Hello,

I am looking for some insight on marketing. I have a friend that has started an online Poker site. It is strickly poker, no casino games. He has done everything from banners to surfing forums. What suggestions can you offer him to become successful and increase his clientel.

Thanks

Tom

Hey Tom. Welcome to DaniWeb. I had to edit your post because there is no site-specific talk permitted in the Internet Marketing forums (since spam has become such a problem). I would try Google AdWords - they're good at getting conversions if that's what you're after, and it seems it is.

I have owned casino and gambling related website and they are profitable but the only problem is marketing them. It does involve a large amount of time and money to market a gambling related site. The way i mostly got visitors was to use PPC campains on popular ppc search engines such as search feed and 7 search it is a very expensive set of keywords to market on the top resaults are usuallly $4 per click and even sometimes $5+.

Good Luck

if you can get your site up in top 10 for main keywords, you will make good money. One of my pal is in this industry and he told me about it.

Try marketing the site to websites/forum with a main demographic of college aged persons.

As far as I know Google and Overture banned all casino and gambling related ads, at least in parts of Europe.

But I came across another way of advertising, used for gambling sites: Bumvertising! (Which is a trademark already of ***peeep***

http://www.bumvertising.com/images/terrybum.jpg

raffzahn

Google and overture have banned gambling related adwords advertising but google have gambling related search listings where you are able seo your website to gain top results but it is a vey competative. You are able to buy ppc advertings from revenue pilot, 7 search and other popular ppc search engines but overture has banned some gambling related advertisements.

Hi Tom,

Currently, I'm having the opposite problem. I'm a marketing strategist looking for an online poker site to hire him. *laugh*

What I would suggest is to first stop and think. What makes your friend's poker site different from all the rest? If it is nothing, change that. Find a niche that no one is currently targeting and have him go after that.

Once a niche is decided upon, find out the publications and websites that cater to that niche. Advertise only on them.

Does the niche have conventions? If so, rent a spot in their vendor hall and have your friend promote his website there. Rent enough space to have plenty of room to set up at least ten laptops for people to test out your friend's poke site. Sponsor a freeroll tournament at the convention for anyone with a wireless laptop. Get the con organizers to promote this to those that buy their tickets in advance.

Get a fresh mailing list on your niche market and send out direct mail postcards to them. Your headline on these cards should connect your site to the niche market so the receivers read beyond that headline.

If your friend can spend at least $10,000 a month on advertising, recommend he hire a marketer to handle his marketing. $5,000 for the marketer's salary and $5,000+ for the marketing budget the marketer is to manage. Have performance incentives to spur the marketer to make the site a roaring success. Keep the incentives simple. Something along the lines that everytime the site's gross revenue doubles, the marketer's salary doubles.

However, do realize that with marketers, what you pay is what you get. Unless the marketer is looking to go into your industry from another (such as myself), the good ones don't come cheap. The more your friend can offer to pay them, the better caliber of applicants he will receive. And marketers being marketers know their own value. But you can get good ones if you offer good performance incentives, such as what I mentioned in the last paragraph.

But if he budget is limited, tell what it is per month (rounding up to the nearest thousand) and perhaps I might be able to suggest some ideas.

$10,000 a month advertising!!!! That's a lot of money. Do gambling sites make that much money to justify spending that much money advertising?

The small affiliate sites normally don't (and usually fail because they don't) but the bigger sites do. And $10,000 is a very small marketing budget. That's only $120,000 a year. The online casino that I did the interview with last week is up for spending between $100,000 to $10,000,000 per advertising campaign.

And, yes, the online casinos make more than enough money to justify spending these amounts. I wouldn't be interested in working for one if they didn't. I am however willing to work for one that is on the small side at the moment but with funding and the desire to grow bigger. I fully expect to be the only person in their marketing department initially but, as I grow their company, I will grow the marketing department to meet the needs of the online casino.

But sad to say, it takes money to make money. Even if I did a PR-only campaign, it would cost money. Nothing is free. However, I can see a poker site getting started on a shoe string and slowly building itself to the point where they could afford someone like to me to take them to the next level.