How to Get Started Poker Affiliating
Well, if you've read over the site, and are ready to get started in the poker affiliate business, this article will guide you through it. The first thing you need to do is decide which niche of the poker market you're going to target. You may have already decided this, but if not, here's my article on choosing a poker niche.
Once you've got your niche nailed down, the next thing you need to do is decide if you are going to create your own website, or use a free hosted site such as a Blog or a Squidoo lens. Let's weight the benefits of each:
Blogs are free, so that is an obvious advantage for someone looking to get into the market for absolutely no cost. Plus, if you have no knowledge of HTML or web design, you'll be fine with a Blog, because all you have to do is write your articles and click submit. Also, Blogs can be indexed very quickly, and show up in search engines very fast if you use the right bloghost.
Now, if you decide to create your own website, here are the advantages. You get total control of how the site looks and feels. Also, you can create separate pages for each page of content, and focus each of those pages on different keywords. This can be done with a Blog, but is much harder.
Although you can be profitable either way, I recommend going with your own sites, and mixing in Blogs at times. HTML isn't that hard to learn, and if you use a program like Microsoft FrontPage or Dreamweaver, you don't even need to know anything about HTML.
If you decide to go with a Blog, use www.blogger.com. This is what I use for my poker Blogs, and it ranks very well in the search engines.
If you go with a website, I recommend hosting your site at www.ipowerweb.com. This is what I've used for a long time, and I've never had a problem with their service or their price.
Ok, now that you're ready to set up your site, you need to sign up to become a poker affiliate. I recommend using the Poker Affiliate Integrated Network, because it centralizes all of your resources and promotions. Instead of having to go to each individual poker rooms' sites, you go to one site to get your links, banners, marketing tools, and etc. Plus, you receive one payment a month, instead of payments from each individual room. Sign up here.
Now that you've chosen your rooms, you need to choose which keywords you're going to target for your site. This goes along with choosing your niche, but in order to find good keywords, one tool I use is the Google Keyword Tool.
This tool allows you to put in potential keywords, and lets you know how often they are searched. I recommend putting in a ton of keywords, then going after the ones that have mid-low search amounts.
The reason for this is because since you're a new site you're going to have a hard time ranking for competitive terms at first, so its best to go after smaller terms to start out.
Now that your site is set up, and you've got your keywords chosen, you just need to keep adding fresh content to your site, and do link-building. There is an article coming on this shortly...
Good luck!