New Poker Room joins B4Playing – PKR

The great 3D PKR poker room is joining the B4Playing tool. This is a great poker room that really brought to player a different feel and look of playing poker. Thanks for the nice people at PKR that assist us with the setup.

B4Playing Update

We are almost done with all the information for December, we are now crossing the $100,000 in bonuses and 47,500 poker tournaments. One of the important thing for B4Playing is having the information on the client updated. Some properties are sending the information via XML but unfortunately some still send it via email.

Well, nevertheless we do the work to make sure all players have the information updated. We encourage users who find new bonuses who weren’t update to inform us. It feels great when the community supports the product, sends feedback, information, ideas etc’ – it makes everything worth while doing.


B4Playing will not be in CAC Macau this week. We were actually planning but traveling is taking too much our valuable time. I guess saying that lots of people will agree. As one who is on the road a lot flying almost every week spending time in meetings and conferences (which there are hundreds of them) it is very difficult to also find time to work. So this time I stayed around here (even if it would have been probably a great place to visit).
That is it for a short update.

B4Playing at Ad-Tech

NYC, either you hate it or you love it, I am from the lovers side. The Ad-Tech in NYC was one of the biggest, if not the biggest conference for online media I ever seen. Great lectures, huge exhibition (450 booths) and around 10,000 visitors. This was one the best places to find technologies, sources, media, advertising opportunities, partners and affiliates. The B4Playing Comparison Shopping tool for the online gambling industry attracted a lot of attention from anyone we talked to. Practically, we are going home with huge amount of valuable contacts. I think one of the biggest proof we had a success is that after a day and half I ran out of business cards and I did bring with me over 400 :)

Below are some pictures from At-Tech conference and NYC (and also my first time in my life trick n treat).


Halloween




A taste of midtown Manhattan




The M&M store


And the convention

B4Playing is flying

Things are flying along at hyper-speed, with 300 new users joining everyday from different locations worldwide with focus on Europe. The word is spreading very quickly, and we’re happy that so many people are taking advantage of all of the opportunities that B4Playing has to offer – after all, there are lots of them.

We’re already working on our second version development. We’ve received great feedback from the many, many members, and it’s full-steam ahead for the development team to put the things we’ve learned into action.

B4Playing is always growing, and with every day, it’s getting better than ever!

What a month- September media results

In my previous blog posted on September 10th, I have shared my general view about running media campaigns. Well, it was harder than I thought. Media companies became a commodity and their service level as well as their professionalism has gone down. There are too many offline companies who are using their services and have no tracking tools and their level of monitoring and analysis is close to zero. Media companies got spoiled!

It was clear from the very beginning (around Sep 10th) that the level of our involvement has to be very high (few times a day at each media company). We started with 5 media companies. One could not get pixel tracking to work. The other one was way above our target per user. One was very slow to increase traffic. The forth one did not allow us to get access to their server and we had to terminate them. One was slowly and continuously growing and now delivers about 150 users a day.

The last day of September we had almost 300 new users. 248 from media and 51 from our affiliates. All together we have generated 4100 users. This is all great and dandy but Itay has set my target (without the affiliates) to 12000 this month. This is averaging at 400 a day. This could have been easy if he would not set the price per user at that low! I do need to grow from 250 a day to 500 a day before month end.
I am off to switch on more media companies and accelerate campaigns with the existing ones. I enjoy seeing the bandwidth consumption steadily growing, the price per users going down and the number of users growing!
Who said working hard is no fun??

Stephan
Media Manager

Thank you to our friend, Rudulf

We want to thank our friend, Rudulf, from SuperPokerAffiliates (www.superpokeraffiliates.com) for his great recommendation of the B4Playing tool and affiliate program. Here is his newsletter:

Dear Affiliates of SuperPokerAffiliates

Welcome to a new season as an affiliate of ours. I have a promise for you! This season will be much more exciting then the last one! We will launch new software tools, redesign our websites, offer competitions and special offers and much more. I’ll probably have to email you more often then once a month.

