The Visitors You Never Knew You Had

When monitoring your traffic, especially if you have a large site, you will of course look mainly at the traffic received related to the keywords you have targeted. But is every visitor likely to be there for the same reason? If you take a moment to analyze your traffic statistics, you will be surprised at how many visitors you get from odd places and strange search terms.

If you are working actively with targeting specific keywords within your niche, you are no doubt getting your fair share of traffic from the search engines. But, on top of those visitors, you will get search engine traffic from phrases and words you are not actively targeting. Many of these visitors are most likely derived from searches related to your niche. More often than not however, a web page will have many specific phrases, certain to attract the occasional visitor from Google.

If your site is large enough, or if you are running multiple sites, you are probably getting quite a few visitors like this every day. The problem with this kind of traffic is the lack of information about the visitors. You haven’t actively tried to attract these people, yet they arrive. But, in order to take advantage of this traffic, you need to figure out from where they are coming, and most importantly, what page(s) they are landing on.

The easiest way is to look at your website’s statistics, most information will be found there. First off, look at the search terms that have resulted in visitors. Try to find phrases or words NOT specific for your niche, but instead of a more general nature. Or better yet; A phrase that, taken out of it’s context, will be related to something completely different. If you can find enough, similar or related, search terms, odds are you can use these to improve your revenue with the use of an affiliate program.

When you have figured out what search terms generate the most traffic, it’s time to see where they are landing. Do a few searches on these queries – on ALL major search engines – to see the most likely entry pages for each particular query. If you can find one or a few pages often occurring on various queries, you have an excellent opportunity to figure out what these visitors are looking for. If you can, it’s almost too easy to present them with banners from well chosen affiliate programs. This way, some of the people will click your ads rather than the back button, thus making you some money.

Sometimes the terms giving you the extra visitors will be easy to translate, hence making it clear what the visitors are really looking for. In these cases, all you need to do is sign up for an affiliate program offering products of interest. In other cases, the terms are of a very general nature, making it less obvious what they are looking for. It is, however, possible to experiment with a few text ads, analyzing what ads attract the most clicks. Most free website statistics software don’t enable you to track visitor-behaviour, but if you sign up for Google statistics you’ll be able to see how many times each link is clicked, making it easy to find an affiliate program matching the visitors you never knew you had.

If you have numerous pages attracting odd visitors, you can easily repeat the above for each page getting enough search engine traffic to make it worth your while.

Choosing Commission Model For Poker Affiliate Programs

One of the most profitable niches for an affiliate marketer is with no doubt online poker. If you have a poker website making money it is fairly easy, but make sure you are choosing the right commission model for your affiliate program; fixed commission, revenue share or a combination of both. Use this fairly simple way of calculating which commission to choose.

Sending players to various online poker rooms is a lucrative business. Due to the very high competition, the poker affiliate programs need to offer very high commissions to attract new affiliates. For webmasters, this is as good as it gets.

The typical poker affiliate program offers variations of commission, making it possible for you to analyze your traffic and referred players, helping you choose the best model for you and your site. It is not always easy to know the break-even point for revenue share vs. fixed commission, but if you know your visitors, all you need is a calculator.

You need some information about the players you refer. This is sometimes hard to know, but usually you can use a rough estimate. The more information available to you, the better you will understand your players. Try to find out – or guess – the following:

• Referred players average limit (player level)

• Type of game preferred (limit/no-limit, stud, Omaha etc.)

• Table size preferences (usually 6 or 10 players/table)
  

To find this information out, you can use any method available; a poll on your page isn’t a bad idea, one or a few easy questions will get many answers, making it easier to estimate the above details. There are numerous ways of getting to know your visitors, but that would be another topic, and therefore beyond the scope of this article. If you have no information about your visitors, or if you are yet to build your site, look at a few different levels (of limit games) to see the impact on your revenue. The same applies with table size and type of game, investigate and evaluate.

What you need to know about the affiliate program is the following:

• Rake percentage (the percentage the poker room earns from every pot)
  

• Revenue share (the percentage of the rake paid to the affiliate)

• Average number of players on active tables (on the referrer’s player level)

Find the average number of players seated at the tables, as well as the average pot. This information is given at almost all poker rooms. If you can’t find the information in the affiliate interface, log in as a player and look directly at the tables.

Then calculate as follows:

(rake percentage x average pot x revenue share) / average seated players

This gives you the average commission for one played hand.

Look at their fixed commissions and do another quick calculation:

Fixed commission / earnings per hand

This gives you the number of hands the referred players has to be part of, before you make more from revenue share than from the fixed commission.

If you want to know the time each player has to spend in the poker room to make up for the fixed commission, all you need to find is the average pots per hour. This information is also available in almost every poker room. Then simply calculate:

Number of hands (from the calculation above) / hands per hour

Giving you an estimate of the time each player has to spend in the poker room before you start earning more than the fixed commission.

