A recent study by Poker Players Research (PPR), a market research company specializing in the poker industry, shows the growing importance of women in the poker market.  Female poker players are set to grow to a third of real money poker players by 2011 and are a key focus for operators in Europe, new research has revealed.

The Poker Players Research (PPR) research shows that a quarter of real money poker players are women, but that the average female’s rake per session is currently half that of men due to lower stakes and shorter sessions on the tables. However greater loyalty and lifetime value is being seen by some operators as potentially offering a better return on investment, particularly at a time when fierce competition for poker’s existing male demographic is sending player acquisition costs spiraling.

With this emerging and lucrative market of female poker players, several poker operators have been successfully targeting this demographic. For example, Ladbrokes Poker has done the following to target this market:

• Ladbrokes offers a female-targeted site called Ladybrokes.com
• Ladybrokes Poker offers a fun, friendly, chatty environment for female poker players who want to play for prizes for free.
• New players still benefit from a 2000% welcome bonus as well as lots of fun prizes to be won
• Video tutorials offered online outline what attracts women from all walks of life to the game of poker and why they play at Ladbrokes, with some great top tips from some of Ladbrokes’ top female players

Being aware of the rising trend of female poker players, many online poker sites have focused their attention on their female clientele by hosting ladies-only tournaments and providing plenty of information on how to play the game and regulations in tournament play.

Over the past ten years, poker among women has exploded in popularity and over the past five years there has been at least a double in the number of female players who play poker.  Those who want to succeed in the affiliate poker space will have to service niche markets, and based on its predicted growth, the female poker demographic is one to target.

Be sure to check back every day this week for more tips, tools and promotions, as we celebrate Poker week on the iGaming Affiliate Marketing Blog. And, be sure to take part in our celebratory freeroll, happening November 13^th on betweendrinks.com.

Be sure to visit the Income Access blog every day this week for the next installment in this informative series.

This means that making it simple for people to navigate and explore with their mobile device is absolutely essential. Marketers who are able to adjust their campaigns to target users with these devices will be able to reap the rewards of getting in on this new mobile opportunity while it is still emerging. And a good part of this opportunity is related to online gambling.

Europe and Asia will most likely make up close to 80% of the market share for mobile gambling, while the U.S. will make up the majority of the remainder. Mobile lotteries are sure to be a big part of the revenues created here, with sports betting and casino-style gaming following closely.

Adjusting marketing campaigns to the needs of these people will target those who are already ensconced in the “mobile lifestyle,” and will cement your position in a growing market. Knowing how and where to target your text ads, as well as finding out about what the requirements are for image-based ads will help you get ahead of your competitors.

Within the Income Access affiliate program, several of our operators are offering mobile gambling to consumers. One of them, the mFortune Mobile Casino, offers poker, blackjack, roulette, slots, bingo, and even allows players to use a Pay-By-Phone option. Also, Bet Tracker has a mobile tool that allows users to view updated stats in real time.

With operators making it this easy to capitalize on mobile markets, it seems very worthwhile to put the effort into accessing this marketplace. For more information on how to get in on these opportunities, feel free to contact us at affiliates [at] incomeaccess [dot] com.

The prize is a €10,000 package including main event buy-in to the Aussie Millions, 10 days accommodation and €2,150 for travel and spending money. Who wouldn’t want to be in sunny Melbourne to enjoy the Australian summer?

To be eligible, players must join for Freeroll Friday on the 13th November 2009. The top 10 winners will be qualified for a free entry into the daily satellites. For more details and a full list of terms visit Aussie Millions at Globetpoker.

Imagine the publicity for your site if it is one of your members that wins this wonderful prize! If you are not already a member, sign up for the Globet affiliate program and you will be eligible for 50% rev share for the first month. Couple that with this great promotion and you could be earning great commissions in no time.

The Aussie Millions, you have to be in it, to win it!

As an industry average most poker rooms rely on affiliates for about 30-40% of their business Therefore, affiliate Programs are seen as an essential for any established online Poker operator. Typically, affiliate marketing has been strictly thought of as an acquisition channel however affiliate programs can contribute to both the acquisition and retention of players. An affiliate program should be thought of as an operator’s extended sales force and as such they should be given the tools they need to meet the company’s goals.

