One of the most common errors when creating a newsletter service to your visitors is to offer one thing on your site, and then send out newsletters that are unrelated to what you initially said they would be about. Basically, if you are setting up a newsletter and describing it as a ‘strategy tips’ newsletter to get your visitors to sign up, you should not go about regularly emailing those subscribers with bonus offers left right and center. The people are subscribing to your newsletter with the belief that they will be receiving some useful strategy tips in the form of a newsletter to benefit their game, so make sure that you give it to them.

Many webmasters will see the newsletter as an excuse to spam the hell out of subscribers with as many bonus offers as possible, hoping to squeeze out those extra conversions every week. In my opinion this is really unfortunate, and is frankly an abuse of what the newsletter is there for.

The more you try and force your subscribers to convert with random bonus offers, the more your newsletter is just going to look like spam, and the number of subscribers will diminish along with your site’s credibility. However, if you treat your newsletter as an extension of the information on your site, then the returning visitors number and number of conversions will naturally increase.

What should you include in your newsletter?

As I have already mentioned, the content of your newsletters will be entirely dependant on the type of newsletter your are offering. If you are offering a ‘poker news newsletter’, then give your visitors interesting updates and news in the world of poker. If you are offering ‘Omaha strategy’, then give your subscribers newsletters filled with Omaha strategy and tips.

As long as you give your visitors exactly what they are expecting (and even exceed those expectations), you will have a loyal base of subscribers that look forward to seeing your newsletter in their inbox, and not considering it as another useless spam email that they regrettable signed up for in the past. Having a loyal readership should be your number one goal when creating your newsletter service, so try your best to write quality content and information that your visitors will be interested in.

Earlier in this article, I made it seem as though sending out bonus offers to your subscribers is a bad idea… this of course isn’t completely the case. If you actually own a poker bonus website and offer a ‘poker bonus’ newsletter, then it makes perfect sense to only include bonus offers in your newsletters.

However, you want to look to only ever offer quality bonus offers that your visitors will be genuinely interested in. If your readers can tell that you have their best interests at heart, then you are far more likely to get a loyal readership that are happy to take you up on your bonus offers. If you just bombard them with standard offers and try to force them into signing up with overly persuasive language, your visitors will see right through it, and your newsletter and site will lose a lot of credibility.

Remember that quality and honesty is the key to making money from your newsletters.

How to get conversions from your newsletters

After you have started to form a loyal readership for your newsletter, you can look to start monetizing your newsletter service (which is more than likely the reason you would have started a newsletter in the first place). The key to making money from your newsletters is to offer something that your readers will be genuinely interested in. Here are a few examples of ways you can monetize your newsletters

• Affiliates links to poker rooms (highlighting bonuses etc.)
• Affiliate links to poker software
• Pay per lead affiliate links

As I have highlighted throughout this article, you want to provide useful information to your subscribers… so there is no harm in offering a certain bonus in a strategy newsletter if you feel that your visitors will find it useful. It is important to remember to put your readers’ interests first, and your profits second; you are going to do a lot better by offering a good bonus with little monetary return on your part, than you would if you offered a poor bonus that would make you more money per player. If you can get your readers to respect your opinion as far as offers go, you are far more likely to get them to convert into real money players.

A great option for webmasters with poker strategy newsletters is to include links to online poker software, as these can be very effective in helping online players analyse their gaming, helping them to develop and win more money. One of the best pieces of online poker software is PokerOffice, which runs an affiliate program that offers up to $50 per purchase. This software is genuinely useful, and so it shouldn’t be too difficult to market this to your readers and get a few signups. This is just one of a number of poker programs that you affiliate for and market to your readers.

The pay per lead affiliate links are a little rarer than standard CPA or MGR deals, but there are a few available if you search around. Using this method you can get a solid amount of money if people visit certain sites through your affiliate link and fill out a form.

A few extra tips

Try not to make your newsletters too big. When people are browsing their mail, they are not in the right frame of mind to read long chunks of text. So keep them compact and interesting.

Be careful when adding images, as a lot of the time they will be blocked and prevented from appearing in many web mail websites. Focus mainly and the content, and only add images if you feel they are really necessary, and will help convey your message or help with conversions.