Now you have a few more parameters to consider before choosing your revenue model for poker affiliate programs, take your time – it is well worth it.

Poker affiliate programs – Look beyond the obvious

If you have a site about poker, casinos or gambling in general, you stand a good chance of making a nice profit by using various affiliate programs. But, choosing a program solely on its pay per sale percentage won’t necessarily maximize your revenue. Looking at your visitors – and what they are looking for – will make it easier to choose a new poker affiliate program.

The online gambling industry is one of the most profitable niches for an affiliate marketer. But, due to its potential revenue, the competition is very hard, and you really need to make the most of every single visitor you get.

The more information you can gather about your visitors, the easier it gets to choose the right affiliate program suiting their needs. Much information can be accessed from your website statistics – or from the account statistics if you are buying traffic with contextual ads. What search terms attract the most traffic? Do you know exactly why they are arriving and where? If the most common search term is very general in its nature, it can be hard to know exactly what the visitors are looking for, but if you are getting visitors from more specific search terms, you should have a pretty good idea as to what your visitors are interested in.

Once you have evaluated your visitors’ needs, it’s time to figure out how to meet them. If you are getting search engine traffic for any term related to poker bonuses, odds are many of your visitors are looking for just that. No matter how good the affiliate program’s percentage, if they do not offer a bonus high enough – or no bonus at all -, most of your visitors won’t sign up, hence not making you a commission. Instead, this would give you an excellent opportunity to find as many poker rooms possible with high sign up bonuses, and hopefully many of your visitors will come back to find a new poker room with a good bonus once they are done with their first choice.

In the same manner you can find affiliate programs matching most keywords, if you have visitors you KNOW are looking for one particular thing – no matter if it’s poker bonuses, Omaha tables or stud – you should try to present them with products and services matching their needs on an as detailed level as possible.

Assuming you have a somewhat good knowledge in the niche you are working within, finding this kind of information can be done rapidly, but the more effort you put into finding the correct casino- or poker affiliate program, the better your traffic will convert. Most often the poker rooms offer trial accounts, making it free and easy to check out both the software, type of games and whether or not it’s a busy poker room or not. All this information is highly important for knowing IF you should use the affiliate program in question, as well as for the marketer choosing what commission plan to use.

The more information you can get hold of – both about your visitors and about the affiliate programs – the better. You should always evaluate the programs joined, to ensure they are converting as expected.

5 important factors when choosing affiliate program

Choosing an affiliate program is presumably easy, yet many webmasters won’t find the program best suited for their site. In order to maximize your online revenue, you should – before choosing program – consider a few factors.

When deciding what affiliate program(s) to use on your site, there are many factors to consider. You will, of course, have to narrow down the selection by searching for programs related to your site’s topic. But, depending on site, you will find yourself with a quite long list of potential affiliate program – All with different types of commission. What should you choose, what information is relevant, and most important, which program will make you the most money?

#1 - Size of commission

The size of commission is, of course, the single most important factor. While this is an easy factor to compare, the comparison between a fixed commission and revenue share can pose a problem. You need to look at the estimated average sale to get a figure to compare. This isn’t always easy, but generally speaking the higher the price of the product, the higher your revenue will be. This is easy enough, but sometimes the products are cheap, but people but many items, thus adding up to nice commissions. Try to evaluate the niche you are in, who are you referring? What are they likely to buy? The more information you have about your visitors, the better off you’ll be.

# 2 - Compatibility

Equally important is the compatibility between you site and the program. Are your visitors likely to click the ads? Are the likely to buy? Don’t settle for just any affiliate program in your niche, you need to find the best affiliate program available for your site. Visit the site you are advertising, have a look around. Would you shop there? Is it a nice looking, easy manageable site? If you wouldn’t shop there, odds are your visitors won’t either.

# 3 - Recurring commission

A very important, but often forgotten, variable to look at is whether or not the affiliate program offers recurring commission. What this means is: The customer referred by you stays yours for a limited time, or for life. If you find a good affiliate program with recurring commission, you do not need to send many customers before it really adds up.

# 4 – Promotional tools etc.

A very good way of further increasing your conversion ratio is to look closely at the promotional tools, banners and potential offers the affiliate program are using to convert the traffic you send. In some niches – gambling in particular - the competition is so hard they have to offer their visitors high bonuses or the like, just to stand a chance of converting them. In cases like this, you would want to promote a program offering good bonuses; otherwise you stand a much lesser chance of sending highly converting traffic.

#5 Payout frequency, type and threshold

If you are running a small site, or if you use many different affiliate programs, you will need to look at the payout threshold AND payout method. See to it you will get your commission within a fair period of time, and that they offer easy and cheap ways of collecting your commission. International checks can, in some countries, be very expensive to cash in. No fun in paying $10 dollar to cash in a $25 check, now is it? You should glance on the frequency of payments as well. Most affiliate programs pay monthly or bi-monthly, but be sure to check it out.