New poker rooms or those focused on acquisition of new players will be looking to attract affiliates to promote their poker room. Not just any affiliates either – they will want to partner with affiliates who are connected to a large network of players. Wanting to partner with affiliates means thinking about what affiliates are looking for. Affiliates want to partner with the right operators, those who can provide a large network of players so that referred players have people to play with, attractive incentives, a good brand name and commissions. In essence, the affiliate needs to partner with a program they feel good about selling. As such, the affiliate program managers and marketing department of the operator should have a clear list of the incentives being offered to affiliates to attract and retain, six examples appear below.

Tips to attract Affiliates to join your affiliate program
1. Friendly terms and conditions
2. Paid commissions for the life time of player
3. Attractive commission structures such a hybrid commission structure of CPA and Rev Share,
4. Consistently paying affiliates every month
5. Attractive affiliate and player promotions
6. Quality customer relations management to keep their players happy and playing poker.

Affiliates these days are savvier in attracting new players than they were a number of years ago. And they need to if they wish to succeed. After all, the poker affiliate space is quite saturated. As a result, the smarter affiliates are using a variety of techniques to acquire new players. One of these tools is PPC. Since the beginning of the year, search engines have opened up PPC for the iGaming industry; this has helped affiliates to increase their business in key demographic markets that are open to PPC, including the UK, Ireland and Australia.

Operators who want to attract Poker affiliates can also do so by offering special promotional tools that make their program stand out. An example of this might be a special acquisition tool, such as the new DSP tool. Trebax’s Damn Small Poker™ consists of a mini poker application that can be easily launched on affiliate sites where players can play each other in free play and receive real cash bonuses to use on operator sites. The banner allows players to take part in a real poker game for free, to play with real players, and to chat and engage across the DSP tool. Once players are engaged in the game, they are presented with your offer, whether it be a product or site. The tool is designed to help affiliates refer and convert players by offering them increased interaction.

Affiliate marketing and retention
In the past Operators didn’t often think of using affiliate marketing for retention. Previously most operators measured the success of their affiliate marketing from the number of new players that joined their program. As the industry has evolved the marketing strategies of the operators have also evolved. Contributing to this evolution has been the increased amount of information that their affiliate software has provided. A comprehensive affiliate software platform can show data about the whole life cycle of the player form first click to last wager. This information can then be used to fine tune not only acquisition but retention strategies. The information can then be used to identify the campaigns that assist in player retention and in turn will allow a merchant to further develop their strategies and which affiliates they can rely on to implement them.

Be sure to check back every day this week for more tips, tools and promotions, as we celebrate Poker week on the iGaming Affiliate Marketing Blog. And, be sure to take part in our celebratory freeroll, happening November 13th on BetweenDrinks.com.

Be sure to check the every day this week for the next installment in this informative series.

Blog Affiliates

Blog Affiliates are similar to Community Affiliates in the sense that the comment areas on blogs give players a place to express themselves and interact with each other.  As with a forum, content is key to becoming a successful Blog Affiliate, and attracting readers that keep coming back for more.

Benefit of Blog Affiliate Marketing

Much like the Community Affiliate, the benefit for the Blog Affiliate is (a) being able to create a relationship with a reader and then (b) having the opportunity to turn those readers into consumers by tastefully incorporating a brand name or link to a product or service that they think is cool, different or resourceful.

Disadvantage of Blog Affiliates: In order to have a successful blog, you’re going to have to do more than string a couple of words together.  You have to be able to write in a compelling and clear manner, and keep up this writing style consistently in regular blog postings.  Much to the contrary of the thought that this avenue is cheap, it can actually be very expensive since blogging tends to be fairly time consuming, especially for the novice writer.

One of the best approaches to finding out which revenue stream works for you is giving some, if not all of them, a try.  For a complete list of the Ways iGaming Affiliates Can Earn Money, including in-depth information about the most popular types of iGaming affiliate marketing available today, you can consult our index, or visit the Income Access Website.

Christmas might still be a few weeks off, but that doesn’t mean players have to wait that long to get their hands on a £1,000 early Christmas present.

The Genting Alderney affiliate program is offering your players comp points every time they play online. Those points get turned into an entry into their fantastic Christmas Shopping Spree. The winner will be awarded £1,000 to spend on whatever they like and 5 lucky runners up will also get £100 each. Plus, there’s also a selection box of other great prizes to be won!

What’s more, Circus Casino is sending your players a free £5 to play!

Pick up your banners from your affiliate account or sign up to the Genting Alderney affiliate program to take advantage of this promotion today!

