How to Find a CMO for niche products

I currently run two 3rd-party poker related SaaS and will soon launch another.

Both products are very specialized and niche but there is a large demand for both products within the community. My co-founder and I can continue to add a lot of value onto the products on the programming side but we really need to start working heavily on our marketing / traffic and conversions. Things like:

• Optimizing the websites for conversions
• Community development
• Traffic growth through forums, in-bound marketing, affiliate growth, contacting blogs etc
• SEO


• Anything and everything else

The problem is neither of us are highly specialized in this and it will slow down our development efforts massively. We will be able to pay someone at decent but not fantastic wage w. some benefits plus offer equity and/or commission (i.e the amount of $ the business grows each month you keep X % etc). We need someone who is highly motivated and independent. They'd need to be able to learn how best to market and publicize in this niche industry of 3rd party poker software.

What would be the best way for us to go about finding said person? We are currently based in Seattle. Would it be reasonable to have someone who worked remote?

CMO implies enough money to have other people working as employees.

Here is what I would do:

1. consider hiring agencies to do the conversion work (conversionvodoo for instance)
2. read this - http://sixteenventures.com/saas-secret-to-one-million-dollars
3. remote is perfectly viable if you use good tools like hipchat/basecamp
4. the amount budgeted for marketing is also important to attracting good talent
5. I would consider someone who really digs poker already and appears to utilize tools that are complimentary to your software

The saying is you get what you pay for ... for a reason. Poker is a highly affiliated and competitive market so you need someone who knows the subject well.

Thus if it were me and I was trying to find good talent I would say:

1. here is the salary you can expect
2. here is the commission/sales bonus you can expect
3. here is the budget you are afforded
4. here are the additional people/resources you are able to use (for instance do you have designer/developer resources)