After writing this post on affiliate managers who make little or no effort to learn anything about your site before spamming you with an affiliate offer, I get yet another one! Yes, with a story about affiliate managers who send spammy offers on the homepage AND a section on the contact form that describes why I can’t be an affiliate, I still receive affiliate deal pitches from online poker rooms.
Greetings:
My name is Harold, commercial agent of
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX.comWe have a commercial proposal related to promote several Casino, Poker, Bingo,
Skillgames, and Sportsbook brands through our platform.Right now we are adding even more rooms with better deals. We hope you
can join us. :)Feel free to contact me.
Regards,
Harold
E-mail: XXXXXXXX@XXXXXXXXXXX.com
MSN: XXXXXXXX@XXXXXXXXXXX.com
Gtalk: XXXXXXXX
Skype: XXXXXXXX
www.XXXXXXXXXXX.com
That’s exactly how the email showed up in my inbox (minus the URL and contact obfuscation). All that gobbley-gook is not some sort of display error. The email came that way.
Who is hiring these monkeys?
As a public service I’m going to offer some advice to affiliate managers out there. Online poker sites who use this as a training tool are free to wire me money for providing this valuable service. Readers of this site who get spammy affiliate pitches are encouraged to send them this link and put the sender into your block filter.
Tip #1: Don’t Use a Form Letter
Anybody who runs a website has probably received a request for a link exchange or some other unsolicited sort of opportunity. The thing that usually keeps me from hitting the delete button the second I recognize it for what it is, is whether or not it’s a form letter. I have no time to read your pitch if you couldn’t bother yourself with something as simple as my name. Here’s a hint: It’s in the freakin’ URL!!!! When you address me as “Dear Webmaster” or “Dear Site Owner” when my site name is Bill’s Poker Blog it demonstrates to me that you’re an idiot. And I don’t do business with idiots.
On the other hand, I have received dozens of pitches from affiliate managers who have read my blog, take the time to reference something I’ve written (yes, flattery still works on the interwebs), and then suggested I might be interested in their affiliate program. I usually respond very politely, thank them for contacting me, and explain why I can’t be an affiliate. In some cases that little exchange has developed into friendships and when I’ve run into them at CAP and CAC events I’m actually happy to see them.
Tip #2: Don’t Cut-n-Paste From MS Word
Although I’ve written my fair share of code I’ve never bothered to learn all the different data types like utf-8 or ISO blah, blah, blah (which explains why I’ve never headed up any internationalization projects). I never had a real use for it and I have better things to do with my time.
However, I do know that if you cut-n-paste from MS Word into certain web forms and email clients it comes out all gobbley-gook when the person who you sent it to receives it.
Cut and paste your canned pitch into Notepad or some other plain text editor. That’s the purest form of text and it will work for nearly everyone without inserting crazy characters.
Now, I know some of you reading this are saying “But Bill, you just said not to send a form letter.” I know what I said. I wrote it! I also know you don’t need to write out the canned pitch part of your email each and every time. How personal can you make the percentage payouts?
Perhaps an example might help:
[PERSONAL PORTION]
Dear Bill,
I was reading your post about dwarf tossing Iggy from Guinness and Poker across the craps table at the Bellagio and you had everybody in the office in stitches.
Anyway, I’m a new reader of your blog and I notice that you seem to have a fairly high page rank and was wondering why you haven’t attempted to monetize your website via affiliate ads.
I’m the affiliate manager at DwarfTossingPoker.com and I think we can make you a pretty attractive offer. Here’s what we offer:
[END OF PERSONAL SECTION AND BEGINNING OF CANNED PITCH]
10000000000000% MGR or $7,000,000,000,000,000 CPA or both!!!
We host over $3.00 in freerolls every month and offer a 14% matching bonus up to $27.50.
Blah, blah, blah, blah – sales pitch
Highest payouts in the industry.
If you’re interested go sign up at http://dwarftossingpoker.com/affiliates/
Sincerely,
Tom
See the difference?
Tip #3: Do Some Research
I know this site isn’t PokerNews or doing a kazillion page views a day. I know that a lot of people may have never heard of this blog. I’m okay with that. But would it hurt to look down the right hand navigation and see that I’ve got blog posts going back to 2003? Would it kill an affiliate manager to do a Google or Yahoo search to find out how many incoming links the site has or the Alexa ranking for the site? Can’t they just take the time to look at the number of RSS subscribers to get a sense of how popular or unpopular this blog is?
