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Casino Affiliate Gaming Niches, Volume 1: Rummy

Online gambling affiliates interested in exploring the market space and looking for new niches to expand to should consider building content and possibly minisites that center around specific games.
Expanding your business plan from a single site to a suite of related websites means taking the first steps to scaling your business — and affiliate marketers who scale their business can increase revenue substantially, in much less time than they otherwise would have.
That’s not just a rhetorical statement: Business scaling literally means utilizing real-world, forward-thinking business strategies to enable your business to grow on a larger scale. These strategies include professional management of your customer and client email contact list, the strict measurement of all available data, and the exploration of other business paths — like specialized casino affiliate niches.
Those online marketers with the ambition to expand into new niches aren’t only opening up new revenue sources, but laying the foundation for a complete, long-term online business that’s scaled for future growth.
Why start a niche affiliate site?
Niche sites represent a way to market to a specific search engine term that’s likely to be much less competitive than bigger, more basic terms like casino or poker.
To that end, any number of the casino world’s more popular card games can also serve as valuable niche ideas for ambitious casin

o affiliates: baccarat, blackjack, and all the myriad types of poker, from Texas Hold’em to Omaha eight or better.
With any of these games,

you’ll find that each has its own special, exclusive market (especially Texas Hold’em, which has become the default poker game throughout most of the world).
Whatever their motivations, whether nostalgic of just basic preference, a specific type of people (a market, if you will) are attracted to rummy casino games and specifically seek it out by name.
Adjust your expectations
That’s not to say the online rummy is the next poker, just waiting to happen. Consider that, while the simple keyword “poker” has almost 25 million global monthly searches (per Google’s keyword tool), “rummy” has only 301,000. (These and subsequent numbers are of March 1, 2011.)
But when you start looking at more specific SEO terms, more opportunities appear, and the difference in numbers between rummy and some of the other big games starts to fade.
Some examples:

  • “play rummy online”, 90,500 global monthly searches
  • “play rummy” 18,100 global monthly searches
  • “how to play rummy”, 9,900 global monthly searches
  • “gin rummy online,” 8,100 global monthly searches

Sure, in SEO terms, these numbers don’t even approach the kinds of search numbers enjoyed by poker games, or even bingo. But that’s exactly the point — more importantly, these terms aren’t nearly as competitive as other big name SEO gambling terms, particularly all those red hot poker variations.
Each of the terms above is regarded by the Google keyword tool to be of “low competition”, spelling a golden opportunity to set up a marketing and earning channel where very few are currently competiting. And, while somewhat modest, the numbers are big enough to suggest that the game is popular with a certain type of online gamer. Further research into markets and demographics can go a long way towards letting you know exactly what sort of gamer that is, where he or she lives, and how you can engineer your affiliate site to use that info to bring in traffic and drive conversions.
Affiliate partners
When you’re ready to build your online rummy affiliate marketing plan, you have many options to choose from.
In addition, most other online casinos and Internet gaming rooms offer rummy as a gaming option. The marketing materials for these programs might not specifically focus on rummy as a game — but if you’re putting up the right content, that’s not likely to matter too much. After all, it’s your site, and your marketing plan — you’re in control of the message, and the banner ads should be the ends, not the means.
Speak up!
We’ll look at more specific online casino gaming niches in the future. Any suggestions, or comments? Sound off in the comments and let us know what you’re thinking — and if you’ve had any success in the online rummy niche, let us know!