you’re blogging about is also one of your advertising partners. Read more about that here.)

So, a good strategy to get your online poker blog started is to select a handful of poker affiliate programs such as those at PAP and create blog content around them. Try to select a few that you’re already familiar with; for example, if you’ve played a lot of poker at Full Tilt Poker or Titan Poker, and you understand how those sites are set up and what players may like about them, then when you blog about these programs, you can come from a place of authority, and will be more likely to inspire readers to click on your ads.

But how to bring in the online poker readers, in such a crowded blogosphere? Like your regular site content, online poker blogging should incorporate the basics of poker SEO, as we’ve discussed here at the PAP Blog. Beyond SEO engineering, be sure to use poker linkbacks and other promotional techniques to get your poker blog out in front of the right people. Combined with good content, you can slowly build a strong audience this way, which will boost your online poker revenue.

“Link data in Google Webmaster Tools, Yahoo! Site Explorer and Microsoft’s Webmaster Portal is pretty static, they give you the pages a site has links on, and let you do all the analysis with other tools,” says Yoast, hitting the nail on the head. “That sucks if you want to do a quick analysis of a site, or want to get a quick overview of inbound anchor texts for a site.”

“The data classically used in search engine optimization (SEO) to benchmark sites and track performance is all but useless today,” adds SearchEngineLand. “Ranking reports, still a necessary evil in SEO reporting, have been unreliable (at best) for at least 3 years.”

It’s true: Often, you’ll want SEO information that isn’t on offer from Google (or Yahoo, or Microsoft), or that is offered, but with unsatisfying results. And this is basic stuff, info you need to know: You need data on how many unique domains link to each of your major pages and subdomains, as well as to your entire website. You also need an effective method of evaluating the SEO performance of your competitors to see if there’s room to be more competitive in their targeted keywords or marketing areas.

For beginners, here’s a quick list of other online marketing SEO resources that can fill in the gaps in your online poker SEO measurement and link analysis knowledge:

1. SEOMoz Linkscape offers a solid, though commercialized, tool  that lets you pretty easily analyze the quality of links (and potential links) to your online poker website. It also is effective at pointing out potential targets for specific link acquisition and evaluating your linkbait efforts and/or viral marketing campaigns (if you got ‘em).

2. Majestic SEO is another popular link analysis tool for measuring existing SEO and finding new link-building opportunities. Calling themselves “the planet’s most comprehensive backlinks provider,” MajesticSEO does offer an impressive number of SEO tools and does seem to truly understand what’s needed for effective link analysis. Big pro: Reports are easy to generate. Registration and trail is free; subscription rates apply later on.

3. If you use Firefox as your web browser, consider Mozilla’s own Firefox SEO Link Analysis tool. It doesn’t offer much more than Google — in fact it seems to exist primarily to enhance Google’s PageRank tool — but it does provide a solid, quick look at the basics of SEO analysis, in a pretty easy-to-use toolbar.

Know of any other SEO link analysis tools that are effective for Internet poker? Sound off in the comments section and let us know.

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.

The answer should be, of course, yes to both questions. And since we make no secrets at the PAP Blog of designing our content for Internet poker affiliate marketing beginners, the following is a basic take on getting started on Google AdWords is for those online poker affiliates who want to take their online poker affiliate marketing game to the next level, but as of yet haven’t invested the time or money to do so.

Google AdWords is the industry standard for advertising your website on the Internet — whether you’re in the online poker game or any other eCommerce situation, Google AdWords is the leading service in which to place ads for your site in front of motivated customers (the very people who are searching for your chosen online poker keywords) at a minimal expense.

The key advantage of Google AdWords is that it lets you advertise locally, nationally, and internationally — which is of course a big distinction in the online poker world, with its problematic legal settings that change dramatically across borders.

How does it work? As an advertiser, you specify the keywords and phrases you want to target, and when those terms are searched for, a special ad, that you’ve paid for, will show up in the search results. You also specify how much you’ll pay for each click on your ad, and that amount will decide how prominently your ad appears. In this respect, it’s easy to be outbid for basic terms like “Internet poker” — in other words, chances are that some competitors are laying down big money for pay-per-clicks (PPC) for those terms, so unless you’re similarly inclined to spend big, you’re not going to be competitive for those kinds of broad terms. Your best bet is to invest in more niche online poker keywords or phrases and target those at a more reasonable cost. Advice on selecting an online poker niche can be found here.

