Poker Affiliate BlogPoker Affiliate Blog, courtesy of Jeremy Enke, expert in Poker Affiliate Marketing.

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Poker affiliates are seldom creative. Most poker webmasters launch page after page of online poker reviews that read just about the same as everyone else’s poker room reviews. Then they wonder why Google doesn’t like their site, or why they can’t get a DMOZ listing, or why certain webmasters won’t link to them. (And these webmasters are invariably the webmasters they most need or want links from.)

My contention is that being creative is central to writing good poker content. So in today’s post I’m offering some tips for how to be creative, or at least for how to become more creative.

How To Become More Creative As A Poker Affiliate

1. Brainstorm. Brainstorming is a process where you generate as many ideas as you possibly can in a limited timeframe. You pay no attention to the quality of the ideas until AFTER the brainstorming session. It’s similar to writing a crappy first draft of an article. You’re in motion, and you can make revisions and refinements later.

2. Write poems. Maybe you’ve never written a poem. Or maybe you wrote a sonnet as a high school project. Maybe you write poems regularly. If you fall into that last category, then you probably know that working within a tight structural boundary makes you MORE creative, not less. You have to be creative to come up with a coherent and beautiful poem in 14 lines with a specific rhyming scheme, divided into four quatrains and a closing couplet. But if that’s too hard, try writing a haiku about poker.

3. Combine disparate things. This is the essence of creativity. Understanding the similarities and differences between radically different subjects is the very essence of creativity. It can also be pretty easy.

This article, 10 NFL Players We’d Like To Date, is a great example of an article combining two disparate subjects into a single, interesting, new piece of content.

4. Imitate. Look at what other creative people are doing in other industries, then look at doing something similar in the poker industry. You can take the piece of content I linked to in #3 above and apply it to poker and write an article called “10 Poker Players We’d Like To Date”. You could write it from a male perspective and/or a female perspective.

Or look at what Seth Gordon has done by creating Squidoo. Do you think you could create a poker-specific site with the same business model as Squidoo? Sure you can.

You might think this is the antithesis of being creative, but it’s not. You will inevitably have ideas of how you would like your poker-specific version of Squidoo to be different. That’s where your creativity comes into play.

5. Do something. Anything. Action begets creativity. Write an article, even if it’s terrible. Draw a picture. Create a new website with no subject or niche, and see what happens.

Ignore those people who tell you that you need a “niche” website. Go create a website about “nothing”, and see what kind of creative juices that gets flowing.

Does the poker content that you write suck? Even if your poker writing sucks, you can turn it around and make it into fantastic poker content with a little bit of effort. You don’t need an English degree, and you don’t need any slick, high-priced copywriting ebooks in order to make it happen. Here are some tips on how to write fantastic poker content.

9 Tips For Writing Interesting Poker Content

1. Be direct. Focus on nouns and verbs. It’s better to use a strong, clear noun or verb than to use an adjective+noun or adverb+verb. “Loser” is a more direct and clearer word choice than “a losing player”. (”Fish” would be a strong word choice here too, depending on the context.) “Aggressively playing” is a weaker phrase than “betting and raising”.

2. Be opinionated. Stop using relative terms like “some”, “tend”, and “somewhat”. Don’t say “I think” or “In my opinion”. Whatever you’ve written is obviously your opinion already; adding the phrase to the beginning of  sentence makes you sound unsure and weak.

Compare these two sentences:

“Online casinos somewhat alleviate this potential problem because there are no other players to give you advice on how to play your hand.”

versus

“Online casinos solve this problem by eliminating the other players. No other players at the table means no distractions.”

Notice I changed “somewhat alleviate” to “solve”. “Potential problem” becomes “problem”. The strong verb “eliminating” clarifies my opinion and the situation.

3. Read constantly. Read everything, especially literature, but also math, science, philosophy, etc. The more you read, the smarter you’ll be. And smart people have interesting opinions. And you’ll develop and ear for what good writing sounds like.

While you’re at it, try reading your content aloud before you hit publish. You’ll be surprised at how your writing sounds when read aloud.

4. Do crossword puzzles. Doing crossword puzzles will improve your vocabulary. The more words you know, the better choices you can make when writing your next sentence.

