How To Write Quality Content

Throughout this site, I always talk about how writing content is important. On top of that, I also stress how important it is to write quality content. After all, you could have 300 or more pages of content on your site, but if they are completely rubbish then all that content is going to be useless. However, if each one of those pages contains useful and informative information, you will have a great resource that you can provide to your visitors.

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.

April 9, 2008 | Content | No Comments »

Don’t Give Up

The title pretty much says it all here; but if I left it at that we wouldn’t have much of an article on our hands, so let me take the time to elaborate a little…

As a new poker affiliate, there will often be times where you consider whether or not the whole idea of promoting online poker rooms is really worth while. When you’re at your computer facing a serious bout of writer’s block, or having a shitty time trying to modify a section of your site, it may seem as though poker affiliating is way more hassle than it’s worth. You will think it much easier to knock it all on the head and try something else instead.

But seriously, don’t give up.

There are very few online industries that will allow you to make as much money online as poker affiliating will. By giving up you are missing out on a prime opportunity to make a very nice amount of money from month to month, and possible live a far more comfortable life than you are now. Whilst making 6 figures a year seems pretty distant to most new poker affiliates, it is by no means an unattainable target.

Waking up in the morning to see that you’ve made a few hundred dollars whilst you were sleeping is a pretty enjoyable experience… I will tell you that for free.

After you get past the breaking point, you will have a completely different approach to your affiliate business. Whilst at the start you were always wondering if you would ever see any return on your efforts, you will now be wondering how far you can push yourself, and how many figures you could be bringing in each and every month. When things start to fall into place and you start making money, making even more money on top of that gets a lot easier.

Nobody likes to work for nothing, especially if things don’t appear to be going your way. There will be set backs, and there will be disappointments. There will be missed opportunities, and there will be failures. But hey, who’s counting? It doesn’t make a difference how many times you fail; all that matter is that you have that one break through project.

All the greatest Internet entrepreneurs have had their failures; some have even had some pretty monumental ones. But at the end of the day, nobody cares. Nothing is stopping you from trying again, and from every failure you set yourself up to do even better with your next project. Even if things do not work out as you have planned, you will still have learnt a few tricks and picked up some valuable experience. As hard to believe as it is, the experience you gain will often make up for the fact that your project was a failure.

Sometimes as a poker affiliate, things will go seriously wrong. You may lose a week’s or a month’s worth of work, but on the grand scale of things this isn’t too much of a big deal. Don’t get me wrong, you will be uber-pissed off if something like that happens, but it’s how you deal with it that counts. You can really let it get to you, and just forget about trying again. However, if you’re the sort of person to just let it go and start again, you are the sort of person that is hella likely to be making a boat load of money online at some point in the future.

As the old saying goes… its not the falling down that matters, it’s the way you pick yourself back up that counts. It may well be a little cliché, but it couldn’t be more accurate as far as poker affiliating is concerned. If you can bounce back from all of your set-backs, eventually you are going to hit on something that will be a great success. It’s just the way things work.

You have to realise that not everything you touch is going to turn to gold as you’re learning the business, but the one thing that does work out for you is more than going to make up for all the other projects that didn’t work out how you planned.

So as I was saying… don’t give up. Giving up is by far the easiest option; but it’s not going to make you any money at the end of the day. If can continue to work through the worst of it, your success is going to be just around the corner.

Keep plugging away.

April 8, 2008 | Motivation | No Comments »

Get Focused And Start Making Money

I don’t like to write similar articles about the same sort of topic if I can help it, but this is something I feel I really need to drill into new affiliates (and to some experienced affiliates also). Being focused is one of the key factors that drives you to success. If you can’t stay focused and see your goals, how are you supposed to know where you’re heading? If you can’t see the light at the end of the tunnel, then it isn’t there.

One of the worst mindsets you can be in as a webmaster is where you do little work, yet still expect things to ‘just happen’. You can check your stats religiously waiting for ‘the change’, but if you’re not feeding fuel into the fire then you will be whittling away the hours waiting for something that just isn’t going to take place. This why you need to keep a clear head, and get focused with your work.

