If you ever wondered about the perks of a sub-affiliate or internet marketer, a friend of mine sent a video of a cool party thrown by Bodog. I feel pretty lame sometimes because for every conference, every WSOP, etc I get invites and free trips offered to me and the crew to all the major conferences… But I’m lame and I never go. Part of it is my new found fear of flying (Thanks American Airlines) and the other part is that I have a big family with 6 kids, hard to find a sitter for a week lol. I have promised to hit Vegas this year and throw a party for some of our Sub-Affiliates, but now that I know more about Vegas Parties, we will probably be better just goign to a Bodog Party

Anyway, if this Video doesn’t make you want to go to a Conference, nothing will.

Projects

Nothing new in the way of projects, I am helping Marius with his MPC website, this site has so much potential and the groundwork is being laid to make it an awesome portal. Check out the new Poker Rakeback section too, will be big we hope!

I did buy some new domains and small websites which my team is building up, I have high hopes for these and we are seeing instant traffic which is the cool thing about exact match domains. The new ones are:

• Poker Rakeback Online – Future Rakeback Site
• Online Rakeback – Coming along nicely – Instant Traffic
• Internet Poker Bonus – Got this domain for a steal! Aged domain with a good history
• Carbon Rakeback – Thanks MJ – Just the domain ranks #5, just wait until I do some SEO and add some content
• Secret Project – LOL, well I think everyone int he poker industry will know about this soon enough, especially since it involves some big players in the biz, super excited about this! Could be my “Million Dollar Idea”

Anyway, like I said short post with nothing awesome to say. Oh for all the webmasters reading this, I made what I’ve been told is a good post over on the SEO website : Affiliate Tips For Making Money

I’ll post some more pics later and probably update this post with the official snowfall and ice stats. We are literally snowed in which is actually pretty cool. The wife and I spend so much time working and driving our kids all over the country that its actually nice to know we will all be here together and ride out the storm. Watching the kids play “snowball” which is really just a bundled up tackle football and just be able to dive into the snow. Man, being a kid is awesome.

This is also a great time for me to devise a strategy to beat my boys at ping pong!!! We bought them a regulation size pingpong table for Xmas and of course they joined the school pingpong team <—- LOL at my tax dollars – Anyway, my kids are good and I’ve never played much. So they have been smacking me around for the last couple weeks. I’ve managed a few wins so far, but I think they just felt sorry for me. I’ve coached these boys at Football, Baseball, etc since they were little and before they had to have real coaches. So I know they are enjoying teaching me, and beating me down. They are even talking non-stop smack.

Anyway, I’ll post pics and such later and I’ll try to post something useful too.

BTW – I figured I would throw in some marketing candy to everyone that reads this blog for info. So do yourself a favor and check this out:

Homework: Figure out how this site makes money, and why it works. Melted Felt – Poker Comedy

2009 was a great year for me personally and in business. I work 12-18 hour days sometimes, I’m sleepy a lot, and according to my kids I’m cranky lol but overall life is good. I have to remind myself how good I have it sometimes. I remember 6 years ago I was thinking making 30k a year was ballin’ lol – Now I dunno how we would survive on that. We have 6 kids and we would just be poor as hell!

Poker Changed My Life

I was one of those guys who say Moneymaker on ESPN and figured if he could do it, I could too. I started playing poker on Paradise Poker and after losing $50 I went super hot and never looked back. Later I needed a new hobby and built a website on Lycos (Tripod) Being the perfectionist I am, I quickly realized a cheap website creator type thing like that wasn’t going to be enough. So I moved on to bigger and better things. Hell I didn’t even make any money during the first year and a half lol. It was fun though and the thought of creating a website various people might visit intrigued me.

Anyway, that is my new big time goal. I have 8 years to make it, and I’m more than 1/4 of the way there. If the start of 2010 is any indication, I should make it with a few years to spare. More than the money, the stability appeals to me more than anything. My brother and sister in-law are both Teachers at our local High school, and they even fo extra things to make money and they still struggle with no end in site. I remember that feeling all too well and I never want to live paycheck to paycheck again.

Its funny, I almost feel arrogant saying something like that out loud. I just don’t ever want to have to worry about money again. Worrying about money sucks. Most couples fight more about money than anything else, including sex! Tons of people I know seem to have given up on their dreams of freedom and stablility. They think staying at the jobs (which most hate) keeps them stable and worst yet they think they don’t have any choices. Sure they may not become internet guru’s but they have lost motivation to even try which is sad.