But just because you know a big fancy word doesn’t mean it’s the best word in a sentence. Most of the time the nickel word will perform better than the half dollar word.

5. Answer questions. People read your content because they have questions they want answered. So don’t write drivel. Know what question each article answers.

Every sentence, every paragraph, and every article answers a question.

6. Stop selling. It’s the 21st century. Web readers, especially poker players, are savvy. They don’t fall for the hard sell anymore, and most of them won’t even continue to read a page. Look at this example of something someone might include on their homepage:

“My Wanna Be poker site has the best promotions and bonuses online which makes winning a life-changing jackpot easier than you ever thought possible!!!”

Compare that with:

“My name is Randy Ray, and this is my poker site. I provide detailed analysis of poker promotions and bonus offers, including information about playthrough requirements. You can use this information to make an educated decision about where you want to play poker online.”

Notice that there’s an almost total lack of promotion or selling in the second sentence. Which of those sentences is going to get a reader to engage with my poker content? Which one generates trust?

7. Write sentences and paragraphs. Every sentence should make me want to read the next sentence. Every paragraph should make me want to read the next paragraph. Fantastic poker content is written one sentence at a time and one paragraph at a time.

When literature professors analyze poems, they look at why each word (and not any other word) was chosen in each sentence. Do you want to write fantastic poker content? Then know why each word in each sentence is being used instead of any other word.

8. Rewrite. First drafts always suck. The art of readable writing is the art of rewriting. Spend enough time rewriting your content, and you can make it terrific. Publish all your first drafts without any rewriting, and get used to execrable poker content.

9. Practice. Writing is a skill like any other. The more you practice, the more skilled you’ll become.

Some people love to make New Years resolutions; others hate the very idea of New Years resolutions. So if you’re a poker affiliate, and you fall into the former camp, this post is for you. If you’re part of the camp that hates New Years resolutions, well, I will only make one post on the subject each year.

5 Suggested New Years Resolutions for Poker Affiliates

1. Know how much money you need in order to retire. A lot of poker affiliates work so hard at getting rich that they never set up an exit strategy or a final goal for how much money they need in order to retire. I have a simple formula for this. In order to retire at any age, multiply your desired annual retirement income by 25. Put half your money in stocks and half in bonds, then live on the interest.

If you want to have a post-retirement income of $100,000 a year, you need $2.5 million to retire. You should never have to touch your principal, so you can even leave a legacy for your children, if you’re into that sort of thing. (I love my kids, but I plan to die broke. But that’s a whole other post.)

2. Set up some routines and habits in your life that will help you achieve your goals. The difference between the guy with lots of energy and a great physique and me can be boiled down to one word: habits. The guy who’s in shape has habits of exercising and eating right. I have habits of lying on the couch and eating wrong.

These habits and routines apply to anything. If you have a habit of writing 3 pages of content every day, then you’ll have a 1000 page website at the end of the year.  If you have a habit of asking for links every day until someone says yes, then you’ll have 365 new links to that content this year.

3. Try some SEO experiments this year. Sometimes doing things wrong can teach you how to do other things right. I launched a page about a particular casino this year, and I decided to handicap myself by not using the casino name in the title tag or the URL, and then see how well that page would rank for the casino’s name. Just engaging in that one tiny experiment, I got a better idea of how important title tags and URL’s are. I also learned some serious on-page optimizations skills from getting the page to rank.

I made it to the top 30, in case you’re interested, which felt pretty good. I’m convinced I could have made it higher before I concluded the experiment.

At any rate, come up with your experiment. The whole SEO method involves experimenting and making adjustments then seeing what works.

4. Read more books and magazines. If the only reading you do is on the Internet, then you’re really limiting yourself. The more you read, the better off you’ll be. You’ll think better, have more ideas, and be able to make better decisions. Every time you read a book, it’s like building an extra room onto the house that is your mind. Charles Munger talks about being able to look at the world through different frameworks. You gain that ability by being widely read.

5. Participate in an online community that is NOT related to your livelihood. Lots of readers here participate in poker affiliate forums or other webmaster forums. But participating in an online community that’s not related to how you make your living will teach you more about how to participate on the web without being an obnoxious self-promoter.

