With online Poker having become a true phenomenon of our time, it seems clear that an incredible number of people spend a lot of their time gambling at all the most popular online Poker sites. But the truly important question is, how come these people choose a particular Poker site and how do they discover it? This is where the very important work of Poker affiliates comes into play. It seems logical that the biggest and most successful online Poker sites would pay a lot of money to have new players referred to them, after all, every business’ goal is steady growth. Affiliates do exactly that work. By focusing on referring the biggest possible amount of people to a particular Poker site or even multiple sites, they can get a piece of the successful industry that online Poker has become.

Once a person has decided to dedicate his or her time to promoting online Poker, there are a few things one absolutely has to know about being an affiliate. As in every industry there is the potential of making a lot of money, but it will only come through hard work, which starts with obtaining all the important information. To begin with, there are two different ways in which online Poker site pay their affiliates. The first way is called CPA, which stands for Cost per Acquisition. As the name already implies, in this case affiliates get paid for every person who is referred to the online Poker site. This means, that once a referred player has played for a specific time or earned a certain amount of loyalty points, the affiliate receives a previously negotiated flat rate. This flat rate can be quite a significant amount of money. The second method is called revenue sharing. In this case the affiliate receives a certain amount of what the referred player is spending on the website. Since every tournament has a different buy-in amount, not every player yield the same amount of income. If a tournament costs, for example, $20+$2, the two dollar part is the contribution the player makes to the revenue out of which the affiliates get paid. In addition to that, the Poker site also uses a percentage of the total tournament pool in order to pay its affiliates. The type of payment that the affiliate chooses, if he or she has the option to choose, largely depends on the marketing strategy that is being used. If a website, blog, or forum post focuses on attracting high rollers, revenue sharing is clearly more profitable. If an affiliate is attracting sheer numbers, however, a flat rate per player might be more lucrative. As already mentioned, after signing up as an affiliate of an online Poker website, the responsibility of how to attract people to the website is in the hands of the new affiliate. Clearly only the best strategies and most dedicated individuals will be able to make a big profit from it.

In order to sign up as an affiliate, with Full Tilt Poker for example, one has to go to the Poker website and click on the affiliate option on the website’s browser. If the site is accepting new affiliates, one has to register with personal details. There is generally no fee that needs to be paid to be able to register. After that, the website lets the new affiliates choose the preferred payment option. Full Tilt Poker offers both CPA and Revenue share plans to its future associates. After having verified the email address, affiliates can log into the Affiliate Center in order to obtain important promotional information for their particular website. The most important thing for this kind of business venture is to target the right group of people and leading them to the desired website without spamming advertisement.

Like regular employees of a company, affiliates generally get paid once a month and are alerted to this by email. The online Poker website transfers the commission payments to the website’s affiliate accounts from where affiliates can withdraw the money onto their player accounts. Once it is on the player account the affiliate has the same choices as a regular player would, namely either to join a tournament and spend it on some good Poker games, or have it paid out. Affiliates can cash out with Moneybookers, Instadebit, Click 2 Pay and ClickandBuy. Since the amount of money that is being earned like this depends on the number of players that have been referred through the affiliate’s efforts, there are various ways to track this number. Generally this is done with the help of either tracking codes or referral codes. A tracking code is a specific URL that tracks the players that are being referred from a particular site. A referral code is a code that the player enters when signing up on the site, which also works for players which have been attracted to the online Poker site through an offline promotion. These tracking methods are of great importance since being an affiliate is purely based on commission.