Anyway, I think I’m rambling now. I have high hoped for this new decade and I just feel lucky. A few years from now people will be saying “If only I got into Internet Marketing a few years ago”. We are the future of Poker, we are bringing a whole new generation of poker players into the market. We actually create a bigger marketing base for ourselves! <0—– It awesome and something most marketers cannot do. We all need to consider ourselves lucky….

Let’s go make some money!

The original article can be found here: 700% Increase in Email Subscriptions

Originally we planned on posting it on Arkansas Gambler, but I thought it was a better fit on my SEO website.

Anyway, you can see the article which is about email marketing here: John Chow Article Re-post

Big thanks to John for posting this for us!

Also, if you want to see how a great Online Poker/Casino website is built, then be sure and check this site out. Not only is the content top notch, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen a website combine the two niche’s in this way. Best Poker and Casino Sites

Woopra – Woopra is finally out of beta and this is just an awesome product. I was lucky enough to be one of the original beta testers, so I have 20+ website on woopra which allowed me to see live stats, traffic, KW’s etc. Woopra works just like Google Analytics except that stats are instant and live. You can actually see visitors as they come to your website, and watch them navigate through your website. You will also see info on how they got their, the KW and search phrases. Of course if you are not careful you can waste a ton of time watching stats, so make sure you are using your time wisely.

Overall, woopra has to be the best new tool for webmasters in years. It combines the best parts of different stats programs all into one, and best of all you can start using it for just $5 a month which is super cheap. This pays for itself almost instantly because you can see daily trends, LT’s, etc. Just so cool. Check it out here: Woopra

Digital Point KW Tool – This is another tool I’ve grown to love. With this tool you can add your website and Keywords you want to track on google, bing, yahooo and you can check where your website(s) rank for these KW’s. It give you data in daily, weekly, and monthly position changes as well.

This is a great tool to let you know when your site is dropping in the SERP’s, rather than figuring it out 2 weeks later. Anyway, this tool is free and just takes a few minutes to setup. Check it out here: DP KW Tool

Google Insights – This is another great google tool that show search data dating back to 2004. With this tool you can compare search volume for phrases, keywords, searches by country, etc. Just a ton of data for us to use. If you are not sure if “Whatever keyword” gets enough traffic to make it worth your while to rank for, then this is a tool that will give you an idea. This is one of those tools that I have not figured everything out with, but I’m going to keep playing with it and seeing what I can learn. Google Insights tool

Search Browser – This last tool may seem odd to some people, but I think if you check it out you will see why I like it, and of course it is free to use. Search Browser allows you to see your website as most search engines see your website. There is always so much talk of “My site is SEO optimized” and every time I hear this I cringe a little, and I’m sure somewhere an SEO dies – But seriously, this is a simple way to see if you have an big code issues, missing alt tags, etc. Simple but effective for sure. Search Browser

I guess that is really the great thing about being in this business, you actually WANT to work and make things happen. I’ve never been what you would call a “handy man” and I’m actually forbidden by my wife to do any type of home repairs or car repairs. Anytime I even attempt things like that, it ends in utter disaster for my whole family lol.

The Radio show – I’m always looking for gaps to fill in the world, thats sort of what we should be doing as marketers. Over the last couple months I’ve been listening to a ton of podcasts and radios shows. My XM radio usually stays on some type of talk radio. It occurred to me that with all the Poker Podcasts, SEO Podcasts, and Affiliate  Radio shows that we didn’t have any type of Poker SEO radio shows or podcasts. So, I chatted with my good buddy Randy Ray and Jeremy and decided to fill this gap.

Now over the last 4 years I’ve learned quite a bit about marketing and SEO, I’m not Randy Ray or Michael Martinez but I make money from organic search engine marketing so I guess I’m qualified enough Also with Jeremy as a partner and the contacts we have to bring on real SEO’s and marketers I really hope this show will provide people with something of value.

Learning Adsense and Email Marketing

One thing I’ve really been enjoying lately is Adsense and learning Email Marketing. I think Email Campaigns are very underused in our industry and the potential is huge. I use Aweber which is an opt in service which takes most of the work out of setting things up. Greg recently setup an Ebook Email Marketing Campaign on Felt Poker that revolves around “Double or Nothing Tournaments“. This has been a huge success and the leads being generated are very valuable. This whole campaign is a great example of targeting a Key Phrase and attacking it form all angles. We have several Articles about this subject, a close to 30 page Ebook, email capture, and several follow up emails and broadcasts.