And there are lots of communities besides just the obvious message board type communities. There are volunteer-edited directories and encyclopedias, social networking sites, and email discussion lists you can participate in. They’re not just places to drop links, and the sooner you understand that, the better you’ll become at marketing your website online.

I didn’t start writing for the Poker Affiliate Programs blog until October, so I’m going to limit this particular greatest hits list to the posts made during the final quarter of the year. (I’m not comfortable rating other people’s blog posts, but I have no problem rating my own.) I’ll post a best of 2009 next year too, since it seems like this is something of a popular tradition among some bloggers.

1. How to Make $1 Million in 12 Months as a Poker Affiliate -Mostly this post just illustrates the importance of setting specific and measurable goals. Any time you want to achieve anything, it’s a lot easier if you figure out how to measure it first, then break the steps down into measurable increases. In that blog post, I described how to make $1 million in 12 months if you’re making a $200 CPA, but the process is more important than the actual numbers there.
2. Poker Link Building Secrets - Everyone loves the topic of link building, but this post seems to be the most popular of all of the posts I’ve made about building links to a poker site. I don’t think I really revealed any “secrets”, but I also don’t think there are any real secrets to conducting an effective linkbuilding campaign. Focus on the fundamentals, like quality content.
3. An Example of a Great About Us Page - I was a little surprised to see how popular this blog post was. I was also pleased. A great”about us” page is an opportunity to build trust with your site’s visitors, which increases conversion rates, which makes you more money. And I try to keep this blog focused on how to make money.
4. One Way Link Building For Poker Websites - I was not surprised to see this post was very popular with readers. One way link building is overrated in terms of importance to SEO, as far as I’m concerned, but it’s easy enough to accomplish if you’re willing to do the work required. Most poker sites don’t need as many links as they think they do. And they usually have a lot fewer pages of unique, original, helpful content than they do.
5. Five Easy Poker Niches - This one was another non-surprise. Lots of poker affiliates have trouble coming up with unique ideas for content, so it’s only natural that an article about how to come up with content ideas for an entire niche site would be popular. Nothing particularly original about the ideas in this article, but I like to think that their application to poker websites is at least a little bit different from stuff you might read elsewhere.
6. Poker SEO For Cuil.com - A little surprised at the popularity of this particular post, as a lot of doubters have posted that they didn’t think that looking at how to do SEO for Cuil.com was particularly useful. I differ; I think it’s useful from a number of perspectives. For one thing, if you can figure out how to do poker seo for Cuil.com, you can figure out how to do poker seo for any other search engine. For another thing, even if Cuil is a smaller search engine, being #1 for “poker” or “online poker” there might be a LOT easier than being #1 for those phrases in Google. And if you can be #1 there for something like that, you can benefit from the traffic, even if it’s only 1/10 or 1/20 of the corresponding amount of traffic you could have received from another search engine.

I didn’t base these rankings solely on traffic popularity, but that did play a factor in the decisions of which posts to list here. It seems to me that posts about content and about links are going to be perennially solid topics. That shouldn’t be a surprise either. I’ve touted the formula for success as an affiliate webmaster as being pretty simple: content + links = success.

Happy new year!

I found a great blog about writers’ productivity habits, and it made me think about poker writing routines. For example, the latest post was about Anthony Trollope’s writing routine. He worked every morning from 5:30am to 8:30am on his writing, before working a full time job with the postal service. His target was 250 words every 15 minutes, or 1000 words every hour. If he finished a novel during a writing session, he immediately started a new novel. That’s 3000 words per day.

Anthony Trollope wrote 49 novels in 35 years.

I understand that some of this blog’s readers don’t write their own content, but everyone reading a poker affiliate blog has work of some kind to do. What could you accomplish if you had this kind of discipline toward your work?

Let’s suppose you have a full time job, and you want to transition to a full-time poker affiliate. Writing poker content, and plenty of it,  is the most effective way to generate search engine traffic to your site. If you write 3000 words per day every day for a year, then you should be able to finish writing 2190 pages of content in a year. That’s enough for 7 decent sized website of 300 or so pages each.

