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Being a poker affiliate is hard. Being a rakeback affiliate is harder. Trying to offer competitive rates, battling against the authority sites with their $100k+ rake races while trying to keep your customers happy with responsive customer support.
Well, being a rakeback affiliate WAS hard. It’s not anymore.
This is thanks to a company called Poker Affiliate Solutions, and they’re not just for rakeback. Basically, you sign up at the Poker Affiliate Solutions website, and suddenly you have the ability to sign up at any poker room via them to promote. You get better rates, you get the highest rakeback rates available, as well as high cost per acquisition deals.
And you get more. Much more.
Poker Affiliate Solutions isn’t just a fancy name – it’s the SOLUTION for Poker Affiliates. They handle all customer service. Through their website you can promote all the big huge rake races, and make it your own website. You have access to a variety of free bankroll promotions, and so much more.
Poker Affiliate Solutions really is one of the most ground breaking things to hit the poker affiliate world in a long, long time.
Now I’ve personally never really needed to use a service like Poker Affiliate Solutions although I have played with and researched their system, and I get asked by affiliates about it all the time, so I felt the best solution was to sit down with the guys from Poker Affiliate Solutions themselves. I had the great pleasure of sitting down with Tony and Tim to discuss Poker Affiliate Solutions, and provide more information about the awesome company. Tony is the head of the affiliate team at Poker Affiliate Solutions (PAS for short), and will answer the first five questions. Tim, who has been in the rakeback business since 2004 and has worked with PAS since 2008, will answer the second set of questions. Tim is the rakeback affiliate manager at PAS.
1: Can you briefly summarize up Poker Affiliate Solutions, and your history in the poker affiliate market in general.
The owner of PAS, Chris Carlson, saw a niche in providing affiliates with turnkey rakeback sites after years of running his retail rakeback site Raketracker.com. Rake Tracker was the first rakeback site to launch on the Internet in 2004. Our parent company also owns YourPokerCash.com, offering no deposit bankrolls since 2005. PAS was conceptualized approximately three years ago. I started working at PAS in early 2008. I had previously worked for a company who owned several merchant websites. When Chris approached me to head up the affiliate team at PAS, I couldn’t pass up on the chance to work with the team here. I had played poker for many years and the change to market and promote a product I love was too good of a chance to pass up.2: What does your job involve on a daily basis?Lots of emails and IM conversations!In all seriousness, I service PAS Publishers from the day they sign up. I assist new Publishers in getting their websites set up on our system and coordinating their design integration with our design staff. Once they have launched, I am their go to guy if they have any questions about their CMS, rakeback offers, player payments, and other areas involved in the day to day operations of a rakeback site. I work with a great team of programmers and designers and our Player Support Rep PokerAddict (Of TwoPlusTwo fame) is the best in the business.3: Obviously Poker Affiliate Solutions offers the maximum rakeback rates for the majority of online poker rooms online. However there’s a lot more to being a rakeback affiliate than being able to offer 27% rakeback at Full Tilt Poker, etc. What else is involved in being a rakeback affiliate, which Poker Affiliate Solutions can make easier?With the invention of rakeback caps (which we helped put in place) the competition is driven by added value: Player Support, Promotions, Payment Options, Referral Programs, and a trusted brand. Players are more informed than they were 5 years ago. They shop around for the best promotions to add cash in their pocket along with rakeback. Player Promotions has been the craze of late. Rake Races and free subscriptions to poker schools are two of the biggest added incentives for rakeback players. Poker Affiliate Solutions set up deals with Deuces Cracked and Leggo Poker that allow all of our Publisher’s players to access their videos at certain MGR (monthly grossed rake) levels. All of our Publisher’s players are also eligible for $400,000 (And growing) in monthly rake races, rake chases, and freerolls. One of the biggest hassles of running a rakeback site is player support and payments. We handle all of that and more. Each PAS Publisher receives a backend suite where they can access their player’s stats, affiliate revenue, trends, and our Content Management System. The PAS support staff sends out newsletters alerting players of new offers, promotions, and relevant rakeback news.4: So a new affiliate, who has never done internet marketing of any kind before, decides he wants to enter the rakeback industry, using all the offers available at Poker Affiliate Solutions. What advice would you give to them in regard to getting started?Find a niche and build your site around it. That could be a country, region, poker game, keyword, network, poker training, or poker tool/software. We recently just introduced CPA and non-Rakeback revenue share offers to the PAS Network. Determine the kind of player you are going to market to and set up your commission model accordingly.5: Many new affiliates I speak to are not too knowledgeable when it comes to HTML, CSS etc. How easy is it for affiliates to implement this onto your website?We believe we have a system that scales to fit the user regardless of their level of experience. You won’t need to know any code at all to get started and we offer a wide array of free templates that can be installed with a mouse click. These templates