If you have not ever looked at Aweber, this program is cheap at $19 a month (cheaper for an annual membership) and it actually teaches you to conduct a proper campaign. I encourage everyone to check it our here: Aweber – <— Affiliate Link

The Twilight Project

Unless you are living under a rock, you have probably heard about the second Twilight Saga Movie that came out last week called “New Moon”. Almost a year ago my sister in law read the books and kept telling us how huge it was going to be. So being the opportunist I am, we decided to make a “Twilight” website to see where it took us. Unfortunately I knew jack about anything outside of gaming, but I like new challenges so we plugged along anyway. My wife and Sis in Law (Julie). They wrote a ton of content (over 500 posts and pages to date) and within a month we had 2k in traffic. The big issue is that we didn’t know how to monetize it very well. So we tried Amazon, Adsense, CJ.com, etc.

Then the owner of “Kick Ass Poker” chatted with em about a product called PHPbay and totally changed my perspective, of course Ebay took 4 months to finally accept me into their aff program. But once they did we started doing better. Of course with 30+ website, a full time day job, and a family which includes 6 kids, I couldn’t focus much on the website. So I let Julie and Ranna run it. They did good selling a few items a day, ebay was doing ok, and adsense averaged about $2 a day for months. Most of this time we have been getting 3k-5k in visits daily, but only making $400 or so a month. Then during the summer we just neglected the website.

Fast Forward to the start of November ‘09 and I got everyone together, New Moon was fixing to be out in the theaters and I wanted to either get this site going or sell it. So we came up with a plan which included a new faster loading template, plans for content, SEO changes, etc. Within a week of these changes we started to see great increases. Also keep in mind that Ebay now does CPC and not a % of sales, which really blows, so we had to change focus from ebay to CJ, Amazon, Hot Topic, and Adsense.

Anyway, the new movie came out, and the day after we had close to 40k visits that day which crashed my server and made us realize we needed to get serious. So now we are, we’re selling about 1k a day at CJ, Amazon, etc and adsense has increased to almost $20 a day. It just took commitment, a plan, and of course goals. We are averaging 7k visits a day and we are doing an email campaign that is snagging close to 100 emails a day. With the holiday buying just starting, we are in a great position to make bank!

Anyway, luck is with me once again. Greg interning is just another list of awesome things that happens to me. I just hope I am helping him get to where he wants to be as well!

As most of the readers of this site know, I joined the RakeUpdate.com Team about 6 months ago overseeing their marketing and development team. RakeUpdate has been around since before Rakeback was invested, dating all the way back to the first days of Party Poker and Empire. Over the years they built a solid foundation of players and sub-affiliate partners. Until I came aboard RU relied on player to player referrals and word of mouth, and exposure on our 2+2 Support forum which gives us great exposure to our player base and Partner base.

We have yet to actually launch a full marketing campaign as we are holding off until our new software comes out of beta, the down side is we have some of the slowest programmer known to man The positive thing is that because of my experience in the industry and the reputation of RU we get new Sub-Affiliate Partners every day, and 100% of them contact us first which is extraordinary! We are quickly growing our Partner Base once again by word of mouth only. The software will be out of beta soon and we will be launching a very nice marketing campaign that I’m super excited about.

Why RakeUpdate Works?

Recently I realized WHY RU has quickly becoming the Rakeback Provider of choice. Also to be clear this post in not intended as a sales pitch, more observations of a very different type of poker niche where competition is very fierce to the point where other companies take the competition very personal. The fact is RU works because we are not greedy and we want actual “Partners” instead of “Plain Subs”.

I actually got some hate mail from one of our competitors saying that we are giving “Affiliates Partners (Subs) too much money” and they think there should be a cap on how much affiliates can earn? <——- Erm What? Excuse me? Sorta greedy isn’t it?

RakeUpdate

• The Highest Sub-Affiliate Margins – Usually 3-5 Times that of the other companies
• Anytime Cashouts for Sub Affiliates and Player
• 5 Tier Referrals
• $150,000 In Monthly Promotions
• 24/7 Live support
• Design help, SEO Help
• We do whatever it takes to help our partners succeed!

Other Rakeback Providers

• Low Sub-Affiliate Margins – usually 5%-7% Which is very greedy and 3-5 Times less than RU
• Monthly Cashouts Only
• Email Support – Complaints of Delays
• Good Room Selection
• Good Software Solutions for New Subs

Greed Kills

As you can see above, the MOST important aspect of all of this is the $Money our Partners can make. Good Software can only get you so far, players and affiliates want to make the most money. So why are our competitors only giving them 1/3 of what they should be getting? The answer is simple, Greed drives them.