I have sites with 300 or so pages that get 1000 to 2000 visitors per day each. Even if you’re only half as successful, you can still probably count on 500 to 1000 visitors per day per site. 7 sites X 500 visitors per day = 3500 visitors per day. Suppose you make 25 cents per daily visitor to your site.  That’s $875 a day, or $319,000 a year.

So if you don’t want to work at a full time job anymore, spend a year writing poker content every morning for 3 hours.

Do this for a little over 3 years, and you’ve got a million dollars a year in revenue.

On a related topic, here’s an article of interest to poker affiliates called “The Best Poker Affiliate Advice You’ll Ever Receive” - well worth reading. Check it out.

I’ve been working part time on one of my gambling projects for the last 3 months, and I’m willing to share some of my visitor stats here. (I’m not going to share the actual site name, but it’s not a poker site.) We’ve added 66 pages of content to the site in the last 3 months. We’ve done no link building work on the site, besides adding the content. And here are our visitor stats:

Nov 16 - Dec 16 - 2594 visits, 2172 from search, 1386 keyword phrases, 2.06 pages per visit
Oct 16 - Nov 16 - 3148 visits, 1900 from search, 1040 keyword phrases, 1.86 pages per visit
Sep 16 - Oct 16 - 2405 visits, 2043 from search, for 840 keyword phrases, 1.63 pages per visit

You’ll notice that we haven’t seen a huge increase in search-based traffic, but some of that’s because for part of the months of September and October, we were ranking for a pretty top level term in the gambling industry. (Think along the lines of “poker” or “online poker”.) But that single term was cycling in and out of being #5 and being #70 or so. On the days we were #5, we saw a lot more traffic. We also got a bunch of extra traffic during that 2nd period from a Stumble Upon notice.

What’s more interesting to me is the number of keyword phrases we’ve been found for. That’s about a 60% increase, so I’m pretty pleased with that. I never feel like I can rely on a single keyword phrase to send me lots of traffic on a consistent basis, but if I have a lot of keyword phrases doing well, I feel like my traffic is pretty defensible. I like to think of it as “keyword phrase diversification”.

What’s also interesting to me is the increase in pageviews per visit. Moving from 1.63 pageviews per visitor to 2.06 pageviews per visitor is a really solid increase. We had a discussion not long ago in the forum about bounce rates, but I think number of pageviews per visitor is a better metric for seeing how well I’m engaging my visitors. I’d like to see my number of pageviews per visitor increase to more like 3 or 4, so I’ll continue to work on that for this site. I think having additional content prominently promoted on pages helps with increasing number of pageviews per visitor.

Pageviews per visitor is important from an advertising standpoint too. Lots of online advertising campaigns look at impressions, and there’s a reason for that. More impressions = a greater likelihood of an ad getting clicked on. Conversions start with clickthrough’s. In my mind, doubling pageviews per visitor from 2 to 4 is as good as doubling the total amount of traffic to my site, because I’m doubling the number of opportunities someone can click through to my ads.

This project has been a training exercise for one of my webmaster/SEO intern types. I didn’t do any of the work on the site myself.

Wanted to bring attention to a terrific post on another blog called 4 Poker Affiliate Tips I Learned From Hockey. This was written by our very own poker69 on his site Poker Marketing Star. His site’s worth checking out if you haven’t done so already, and I’m tickled that someone has taken advantage of our offer to link to real and valuable content like this.

You can find more examples of Kevin’s poker websites here.

We do have additional opportunities for poker affiliates to get publicity to their site here in this very blog. Here are a few ways to get publicity on the blog:

1. Write a guest post about something related to affiliate marketing. I’ll publish it here and include a link back to your website.
2. Write a “linkbaity” type page on your site that consists of a list of 100 links to some kind of poker resources. You can see an example of that kind of content here: 100 Poker Resources Worth Checking Out
3. Create a local-based poker portal of some kind for the area in which you live.
4. Heck, if you’ve got any content that you’re particularly proud of, I’ll probably mention it here on the blog, provided the communication is professional and the content is great.

Thanks again to Kevin for letting me know about his oh-so-cool content. I love seeing stuff like this.