Affiliate marketers tend to spend rather a large amount of time obsessing about Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).

If you do manage an affiliate website, then ensuring that consumers find you on the first page of a Google search is usually of critical importance.

In an interview published this week, CEO Dominik Kofert acknowledges publically that PokerStrategy.com is in fact rather bad at SEO, and that it is not actually a real focus for the company.

In spite of this, the website achieved 1.1 billion pageviews in 2011. Dominik goes on to suggest that the time is up for the old-school focus amongst affiliate marketers on lead generation through SEO-optimised websites.

Create Value 

Online consumers today are much smarter and will not be duped by Google-optimised websites whose primary function is to drive low-quality traffic to business partners. Consumers are looking for more value and are far more discerning when they visit an unfamiliar website. Business partners too are demanding higher quality referral traffic from their affiliate partners.

The real success in affiliate marketing comes from building a product that creates value for either the consumer or the business partner or both. If you are thinking of establishing an affiliate website, then the first step is to consider what you can do to bring value to your website visitors and then how you can convert those visitors into high value referrals for your business partner. 

Achieving Affiliate Success 

Our approach to this value challenge here in PokerStrategy.com is of course to focus on high-quality education material. In so doing, we offer significant value to both our members and our business partners.

We help our members succeed at poker and we bring the highest quality players to the poker tables. The value circle is finally closed since poker operators are happy to offer the best rewards for PokerStrategists.

Watch the Domink Kofert interview with CasinoAffiliatePartners.com

The PokerStrategy.com Affiliate Programme 

We run our own affiliate programme, not focused on rewarding low value leads, but instead offering the highest rewards for referred visitors with a real interest in learning poker. Visit our Tell A Friend page where you can find out more about our affiliate system and instantly create your own referral link. If you do manage your own affiliate marketing website, perhaps now is the time to forget about SEO.

Visit CasinoAffiliatePartners.com to watch the entire interview with Dominik or read the transcript. 

Most of the world’s great companies have a mission statement that acts as a reminder to employees why the company exists and what the founders envisioned when they put their time and money into that initial idea. The founders of PokerStrategy.com have recently refined our mission statement and added to it the values and beliefs that will be instrumental in delivering that mission as we expand into new verticals. Here are my reflections on our mission.

Mission Statements

A mission statement is primarily for internal use; reminding each employee why we are here and thus helping to shape each decision we take so that we don’t lose sight of what we are about. It is rather interesting to read the mission statements of some particularly inspiring companies.

Google’s stated mission is to "organize the world‘s information and make it universally accessible and useful."  Apple is "committed to bringing the best personal computing experience to consumers around the world through its innovative hardware, software and Internet offerings." Facebook’s mission is "to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected." Skype’s mission is "to be the fabric of real-time communication on the web." Twitter wants to "instantly connect people everywhere to what’s most important to them."   

Making the World a Smarter Place - Our Mission

Our mission in PokerStrategy.com is to make the world a smarter place. We believe that our growth so far is because of our mission. We also believe that sticking to this mission will deliver our continued success in the future.  For five years we have been enabling poker players around the world to become smarter. In the future we will be make many other people smarter (and more successful) in other aspects of their lives as we create unique e-learning communities dedicated to other topics.

Our mission as it has been communicated internally 

In order to achieve this mission, we rely heavily on the passion and performance of our staff. We value those qualities in our employees and freelancers above all else. Without passion and performance, PokerStrategy.com would still be just a good idea. With them, we are the largest poker affiliate in the world with ambitions to conquer new spheres.

Passion

Passion is the driving force behind every action here. No one can work for PokerStrategy.com without passion for the job they do and for what we seek to achieve as a company. We only want people who can, with their hand on their heart, admit to themselves that they love their job – imagine what it must be like to work with people who do not love their job! We want people who are driven by their own personal ambition and their ambition for our business. People who are passionate about what they believe will always challenge others’ ideas and likewise respect others who challenge their ideas.  

In such an organisation there is little place for hierarchy. As Head of Operations I have line management responsibility for other employees and freelancers. All of these are superior to me in some aspect of what they do; such as in teaching, community support or poker. No one who reports to me should ever be inhibited from contributing to the improvement of who we are and what we do. Great people don’t get consumed by hierarchies or job titles; and such things should never get in the way of great people.

Performance

All entrepreneurs know that success in business is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration. Passion is nothing without focused endeavour. There are many great ideas that never made it as a business, very often because there was no real effort to deliver a result. In our organisation, as in many other young companies, there is no alternative to hard work. Long hours and never giving up are part of how each of us operates. Of course this hard work must be directed to ensuring the highest quality standards possible in everything. The web is filled with mediocrity and PokerStrategy.com would not succeed if we ever settled for sub-par quality. Our members work hard at what they do and they deserve the best from us.

We expect reliability and transparency from every employee and freelancer. From a coach turning up on time for a scheduled live class to the delivery of a large strategic project; everyone must do their bit to deliver on our commitments to our members. There is no place to hide in an organization where open and transparent communication exists between full-time staff, freelance specialists and members. When passion and performance combine with an awesome idea the result is great.  As a company and in every individual action we aim to deliver great results for each member who chooses to become smarter by participating in one of our education communities.

These are the beliefs, values and mission that have been central in bringing PokerStrategy.com to where it is today. They are the bedrock of all the future successes for which we now aspire. 

Der Spiegel, Germany’s largest weekly news magazine, this week published an extensive article on PokerStrategy.com. A few weeks ago one of their top journalists came to Gibraltar to interview a number of employees and in particular spend some time with German-born founder Dominik ‘Korn’ Kofert. The result is a reflective article on the world of online poker and a detailed overview of the PokerStrategy.com poker school.