I’ve also been accused by our competitors of “poaching” sub-affiliates which simply isn’t true. The awesome fact is that we don’t need to do business that way, because after Affiliates realize they could have been making 3-5 Times the Profit they have been getting, they get pissed at the other guys and bail & never to look back. I’m sure it might be more comforting to think that some like me is “poaching” as they call it, isn’t it always easier to blame someone else for your shortcomings? We are in a business, and sub-affiliate partners want to make money.

Business Ethics 101

Having my ethics questioned is new to me. I do not have an extensive marketing background outside of the net, but as a company offering a service or product, should we not be pursuing potential clients? Isn’t that what happens in business every day? My theory is that if you are giving your customers the best rates, best service, best everything, then you have customers for life! If you are losing clients for any of those reasons, you need to take a serious look at your long term goals.

Once again just for the sake of humor, I have to point out that up to now, myself or anyone on my team has ever once contacted a potential customer or partner out of the blue. We simply have not had too. I am easy to find and get a hold of; I’m am online at least 18 hours a day and regularly give out my cell number. If I was our competition, I would be nervous because if their customers are jumping ship now, it will get ever worse when we ARE doing active marketing.

So I think I am at the point in my affiliate career where I am seriously thinking about losing my safety net and going full time into internet marketing. I say internet marketing and no “poker affiliating” because I have some great non gaming websites as well. I don’t restrict myself to being just a poker affiliate.

As you may or may not know, I have been in the internet marketing business for at least 3 solid years. At the same time I have still been working for a very large US corporation that has treated me very well. I have great insurance, an annual bonus, a fat salary, and a kick ass office. I do legal affairs and general compliance. Sounds boring but its really not. I’ve done the same type work for the past 10 years either working for someone else or working for myself.

I live in a very small town in the heart of the Ozark Mountains, jobs like the one are very rare and leaving this job scares my wife, and scares me. This job which only accounts for 40% of my income at the moment. My sites could all get nuked tomorrow and I would still live well. I think that is one of the scary parts, thinking that google could nuke my rankings tomorrow makes me very uncomfortable no matter how unlikely it is. I own 30 websites and get income from them all, but most of my online income comes from two websites, Felt Poker and LooseChangePoker. The chances of both of them being nuked is slim. There is nothing shady about those sites, so not much to worry about.

Now obviously if I was a single guy, the choice would be an easy one. I would be a self employed internet marketer. As it is, I have 6 kids and a great wife who married me when I was flat broke. She is worried about our future if leave this company, and I share her anxiety about it. 2009 has been a great year for us as a family and financially. Leaving my job could be the biggest mistake of my life.

On the flip side, my internet income has been growing each month of 2009, with each month better than the last. I’m 31 years old, and work from 6am to 12am at least most every night of the week and sometimes into the weekend. I do this because I know that is what it takes to make things happen. I have to out work the other guy if I want to get ahead, while the other guys are out enjoying themselves, I stay home and work. I do it because I love it, and I love the satisfaction of watching something I built become useful to other people. I try to provide some of value on the internet, this concept has seem to been lost with most websites built now, especially in the gaming niche.

Right now I essentially work three jobs, two full time and one part time. I work for my company which is me being on call 24/7 and on site 60+ hours a week, I work and have an investment in Simian Play Corporation which owns Rakeupdate, RakeReduction, and several other large websites. Officially I am the head of marketing Marketing for Simian Play. Also, I have 30+ websites of my own which need constant TLC.

My wife finally quit her job with the State to help with our websites, but she needed to make some money of her own to feel like she was “Contributing” so she now writes content for several large websites and has been little help to me in months. Although we had a chat and she is pushing back her writing to help me more before I collapse. Anyway, I work all the time, I’m tired all the time, and I’m not sure I can continue to work three jobs.

Crossroads

This is such a cross roads for me, I was a high school drop out and I now make more a year than anyone I know personally, Coaches, Teachers, Executives, etc. I am so lucky it is sic! By all accounts I should have ended up either in jail or at some factory working for minimum wage. Not considering quitting a job most people would LOVE to have. Especially with our crazy economy and a President which insists on “spreading the wealth”. Yet the other part of me hates working a 9-5 knowing my potential income is pretty restricted. I know I do not want to work for corporate America until I hit 70 or w/e. I just cannot do it.

My theory is that if I could work full time on my sites and growing the income of “Simian Play” where I get a % of profits as well as a salary, I could make double what I make now. Probably even triple. Of course there is always the chance that I fail miserably and then I will put my family in an awful position and probably never find a decent job around here again.

