SitandGoPlanet.com Case Study
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URL: www.SitandGoPlanet.com |
| PR: 4 | |
| Est: 2007 |
Overview
SitandGo Planet is owned by a good affiliate friend of mine, Mark Holland, who is an incredibly hard worker. Mark owns a number of other websites besides this one, but SnG Planet is currently his biggest site and currently his biggest earner.
The great thing about this site is that it is under a year old (at the time of writing this article), and it is already making a significant amount of money for Mark. I am more than happy to use this site as a case study purely because of the fact that it is a great example of how you can become successful in the poker affiliate industry if you put the effort in.
Work hard, write content, and this time next year you could have a big money-making website just like SitandGo Planet. It is a simple formula that winds you up with a site like this.
Design
The site design was created by Mark’s fiance Erika. The site design has developed over the first few months into its current look, which utilizes the popular blue colour scheme. On first impression the site is clean, and allows you to comfortably skim over all of the content and sections made availalable on the homepage. The site looks professional, and allows for good navigation throughout, which is a key aspect of any successful poker site.
This shows how getting a professional to do your design work will save a lot of headaches and allow you to get down to the real work for your site, especially if you have troubles designing websites for yourself.
SnG Planet takes every opportunity to provide the visitor with comparison tables of the top poker rooms for each aspect of sit and go poker. For example, if you click on the MTT strategy link, instead of finding a list of the strategy articles on offer, you are also provided with an informative table highlighting the best poker rooms for MTTs. Therefore the visitor is already provided with the opportunity to visit one of the top poker rooms through the reviews on offer, which is a great way to pick up those passive visitors and convert them into RMPs.
The overall design of the site is pretty simple, but at the same time it is clean and easy to navigate. The site is a prefect example of how good navigation and content should be the main focus over design every time, just as long as you have a half-decent design to work with.
Content
The content is the driving force behind SnG planet. Even though the site is less than a year old, there are already over 300 pages on the site (at the time of writing). Although this may sound like a staggering amount (which it is), it is perfectly feasible to achieve if you just write 1 or 2 articles and day and stick with it. If you can get 300 quality pages onto your site, there is no doubt you will be onto a winner.
The strategy articles are well laid-out using good content structure, which makes it easier for the visitor to read. It is obvious that Mark has gone out of his way to make sure that the articles are well displayed on his pages after writing them, rather than writing them and just throwing them onto the page. There is a good use of bolding, bullet points, and headers to help display the content as effectively as possible.
It is these touches that gives a site like SnG Planet the edge over your average site, and they will often be appreciated by 
the visitors. If your visitors notice that your site offers great articles that have that little something extra, they are far more likely to bookmark your site and return for more content in the future.
SnG Planet also effectively uses a newsletter box to capture the email addresses of its visitors. However, instead of just offering your standard newsletter as an incentive to sign up, the site offers a free SnG strategy e-book.
By doing this, Mark is far more likely to get the passing visitor to sign up for the free gift, and so there is another opportunity to market to this visitor in the future and get another RMP. This is a great example of how you can effectively use newsletters on your site.
SEO
Mark has only been affiliating for just under a year, so he will be happy to admit that he is no SEO guru. However, by learning the SEO basics and writing content, he is able to bring in over 400 unique visitors a day. 400 visitors is a hefty amount for a relatively new poker site, and it gives you more than enough opportunity to sign up players and make money.
The fact that Mark chose a good niche like Sit and Go poker means that he was able to compete for the less competitive poker search terms, and rank higher in the search engines to bring in more visitors from the start. This highlights how choosing a good niche is key to bringing in quality traffic without having to shoot for those overly competitive keywords.
As with most of the best sites, SnG Planet makes good use of h1 tags, meta tags, title tags and bolded text to help Google identify what each page is about.
The inner pages of the site benefit greatly from the interlinking that takes place. By interlinking your articles, Google is able to search through more of your site more easily, and so it will be able to index and rank the majority of your pages well. Therefore once again, the more pages you have in the search engines that rank well, the more traffic you will have coming to your site. So be sure to interlink your articles at every opportunity to get Google to notice each and every page.
Summary
SnG Planet is a great site to do a case study on, because it is a great example of how you can go from knowing nothing about poker affiliating to creating a resourceful website that dominates its niche within a year. Pretty impressive.
But anyways, this case study is getting a little longer than most, so I am going to wrap it up there. But if you ever want to be inspired to start developing your poker site, simply take a look at Sit and Go Planet.
Talk about making a site to be proud of.