Customer Retention

[Carrie]

Ditto everything The Enforcer said re: casinos.
CJ your idea of 100 X $10 is right-on. Your small to medium sized players will play more with that money and actually deposit with you if they've already got some money there, versus another casino where they have no money (yet). Sure the whales are important, but spending all of your effort on one guy who deposits a thousand versus 100 guys who'll deposit 100 every couple of weeks..? Silly.

Ever since the big poker craze came through here I've been playing, and I've settled on two sites mainly - UltimateBet because they give you points for time played (that you can trade in for stuff or tourney seats) and AbsolutePoker because they have a wider array of single-table tourneys you can hop in on at any time. Been thinking of going back over to PartyPoker because I know they have a shitload of single-table tourneys as well. Make it fast and easy for me to play (not lots of pop-ups when I enter the casino or when I click on a table), and give me lots of options to play (I can use my money, my points, or both, and can spend anywhere from $2 to $40 on a single-table tourney). For all of the fancy stuff most of these casinos have, a lot of them are missing the basics.

re: retraining the affiliate... god how I wish. One thing I think the midbie webmasters need are pre-made graphics - things cut out of the site tour that they can use on their galleries and sites. The header graphic, for example. Takes 5 extra seconds for the sponsor's graphic guy to save it as a .psd file that the affiliates can use. For an affiliate it takes a lot of time to chop that out of the tour and clean it up. Save them that time and they'll use it to pump out more pages promoting your sites with their own unique flair. Or a animated/flash video clip on the tour - give that to the affiliates (put the site name on it of course) to plop into their sites. Stuff like that. Screw this whole pre-made gallery and site stuff that they go spam the TGPs (and customers) with.