This is how I keep myself focused…

I always have a list of things to do

This for me is the most important thing that helps keep me focused and helps me to get down to work. If I don’t have anything in front of me reminding me about work that needs to be done, I’m pretty much lost. If all my work plans are stored up in my head, they just become too overwhelming, and I just end up falling into the downward spiral of stat-checking instead.

It may sound pretty daunting to always be faced with a never ending list of tasks, but I always see a dollar sign attached to each piece of work that I am faced with. This helps to remind me that the more I get done, the more money I will be making in the near future. Whilst some things will not directly affect my earnings, as long as I am developing my sites in some way I can be sure that it will be contributing the final figures in my monthly payments.

I avoid all distractions

• I never have MSN/Yahoo/Skype or any IM programs on
• I rarely have any music playing in the background

I will admit that I keep my web browser running, as this normally helps contribute to research, or for when I intend to have a quick break. But I’m pretty strict with this, and I don’t spend too much time browsing around pointless stuff that just leads to further procrastination. Of course this is assuming that I do not need to browser to do work, for example if I’m writing content in Word, designing in Photoshop or modifying my sites in Dreamweaver.

The more distractions you have whilst you work, the more opportunities you have available to you to prevent you from being focused on the work at hand. So make sure you set yourself up to be as productive as possible when you sit down at your desk.

>The fewer distractions you have, the more focused you are.
>The more focused you become, the harder you will work.
>The harder you work, the more money you will be making.

It’s a simple series of events, but it is one that works perfectly well.

I set myself goals

If I’m being honest, I never used to set myself goals in the past. Setting goals always used to sound like one of those things that ‘other people’ did to try and help themselves get more motivated, probably ending in little to no success. However, I realised that setting yourself goals can have a powerful effect on the way you approach your work.

If you set yourself realistic goals, you have something to shoot for each time you get down to work. This helps to drive you to get things done, as it is a great feeling to achieve your goals and cross them off the list. You will be surprised at how good it feels to complete your own personal goals, no matter how small they may be.

Without goals in front of you, your overall work ethic is a little more lax and you no longer push yourself to achieve more than you would be able to if you had something to aim for. So never underestimate to power of setting yourself goals.

Just make sure to set your goals as follows:

• Set your goals around how much work you can get done, rather than based on results.
• Set goals over short periods of time; they are much easier to stick to and complete.
• Set attainable goals so that you do not overly stress yourself.

If you follow all of these rules, your work will be incredibly focused and your productivity will be at an all time high. So stop reading, and start making some money.

April 8, 2008 | Motivation | No Comments »

Don’t Become A Banner Farm

Scroll Down!

