When promoting poker affiliate programs, you should really try to look for the best viable option for your website. As online poker has grown, the alternatives are numerous, and finding the right affiliate program might not always be obvious.

The single most important factor is, despite what many publishers might think, not necessarily the size of commission gained from referring players to a poker room, but the quality of the site itself.

In order to choose wisely, you need a basic understanding of poker - both online and off-line. What are people looking for when choosing a poker room? Looking only at the commission structure for the affiliate program will give you little information - if any at all - regarding how potential players will consider the poker site in question.

Instead, you should try to figure out what aspects players look at when choosing where to play poker.

If you have a good idea what your visitors are looking for, it's easier to find an affiliate program matching their demands, but often you need to target a more general visitor; a visitor you do not know much about. In order to maximize your revenue, you should look at the factors most potential players are looking for.

While poker as a whole has grown in interest in all media, the main focus is on Texas Holdem. With this in mind, it should be obvious you choose a poker room featuring Holdem. Luckily most - if not all - poker rooms are focusing on this game, so unless you find a very odd poker room, you should have no problem with this.

Depending on your website and audience, you might be able to figure out if your average visitor is new to poker, experienced or somewhere in between. If you are attracting newcomers, you should of course choose an affiliate program with promotional material targeting curious people looking to experience online poker. This is mainly done with high sign-up bonuses and low stake tables, but a few poker rooms are offering - what they call - education in most poker games. Some poker sites takes this one step further, and have a wide variety of free games, articles about winning in poker and poker schools for new players.

If you instead are looking at a player with former experience in online poker, you need to look at what they want. Most often, these players are very focused on what they want, and if you can't present them with this information, they'll look somewhere else for it. A very important factor for experienced players is the rake. This is even truer if you are lucky enough to attract people playing high-stake poker. A seemingly small difference in rake percentage will soon add up to enormous sums if you play regularly on a high-stake table. This is something most experienced players are very much aware of, and most of them will find this information useful if you present them with it.

If you are attracting search engine traffic, you are in a very good position to earn money, but visitors from search engines are often looking for plenty of information fast. If you don't present them with the information they want, they have no problem clicking the next link in the SERP's, leaving you with nothing more than used bandwidth.

Adding to much information to a page will always have a potential side effect; making the page cluttered and hard to grasp. This is a sure way of sending your visitors elsewhere, be careful not to overdo it.

Look at what information the poker rooms are focusing on, they often have done some serious research in order to present their visitors with the correct information about both their affiliate program and online poker room. Promoting several poker affiliate programs makes the information even more important. If you have a list, or reviews in any way, you are presenting your visitors with a choice. Make sure they get enough information to actually feel comfortable making that choice.