Relax and be yourself when you are writing your newsletters. Your newsletters will be far more entertaining if you let your persoanlity shine through, so don’t be afraid to be a little more informal than you might be with your main site. Readers are far more likely to open up future newsletters and return to your site if you can connect to them by writing a more personal style newsletter.

The “Top 10” Article

Not only are “top 10” articles some of the most eye catching articles, but it extends to anything listing the top X of anything or something along those lines. Any article with this sort of title is almost irresistible to any passing visitor, and is sure to catch their attention. For example, take a look at the article titles below. Which of these looks more interesting?

• Guide to bluffing your poker opponents
• Top 10 tips on how to bluff your opponents

Immediately your eyes are drawn to the “top 10” article, simply because it looks far more interesting. By looking at the title it suggests that the article will be in a listed format, which web users love to read. People browsing the web are always on the look out for quick and easy information, and articles containing lists and bullet points are always a fan favourite.

I’m no psychologist, so I can’t explain exactly why people are fascinated by the top 10 of one thing or another, but then again I don’t need to. If you check out some of the top social bookmarking sites like digg.com, you will often find “top 10” articles on the front page. This is because people just love to read them, and they are sure to catch people’s attention as you scan through the list of articles.

Remember, it doesn’t just stop at the “top 10” of something. It could be the top X of anything, and it will still look interesting. As long as the title suggests that the article will contain a list of top tips or an interesting list of any kind, your visitors are going to want to click on it.

Easy to write

One of the best aspects about these types of articles is that they are exceptionally easy to write. Whilst in most articles you have to make sure your information flows correctly from one paragraph to another, with an article listing the top 10 of something you don’t have the worry of making sure everything fits perfectly. All you have to do is write down one title after another giving a short explanation on each. Before you know it you’ve got to number 10 and your work is done.

This means that these articles are a great for people suffering from writer’s block. All you have to do is list a few things, write a little bit of information on each and you are done. So just give them a try, it probably won’t take you any longer than 20 minutes to write one. In addition, as well as the articles being fun to read, they are equally as enjoyable to write.

How many should you have on your site?

The more interesting articles you have on your site the better, so there is no real limit to how many “top 10” articles you can have on your site. However, you wouldn’t want to create some gimmick site with just top 10 lists of everything and anything about poker, so make sure you have to some good quality, “standard” articles to back them up.

Everyone loves to browse over these lists, but you want to provide some meaty articles that people can get their teeth into to give your site some credibility.

But at the end of the day, if you can find a good balance between the two types of articles, the more interesting information you have on your site the better. People are sure to stick around your site for a while if you have a nice number of “top 10s” to keep them occupied.

But anyways, writing quality content is always easier said than done.

What makes quality content?

In my opinion, quality content conveys the exact information that a visitor is looking for (in regards to the title of the article), whilst being as informative as possible and keeping everything concise at the same time. That means your article should have no extra padding by repeating the same things over again, or using more words than necessary to build up the word count. So if you can get your point across using one sentence, why would you want to use two?

When people are searching the web for information, they want to get is as quickly as possible without delay. So make sure you allow your articles to be long enough to convey everything you want to get across, whilst omitting all unnecessary information that you might be tempted to throw in.

Think of your content as a weapon; you want to keep it as clean as possible without weighing it down. If you can keep every part of your article concise and informative, your content will be able to fight off all of the lesser content on the same topic across the web, making your site a valuable resource to others.

You might think it a good idea to try and make your articles as long as possible to keep your visitors on the page for longer, and thus giving you more opportunity to convert them into RMPs. But in real fact that visitor is just going to find your writing style tedious, and they probably won’t be returning back to your site in the near future. However, if you’re visitors enjoy your content, they may well leave after reading the article, but they are far more likely to return and possible become a RMP.

This isn’t an excuse to write short articles, but it simple highlights how you should get straight to the point without babbling. Long articles are good, but only if each paragraph has a purpose.

Keep focused on one topic

When you get into your rhythm whilst writing, it’s easy to go off topic without knowing it. Always be sure to keep the title of your article at the forefront of your mind so that you do not end up talking about something completely unrelated. Again, visitors want quick and easy information.

If a visitor comes to your site looking for information about ‘pot odds’, they aren’t going to want to know the ins and outs of implied odds and reverse implied odds quite yet. However, if they come to your site looking for information on ‘poker mathematics’, the are more likely to be interested in having a brief introduction pot odds, as well as implied odds, reverse implied odds, expected value and so on.

