My Affiliate Story
My affiliate, who I’ll simply call “my affiliate” was well read when it came to using the Internet to put a little change in our pockets. When I came up with the idea to start a website he started generating ideas on how to market it and even better how to make money off of it. That made the creation of our poker information site that much more fun, because I knew my Poker Affiliate would offer both of us a financial return in the future.
Sure enough when we stared Donkeys and Dragons Poker Dot Net, my affiliate already had us three advertisers. Even better they were content specific advertisers that focused on Texas Hold em Poker. All we had to do was send them traffic and/or customers and they’d pay us for the visitors. My affiliate was a busy, industrious man who didn’t stop there.
While he was out selling our site, I was responsible for the content which centered on poker’s bad plays that famous poker players made, bad players, and for a short while bad beats. The readership on our message board quickly let me and my affiliate know that bad beats were bad content. As I continued to build content that brought in interest and developed a following, my affiliate was able to approach other companies about advertising. If I really wanted to confuse you I’d tell you how my affiliate started us in affiliate marketing programs. I don’t want to confuse you but he did just that.
Now, when we steered traffic to sites and our readers spent money there or enrolled in an affiliate program site we got a piece of the money they spent. For a while that was very lucrative. Then it seemed like everybody had either found their way to those sites before, or were already familiar with the products, and the affiliate marketing programs started to dry up.
Now, the focus of Donkeys and Dragons shifted a little bit. In my haste to get rich quick, I put less emphasis on the quality of the content and we spent more effort trying to solicit future customers for our advertisers. This turned off many of our devoted following and instead of gaining market share we lost it. As the site’s popularity lessened so too did the new traffic.
One day, we had a very honest look at what we had become and we realized Donkeys and Dragons Poker was no longer a site featuring funny anecdotes and a community of like minded poker fans, instead it was simply a shill site, thin on content and heavy on advertising. We weren’t very original because much of what we had done was the same banners and branding on all the other sites. So we adjusted on the fly.
My affiliate took a back seat to me again. I upped the quality of the materials, featuring video clips, and better moderation on the message board, and focused on content. I brought back a sense of community and loyalty to the site. The readers, now happier with the content, came back to us, and things were good again.
Only problem is we weren’t making much money. The conundrum any popular site with an affiliate running affiliate programs invariably faces. Just how much do you sell and how much do you entertain. You can do a little of both, but if you do too much of either you aren’t making enough money to survive. Donkeys and Dragons Poker hopefully has found, now, a happy medium.
The readers don’t like to be thought of as products for a site to sell. They will follow your advice on a product if you’ve proven yourself to be knowledgeable and shown the integrity to turn some of the potential advertisers down but they won’t blindly click every link you put before them. We didn’t invent Huffington Post but as it stands Donkeys and Dragons is getting popular all over again and this time we won’t waste our market share by selling out–completely.