The article title is “University of Gaming” and starts by wondering what is there to study in the game of poker. “Sure isn’t it just a game of chance?” asks the reporter. He paints a vivid picture of Dominik responding by jumping from his chair and scribbling graphs and formulas on the whiteboard in his office; explaining that this assumption is the greatest enemy in poker. The professional and winning poker player relies on statistics, mathematical game theory and discipline.

The author recounts how Dominik had been deeply involved in the Starcraft scene from a young age. He was among the first professional players of this particular real-time strategy game. One day he realised that poker was also a game that required strategic thinking but was much more lucrative for the professional player. Following his own initial success in poker grounded on mathematical analysis, he quickly formed the idea of an online school as a business model. He launched the first version as an online forum from his small student room in Oxford where he studied Mathematics and Philosophy. A few years later and Dominik now sits in a comfortable office in Gibraltar surrounded by his team of poker professionals, educationalists and community managers who work with hundreds of freelance specialists spread around the globe.

Online gaming in Germany is a hot topic right now. One state, Schleswig-Holstein, will introduce regulations from March 1st, however in all other 15 states it will remain banned. Researchers in the university of Hamburg estimate that there are 581,000 online poker players in Germany generating around $400m rake for the poker rooms annually. 90% of this income is generated by just 10% of the players according to the researchers. This is perceived as a negative. One of the difficulties faced by online poker is perception. The Gambling Association includes poker in the same category as slot machines and would therefore favour an outright ban. The Der Spiegel author picks up on the subtlety here that a solid education that teaches rational strategies based on good bankroll management is the best defence against deep losing streaks.

Overall, the article reports objectively on PokerStrategy.com as a "pilot in a modern e-learning". Dominik believes in the potential for this teaching model in other areas such as foreign exchange and equity trading and reveals the plan to shortly launch tradimo.com, a new online trading school.

The full article in German is available online here. If you don't speak German, Google Translate will come in handy. ;)  

PokerStrategy.com has grown to be the world’s most popular poker website. For any organisation, creating high quality education content and serving a large online community on a daily basis would be a large challenge. With over 5.5 million members, speaking 19 different languages and spread across over 200 countries, our organisational challenge is greater than most.

Content & Service Challenge 

Each month we stream over 1,000 live coachings, publish over 2,300 news articles and upload over 500 educational videos. A whopping 35,000 poker hands are evaluated by our poker experts in our forums monthly. Every day our moderators monitor over 23,000 forum posts and our customer service teams deal with over 1,200 queries from members.  These queries will range from questions about starting capital transfers from the hundreds of new members who join each day to questions about poker room VIP systems from the thousands of top poker players we support.

To ensure we offer the best content and service possible, our aim has always been to hire top poker experts, education specialists and community managers wherever we can find them around the globe. In the past we usually preferred to bring them here to our offices Gibraltar to work.

While we have hired many great people here in Gib, we’ve also discovered that many other great people simply don’t want to make the move. Often we speak with high-raking poker players, for whom a full-time job interferes too much with their poker routine. Others already have permanent jobs in their local cities and don’t want to make a career out of their hobby. Others like to come for short stays in the south of Spain, but don’t really settle as they miss family and friends back home.

The Freelance Approach

In the end we realise that it is often easier to find the best people to work for us as freelancers based in their home countries. Being a freelancer gives you the freedom to live and play the way you want to. Communications technology has continued to develop and it is now easier to be in constant contact with teams spread throughout the world.

As a result, for roles that we would previously only have hired as full-time positions here in Gibraltar, we are now recruiting as freelancers.  For example, in the past like many other service-oriented companies, we hired a large on-site multi-lingual customer service team to support our members’ needs. In reality we often found it difficult to hire people to this role in Gibraltar; in particular as we preferred candidates to have been involved in our community and to have an interest in poker.

Today we announce that we are seeking to recruit Freelance Community Supporters who will be responsible for servicing our customers remotely through our forums and ticket system. Our ideal candidates are existing active members in our community who have over a long time demonstrated their commitment to helping and advising others in the community. What better candidates could there be to offer great service to our members, than the people who have being doing it on a voluntary basis for years.

We currently have several other freelance positions advertised in our job page and will continue to further advertise new roles there. Our Business Units are always on the lookout for new talent, so if you are interested in finding out more about potential freelance roles drop over to our forum and introduce yourself to our local team. Perhaps we can help you too find a way to be free to live and play the way you really want.

The fourth Monday of January has been established as Community Manager Appreciation Day - a day when people around the globe take a few moments out to say Thank You! for all the hard work to the community managers they have come to rely on over the past year.

Today, I want to give a big shout out to our hundreds of Moderators, SuperMods and HeadAdmins who on a daily basis take care of the needs of the members of the PokerStrategy.com community.

These are the guys and girls who help to create and maintain a positive atmosphere in our forums; make sure that our newest members feel welcome; answer questions that would otherwise go unanswered; deal with members' frustrations and irritations; escalate members' issues to our partner poker rooms; and generally act as the heart and soul of our community. 

Without their seemingly bottomless reservoirs of patience and willingness to help; there simply would not be a PokerStrategy.com.

How to Mark Community Manager Appreciation Day:

If you’re a member, and your problem was solved by a PokerStrategy.com community manager be sure to thank them today. Open a forum thread, post a message on Facebook or on Twitter (use the hashtag #CMAD #PokerStrategy).

• If you are a Moderator, SuperMod or HeadAdmin, take some time out today to relax, and know that you’re appreciated. Thank you for being an inspiration to me and many others.