While Affiliates Battle for Your Loyalty, Players Profit

You only need to look at the landscape of modern football to realise how lucrative being a middleman can be. The presence of an agent in football transfer deals can lump millions onto the asking price of a player, with most of that increment going directly to the lucky sod that arranged it. Poker is no different in this regard, and there is plenty of money to be made by referring players to online poker rooms and taking a percentage of their rake.

 Photo by ARIUSZ NAWROCKI

    The poker affiliate industry is one of the fastest growing and most competitive markets within online poker. If you persuade a real-money player to sign up with a poker room, whether via word of mouth or a website link, you will either be entitled to a single payment known as a CPA (Cost Per Acquisition) or a percentage of that player’s gross monthly rake – for life.
    These percentages can often be 20 to 40 percent of the gross monthly rake of a player. Although the estimated average rake of a typical player is $500 a year, if you are lucky enough to recruit a handful of high-stakes, high-volume grinders, you could make a neat living off that alone.
    It sounds simple, but it really is as tough a niche industry as you will find within the online gambling sphere. Online poker players are getting more and more sophisticated and aware of their worth to affiliates and poker rooms, so much so that they can afford to be choosy. The successful affiliates are those that offer better and better deals that both undercut their competition and keep a smaller portion of the profits, often by offering most of their profit back to players in the form of rakeback and bonuses.

Rakeback Crucial for
Online Grinders
Type the word ‘rakeback’ into Google right now and you literally will be presented with hundreds of websites that allow you to sign up with an online poker room via an affiliate, which will then return a hefty percentage of your gross rake back to you. The deals vary greatly, but a ‘standard’ affiliate deal might see the affiliate get 30 percent, the player get 40 percent and the poker room get 30 percent of the gross rake of a customer.
    Of course, when a player signs up through an affiliate – earning them money for nothing – it’s plain sailing, but getting enough players to pay the bills and not move onto a different deal is the hard part. I spoke with Nik Spooner of one such affiliate business, www.tetleyboy-affiliates.com, whom I met because he was able to offer me a very good deal at a popular poker room. He has been around the industry for a while now, but his website is relatively new.
    “I didn’t consider myself a fully fledged ‘affiliate’ until I got my website up and running just a few months ago. I realised quite quickly that without a website, you were not going to get business. It’s a kind of tool to make people feel more confident that you are genuine.
    “I think that may be the hardest part: convincing people you are not going to rip them off.”

Aggressive Marketing, and Trust
I came across Tetleyboy Affiliates when I replied on a public poker forum asking for poker affiliates to PM me with good loyalty deals. My inbox was jam-packed within minutes, and Nik’s offer was the best one from a percentage point of view as well as the best structured sales pitch. It turns out that this sort of aggressive marketing is pivotal to the affiliate industry, and Nik spends most of his week seeking out interested potential customers.
    “I have resigned myself to the fact that nobody will ever find our site by googling for rakeback sites (because there are so many available). I’d say 95 percent of our signups have come via forums like 2+2. I will be lucky if I get four out of every 100 players I contact this way to sign up to the service. I am experimenting with the first advertisements on a couple of websites, just for a three-month period, to see if any new business will be generated. We are reluctant to spend a lot on advertising before we have any real idea of whether it is likely to be cost effective.”
    Tetleyboy Affiliates offers the same – and sometimes better – rakeback deals as some of the ‘big boys’ in the affiliate industry. For example, it now offers
rakeback and loyalty bonuses up to 70 percent. But its biggest hurdle is gaining the trust of potential clients. Nik’s remedy for this is a personalised approach to keeping his clients happy.
    “I tried to think of the things that are important to me in choosing an affiliate in the past. I realise how much people appreciate a personal and swift service. I wanted to make a point of highlighting on my website the areas where we feel we are different and maybe even preferable to other sites. We always reply to email and enquiries personally – we don’t want to send standard stock answers or automated responses. We assure people that we are NOT handling their funds.
    “Unless their system changes, we will not be offering deals on either Full Tilt Poker or UltimateBet because these sites pay the affiliate the relevant amount of rakeback and the affiliate has to then pass it on to the player. Although I know we are completely trustworthy and would do this, a lot of prospective new players are going to be concerned about the arrangement. Therefore, we state on our site that we will NEVER handle the funds. It’s easier to deal with sites that allow us to keep this promise.”

Special Deals
And it is a very personalised service Tetleyboy offers. I signed up just a few weeks ago and have had loads of email from Nik already and have been chatting to him on MSN every day. He has also been able to sort out some special deals for me with some poker rooms that were not advertised on the site, and also gave me a very accurate breakdown as to what I can expect from them. At the end of the day, keeping a ‘high raker’ like me is very important to Nik, which is why I know he’ll jump through hoops to help me obtain the best deal he can.
    “I’m hoping that the terms of the deals we offer will mean that the customer will stay with us. As long as players get what they are expecting, we shouldn’t have a problem. I’ve had players contact me
saying they were changing sites because maybe the games weren’t all they were expecting for the level they play. These players don’t just disappear, they often ask about other networks with the intention of signing through us again on the new site. This makes us feel very good that the customer is at least satisfied with the part that we are doing…
    “We also deal with smaller poker skins like Betfred (note that Betfred does not offer rakeback, but has a very competitive loyalty bonus system instead), which is a big name in gambling, but not so much in poker. As a result, you still get that ‘personal touch’ if you deal with them. I certainly couldn’t be happier with the representatives I deal with on the affiliate side of things.”

Volume, Volume, Volume
Tetleyboy likes to offer the same personalised service to all players, regardless of whether they are a micro-stakes player or a high-stakes grinder, but clearly the real value in being an affiliate is getting loyal high-volume players on board.
    “At the moment I’d say that probably 80 percent of our total monthly commission is accumulated from the play of maybe just 20 percent of our players. I can see that from my point of view I would only need five or six real high-volume players and my income from that would be very nice. But players are more mercenary now. I think if a player is generating say $15k in rake for a poker site, they realise that their services are going to be in demand and they are in a good position to negotiate ‘better than normal’ deals for themselves. This is where it gets frustrating for somebody like myself. We KNOW that our deals are as good as the ‘big boys’. We KNOW that by signing up with us then a majority of players will be better off each month. But as a new kid on the block we have to work twice as hard to prove we are the real deal.”
    The affiliate industry can reap big dividends for those who work hard enough to attract and retain a loyal base of high-
volume players, but poker players can pick and choose where they play poker and for whom these days. Any high-raking poker player will know his worth to a poker affiliate, and it seems that being able to offer them the very best deal and make yourself appear trustworthy at the same time is the biggest barrier to overcome.
    Being a poker affiliate is by no means the ‘easy money’ venture that it looks on paper, and it’s only going to get more cutthroat as everyone continues to undercut each other.
    And that will mean great deals for smart players.                                          
– Barry Carter