Okay that’s enough. That really isn’t a pretty sight to see, and it’s going to send you into a daze if you stare at it for long enough. Hence why there is a nice distance between this text and the horrific image above. But anyways, on with the article… The animation above was actually taken from a real website. In fact, the actual website looked a lot worse; if you scrolled up or down the page it didn’t look much better. The saddest part of it all is that the webmaster may have thought that this looked good in some way, but unfortunately for him or her, 99.9% of the visitors to that site won’t be able to find the ‘back’ button quick enough. You might think that this site is just a one-off; however, banner-farm-syndrome is ripe amongst poker webmasters. For many starting out in the poker affiliate industry looking to build their own site, good web design skills are often not immediately at hand. Therefore it is common to find amateur webmasters filling up their self-designed sites with these free banners, thinking that they help the site look more attractive in some way. They couldn’t be more wrong. The main cause of banner farms is that new webmasters have limited ability in web design, and so in an attempt to compensate for this they use a large numbers of banners on their sites. Whilst these banners may be professionally designed, their flashy nature will be overly distracting and will simply look like a mess if a number of them are in a close proximity. How to avoid creating a banner farm The best way to avoid creating a banner farm is to simply restrict yourself from using any banners whatsoever on your site when you first start. This may sound a little extreme, but trust me; in my opinion flashing banners make sites look worse on almost every occasion. Poker room logos are fine to use in the right situation; in fact I recommend you use some classy logos in your reviews and such. But banners should be a big no-no. If you look at some of the best performing poker websites (case studies), you will notice that many of them will not have a flashing banner anywhere on their site. This is because these webmasters are aware of the fact that they have a very low click-through rate, and so they are happy to leave them out from the site. Big banners will also often make sites look a little unprofessional, so it’s easy to see why the big name poker sites are not using them There always seems to be the underlying idea that more banners = more signups. In reality however, the more banners you have on your site, the uglier it is going to look. Now if your site looks ugly and unprofessional, you can guarantee that you will be turning away visitors. So your banner will unintentionally be doing more damage than good. Realize that your site will do just fine (if not better) without banners and you will save yourself a whole load of trouble. Focus on writing lots of quality content and you will be on the road to creating a resourceful and profitable poker site. Put banners at the back of your mind, or you will be doomed to fail as a new poker affiliate. What you can use instead of banners A lot of the time flashing banners are thrown into a page because a webmaster feels that they are necessary… this is not the case. So a lot of the time you shouldn’t really be looking to ‘replace’ a banner with something, because ideally that banner shouldn’t have been there in the first place. Instead of looking for reasons to add a banner, look for reasons to avoid using one. However, it is common to find webmasters using banners within articles to help break them up, or at the end of an article to try and give the page more ‘substance’. Instead of using a banner, try a text link like “Try out our top rated poker room X Poker” or something similar. I am 99% sure that this text link will convert much better than a banner, and I’m 100% sure it will look better too. So give it a try Summary If you want to be successful in this industry, you want to avoid making a banner farm at all costs. If you end up creating a site packed full of banners with little to no content, you are guaranteed to fail; there are no two ways about it. Google is not impressed by how many banners you have on your site, but they are impressed by how much useful content you can provide to your visitors, so work on that. To help get you started creating a content rich (and banner free) site, try using one of these free templates. This is a good way to start making a website with a solid design, and they are perfect for new webmasters who might be struggling with web design. Alternatively you can pay a web designer to create a unique template for you, which will cost around $200 if you use these guys. Both of these options will set you on your way to making a useful and great looking site. So don’t mess them up with loads of banners!

April 4, 2008 | Design | No Comments »

Poker Article Marketing

What is article marketing?

Article marketing is where you write a unique article and submit it to a large and highly trafficked article directory. At the bottom of the article, you have the opportunity to write a resource box about yourself, in which you can include links back to your own site.

After submitting your article to a directory, it is available for other people to look at, as well as available to other webmasters to republish the article on their own sites. If your article gets republished, you will obtain more backlinks to your site, which in turn should help with traffic and improve your rankings in the search engines.

How beneficial is it?

By submitting articles that include links to your site in the resource box, you are increasing the exposure of your website. Depending on how popular the article is, it can be republished by numerous high PR websites, which will heavily increase the number of backlinks pointing to your site. Similarly, an unpopular article will not do so well, and you may only get a handful of backlinks and see minimal traffic from the article.

Either way, there is never any harm in article marketing, as it can only help to increase the awareness of your site around the web. Results will obviously vary depending on how many articles you submit and how good the articles are, but overall the higher the quality of the articles and the higher number you submit the better.

If you only ever submit one poor quality article to an article directory, you shouldn’t expect to see any dazzling results. So it’s a good idea to write a handful of good quality articles for optimal results.

How do you do it?

The best article directory to submit to is www.ezinearticles.com.

EzineArticles is by far the most popular article directory, as it receives the most traffic and gives your articles the most exposure. So this is the best directory that you should sign-up and start out with when you give article marketing a try.

After signing up, you should start writing some unique articles related to your niche. For example, if your site is about Omaha poker, you should write interesting articles about Omaha. It’s a good idea to write general articles about your niche rather than overly specific ones, as the general articles are more likely to catch people’s attention and get republished on other websites.

The best range for word count for these articles I have found to be around 400 – 650 words. Whilst it is a good idea to write in depth and informative articles with good article length on your own site, for article directories you want to try and keep them short and sweet. You also want to break up paragraphs to keep them short enough so that people can skim over them. Bullet points and numbered lists also work well to catch readers’ attention.

The directories are full of people looking for quick information, so don’t scare them away from your article by writing huge chunks of text. Furthermore by keeping it short you can entice the reader to click the links in the resource box to find out more information.

After writing your article, simply submit it to the article directory and include a nice and persuasive resource box at the bottom, including a link to your site. Here are a few tips on writing a resource box. This is your opportunity to sell your site to the reader, so make sure you do a good job of it.

