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Create a Kick Ass FaceBook Landing Page

MPC — Fri, 24 Jun 2011 02:45:28 GMT

As soon as people hit your page you need to make a good impression. It�s no different than a regular website. So here�s some of the latest tricks I have learned in relation to creating a landing page. Kevin had posted an interesting video for me in the past on this, but that information is now obsolete. Here�s the better way to do it:

Create your fan page. Add the app �Static HTML: iframe tabs�. This will create a new menu called �welcome�. Click on the �welcome� menu while you are logged in your facebook account. You can now create two separate landing pages. One is for what �non fans� will see. The other is for what �fans� will see. The second is optional, but I encourage you to use it as a CTA, and to change the content once in a while. The app accepts standard HTML and CSS code so you can do pretty much anything here.

Here�s an example of my page. Have a look and then I�ll tell you what I did specifically, and share some of the code you would need to duplicate it. Visit TelescopeKing.com | Facebook

You�ll see my page as a non fan. If you�re a fan, my landing page is completely different. You�ll have to �like� the page to see it.

The first thing you�ll notice is that my profile image blends in well with my landing page image. You can even create the illusion that the two are connected by using some graphic design tricks where one element crosses over both images. I didn�t do it here, but here�s an example on my old page: Buy-Telescope.com | Facebook

You will also notice that I added a bunch of call to actions on the non fan landing page. First, I actually included a workable �like� button directly on the landing page as oppose to telling people to �click the like button above� as most people do. I�ll give you the code to recreate this shortly. I also create links directly on the image using image maps. I�ll also show you how that can be done.

Finally, I�ve taken the liberty to help myself to a few links. They provide visitors with a practical way to jump from my Facebook page to specific content on my site. Plus it generates public backlinks directly from the Facebook domain which I assume is good 

Here are some specs in terms of images sizes I used:
Profile image is 180 x 540
Landing page image is 500 x 476
The length can be changed on these, but the width should be the same.

The profile image is uploaded directly to Facebook, but the landing page image has to be hosted on your server.

To the code:
If you want to create an image map like I did, meaning some zones on your image are clickable as links, then make sure your image is hosted on your server and go to Image Map Tool - On-line Image Map Creator - HTML & CSS to create it and get the code. Follow the instructions, and once you generate the code, grab the CSS code (from the tabs above where the code is generated).

That code can be copied directly into your welcome link on your Facebook page. That will setup your basic image with the landing page and image map links activated. Next you want to add the �like� button. Go to Like Button - Facebook Developers to generate the code you�ll need. There�s different options in terms of how you want the button to appear so fill out the form and click get code. What ever this code is, let�s call it �LIKECODE� for now.

Now go back to your welcome page as you will need to add this line:

PHP Code:

#like {height:50px; position: relative; top: -350px; text-align: center; z-index:99; }

This code uses z-index to specify layers. So my main image is by default on the initial layer, and my like is actually on layer 99 (which is really me second layer since I only have two). The code must be added at the top within the section where the CSS variables are declared (inside the code that was generated by Image Map Tool - On-line Image Map Creator - HTML & CSS).

Now go to the very bottom of your code and add the following at the end:

PHP Code:

<div id="like"> Insert your LIKECODE here div>

So it should look similar to this:

PHP Code:

<div id="like"><script src="http://connect.facebook.net/en_US/all.js#xfbml=1">

You�ll probably need to adjust the positioning of the like button over your image. Look in the code I posted earlier where we declared the #like parameter in CSS as follows:

PHP Code:

#like {height:50px; position: relative; top: -350px; text-align: center; z-index:99; }

Simply adjust the value of �top�( the -350px) to move the like button up or down.

Finally, if you want to include a navigation menu / hyperlinks of some kind below your landing image like I did, then just stick standard html code at the bottom of the existing code.

Repeat the process for the fan landing page, and put in whatever HTML code suits you. Obviously, you�ll want to remove the like button from that page.