I was recently going through the latest set of new games at Ladbrokes Casino when I came across Whack a Jackpot. There is something so fun about whacking a mole over the head! It’s a great way to de-stress in the middle of your day, if only for five minutes.

The concept is simple enough: you whack, smash and bash your way to big prizes. Pick up your mallet and swing quickly to smash the mechanical moles and either reveal a prize inside or block the mole hole. Match 3 prizes to win that amount – block 3 holes and the game ends. You can find three matching amounts to win a prize of up to x10000 of your stake. Like all games at Ladbrokes, this game has a Free Play mode, so take a moment to try it out!

In the Ladbrokes affiliate program we set up some screenshots of the game in the banner manager, so that *smashing* affiliates can spread the word about this whack-y game on their sites!

Login to your affiliate account to pick up your screen shots – you will find that we have an abundance of new creative about all our latest games available – pick, play the games for free and set up some fresh content up on your site. Is there a game that you’d like to have creative for, but it’s not in the banner manager? Stuck on how to write about that game? Get in contact with us at ladbrokesaffiliates@incomeaccess.com

To start promoting these games by signing up to the Ladbrokes Casino affiliate program.

Community Affiliates (Forums)
Community affiliates are those who use social tactics to engage players and drive traffic to a given program or product. Chat rooms or online forums are one of the most common places community affiliates promote online casinos to players. In the iGaming industry, these online forums have become widely known as player forums, because they cater to gaming players.

Benefit of Community Affiliates

Clear benefits of maintaining a chat room or online forum that caters to gaming players, are (a) building a relationship with users in the community, which leaves users with a sense of loyalty and(b) exciting players to come back to your site because they are genuinely interested in the content, discussions with peers etc.  In the case of (a) or (b) the benefit for the Community Affiliate is that the players that they attract will stick with them, and keep on playing.

Disadvantage of Community Affiliates

If you’re opening up the floor to commentary, prepare to receive it—and know that it’s not always pretty.  Chat rooms and forums need to be monitored closely, and as such, can be quite time consuming.

One of the best approaches to finding out which revenue stream works for you is giving some, if not all of them, a try.  For a complete list of the Ways iGaming Affiliates Can Earn Money, including in-depth information about the most popular types of iGaming affiliate marketing available today, you can consult our index, or visit the Income Access Website.

All of us here at Income Access are so proud to be working with some of the best and brightest in the iGaming industry. We work with businesses that are constantly innovating and growing, which inspires and motivates us to be constantly improving our own products. Indeed, much of what we do here is focused on serving the needs of our customers. As partners with clients who are constantly setting the industry standard, we are able to create a product that serves their needs by working closely with them to help them achieve their goals.

This year there are 19 categories of awards and eight operators that we have partnered with have been nominated for awards. Notably, Ladbrokes is leading the way with five nominations and is looking for an even better night than the one they had last year when they walked away with three awards.

Here is a list of the nominees that Income Access has the pleasure to be working with:

Socially Responsible Operator of the Year
Ladbrokes

European Sports Betting Operator of the Year
Sportingbet

Poker Operator of the Year
Gaming Media Group (Poker Channel Europe, Poker Heaven)
Ladbrokes

Casino Operator of the Year
Ladbrokes

Bingo Operator of the Year
Gamesys (Jackpot Joy)
Ladbrokes
Tombola

Affiliate Programme of the Year
Bingo.com
Ladbrokes
Sportingbet

Online Marketing Campaign of the Year
Betinternet

Offline Marketing Campaign of the Year
Tombola

Rising Star
Gaming Media Group (Poker Channel Europe, Poker Heaven)

Mobile Gaming Operator of the Year
Gamesys (Jackpot Joy)
Ladbrokes

Financial Betting Operator of the Year
ExtrabetAsian

Once again, best of luck to all of our partners who have been nominated. Who knows, maybe someone will do their best Cuba Gooding impersonation and wow the crowd with their award-acceptance skills. Either way, it’s bound to be a great evening for everyone involved.

Affiliates are still able to win in several categories including:

1. Highest Number of New Players

2. Best Conversion Rate – from clicks to new players – min of 10 players

3. Most Creative/Effective Campaign  -as selected by the PokerStrategy.com affiliate team

Because of the time extension, this means that all affiliates (including those who are not yet part of the PokerStrategy.com program) still have the opportunity to get involved with the PokerStrategy.com affiliate program and win!

Do you have any questions?  Please email pokerstrategy@incomeaccess.com with any inquiries or for more details. Sign up today for the PokerStrategy affiliate program.