So, once again I am at a crossroads in my life. I know this decision will be a defining moment in my life which will affect me and my family for the rest of our lives. I can choose to leave my security net, or I can stay with it and wonder “what if” forever. Of course I can also try and continue to do what I have been doing and hope I don’t die of exhaustion. This is a great example where I have to balance what I want to do, with what is right for me to do. I know that no matter what is decided, my wife will support my decision 100%.

Anyway, I’m goign to be seeking for wisdom of some of my most trusted friends, some of who have faced this decision before. I will also welcome any input anyone reading this has.

• Hard Work
• Time Management
• Networking Skills
• Backstabbing
• Drama

The last two are the ones most of us hate. In any business there are winners and loser. The winnings want to continue to be winners and the loser usually fall into two categories.

1. They have the desire but do not yet have the skills needed to succeed

2. They are lazy, easily distracted and spend far too much time resenting the winners.

The good news, is that people can learn the skills needed to succeed, they can train themselves into new habits of hard work, educating themselves, and learning to be a success. You can learn to be a winner if you have the desire. One thing you have to do to accomplish this is too let go of the jealously, envy, and resentment. You have to understand that successful people didn;t get where they are by wasting time on issues they cannot control, or by engaging in un-productive actions.

In the corporate world people are always jockeying for position with the high-ups, sometimes that means finger pointing at others and their failures and short comings. The corporate world liek the affiliate would routinely monitors their competiton and tries to one up the other. As silly as it may seem, I’ve learned that the business world is actually more professilonal than most small business owners and especially affiliate marketers.

The affiliate business and especially gaming is filled with man many shady people that have failed at most things in their life. What usually happens is they are either too lazy to get a real job, turn to internet marketing hoping to make money. Usually they lack the skills to have a regular job/business  and are desperate to find a way to make money without doing real work. The other side is smart people, who although they have good skills in other areas, want to make money online but again lack the self discipline to put in the hours and work. These type usually are at the bottom of the affiliate food chain and are the constant spammers, or junk site operators.

The rest of affiliates are usually the well intention and hard working group that is willing to put in the time, effort, and self discipline to eventually make money. I would suggest that less that 15% of current gaming affiliates actually make money. Everyone else is still clinging to the dream and hoping it one day happens. The cold hard fact is that most of them will fail for a number of reasons.

Over the last couple months I’ve unfortunately been involved in a bit of silly drama that has really bothered me. I now see that this was a great wake-up call and opportunity. I have been accused by a group of people of being an asshole (hard to argue that lol) but also accused me of being a bully, and a self centered person. Those I don’t agree with. What I foudn most interesting is that the same people who over the years have not hesitated to ask for my help, advice, or opinion were some of the same people jumping on the bandwagon. It is true that people love to do the easy thing and go along with others mindlessly.

None of those people knew the facts, asked for the facts, and probably were not interested in the facts. They love drama, and the feeling of being a part of “groupthink”. Now I wish I could take all the credit for realizing that these people are two-faced, wannabe affilaites without a clue. But thankfully the true friends and assoctiates I have pointed this out to me and even offered to let the truth of some of the situations know. While I know this would have made me feel better, and just the fact they we willing to speak up for me made me feel great. I knew that feeding into the drama queen bullshit would just be pointless as we all have real business to run.

Since the first incident, I recently saw another one come up. Where a well know industry hustler decided to one again call me out for being a bully and a 2+2 like bully moderator. Once again I was tempted to feed into it, but once again my better judgment told me I had nothing to gain. I know who I am, and at the end of the day I have work to do and a business to run.

Finally, this week I saw another affiliate or should I saw wannabe affiliate decide to take issues with events that are more that 4 months old. Out of the blue, no rhyme or reason to it. Once again I have to ask myself, “Do these people not have anything better to do with their time”. The obvious answer is NO they don’t lol. Their businesses apparently suck enough that they spend their time trying to force their opinions on others. Also I want to add that I made thge decision to remove and block a ton of people from my skype, IM, etc.

Over the years I’ve allowed people to contact me at will, but something my good friend and fellow affiliate pointed out to me, is that most of these people are “takers” and they take, take, take, and have nothing to offer in return. They use people, and eventually they will fade out of the business anyway because they cannot focus on important aspects of running a business. I like to call these people the “crusaders” They are always looking for a cause to fight. IE – 60 Day Rule, PS FPP’s, Iframes, etc. There is always a cause which distracts them.

Anyway back to the point of this post, in the affiliate business or the normal business world you will be faced with many tough decisions and even more distractions. Make sure you are putting yourself into a position to have success, and keep your eye on your goals. Being a winner brings you resentment, jealousy, and people that want/need to see you fail so they feel better about themselves. Do not be one of those people, and keep doing the hard work.