Poker69's Affiliate Blog

First I want to make an introduction... If you didn't read my blog post at PAL I decided I was going to start a "Blog Series" that will go over the entire creation of an affiliate site from scratch.

I explained on the blog post "I decided to do this for a couple reasons... It will motivate me and make me work hard, I will for sure be accepting input and critique (hopefully I get lots), I will be learning stuff as I go, and it will probably be really interesting for others to follow along (especially newer affiliates)."

I really hope that by the end of this blog series of posts that some newer (or even older) affiliates will learn a couple things or even just get motivated, and that I will personally learn things from tips that people give in the comments.

Quick About Me - For those who don't know me well my name is Kevin and I'm 21 years old. I won't go into too much detail here, but I have been an affiliate for just over 2 years now. I knew nothing about creating a website or internet marketing in general before joining the PAW forums, but have gotten enough knowledge from the forums and members to be doing this as my only source of income. I'm currently attending college taking business marketing. I would call myself a medium sized affiliate maybe, with still a long ways to go and tons to learn.

Part 1 - In this part of the blog series I will go over what the domain is that I will be developing, how and why I came up with that, and the planning that I am putting into creating the site. Although this is a sports betting site, poker affiliates will probably be interested in reading to, as a lot of it relates.

The Idea:

I recently have gotten more and more into sports betting affiliating. I absolutely love watching, playing and betting on sports so creating sites about sports betting is actually entertaining to me (although I get sick of writing content all the time). For those who didn't read my thread and blog post about the Super Bowl site, I created a site dedicated to betting on the Super Bowl which along with my other sports betting portal provided me with the most real money players I've ever gotten in one weekend.

I was really excited Sunday and was already thinking of the next big sporting event to take advantage of. March Madness is coming up half way through March and is one of the biggest sports betting events of the year in the US. I knew I had to try and get a piece of all the fans who will be watching and betting on all of the games.

The great thing about creating a site about sporting events, like March Madness, is that they happen every year. so you can capitalize on the site year after year, and continue to work on and build the site during the other months.

There is seriously a lot of room still in the sports betting industry, and it would be really cool if a couple other affiliates started testing the waters...there are tons of good domains still out there. It's always cool being able to talk to other affiliates about ideas, pick each other brains, trade links, etc. Hit me up on IM if you ever want to talk about it....OK back to the site..

Research:

The first thing I needed was a solid domain name. When I try and find domain names I like to look for exact match domains, or at the least domains with all of the keywords I am trying to target in it. I started with brainstorming by myself all of the different keywords I think people will be searching for in March for the tournament, and wrote down the main ones. These are what I came up with:

March Madness Betting
Bet on March Madness
March Madness Predictions
March Madness Picks

The next thing I did was a quick search using the Google Keyword Tool. I never rely on this fully but I do use it just to check what information it pulls up. Here is a screenshot of the results for that.

I then typed each keyword into Google and evaluated the other sites that came up on the first page. My goal with any site like this is to rank top 3, if not 1st so I knew with only a month until this years tournament I would need something that didn't have really really stiff competition in the SERPs.

Although I thought that of course targeting a betting term would be the best for conversions it looked really tough in the SERPs with sites like sportsbook.com, betus, and docs sports already ranking.

So I checked "predictions" terms and I didn't really think there was too big of competition. I already own NBAPredictions.org, NHLPredictions.org, WorldCupPredictions.org, and have all three of those ranking easier then I thought. So I made up my mind that I would try to get the site ranking for prediction terms such as "March Madness Predictions".

I went over to GoDaddy, and what do you know.. no one has picked up MarchMadnessPredictions.org or net so I snatched them both up. Looks like I have a pretty solid exact match domain to get started.

Planning:

The next step I take when creating a site is the planning. I plan what content I want on the site, what keywords I want to try and rank for, the style of template I want, and any other ideas I have.

I'm old fashion and I jot all of this on a piece of paper.

On the first sheet I wrote down as many ideas for pages on the site that I could. The minimum I want to have for this year is 20 solid articles so I made sure I had enough ideas to cover that. I would even suggest just writing down anything that comes to mind even if it sounds silly it may help you think of new ideas and you can always cross it off.

The second sheet had general ideas about what I am going to do with the site. On the sheet I wrote things like "e-book newsletter signup?", "static comments", "split test landing pages", "wordpress?", and a couple others.

Edit - I wanted to add in quickly my basis of the site as some may wonder how I can tie in affiliate stuff with predictions. I will make a full blog post about converting visitors, but basically people who are looking for predictions either want to bet on the games, or are in pools. The people who are in pools may not know you can bet on individual games online. The people already betting may want a new sportsbook to sign up (bonus incentive maybe?) and there are also paid picks services out there that you can sign up as an affiliate for.

After jotting down all of those ideas I created a plan in my head of which ideas I wanted to implement.

My next and final step of the planning was to draw up a little paint image of how I wanted my site to look. I have a lot of domains put up half-assed on ugly templates, but for a site like this that I am motivated to create and know can make me money if I work hard enough, I needed to get a nice looking template made. A nice looking template can make a huge difference IMO on conversions, as I think it helps gain some trust with your visitors (more on this in my next post). I also like to make sure that my templates aren't too crammed and are pretty overall "clean". Here is the paint image I drew up.

I asked Eduardo from Eyenod if he had time to create me a template, and of course he did and was excited to start another awesome template for me. This guy is awesome, trust me or go read some PAL threads about him.

In the mean time I am going to be getting the content for the site going so that when I get it I can start posting my articles up and getting it started right away.

Part 2 - Getting The Site Going (coming within the next few days)

What do you guys do differently before starting a site? Any big steps I missed that I should be doing for the research or planning of a site? Is anyone else taking advantage of March Madness traffic? Would love to get a conversation going in the comments, cheers!