Basically whenever you write an article, look at the title and think “What would I expect to find from an article with this title?” If you know what your visitors want from your content, you will be able to write much more useful and informative articles.

Use good punctuation and grammar

There’s nothing more disappointing than to find a useful article that has been plagued with bad grammar and punctuation. It almost seems as though the effort someone has gone through to type an article out has gone to waste, simply because they didn’t check through it to make sure it read well.

Always make sure that your articles read well and make good use of good punctuation and grammar. It may have the most useful information in the world, but your article is just going to look like a mess if it hasn’t been checked over, and it’s not going to say anything good about the rest of your site.

If I’m being honest, the last thing I want to do after writing a few pages of content is to go back over the whole thing to look for the mistakes. It’s much easier to be naïve and believe that the article was perfect, and throw it up on my site and just forget about it. However, if I did this I know that my site would be full of mistakes, and my number of returning visitors would be pretty low.

Summary

That’s pretty much the basics of writing good quality content, so now there’s no excuse for you to not be able to write useful content for your visitors. Keep your articles clean, concise and informative and you will be onto a winner. It’s as simple as that.

For further information on writing interesting content, check out this article… How to write content your visitors will love.

If I’m being honest, I’m no psychologist, so I can’t really explain scientifically why writer’s block comes about or how to manipulate your mind to get over it. However, I have suffered from writer’s block on a number of occasions, and this is how I get back into the swing of writing good content regularly…

How writer’s block comes about

In my opinion, you find it more difficult to write because you are simply thinking about it too much. For example, if you decide to go bungee jumping, anyone will tell you that it’s best to just get up and jump as soon as you are ready. The longer you take to do it, the more time you will have to think about it, and therefore the less likely you are to do it. The same kind of thing applies to writing.

If you start to over-think things, you can become incredibly critical of your own writing style. I don’t know about you, but every time I used to read someone else’s story as a kid in school, I used to think “whoa, that’s so much better than mine”. Although I used to think this, the real fact of the matter was that my work was just as good or better, yet the fact that I was so critical of my work meant that I couldn’t truly appreciate it.

How to get over writer’s block

If I could tell you to stop being so critical I would, but that’s just not going to have any effect. So here’s what you need to do…

• Open up Word (or whatever you use to write)
• Write the title of your article
• Ignore the fact you have writer’s block
• Write a paragraph, regardless of how shoddy you think it is

I feel that the core problem of writer’s block is actually getting started. If you think about what you are writing in your head, it’s easier to criticize it and pull it apart, putting you off from actually writing in the first place. So push your writer’s block to the side, and just write.

When you see that first paragraph in front of you, it should help to make you realise that your work isn’t half bad at all. But if you are still not happy, just continue writing another paragraph and another. After a while you will feel compelled to finish the piece because of the fact that you have already come so far, and that’s when things will start to flow naturally once again.

Poker affiliate writer’s block

As a poker affiliate, one of the most common reasons for writer’s block is the fact that you haven’t actually been playing poker much. If you haven’t actually been playing the game, then how can you expect yourself to have a passion for what you are writing? So play some poker to remind yourself what it is all about, and those fingers should flow more freely when you decide to type.

On the flip side, I used to find it difficult to write poker strategy if I was in the middle of a bad run of cards and losing money. I used to think that if I couldn’t win money myself, then how could I teach others? The fact of the matter was that I was a winning player, but the losing streak used to make me lose my motivation to write strategy. So instead, I would write news or articles other than strategy to help compensate for the lack of strategy articles.

Summary

Although writer’s block amongst affiliates might be a little more unheard of in comparison to a novelist’s writer’s block, it’s not all that uncommon. As a poker affiliate you could be writing hundreds or thousands of words every day for your site(s), and so it’s not that difficult to let one small criticism of your work escalate into full-blown writer’s block.

Some people are more susceptible to writer’s block that others, it’s just the way things work. But the majority of regular writers will have difficulty putting pen to paper (or fingers to keyboards for affiliates) at some point in their careers. So when it does come about, just remember that there is a light at the end of the tunnel, and just keep writing regardless of how poor you think your work might be. It’s better to press on rather than come to a complete standstill.

If worst comes to worst, you can always outsource your content for a bit.

For more information on writing content, check out the content writing tips.

