GPWA Times Magazine - Issue 26 - October 2013

Within a year and before I could even land my first full-time teaching position, I was making more money with poker marketing than I could have made teaching. It was a pretty easy decision to just plunge full time into poker marketing at that point. How long did it take for you to start earning money? Which site is now the most profitable? After launch- ing Poker-Strategy.Org in Oct. 2003, we earned our first $1,000 from Fortune Affil- iates and got paid in Jan. 2004. Not shabby for someone still living on pizza and ramen noodles purchased with student loans! Our main site now is nodepositbonus.com. Sadly, practically every other site we have is incredibly dusty and in need of major updating or outright relaunch. We’ll get to them eventually. No deposit bonuses are tough for affili- ates because players looking for these types of deals aren’t usually looking to make a deposit. Have you been able to find players with value through your no deposit site? Being successful in the no deposit casino niche is all about volume. Player value tends to be below average, but if you can send enough “below aver- age” players, you can certainly make an “above average” income. We do see some larger players frequently and a whale ev- ery now and then. Success also depends on how seriously the casinos are taking our traffic. Some work hard to convert our leads. Focal Click stands out. Their ability to convert, retain and pull multiple deposits from our traffic is excel- lent. Some programs just look at no deposit traffic as garbage traffic, and so they don’t domuch to convert it, and their results from no deposit campaigns match their efforts. No deposit poker is a bit of a different ani- mal. With this, you are looking to set players up with a “bankroll” and give them strate- gies, tips and tools to become better play- ers. Better players put in more volume and rake and have a much longer life cycle. My own example is proof. I went from a $10 no deposit bonus in 2003 to eventual Iron Man status at Full Tilt before Black Friday. Our most successful no deposit bonus pok- er player was World Series of Poker win- ner Daniel Kelly. When he joined us, we had no idea he was 14 or 15, and we gave him a $25 free account at Absolute Poker. Within weeks, he had built it to thousands of dollars and was playing at the highest limit tables against the likes of Mark Seif and other pros there at Absolute. He bor- rowed the account of another one of our members who was “of age.” He played as “SpiritSlayer” and had a picture of Shrek as his avatar. It was just amazing watching him splash around the big chips with pro- fessional players. They would have been floored had they known that the kid on the other end was too young to grow facial hair. At any rate, he outgrew our “no deposit” bonuses pretty quickly, and moved on to become one of our better rakeback play- ers at Full Tilt before he started playing more or less full time at PokerStars. He went on to win a WSOP bracelet in 2010, and has had quite a run this year, too. Dan Kelly is, by far, the biggest success story of someone getting into online poker via no deposit bonuses and free bankrolls. Anyway, to sum up, no deposit casino is about volume and a casino that will work just as hard on their end to convert the leads. No deposit poker is more about the affiliate’s ability to connect with the play- ers and groom as many as possible into “good players” who move up in limits as their skills increase. Keith and his wife, Leslie, with their children on Easter Sunday. 47 GPWA Affiliate Interview Series