are complete websites that a ready to go out of the box and require no customization. Those users who are new at developing websites might want to start by editing text on the more frequently visited pages using our text editor. Slightly more advanced users may choose to modify some colors and perhaps install a custom logo or header. Experienced website designers won’t be handicapped by this accessibility, and can customize nearly every single aspect of their websites using our advanced code editor. Regardless of your level experience our knowledgeable support staff is always happy to assist and our support forum boasts an active user base and a library of thousands of posts. Affiliates who already have websites can benefit from our free matching service, where our web design experts will craft a custom match just for you.6: What if an affiliate has an existing player base but can’t handle the customer support etc. Is it possible for them to merge those players into the PAS system?In 2004 I signed up for my first affiliate account with Empire Poker. I stared out promoting free bankrolls and eventually moved into the Rakeback niche with other programs. I have been operating my own Rakeback site for years but was having a hard time keeping up with support, payments, stat tracking, etc. The design staff at PAS was able to transfer my site seamlessly. All of my images, content, and feel were ported over. The only noticeable visual changes were the user backend, which was greatly improved with the PAS software.7: PAS offers CPA, Revenue Share and Hybrid Options. What are your opinions on these options, and what would you recommend a new affiliate take?I will give a quick rundown on what each option is with some pros and cons.Revenue Share – This is the classic way to promote online poker. As an affiliate you will earn a percentage of the rake your signups generate. This is also considered the riskiest because it is heavily based on how much your players play. If you send a new player to a poker room, they deposit $50 dollars and lose it within 5 hands you are looking at an affiliate payment of less than 25 cents. However, this is also the form of promotion with the most upside. If you can convert a few grinders you could find yourself making thousands of dollars every month.
CPA aka Cost Per Action – A simple flat fee paid out whenever your website sends a real money player to a poker room, in many cases around $100. This is an easy way to make a lot of money if your website can drive a lot of traffic to a poker room. The downside with promoting CPA trackers is that you are limiting your potential. If you send a room a player that generates thousands of dollars in rake you will never see a dime of it. You are earning $100 per qualified real money player, no more no less.
Hybrid aka CPA/MGR – Hybrid trackers combines features of both revenue share and CPA trackers. As an affiliate you will receive a onetime fee combined with a small percentage of the MGR generated by your players.
8: What if I want to offer rakeback for a poker room that you don’t list, but they do allow rakeback?At PAS our goal is to serve our publishers. If there is a rakeback room that is not amongst our offerings and one of our publishers would like to promote it just contact either Tony or Me (Tim). We will make a concerted effort to add the poker room to our list of partners in a reasonable amount of time.
At Poker Affiliate Solutions we go the extra mile for our publishers.
9: Obviously there have been a lot of changes in both the online poker and rakeback industries since 2004. Where do you see rakeback going within the NEXT 5 years?Much has changed since 2004. With software solutions such as PAS anyone can get a poker affiliate rakeback website up in a matter of minutes. I suspect we will see more and more traditional poker affiliates entering into the rakeback niche because of how easy we have made it here at PAS.
I think we are also seeing more creative rakeback sites. Take Deuces Cracked for example. They were the first to combine the poker coaching subscription model and rakeback all into one. The partnership between DC and PAS has been extremely successful for both parties. I look forward to seeing more and more publishers come up with truly unique business models for their rakeback sites over the course of the next five years.
10: As is natural in any industry, since the launch of Poker Affiliate Solutions we’ve seen some competing sites appear. What does PAS offer that the other sites don’t?What does PAS offer that the competing poker affiliate networks don’t? Other than the best affiliate support in the industry from Tony and I? In all seriousness, I have yet to see one of our competitors offer the wealth of features we do. We offer fully branded customizable automated rakeback websites. Full API integration if you have an existing base of users from a forum or training site. Revenue share and CPA trackers for non-rakeback rooms like Party Poker and Everest Poker.Our biggest selling point for a lot of poker affiliates is our payment processing. There is never any need to chase down multiple checks at PAS. You promote all of your poker rooms in one place, receive stats all in one place, and you get paid in one place.End of Interview
As you can see – the guys at PAS are amazing people. They love what they do, and they offer an absolutely phenomenal service to make life easier for poker affiliates. If you’re looking to sign up as a poker affiliate, I would highly recommend at least starting out with the PAS service, as it will make your life a hell of a lot easier.
Sign up at Poker Affiliate Solutions Today – Click Here.
This article was written on April 21, 2010 however all articles are looked at on a monthly basis and updated to keep them relevant.
If you need to contact Graeme, please see his Contact Page. If you are an affiliate manager wanting promoted please see this page.
