Making money with online poker
There are several ways to earn money with poker. The first, and most obvious one, is playing poker - but you actually have to be a winning player in order to make a profit, which is not trivial. The second alternative is selling books about poker. There exist plenty of books about poker, dealing with general concepts that apply to every form (hold’em, omaha, stud), or targeted towards a particular variant (chiefly texas hold’em), a particular betting structure (limit, no-limit), or game structure (ring games, multitable tournaments, sit-and-go). Some good money can be made here - for example, when I started playing poker, I had already invested around $100 in books before I had even deposited money to play at pokerroom. (Possibly, writing the books is a more profitable business, but successfully doing so requires being a recognized winning player.)
A third alternative, which is best suited for webmasters and bloggers, is promoting online poker rooms. There are a variety of affiliate programs that webmasters can sign up to and generate some income to support their sites. In a future blog post I will discuss my (overall positive) experiences with the pokeraffiliate.com poker affiliate program, that I have signed up with, which covers pokerroom, europoker, and an online casino, casinoroom.
Poker affiliate programs are all about recruiting new players on behalf of the poker rooms by promoting them, usually by the means of banners or text ads in their sites. Forums, blogs, and all kinds of sites related to poker are all full of ads of the poker rooms, with shiny banners that display the benefits that each site offers to new players (usually bonuses, e.g., I currently display a 100%-up-to-$250 first deposit bonus at pokerroom in my blog).
Success in poker affiliate programs comes from web traffic - the more, the better. You ideally already are the owner of a popular poker-related site: poker forums, blogs, etcetera are a great place for placing their banners. In fact, I’ve yet to see a successful poker-centric web page that has no ads from a poker affiliate program. Otherwise, banners on gaming sites may also generate some interest from the users - in fact, many players come to poker from other games (either card games, such as Magic: The Gathering, or others such as backgammon, where betting is part of the game). If you own a popular site that is not poker-related, you may want to investigate the interest of your users by placing some poker ads and see if they catch some attention. If you do not own any website, then I may suggest that you start a blog for free. The raw material you will be working with is user traffic - no users, no clicks. No clicks, no sign ups. No sign ups, no money. Two ideas: either offer some unique content that users can find from search engines, chiefly google, or offer some eye-catching content to hook people to your site.
As I said, expect a future blog post discussing my experience with the pokeraffiliate.com poker affiliate program, which has been helping me build up my bankroll.