As a general rule, the more quality pages you have on your website, the better. Every time you add a new page to your site, you increase your site’s chances of picking up a visitor from the search engines for the new search term coming from that page. So the more pages you have on your site, the more visitors you will be receiving from the search engines.

On top of this, when people visit your site, they are likely to be hungry for information. So the more pages you have on your site, the more likely it is that you will be able to keep those visitors on your site for longer. The longer you have visitors on your site, the higher the chances of a conversion. So always try and give your visitors as much useful information as possible so that they are less tempted to click on that ‘x’ in the top right corner of the page.

Even if some visitors leave your site after a short period, if they realise that your site has lots of quality pages, visitors are likely to return at some point in the future because they will remember your site as being a valuable resource. For example, you might only visit Wikipedia once for a brief visit, but you know that you will probably return there some day because it has lots of information and is a useful resource. So the same should apply to your site.

If you think about your favourite sites (especially poker portals), have a look at how many pages they have on their sites. You may not have realised it, but these sites are your favourite because they provide you with quality content, and lots of it. You may never get around to reading or looking at it all, but it’s nice to know the information is there for you if you need it.

I have heard people mention before how too many pages on a site can make them “too cluttered” or “too big”, which in my opinion is absolute nonsense. If you can add more pages related to your niche, then you should continue to keep adding until you can no longer expand your site. Cluttered sites are the result of poor navigation, not because of there being too many pages.

For tips on how to improve your navigation, check out my article on how to structure your website

Whenever I create a new site, I always like to start with a solid 30 pages or more. When I have all of these pages up, I continue to build on a daily basis, writing about as much information as I can related to the niche my particular site is in. The 100 page mark is something I always like to shoot for, as in my opinion I feel that I have hit a milestone in creating a valuable resource to my visitors. However, just because I hit the 100 page mark, I never intend on stopping there.

How many pages does a useful website have?

Although I mentioned earlier that there are no rules, here is my opinion on how many pages a good site should have; a valuable and resourceful website should have at least 50 – 100 pages. This obviously will not apply to all websites, but for webmasters that are focusing on creating content driven sites, I would rarely be settling for anything less than 50 pages.

So if you think you have finished building your site with your 10 or 20 pages, I would get back into your word processor and start writing more content. There should be no reason why you can’t think up a few new articles to write, as I’m sure that there are plenty to topics to discuss if you brainstorm for a while. You may think that your site does not need any more articles, but why not give them to your visitors anyway? More content is never a bad thing.

I would like to remind you that all sites are different, and so will not need as many pages as others. However, you should not be trying to look for excuses to avoid adding more pages to your website. If you can think of any new article to add to your site, then you should always try and get down and write it. The most successful websites have lots of content on them, so the more you write, the greater your chances of becoming successful. It’s a simple fact of creating profitable websites.

The problem with writing an article is that if you make it too short, you might be disappointing your visitors with a lack of information; but if you make it too long you could be overwhelming your visitors with too much information. It’s nice to have lots of information on something, but a lot of the time a casual reader wants quick information without the hassle of reading reams of paragraphs, even if the content is great.

I am sure that there have been a number of times where you have seen a huge article and thought “f*** that”, and clicked back off the page. Similarly, there will have been times where you wished you had more info on a topic, which can be a real shame.

So again, how long should you make your articles?

It all really depends on what the article is about, which is why I am going to split my recommendations up into 3 sections: Strategy Articles, News Articles and Room Reviews. These are probably going to be the 3 most common types of content that you will be writing as a poker webmaster, so these are the ones I am going to address. So here we go…

Strategy Articles

As a general rule when it comes to writing strategy articles, I never hold back on the word count. My reason for this is that if I’m writing an article on a particular piece of strategy, I want to try and explain things as clearly as possible to try and help the reader understand the concepts of what I am trying to convey as fully as possible. I’m sure that if I tired to confine my strategy articles to 500 words, I would be leaving out a shed load of important information each time and my article would be pretty useless as a resource.

However, this does not mean that I shoot to write the longest strategy article possible. I always try hard to keep the information as concise as best as I can. I really don’t want to write more than I need to, so I make sure I re-read my work and take out any unnecessary words or sentences to help keep the article as short as I can.