A few pointers

• After writing your article, make sure to give it an interesting title. You want to make this as eye catching as possible, because this is what is going to determine whether or not the article is worth reading or not.

• Write a unique and quality article. If your article is rubbish, it’s not going to get you anywhere. So put the effort in and give yourself the best opportunity to make your article marketing a success.

• Aim to submit at least 5 good quality articles to EzineArticles. This way you give yourself a good opportunity to get some exposure and analyse the results. If things do not work out how you expected, you can always say that you gave it a try.

Summary

Article marketing may not always be a raving success, but there is no harm in giving it a try. If your site is new, it is especially a good idea to try out article marketing so that you can increase awareness, and bring in a few new visitors to your site. Just make sure to give it a good go and you might see some great results. You will never know how well it could have worked if you don’t give it a try.

For more directories you can use to submit your articles to, check out the article directories page.

April 4, 2008 | SEO | No Comments »

Tips On Making Valuable Link Exchanges

When you start out with a new site, you want to try and get as many quality links pointing to your site as possible. As you probably already know, one of the best ways to do this is through link exchanges. However, some link exchanges may do more damage to your site than good. So here is a quick heads up on the types of link exchanges that you should be careful to avoid.

Don’t point to bad sites

Every time you link to a site, you are essentially ‘voting’ for that site. For example, if you did not know anything about SEO or the value of links when you started to build your site, you would only link to sites that you thought were useful. If you knew about a certain site that had some really great poker videos, you might decide to link to them from a part of your site so that your visitor could check out those interesting videos.

Therefore you will have linked to another site because you felt it was a valuable resource; which is essentially what linking is all about. Every time you link to another site, you are telling Google that you think that the site you are linking to has some value. So what do you think Google will think about your site if you are linking to low quality and worthless sites? They will think a lot less of your site if you are linking to other poor quality sites.

There is nothing wrong with link exchanges, but simply make sure that you link to quality sites, as you would do if you did not know anything about the value of links. Just as it doesn’t benefit you in life to hand around with the ‘wrong crowd’, make sure you choose your site’s friends carefully. It will do much better if you surround it with other successful sites.

Link with on-topic sites

When you exchange links with another site, make sure that site’s content is related to yours in some way. Seeing as you own a site related to poker, an exchange with another decent poker website or even a casino site will usually be fine. This way your links will appear natural, and will blend in well with rest of your site. If you start linking to gardening sites or whatever, Google is going to notice that something dodgy is taking place, and you may well get penalized.

Avoid 3-way link exchanges

A type of link exchange that many people like to think is useful is the 3 way link exchange. Instead of doing a basic link exchange between two sites, some webmasters like to get tricky and make a link exchange across 3 sites, so that none of the links are actually reciprocal.

For example, say your friend has websites A and B, and you own website C. A 3 way link exchange would be where site A points to your site C, and your site C points to your friend’s other site B. Therefore your site will be benefiting from the link from site A, whilst your friend benefits from the link to his site B from your site C, without their ever being any reciprocal linking taking place.

Whilst 3 way link exchanges aren’t the biggest taboo as far as SEO is concerned, they are basically trying to manipulate the way Google ranks websites, which Google is not going to like. 3 way linking is of course going to pop up naturally across websites, but Google will be able to easily spot when a site is doing it more often than what would be considered natural. So if Google catches you trying to manipulate your search engine rankings through 3 way linking, expect to be penalized.

Avoid 3-way exchanges with the big sites

Whilst you should try and avoid 3-way link exchanges anyway, this is a particular link exchange that is not going to be any benefit to your site whatsoever.

If your site has been online for long enough, you will start to get emails from link exchange companies or individuals working for some of the biggest poker sites. These people will often ask you for a link from your nice little site (preferably from the homepage or other major page on your site) pointing to their big site, in exchange for a link to your site from one of their very small sites that magically happens to have decent PR.

However, the problem with these deals is that the link you will be getting in return is usually worthless, because the site with already have numerous links to other sites, which will in turn decrease the value of the link you will be getting. So even though the site somehow has a decent PR, your link will be practically worthless because it will be coming from a low-content site that has been infested with links.