In the middle of September we will do a complete redesign and re-launch of Calculatem. We believe we can improve conversion and usability of that website. This is good news for you – the traffic you send will be easier to convert, and the redesign will be an excellent opportunity to communicate this to your visitors. New marketing material will be available as well.

I am glad to present a new colleague, Johanna. She will be assisting me with the SuperPokerAffiliates program. She is in charge of affiliate support, so do not hesitate in contacting her at affiliates@superpokeraffiliates.com.

The Calculatem Pro software is now available in several languages: Swedish, German, Spanish, French and Italian. You can change the language in your software by clicking “Options” and then set the language at the top. This is an excellent marketing message for your visitors. Not all poker players are English-speaking.

I would also like to remind you of the download buttons we have launched at SuperPokerAffiliates. Add these buttons or create your own and let your visitors download the software directly from your website. This will increase your conversion, and the users are tracked to you. Most important of all, you do not have to send your traffic to another website.

Take look at a new innovative software tool. B4Playing just launched its software client aimed at poker and casino players. The software is essentially a desktop portal which provides the player with extensive set of information: bonuses, tournaments schedules, exclusive bonuses and more. The reason I am sharing it with you is simply because it can be an excellent compliment to your portfolio. You are used to offer various poker software and it looks like a great addition. From an affiliate perspective, b4playing offers a Multiple CPA (MCPA) commission. You "own" the player and get CPA commission every time the player switches from one poker room to another. Check out their affiliate program at http://affiliates.b4playing.com

Rock on
Christian Rudolf
Affiliate Manager at SuperPokerAffiliates

Types of Casino Poker Tournament

A casino poker tournament can be a lot of fun for someone who knows what they are doing, and the stakes can be pretty high. However, there are some games for the serious poker player who may feel they are not quite ready for the really high stakes games. In most cases, there is a tournament for just about every skill level. If someone does not have a lot of cash to throw around, but loves to play the game, they can still find something within their price range. No matter what skill level someone might have, it is a good idea to have a basic understanding of how these things work and what to expect.

There is an entry fee when entering any type of casino poker tournament. It should be noted that the lower fee tournaments are usually the ones entered by the poker players who are not comfortable enough with their skill level to plop thousands of dollars down to enter. In most cases, the basics of a tournament are all going to be the same. Players are separated into tables, and are given a certain amount of chips. It is a matter of elimination (rules will vary on elimination for each place and event) and the winners move on to the next rounds. In some cases, players might reenter if they have chips left, but once they are gone, they are out of the tournament. Payout comes at the end of the last game with the largest chunk of prize money going to the winner.

It can be a lot of fun to enter into a casino poker tournament. If a person is not sure about their skill level when they enter one of these, they are going to get a good gauge on it rather quickly. Playing poker in the basement with buddies is great for learning, but until someone goes through their first tournament, they may have no idea of their own skill level. If a person bombs out rather quickly, it never hurts to get some help with the game. Though there are some who just have an instinct for these things, others need to work at learning the ins and outs of each type of game.

Finally a smart tool and easy to use - A B4Playing user testimonial

Thank you, B4Playing, for making my life easier. I have downloaded your client few days ago and a whole new world, which I was not aware of, is now at the tip of my hands.

I am an online Poker player, for the last 3 years. I enjoy spending weekends, usually late at night, playing at PartyPoker. I consider myself as a professional (I love these new comers) and once in a while I love playing with other professionals.

Your poker tournaments alert system is awesome. It became my scheduler and I really like it. (Can you connect it to Microsoft Outlook?)

I was not aware that there are so many poker rooms over the net. Went and played at Pacific Poker and I really enjoyed the different look and feel. I am now playing on 4 different poker rooms and I love it. I use the bonus optimizer and go to the ones that give me the highest.

The only downside with your tool is the fact that I am spending more time playing now!

Keep doing a great job. I sure am going to refer it to some of my neighbors.

B4Playing user.

Getting Media to produce results

Online advertizing went a long way since the first Citibank banner appeared on the Netscape front page. Direct response ads became very useful with a clear ROI targets. Sophisticated tracking systems, various ad formats, numerous advertizing networks, learning ad servers and more are available now.