If I ever find that I write a very long strategy article and cannot condense it to at least less than 1200 words, I will be tempted to split the article up into a part.1 and part.2 (or maybe even part.3 or more if necessary). Even if the content is quality and as concise as humanly possible, a big chunk of text is not going to look attractive to anyone, so splitting articles up into smaller chunks is a great way of keeping those strategy articles looking sweet.

Although I never aim for a target, I feel a good strategy article normally consists of around 800-1000 words.

News Articles

News articles can be a little tricky, because you get the casual browsers that want to scan through the interesting information and pick up the quick facts, whereas others will be on a search to find the smallest details on a particular news item. Accommodating for both types of visitor is not going to be easy, but you can help to keep both interested if you know a simple trick.

A very popular method of displaying news articles is to have a short, bolded summary at the top of the paragraph, with the rest of the more in depth content below it. This way, you can appeal to both the scanners and the more interested readers.

When it comes to length, the more information the better; but again, you want to try and hit the right spot when it comes to length so that your news article doesn’t look overly daunting. A lot of the time however you may be constricted when it comes to what you can write, unless of course you are writing the news from first hand experience. So writing huge news articles will not always be possible.

In my opinion, some of the best news articles usually reach around 600-800 words (if you can write that much), which is perfect to provide all the information you need without rambling on about something off topic or unrelated to the news in question.

Room Reviews

It is in writing poker room reviews that the rare situation occurs where you may need to try and overwhelm your visitor with information. By overwhelm I don’t necessarily mean provide ridiculous amounts of content, but instead provide so much information that they will be satisfied and not feel the need to look anywhere else for more.

When a poker player searches for a poker room review, they want to find out as much about the room as possible. After all, these people are considering making deposit at these poker rooms, so they want to have a firm idea about whether or not a particular room is going to be worth their money. So you should be aiming to provide these visitors with all the information they need.

But anyways, when it comes to writing poker room reviews, I wouldn’t be writing anything less than 800 words. This may seem like a lot, and you may be able to convert visitors well with smaller reviews, but this is my personal opinion on what I think will help to convert as many visitors as possible. As long as the content is interesting and relevant, it really will be the more the merrier.

A key point however is that the content must be well structured, and split up into smaller sections so that visitors are not faced with unsightly chunks of text. So split it all up into sections, write as much interesting information as possible and you will have a great piece of content ready to convert your visitors into RMPs.

Throughout your site, you should always try and link between articles as much as possible. For example, if you have a handful of articles based on a similar topic, you should try and link each of these articles between each other. This is because inter-linking your articles has two excellent benefits.

Reader Benefits

If you have a visitor reading one article and they notice a link to another article on a similar topic, there is more chance that you will be able to keep that visitor reading and to hang around your site a little longer. This in turn will help the visitor realise how useful your site is, and so they are likely to come back to browse through your pages again to find more information, jumping from page to page. The more time your visitors spend on your site, the more likely it is that you will get a conversion.

For example, how many times have you spent hours on Wikipedia or YouTube just clicking from one page or video to another because of the related links that you are provided with? It’s crazy how many times I have gone to YouTube to just watch one video, yet I end up spending hours there hopping from one video to the next because of the related video links they are throwing at me. So try to do the same with your work.

If you own a WordPress blog, you should check out the Related Posts plugin that you can use to show links to similar articles on your site from each of your posts. It’s very handy.

SEO Benefits

If you are writing lots of articles, then you want to try and keep them ‘alive’ in your site by linking to them from other pages. If you write loads of articles but do not interlink them with other pages, they will simply get buried and almost forgotten about. So not only will your readers have a hard time trying to find your work, but so will Google and other search engines.

So with all of your pages, you want to try and keep them equally important in Google’s eyes. As you should know from the basics of SEO, Google likes to use links to help rank pages in order of importance. So even though these links won’t be from other sites, Google will still recognise the links and help rank the page you are interlinking to as more important. So if you do this between all of your pages, you will be helping Google to understand the importance of each of your pages and keep them ranking nicely.

A Few Pointers

It’s all well and good to go through your site and start interlinking those pages, but there are a few points that you should remember before you start adding links.