If I were to throw some affiliate ads on the site I could probably send a good bit of traffic. So, isn’t it worth your time to do a little research and figure out whether or not I’m a valuable prospect?
And if I am a valuable prospect then don’t I rank worthy enough to get a personalized email? I’m not asking for you to write a novel but for the love of god can’t you even take the time to put “Bill” after “Greetings” so there’s the smallest iota of a chance I think you actually give a damn about getting my business?
Really how is this different than penis enlargement spam (well, other than the larger penis)?
Am I being a jerk? Okay, don’t answer that. Am I the only person who feels this way? No. Check out this post on Poker Affiliate Programs:
Isn’t it great to receive spam emails from casino and poker affiliate programs you have never heard of, and then you look at their T+Cs, and you read that affiliates are not allowed to spam (I absolutely second a no-spam policy)?
Do those guys really think that a serious affiliate would consider joining a program that obviously has double standards about spamming?
Now, I’m not sure if this guy is miffed because he’s been spammed or if he’s upset that the programs he’s affiliated with won’t let him spam but I’m going to go with the former in order to validate myself.
Or how about an actual affiliate manager, Brandon Berndt, who coaches other affiliate managers:
Never address your email as Dear Webmaster. If their site has a contact form instead of an email address, make sure you just ask for whomever is in charge of Affiliate partnerships to contact you. Don’t try to sell them in the contact form, that’s just cheesy. If it sounds sleazy, cheesy, or to salesy, it probably is. Delete it before sending.
What kind of affiliates are you hoping to entice when your first communication is a spam email?
It obviously doesn’t work because 99.999% of all the affiliate spam I get is from sites I’ve never heard of. And I’m in the damn industry which means I know the names of more obscure poker rooms than most people.
The bottom line is that if you’re looking to grow your affiliate business you’re much better off concentrating on quality of quantity. The same kind of people who would actually respond to spam affiliate pitches are the same kinds of people who sign up for a CPA deal and hire a bunch of bots to slam your site with signups, play the min hands required to get the CPA deal and/or the first deposit bonus and then bail to the next spammer’s site that sends them an email.
photocred to Orange_Beard
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* Absolute Poker and Ultimate Bet (UB) ** May not be available to all players *** Poker Heaven, Fortune Poker, InterPoker, Paradise Poker
Hi, my name is Bill Rini and this is my poker blog. I've been blogging about poker and the poker industry since around 2003-ish. Like most people I started out playing poker as entertainment in home games whenever we wanted to sit around and smoke cigars, drink beer, and eat pizza, and needed a good excuse. I started playing online shortly after the first online card rooms opened and it wasn't long before I was playing 20, 30, or even 40 hours a week or more. One day I received a phone call about a program manager position at Tiltware which was the company that consulted to Full Tilt Poker on software development and marketing. After Tiltware I spent about 2.5 years working at Party Poker where I was the poker room manager.
{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
Great post. Its sad when you compare the number of programs who do it right compared to those who don’t have a clue what their doing. I have a feeling a number of them just hire the cheapest company to outsource their marketing to.
This is so true. I can’t remember why I received the last non spammy email from all those new sites trying to rock the biz with spamming every single poker site out there. I have a very old site without any traffic, without any affiliate links or banners. It’s just an information site I’m not updating any more. And even this crappy site receives an offer every week with the highest CPA.
These guys are just robots. The google and google and contact every site they find with the keyword poker. The don’t even bother to make a personal contact or note.
I insta-delete those mails and recommend every poker affiliate not to promote them.
Great that somebody wants to tell them they suck. I instead try to waste no time with them any more ;)
Hah, I just stumbled on your blog and this is the first post I see. So true sir, so true.
We have to enter the battlefield and strike them down, no foes shall be left standing. It’s morning so I’ll go back to my corner now.
Ta
I’m actually a bit surprised by some of the affiliates (many who would prefer not to go public with their gripes) that have emailed me to say that the same thing happens to them. It seems they’ll spam sites large or small.
My favorite ones start by saying “Note; We are not spammers”.
Very nice post! hahaha