The above mentioned sophistication made the selection, and the initial ramp up a lengthy process. It is not developing a banner any more. It is about installing tracking code (what's so called pixel tracking), it is about low scale testing of various banners, landing pages, various sites (and even ad networks).

It is all geared towards maximizing your investment. We set aggressive ROI goals and we keep waiting for the ad system to tune themselves, select the proper publishers, ad format and creative. It is fascinating to see how the cost per user is improving daily.

We are not there yet but we have all the indications that we will hit and exceed our targets. You better hold your eagerness to get users and get the ad systems to be fully tuned.

Stay tuned to some interesting statistics once our media will be fully tuned and operational.

Meanwhile we are very happy with our conversion rate from our client users to real players. It seems that poker players find the poker tournaments and it associated alert system very useful and the conversion rate is really impressive. The online casino bonus tool seems to be effective to.

More to come.

Stephan
Media manager

Buying Media

Yesterday we have launched our official beta product. Now we officially turn from being a development company to an Internet marketing company. While there are many ways to market over the internet this short blog shares with you our activity as per buying media.

We have searched and interview quite a lot of Internet Media companies and have selected few. A specific budget was allocated to each one and a targeted cost per user (who downloaded the B4Playing client) was set. We are testing various methods:

Textual advertizing
Pay Per Click (keyword search)
Banners campaign

We have selected 2 different countries for each media company and have provided them with translated material.





At our backend we have developed a sophisticated tracking system. Each media company and each campaign is monitored separately and we can analyze and compare the performance of each one of them. Yes, the media companies track the performance themselves (and we even installed some pixel tracking code) but it is always better to own your own tools and do the analysis in-house.

Next week I will write a new blog and share with you some of our statistics.

Stephen
Media Manager

5 days after beta launch

We have launched our beta product on Aug 15th as planned. Have recruited 371 users in the first 5 days and it fits our targets. The feedback is very positive. We get bug reports, suggestion for minor changes and additional feature requests. This is exactly what we have looked for during the beta testing and prior to our official release on September 3rd. We are looking into having up to 1000 users prior to going live with the released product just to make sure that the system is reliable enough to handle large traffic.

While we are recruiting affiliates (we have 245 registered by now) we are finalizing the affiliation system so that we will be able to provide with the support expected from us.

On a different front we develop relationship and resolve technical issues with additional properties and we will get them up as we progress.

Looking forward to serving the players', the affiliates' and the properties' communities.

Itay

Tomorrow

All is frozen. Code was frozen last night and being finally tested the entire day. We do not take additional properties and the ones who did have not complied with our technical and administrative needs will have to wait for the next wave just before we go live with the final version on September 3rd. Now, with more than 50 leading properties we believe that we are having enough value to start with.

With 30000 individuals who have pre- registered we believe that we will have quite a large community participating in our beta group. We have limited it to 1000 users and may consider broadening it based on feedback we will get from the market.

So far we have defined schedule. No more! Now, our users will be the king! They will define if we are giving the expected support and service and they will define the additional features they would like to see from us.

We are ready for the challenge.

Itay

Just one of these busy days…

If your life is anything like B4Playing, we can sympathize with your hectic schedule! Today has been one of the busiest days B4Playig has experienced. We have been bogged down with publishing, testing and preparing information for the official launch of our closed beta. It’s less than twenty days away, and we still have so much to do.

Understand, although it may sound like we’re whining, this is far from the truth. We are pleased to be so busy, because we know our hard work will pay off with our success!

Furthermore, just because we’re busy doesn’t mean we don’t have time for our B4Playig users. We are still so impressed with how many users we’ve accumulated over the past few months, and we can not express our gratitude to those of you who have spread the word about our fantastic tool and have helped grow our community.

Remember, should your ever have any comments, questions, or concerns, we are never to busy to respond to our users. Don’t ever hesitate to contact us, as we always look forward to hearing from you.

Ever busy, yet pleased with our success,

Itay