• Firstly, try to keep the pages that you interlink between related to one another. Don’t try and force a link between two pages, just keep them as natural as possible. Just go through your pages and see if you pick up on anything that you can link to on another part of your site. Let the links jump out at you, don’t force them.
• Don’t overuse interlinking in your articles. If you are linking to another page on your site in every other sentence, you are going to have a pretty colourful page full of links mixed with normal text, which isn’t going to look too pretty. Furthermore, I’m guessing that the majority of these interlinks will be forced, and your article will be pretty poor. So use it in moderation.
• Use anchor text when you are interlinking. Instead of having something like “For more information on poker mathematics, click here” with the “click here” part linked, try something like “For more information, read our article on poker mathematics” with the “Poker Mathematics” part linked. This will help Google to understand what the page is about and help the page with SEO and its rankings.

The idea of presenting articles and content well on a website will often be forgotten about by webmasters, but it is something that shouldn’t be underestimated. Its all well and good just throwing up a chunk of text onto your site, but its just going to look a little ugly, and it won’t look too appealing for the visitors. It will also make it difficult to read, which is going to be a real shame if your work is of a high quality. People might spend ages on website design, yet neglect structuring their actual content well. So here are a few pointers for you to help organise your content.

Avoid Big Chunks of Text

Big chunks of text can look incredibly daunting to the casual Internet browser, and anything that looks like it will take a long time to read will scare many visitors away. Therefore you should get used to making shorter paragraphs than you might normally, and put breaks in between large amounts of text.

Smaller paragraphs make it easier for the visitor to skim over the content to find what they are looking for, or just to read through quickly. So having short and concise paragraphs will help keep the casual browsers on your site as well as allow everyone else to get access to the information they need comfortably.

Use Bullets and Numbered Lists

Again, visitors like the important information placed in front of them, so the use of bullet points and numbered lists really helps to draw attention to the more important parts of your document. Bullets and numbered lists are great ways to recap on things that have already been discussed and list things that have been or will be talked about in the article.

Bullet points are also good because they always give short and concise information, which is what all web users love to see. So the next time you feel you need to make a few quick points, think about using bullets or numbers; they really are pretty effective. Because as you can see…

• They catch your attention
• They provide concise information
• They help to break up the content
• And because they are just generally awesome

Use Headings

Headings and sub-headings are a great for splitting up your work into smaller segments for your readers. Having headings means that visitors can more accurately pin-point the information they are looking for, which means that the casual browsers won’t be turned away by the fact that they may have to read through a big article to try and find something that may not even be there. So again, sub-headings make it as easy as possible for readers to find what they are looking for and keep them browsing around for as long as possible.

As you can see in this article, I have used headings for each of the little pointers that I am giving, and they really help to improve the look of the article, whereas a big block of text would look a little unimpressive to say the least. Google also likes sites that use sub-headings for SEO with the use of h2, h3 tags and so on, so the use of headings can only bring positive outcomes.

Bold Important Text

This is something that I have trouble with if I am being honest, but it doesn’t mean that you can’t utilize it to your advantage. If you make an important point or want to really drum something into your reader’s heads, highlight a key point that you are trying to get across in bold. This will draw attention to the point and help to emphasise the fact that what you are saying is important. Your readers will appreciate the fact that you are trying to help them learn or understand something, but just be careful to use it sparsely and not in every other sentence.

Add an Image

Readers love to see images in content, as it helps to break up articles and make the article feel a little more unique. If you feel that no image in necessarily needed within the content to help convey points that you are making, you can still make up a random yet related image to throw up in the corner of your article. Quite like I have done with the articles on this site (Structure… Stonehenge… A bit off I know, but nice effort surely).

If you take a look at www.pokernews.com, you will also see that they have an image to accompany every article, regardless of whether or not the image actually helps to inform the reader in any way. It is surprising how much a simple image can do to make an article look more attractive, so always try and throw one in if possible. Just try and keep it on topic and don’t make it too intrusive, and your readers will have something to look at when they get tired of reading.

Summarize

It’s always good to have a quick summary at the end of an article to reinforce key points you have made, as well as allow the lazy readers to get a general idea of what is going on. Remember that you shouldn’t stop at just writing an article, as the real beauty comes from the way you structure it. It’s your hard work; so don’t waste it by presenting it poorly… show it off!

After all, when Ferrari make a new car with top of the range engineering; they don’t hide it under a box. They give the people something to look at as well as use, so try and do the same!