Many new affiliates are suckered into these 3 way deals because they see the nice PR on the site they will get a link from, and they are all too happy to give a nice link to the bigger site. But at the end of the day, the real winner is the bigger site, because they are getting a quality link from your nice new site whilst you get a pretty shit link in return.

If you get bored one day, try asking for a link from the big site itself, rather than the shit one that they offer. Watch as they reply in horror, or not even reply at all as you ask for your fair link exchange. They really won’t be interested at all from that point onwards.

April 1, 2008 | SEO | No Comments »

Should You Offer Rakeback As A New Poker Affiliate?

The background

If you have been playing for a while, or you are familiar with the world of online poker, you will know that rakeback is made available to players at certain poker sites. There are many poker websites out there offering all of the standard links and bonuses to poker rooms to make money, and there are also a number of rakeback sites out there offering rakeback to players instead of the standard bonuses.

Without going into too much detail for those that do not know, rakeback is where players are able to get a percentage of their rake back if they sign up through certain affiliate websites, rather than through other affiliates or by directly signing up for the site.

Therefore this makes it attractive for players that know about rakeback to only ever sign up through a rakeback affiliate site wherever possible, instead of missing out on the opportunity to get some of their money back.

So now am I already hearing most of you saying: “Why would I want to set up a new poker website and not offer rakeback then?”

The problems

1) Firstly, players that sign up for rakeback are getting their money from your affiliate earnings. Say for example you are getting a standard 35% commission from a poker room, and offer 30% rakeback to your players who sign up to that poker room. You will only be receiving a total of 5% of the money that your rakeback players generate, because the other 30% will be going back to them.

2) Secondly, you get the best commission and rakeback deals by sending lots of players to poker rooms in the first place. If you are a new affiliate, the affiliate programs have no reason to give you better rakeback and commission, so you will be stuck with a low rakeback rate to offer your visitors.

So because these rakeback visitors are knowledgeable, they will know you are offering a low rakeback deal, and look for some other rakeback site offering something better. Rakeback players are very educated poker players, and so they will always search around for the best deals.

3) Thirdly, poker rakeback is an incredibly competitive market, with big websites investing lots of money and working hard to make sure they are at the top of the search engines for all of the best rakeback terms. Rakeback affiliates are so competitive that it would even be difficult to rank for many of the smaller terms that could bring in visitors to your site looking for rakeback.

Because of these problems, it means that as a new affiliate you will be working very hard and competing against other big affiliates just for a small slice of affiliate income. So anyone with a bit of common sense will tell you that it’s not going to be worth your while to put all your effort into trying to make money as a rakeback affiliate. Not as a new affiliate anyway.

So what should you do?

Just stick to promoting online poker rooms normally.

Just because a number of poker players know about rakeback, it doesn’t mean that they all do. There are still thousands upon thousands of players out there that are completely unaware about rakeback, and you have the opportunity to snap them up through your poker website offering the standard bonuses the poker rooms offer. There is no need to concern yourself with rakeback as a new affiliate.

There is also a large amount of money to be made offering standard bonuses, so don’t feel as though you are missing out by not offering rakeback. If you are still not convinced, take a look at www.everypoker.com. That site makes more money in one month than most people make in a year, so don’t think that there is no money to be made by becoming a standard affiliate. The overwhelming number of poker players are still unaware that rakeback is available.

Even if you are still afraid to miss out, there are a number of poker rooms that do not offer rakeback whatsoever. So if you affiliate for these rooms, the rakeback players will not have any reason to not sign up to the room through your site if you are not a rakeback affiliate, because they would not be able to get rakeback for the room anyway.

Rooms like Chili Poker, Titan Poker, Chan Poker and many more do not offer rakeback, so give them a try out.

Summary

As a new poker affiliate, you should sign up to affiliate programs normally, and leave rakeback alone. It is a far too competitive market to try and make money in, and it’s more likely that you will fail if you are just starting out. Maybe in the future when you are a more educated poker affiliate you could try making a rakeback website, but as a new affiliate you should stick with the tried and tested method that is more likely to make you money.

Poker Affiliate Programs>

March 28, 2008 | General Affiliating | No Comments »