But the prominence of your ad isn’t based solely on how much you pay. It’s also based on the “quality score” of your ad. That is, the more click-through rates you’ve achieved over the run of your ad’s lifespan, the better you rank. Obviously, that means that it’ll take a bit of time, and more than just money, to get your Google AdWords ad ranked at the top of this list.

So how to get to the top fast? Get relevant. Take the PAP Blog’s advice on how to choose effective online poker keywords, and also how to build effective SEO practices, into close consideration. This advice also applies to Google AdWords.

These are just the basics, admittedly; more specific advice on Google AdWords is in the future here at the PAP Blog. In the meantime, if you have a story or effective campaign trick to share, sound off in the comments and let the community know what it takes to excel at the Internet poker Google AdWords game.

One of the best ways to effectively monitor online poker search trends is with the Google PageRank toolbar, which provides a page rank update directly to your Firefox or Internet Explorer browser, giving you a snapshot of a web page’s live SEO metrics. The Google PageRank toolbar gets updated fairly regularly, most recently in December 2009, so it’s pretty reliable and keeps up with Google’s constantly shifting metrics.

Of course, the toolbar shouldn’t be your only tool. “Those new to Search Engine Optimisation get too heavily involved in tracking their PageRank and lose sight of the real goal, which is generating more traffic to a web page,” writes SEO Consult.

So how else can you stay up to date on search engine trends? Some other tricks of the trade are popularity engines, which measure how many clicks a particular website receives for a given search keyword or term. Alexa and Yep.com are the more popular online tools to monitor this kind of search trending.

There are also “meaning-based search engines” that let you focus on specific meanings for a given term. These tools scan a web document’s text and evaluates the relationships among the keywords and terms used on that page’s SEO.

The best advice, though, is to find your out which of these tools best meets your particular needs and then strike a balance between using that data and monitoring the performance of your own site for your given keywords. (For more on Internet poker affiliate marketing keyword selection, click here.)

What all this should tell you is that there’s an enormous amount of interest in poker out there, and have a huge and growing amount of poker traffic. A smart online poker affiliate marketer should always be focusing on new ways to tap into it in all its forms.

Here at the PAP Blog we’ve gone through some of the basic components of harnessing all that Internet poker traffic and bringing it to your online poker website. We’ve explored online poker SEO, link exchanges, and the art of advertising your online poker website. But one thing we haven’t explored yet is how not to get online poker traffic, or, some of the common poker affiliate marketing mistakes to avoid.

1. Don’t Follow Your Competitors’ Moves Too Closely. Of course, you have to stay on top of what the competition is up to in order to get ahead in the online poker marketing world. But a common mistake is following too closely in your competitors’ footsteps. You definitely have to keep yourself informed on what they’re doing SEO-wise, but that doesn’t mean just doing what they’re doing. Make sure to write in your own voice, that your design is your own. If you really want to step up your game, you have to stand out. (PokerSEO.org makes a great argument for the evils of inferior content here.)

2. Don’t Just Wait for Popularity. Especially with SEO, building your site and getting that poker traffic aren’t factors you can afford to just “wait and see” about. Be proactive; make sure you’re working on your site every day. Whether it’s content updates or SEO tweaking, you’ll find that the most successful online poker affiliates attribute their success to a hard-working attitude.

3. Think of Alternate Keywords. Always be playing with your keywords; if certain keywords or phrases are too competitive for you to rank for, don’t be afraid to try out other variations. The amount of variation possible, while not infinite, of course, is still greater than you might think. Play around with some online poker keyword phrases and you’ll see.

4. Don’t Work in a Shell. Social networking is more and more popular in the Internet poker world, and for good reason. It pays to network with other marketers, and with affiliate managers and other industry figures, as well. You’ll find out more about what your competitors are up to, what’s working and what’s not, and you might even get in on some secrets to boot. (If you haven’t yet tried to network online with other poker affiliate marketers yet, the PokerAffiliatePrograms Facebook and LinkedIn pages, as well as the PAP Forum, are all great places to start.)

The most important factor? Target your keywords! Obvious, simple, but absolutely essential: Choose only keywords that closely match your online poker niche. (For info more on choosing a niche, click here.)

