If you are in the Poker Affiliate industry, then you know that 2010 has been a wild wild year for the Poker Affiliates. We have the good, the bad, and the ugly in our industry. Although Online Gaming and specifically the Poker Industry is still a young market compared to Casinos and other Online Marketing Verticals, 2010 had pushed our industry to do some “growing up” so to speak. Before we get too far into where I see the Affiliate Market in the coming 1-2 years, let’s look at some of the good,bad, and ugly over the last 2 years.

Ok so let’s face it, its not as easy at it use to be to make money online weather it be from websites, blogs, forum communities, or anything else. the competition is tougher, google is smart, and scariest of all the average internet user is more educated. Browsers make it easy for people to block ads, images, and pop ups. Even if you can get past those walls, people are now banner blind. When is that last time a banner made you want to click on anything???

Let’s face it – very few sites that rank in the top 10 for worthwhile gambling keywords have natural back-link profiles. There is too much competition to obtain the top spots with absolute white hat methods, so almost everyone goes a little grey to rank higher and make more money.

We wanted to continue our recent articles theme of “Affiliate Money Making Tips” and today we are going to cover one of the most common questions we get asked by clients and new affiliate marketers; “How can I find profitable keywords?” Now I would like to be able to say this is an easy process, but honestly sometimes it is just trial and error which can be time consuming and tedious. Now usually when people hear this their first thought is “Long and boring” and depending on your approach you may be right.

News Flash – google owns the web and controls our Internet Businesses. Big news right? Most serious webmasters already know this and in turn spend 90% of their time optimizing for Google Web Search. If you are one of these people, you need to take a step back and realize you are forgetting about the remaining 20% of the web that uses Bing or Yahoo. Of course there is some small percentage of people still using AOL, Ask.com, etc – For now we will just assume they take up about 1% total. Note: Before I get 50 emails correcting my numbers, understand I’m estimating the last numbers.

I wanted to write a follow up to our last article on Affiliate Money Making Tips, and all too often we focus on the big search engines; Google, Bing, Yahoo that we tend to forget that we are “Internet Marketers First” and “SEO’s” second. I am a regular on the Poker Affiliate Listings Forum owned by my good friend Jeremy Enke, and at least once a day a Poker Affiliate posts wanting to know why he is getting 100 visits a day, but not making money and often times not getting signups. This is a common issue and one where SEO will not help much. Obviously if you already have traffic, SEO is not your problem. The common issues for lack of conversions are:

Note: This is the first in a series of articles which cover some very simple tips which will help you expand your affiliate business, increase conversions, and enhance your exposure in the major search engines. If you have any questions or want some specific areas covered, pelase let us know in the comment seciton. Poker SEO skills is a must have for any webmaster, and as with anything, practice makes perfect

Well it’s a new year and a new decade and so far 2010 has started off awesome! This might be the best time to become a serious poker affiliate because online poker continues to get bigger and bigger! As most of you know, I am a frequent poster and mod over at Poker Affiliate Listings and if it wasn’t for the “PAL” forums, I know I would not be where I am today. Having a resource like this to read through and posts questions is wonderful for new webmasters.

Background

I’m very excited to announce that we have now launched our Live Poker SEO Radio Show which is also available for podcast download and Itunes! We had our first show last night with a very special guest “Michael Martinez” of SEO Theory – Michael is well known in the SEO and SEM industry and last night he covered all the new Google Changes in regards to “Personalized Search” and “Live search“. Both of these issues have a far reaching impact on the world of search marketing, and thankfully Michael was there to explain it in a way everyone can understand.