People that visit poker portals looking for information on strategy, reviews and such are not easily wooed into playing at a particular poker room because you say it’s great and you have lots of banners on your site. Visitors want to be provided with information and form their own opinions on the rooms, which means that we need to cater to their needs to help convert visitors on our poker room review pages.

Here are a few pointers about how to create high-quality, converting poker room review pages…

Play at the room before you review

This may be common sense to most affiliates, but it’s quite surprising that some poker affiliates don’t actual visit the rooms before they review them. Actually playing at the room is essential, as it allows you to pick up on the important features of a room and give an honest and accurate review. But don’t just spend 5 minutes at the room, spend an hour playing at the room at least so that you can fully explore the pros and cons of the room.

If you do not play at the room, you will probably end up making the review up, or relying on copying information from someone else’s review. This is never a good idea, as nobody wants to read about made up information or browse over a re-hash of someone else’s work. It’s going to be much easier and more beneficial to play at the room, and write a great review for your readers. Why should they trust you if you write reviews on rooms you have never experienced for yourself?

Don’t over-rank each room

It’s all too tempting for affiliates to rank each poker room they promote as highly as possible, and write gleaming reviews about every aspect of the rooms. However, although you might think that telling your visitors that each room is awesome; it is more likely to be doing more harm than good.

If someone visits your site and sees that all the rooms you have reviews are all ranked 10 out of 10, you are making two things happen;

1. Visitors will not be able to distinguish which room is the best, and so will have little idea about which room will be best for them.
2. Your reviews will not look legitimate, and it will be obvious that you are just trying to force visitors to sign up with your overly generous reviews. So they will look elsewhere for honest information on which rooms are better than others.

All you have to do is be honest, and give rankings on how good you think the room is. Visitors value honest opinions on rooms rather than a list of biased reviews with no decisive information. There’s no harm in writing an honest review of a poor poker room; although you are unlikely to get any conversions for that 2/10 poker room, at least you are more likely to get a conversion at the 9/10 poker room because your reviews are honest.

If you can’t make decisions on which rooms are better than others, your visitors are going to look elsewhere for sites that can.

Provide lots of information, but keep it useful

When you write a room review, you want to start writing with the intention of your review being the number 1 source on the Internet for information on that particular poker room. If you can provide lots of information to your visitors, they will be less inclined to look elsewhere for information, thus increasing your chances of getting your hands on an RMP.

If you get lazy with your reviews and just keep them short with little information, your visitors are going to want to look elsewhere for information on the room before they sign up. Poker players like to know the facts before the visit a site, so make sure you are the person that can give it to them so you can get that all important conversion under your belt.

In addition to writing lots of information, make sure to keep it concise and provide information that will be useful to the reader. Its all well and good offering an in depth review, but most visitors are not going to care about the things that make no difference to their online experience. So keep it useful, and try and think outside the box a little. Try and talk about interesting things that others might forget, like; Software loading time, game speed, 4-color deck availability, live chat support, withdrawal times. It’s these kinds of things that your visitors are going to be interested in.

Use images and quick facts

Visitors love to be able to actually see what the room is like without having to download it, so make sure you provide them with a screen shot or two. It’s pretty standard to show a screen shot of the table and lobby, but if you feel that your review will benefit with a screen shot of another area of the room; feel free to add it. Again, if you don’t provide screenshots of the room, your visitors may look elsewhere to find another portal that does provide them with useful screenshots.

Similarly, visitors like to see quick facts and figures about the room. Although they are not vital to the success of your review page, it’s nice to see interesting facts like the year the room was established, bonus amount, which network the room is part of, Mac compatibility and so on near the top of the page. It’s the little touches like these that set your review apart from the other 3 paragraph “this room is brilliant” room reviews.

Place affiliate links wisely

After writing your top-notch review, you will need to have a think about where you will place the links to the room in question. It’s all well and good to throw a link in at the bottom of the review, but this may well go un-noticed, and your visitor may end up typing in www.thepokerroom.com rather than clicking on your links. Make it easy for your visitors, and provide them with an obvious link to click on to visit the site rather than have them type in the room address because they can’t find a link to the site.

It would be a terrible shame to lose an RMP because of an unfortunately placed affiliate link, so have a think about placement after writing your review. However, be careful not to litter your review with too many links and make it look scruffy, keep it clean.

