MPC

Continuing from this blog post...

In my last post I finished by setting a goal to rank for Titan Poker Bonus and I explained pretty much how I was going to go about it. The last time I provided an update, I mentioned that I went from not being in the top 100 to being in the 70's. I really haven't done much since because I was busy. Maybe I got one or two more links, that's all. Time des wonderfull things when it comes to SEO. So I checked to day and I'm now in the 40's and getting closer to my goal of being in the top 20's.

On another note, there is another page that I am focusing more effort on. This was a new page and I only started to promote it in the last two weeks. I'm in the top 20 results already. All this to say that there's really three major things to consider when you work on SEO:

1 - Finding the right keyphrase
2 - Coding your page properly
3 - Getting links to it from relevent quality sources

There's a reason why I underlined the word relevent. Any link can help. Relevent links are a lot more effective.

I wanted to talk a bit about poker newsletters. Newsletters are another way to market your site, but for a different purpose than SEO. All seo does it it brings people over. The next part is the conversion and this is the category a newsletter falls in. When people sign up to your newsletter, it's because they're already aware of your site in the majority of cases. That means the newsletetr does not bring in new traffic, but it utilises existing traffic to bring your visitors to the next level.

There is only one reason to have a poker newsletter - It's to make a sale or bring attention to specific areas of your site so you can make a sale there. How you go about making this sale is a different story.

The catch is this: The newsletter generates a mailing list than you can use. However, the quality of your list can be really good, or really bad depending on how you go about it. I learned this the hard way, so avoid my mistake.

To get people to give you their e-mail address, you have to give them something in return. What you give partly determines how good or how sucky your mailing list will be. The first time I did this, I thought the easiest way to get people to sign up was by giving them access to password protected private freerolls. On my website, I would have a freeroll page announcing upcomming events, and the thing I was giving were passwords to get in. Sounds like a good plan right? Not really.

I did get a lot of people to sign up to my newsletter, and had people playing in my freerolls. I would also host a few private friendly games with added money to the prize pool - available exclusively to my newsletter subscribers. And that's where I failed.

My subscribers were freerollers who wanted to play poker for free. They didn't participate in the private game because that required money and them making a deposit, which they weren't really interested in. I would schedule the private tourney the night after the private freeroll and I was encouraging those who won at the freeroll to come play the private game. Some would come when they dint'n already blow their winnings from the night before.

Anyway, long story short - Freerollers don't convert well. I had a small mailing list going in little time - probably around 500 in 3 months or so - and no revenue. And guess wahtm setting these events up and writting newsletters takes time!

Another reason it failed was password leaks. People who already had accounts and were not my players would get their hands on the passwords (all they had to do was sign up to the newsletter), and they would play my private events. If you're going to offer private games, make sure access to the event is tracker based and not password entry. Talk to your AM to see if their room can handle it. If not, use a different room.

The whole thing was a flop and I finally came to my senses and killed it. So if you're going to attempt the newsletter thing, try a different route than I did

I will try newsletters again in the future and use a different approach, but for now I have other experiements in mind.

Anyway.... If someone is looking for link trades OR free original content (in exchange for links), PM me and I'll see what I can do.