Alright so you’ve now signed up and been approved by a poker affiliate site (online poker room, poker merchandise seller, poker software, or poker book site) and now need to place their link on your website.

Where to start?

If you’re using WordPress, the process is fairly simple. Begin by logging into your WordPress dashboard then scroll down to the tab labeled “Appearance.” Click on “Widgets.” Scroll down and find the widget labeled “Text.” Drag the text widget to where you would like your ad to appear (depending on the theme this can vary from left or right, top, bottom, etc.) The top narrow bar is for the title of your new widget. Give your affiliate program a captivating title that is sure to grab a reader’s attention. Now simply paste in the code provided by the poker affiliate site in the bigger box below the title. Click save and your ad is now live on every page of your website.

Location matters

Being that you’re looking to drive traffic to the affiliate program you want to maximize placement of this ad. The typical human eye scans the top left of the page first, meaning that if you want to catch someone’s attention quickly you want the ad closer to the top left of your page than the top right. Where do people typically finish looking at a page? Believe it or not they look at the top right last.

Make your ad words ones of action

Writing an interesting title for your affiliate program helps grab a person’s attention. Try to think from a visitor’s point of view when writing the title. What words would make you want to make the purchase? What words would make your friends want to make the purchase? Action words help as well, as you want your visitors engaged, not passive, just like in the game of poker. Action drives the game.

Want to only promote an affiliate program on one page or post of my website?

Great question. When you create a new post or page in WordPress there are two tabs you can click on in the top right corner, one is labeled “Visual” and the other “HTML.” After you have written your post simply switch over to “HTML” and insert in the affiliate link into your post or page and click save.

Know your product, know how to place your ad!

If you are going this route it is important to make sure you use an intriguing title related to the product you are marketing. If it’s a book by Phil Hellmuth your title should look something like this “Name of book by Poker Legend Phil Hellmuth, Jr.” Do some market research on how stiff the competition is on Google for the product before going this route. If 1,000,000 sites are already promoting the book its probably best to avoid trying to promote this product in a post or page. If less sites are promoting it you have a better chance of people not only seeing your site in the search engine results but giving yourself a nice commission as well.

For American Eyes Only

One word of warning for all you poker affiliates out there living in the good old United States of America. The FTC has now stepped into monitoring affiliate programs online. They’ve deemed it necessary to alert visitors that you will be making a commission for the referral. Do some research on the topic to the best practices of how to comply without hurting your sales at the same time.

Drive traffic to your success

Once you’ve placed your poker affiliate links on your website start driving traffic and you’ll start seeing commission checks. The more traffic, the larger the check.
To Your Poker Website Success,
Jason Narog – Creator of the Royal Flush of Spades poker money clip

Gave OpenX a shot

I had planned on doing lots of work on making a poker website this month but it never happened for a few reasons. Firstly I decided to try out the OpenX http://www.openx.com advertising platform, but I had more difficulties with it than I had bargained for, and it ended up taking up a lot of my time with really nothing to show at the end of it .

Was not impressed with OpenX documentation

Although it is a popular product, the documentation appears very poor and to cut a long story short I basically made a mess of the installation. After having further issues with upgrading it, I decided to start all over and reinstall it, but after then reading a few negative posts on the OpenX forum itself I thought enough is enough.

OIOPublisher sists well with WordPress

I’ve since purchased and installed the OIOPublisher http://www.oiopublisher.com plugin, as it’s just a WordPress plugin the installation was simple. I haven’t looked into it enough yet so I can’t comment on how good or bad it is, but at least I’m off to a good start on it.

Work on site lessened

The problems I had with Openx sort of put me off working on the site – and I ended up drifting off, playing more poker instead and doing other web stuff. Anyway I don’t plan on spending so much time again, for the time being at least, on getting my site advertising ready.

Improving making a poker website

I’ve still got plenty of other tasks I want to achieve before I start feeling really satisfied with making a poker website. The main areas I intend to work on over the next one or two months are to add some more permanent pages, either solve some issues I’m having with the Ikarus theme or switch to a different theme.

Improving the usability of the site

Laying out my posts in a better way so as to improve my readers experience. Improving my site seo wise. Checking that my site is as Google friendly as possible. Beyond Google, trying to also make my site seo friendly for other search engines. See how I can use social networking to further the exposure of my website.