My favourite way to place affiliate links is to have a ‘www.thepokerroom.com’ link near the top (obviously using the affiliate link over it) and have ‘play poker at poker room X’ placed in the middle of the review page after every 2 or 3 paragraphs. I will then have a slightly larger and bolded ‘play poker at poker room X now’ at the bottom of the page, so it is noticeable by anyone that has happened to quickly scroll down the page.

Furthermore, if you own a site with lots of quality content, it is more likely that other sites will link to you, bringing you both traffic and higher positions in search engines like Google (and higher positions in the search engines means more traffic again!)

So as you can see, content is at the heart of successful and profitable poker sites, and the great thing is that you can get as much content as you like for free. All you need to do is put in the effort to churn out great quality content on a regular basis. And remember, quality is key! So here are a few tips to help you generate lots interesting and quality content for your poker site or blog…

Make lists of possible articles

Whenever I am working on my websites or browsing around the web, I will occasionally come up with an idea for a possible article that I can add to my site. Sometimes I will even set aside a few minutes in my day to brainstorm and think about all the different articles that I could potentially write. So whenever I think of something that would be good as an article, I will jot it down in a little notepad file on my desktop for safe keeping, so that whenever I come to write content for my site, I will always have a list of articles to choose from instead of having to think of something on the spot.

Make an article plan before writing

Just as you were told in school that your stories should have a ‘beginning, middle and an end’, you should try and have articles with nice structures so that they flow well. When I first started writing articles I used to dive in head first, as I believed making an article plan before writing it was just going to be a waste of my time. But I later realised that it took me longer to write an article without planning it before hand, and the article itself would not read as well if I didn’t have a plan. It’s better to take 5 minutes to plan an article, and then write it in 20, than it is to spend 40 minutes muddling through an article and trying to plan it along the way. So as they say… fail to plan, plan to fail.

Structuring Your Poker Content>

Proof-read your work

I am always surprised at how many mistakes I can make in one article, even though I try my hardest to get the article as perfect as possible as I go along. Therefore I always re-read my work to find any little errors and correct them before publishing an article to one of my sites. Visitors don’t mind the odd little mistake here and there, but they will start to lose trust in you and your site if they are regularly finding mistakes. So always try and minimize the amount of grammatical mistakes and spelling mistakes you have on your site.

Don’t write if you don’t know

When people visit a website, they almost always automatically assume that the information they are going to be provided with is accurate and correct. So they are putting their trust in you to provide them with articles that will give them with the information that they are looking for.

Therefore if you publish articles on your site that give out false or incorrect advice and information, you will find that you will rapidly lose trust from your visitors, and they won’t stick around for too long once they realise that what you are saying may be incorrect. So if you don’t know about some particular piece of strategy, don’t pretend that you know and give out bad information to your visitors. Just be honest with yourself and stick to what you know.

Do some research

Leading on from the last tip, you should try and do some research about a topic if necessary before you commit to writing to it. Therefore if you are going to write a review of a particular room, make sure you download the room and play there for a while before writing a review.

By doing this you will have a lot more to write about, and more importantly you can give an honest and in-depth review, which is what your visitors are going to be looking for. Similarly, if you are going to write an article about bluffing in poker, try and clue-up on the subject as much as possible even if you feel that you already know a lot. You may unearth a key point that you would have neglected had you not done some research.

Don’t restrict your article length

If you are going to write an article on a particular subject, don’t restrict yourself on the number of words you are going to write. Simply write as many words as you feel necessary to help convey the information as clearly as possible, without babbling on or talking about topics unrelated to the article. Just be clear and concise, and write as much as you need to.

However, if your article reaches 1200 words or more, you may want to consider splitting it up into two segments, such as ‘part 1’ and ‘part 2’. Visitors like to have lots of information, but sometimes a long page of text can look pretty daunting and they will often click away if an article appears too overwhelming, so split long articles up into sweeter looking chunks if necessary.

How Long Should Your Poker Articles Be?>

Break up your work

Just as visitors don’t like being bombarded by huge articles, they also don’t like to be faced with large chunks of text. A lot of the time I will click away from the page if I see a poorly organised article, as it just doesn’t look worth my effort to read it even if the content is great. So if you notice that you have written a particularly large paragraph, get used to using the return button and breaking it up a little. An article that has been split up into smaller sections looks much nicer, and is a lot easier to read than one big long lump of text. The use of small sub-headings like in this article helps to make the text easier to work with.