I'm going to be 100% honest and I hope all that read this post will take my comments in good faith. Firstly compared to many of you I'm new to this industry and I have been developing my sites for just over a year. When I first started I wasted too much time and money buying links to boost my pagerank which did very little to increase my traffic or RPMs. I was working under the illusion that sites with decent pagerank had decent traffic which is simply not true. I have even managed to get one of my sites to PR5 with under 50 visits a day. All I did was buy site wide links on a few PR7 sites and the next PR update my site was PR5 (this was not a poker site).
Also I have made mistakes buying ads or links on sites that were advertised as having decent traffic when in fact they did not although now I have learnt how to get a goods idea of any sites traffic.
I also use to play online and live poker for years before I started my own sites so I think I have a good understanding of what poker players are looking for before they sign up to a poker site. Lets say that you want to sign up to a poker site on the Microgaming
network. You have a choice of 30+ skins on the
network and a choice of 100s or 1000s of sites advertising these skins. Most networks now have more than one poker site on their
network and each one of these sites will have their own bonus or rakeback deal.
In the UK players have now wised up to the fact that they can shop around for a rakeback or bonus deals but to be honest a lot of affiliate sites do not cover these details in enough detail. So if I look at an affiiate site and it does not give a good breakdown of the bonus then I'm simply not interested and will look for another site. Obviously new players or those just looking for freerolls will not be put off by this but I can assure you serious players will be and these are the players we want to convert to RPMs.
Also many affiliates promote a certain site on a
network when another site on the
network may offer a much better deal for players. A good example is the Boss
network where some sites offer rakeback and some do not. Decent players will shop around and find the best deal so it is in the best interest of the affiliate to find the best deal to promote to potential RPMs.
Also I have to say that some of the strategy displayed on affiliate sites is poor and it is obvious to poker players that the site owner knows very little about poker. Put yourself in their shoes and for example would you buy a new car from a salesman who knew nothing about it?
Poker has changed over the last few years and players are much more aware of the game than they were 2 or 3 years ago. Also players are switching to other forms of poker such as Omaha and Stud and from experience thses games can be very profitable.
So back to the original question of how to spend $200. Firstly make sure for the sites you are promoting you give the info the players want to see. If you don't then they will simply move on to another site for the info and you will lose a RPM. So make sure you give the main details such as bonus clearing requirements, game types available, PT compatiable deposit / withdrawal methods etc.
For the
network you are promoting make sure you have a competitive package and are not promoting a site that offers players a relative poor deal compared to other sites on the
network.
Spend time to understand poker, learn about other games such as Omaha and Stud and find sites that have decent traffic for these games.
You have a wide choice of sites you can promote so research these sites and promote the ones that offer the best deal for players and you will not go far wrong.
Before you buy links or advertising on any sites spend a day or two looking at the site. With forums you can get a good idea of quality of traffic from what the members post and how many new posts are generated each day. You can also get a good indication of the nationality of the posters by noting what time the forum peaks each day. Also with forums the ratio with members to posts should be at least 20X, if not then most times either the owner has inflated the membership, the owner has hired posters or the forum is riddled with spam bots.
When buying advertising on other sites spend time reading the content of the site. Is it well written, does it make sense and would poker players find it useful?
Sorry to ramble on a bit but I hope I have got my points across. Quality content + quality products + quality advertising = loads of RPMs.
$200 Budget
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