Be specific! Target! For example, if your niche is online poker tournaments, then buy the whole phrase “online poker tournaments” for maximum effect.

Quality can also equal quantity, especially if your keywords are for Google AdWords. The more keywords you buy, the better; that’s casing a wider net, and more likely to direct more people to your site.

If you are using Google AdWords, and you’re on a somewhat limited budget, then you need to focus on using the best, most targeted keywords first. This ties into the tip above advising you to get specific, because often it means you should get rid of more general keywords for the ones that are more specifically targeted to your traffic. Again, it’s better to have both specific and wider-ranging keywords, but if you have to choose, go with the more specific option.

For ideas on keywords, you also have a wide variety of options. Check out your more successful competitors’ keywords to see what you’re up against. There’s also a great Google keyword generator tool to help you figure out your keywords.

For more info on creating an effective SEO plan, check out this previous PAP Blog entry. For a great primer on the dos and don’ts of keywords in Google AdWords, we recommend this blog from a site called googleblogonline.info.

As we’ve covered before here at the PAP Blog, getting backlinks is a big part of your success in the SEO game, which in turn brings in more online traffic and helps you make money as an Internet poker affiliate. But finding those links isn’t always easy.

Poker link exchanges are the fast track to building a linkback strategy for your site. This not only helps your search engine performance, it gets your online poker site out in front of the Internet poker community in a fast and efficient way. It’s not enough on its own, of course; any effective poker affiliate marketing strategy will want to try to reach a broader audience than those people already familiar with online poker directories. But it’s a key element in building your poker strategy nonetheless, and if done on a wide enough scale, it can not only boost your SEO effectiveness, but also bring in a new crop of online poker players to your site as well.

The best bet is to simply search for online poker link exchange in Google and trying to establish your site on the more prominent link exchanges you find that way. There are the obvious choices, like PokerLinkExchange.com and UltimatePokerBonus.com, both very well optimized SEO sites that get a lot of traffic. If applicable, you’ll also want to add your online poker portal to PokerAffiliatePrograms.com’s own portal exchange section to make sure you get even more coverage.

This is a basic step, and it’s easy to do, but don’t underestimate its effectiveness. Getting your online poker affiliate marketing site extensive poker link exchange saturation — and making sure you check often and re-post to the link exchanges as needed — is one of the first steps any poker affiliate should take on the road to online success.

Of course, the banner ads you use to promote your poker room affiliate marketing ads fuel your online poker affiliate marketing site. Getting users to click on these ads is the whole goal of your site. But before those people can click on those ads, they have to get to your site. So, you have to advertise your site in order to make use of the ads on your site. After all, the whole reason you’re a online poker affiliate marketer is to get a share of commission for each person who clicks on those ads. So, the more clicks, the more money you make.

All that’s obvious, right? What’s a bit more difficult is to determine the best spots to advertise your site. There are the obvious choices for somewhat automated poker advertising: Sites like PokerListings.com, PokerAdNetwork.com, and yes, PokerAffiliatePrograms.com have special sections devoted to poker affiliates looking for advertising space. That’s a great way to get your name out in front of the online poker community, and on sites with great pre-existing SEO that already bring in many poker players.

But if you really want to reach out and find new traffic, above and beyond the usual poker affiliate places, you’ll want to get a bit more creative. Reach beyond the online poker world and utilize poker advertising in other types of sites that hit the same poker playing demographic — video gaming sites, for example, or sports sites. Poker is big in both.

Whip up some banner ads for your site and get them installed on a sports news or sports site directory. No, it doesn’t have to be ESPN: there are many other highly trafficked sports sites out there that include lots of poker content, a great place to bring in poker players who may not visit the usual hotspots.

And if you’re really ambitious — or if you’re already fairly successful and you want to make sure your popularity goes up and not down — you’ll want to get more serious about poker advertising. Design some banner ads, and create some media relationships to get those ads posted on highly trafficked Internet sites. This is advanced stuff, and it generally isn’t cheap. When you get there, you’ll know it, and at that point you’d be better off hiring an advertising consultant. Until then, follow the basic advice for poker advertising, above, and, in conjunction with good Internet poker SEO practices, you’ll find yourself bringing in more traffic and making more money than before.