The last step is to set your welcome page as the default landing page. On Facebook while logged in, click on �EDIT PAGE� go in �Manage Permissions� and set the �Default Landing Tab� to �Welcome�.

That�s it. If you found this useful just remember that I like to be �liked� :D

Enjoy!

Farewell... sort of!

MPC — Fri, 25 Mar 2011 00:25:41 GMT

So it's done. I sold pretty much my gambling stuff and I am moving on to other things. Am I done being an affiliate? Of course not! But I'm refocusing my life priorities for now, and cutting down on affiliate projects. I'll still be around periodically to check on you bitches :p

I'll probably be doing mostely PMs with contacts I have made here, and maybe a "little non gaming forum" action, but I won't be very active. Anyway, it's been fun and PAL was certainly a great place to learn the ropes and make excellent contacts. I just wanted to acknowledge a few people in this blog post.

J-Man, thank you for creating the casual business environement that PAL is. Sure, there's been ups and downs, dissagrements, good days and bad day, but that's the nature of running a forum with JD as a member. OMFGLOL!!! (I'm kidding JD!). Your dedication is appreciated, and enjoy the benefits that come with it.

LadyHoldem was one of the first person to help me out with basic SEO stuff when I started out. She took the time to point me in the right direction, and I truely appreciated this.

Thank you Kevin for being an inspiration to all of us.

Thank you Graham for all your help, insights and advice. If only I followed half of it... lol! I'm still making arrangements for that bottle of wine I promised but it will come (or you may have to pick it up, I'll let you know)

Thank you Cheryle for all your help, insights and advice. If only I followed half of it... lol! Also, I don't think I ever mentioned that I was a MILF man, did I? *wink wink* :eek:

Thank you Randy for your efforts in working with me on our little project. I appreciated the time and advice you provided.

Thank you Sebastian for associating me with Hannah Montana. It was the highlight of my experience. Bastard! Haha! Seriously, thanks for giving me solid advice, and for taking the time to respond to my inquiries.Vive la France!

Martinez, thank you for your contributions in the SEO forum. We didn't interact a lot, but I enjoyed reading your posts, and so did everyone else (altought not everyone agrees with you on EVERYTHING!). Now... can I brag about privately teaching you something you didn't know about Google? (Anyone cand send me $20 paypal if you want to know what it was! No refunds!)

Full Tilt Poker: Thank you for your taking the lead in ruining the affiliate experience. Fuck you.

Jim, thanks for advocating for accountability. Altough some felt you were disruptive or negative, I think it was important to raise some of the points you made, especially after a difficult 2010 for a lot of us. Sure you pushed things a little sometimes, but hey, you're only human. And clearly a bitter one at that! haha!

Corey the Smackdog, you were the first person I did a link exchange with, before even joining an affiliate forum! So in essence, you were the first sucessful contact I made in this industry.

Crazy dude who keept posting lame domains for sales at ridiculously insane prices, I can't remember your name, but christ you made me laugh.

Anyway, I'm sure I'm missing a lot of people here. Don't be offended. I've enjoyed conversing and exchanging with so many of you over the years. I just want to say this to everyone: When I leave, you guys are really going to miss out! Bwahahahaha! (Miss out on comedy perhaps).

Best wishes to everyone!

Setting up a virtual office is easy

MPC — Sat, 05 Mar 2011 03:27:57 GMT

Some of you probably already know what I'm going to share here, but for those who don't, it could be of use to you. I am curently planning a press release campaign. For a press releases to be credible, you must supply a business phone number. As I'm running a part time business from home, I didn't want to actually use my home telephone number when I'm about to blast an article across north america.

Altought I operate under a business name, I don't have a business phone number. So I called my local phone company asking what they could offer. I was basically looking to get number that would send callers direct to a voicemail. I would just check the voicemails daily and call back from home. The best they could do is set me up with a second phone line with a mailbox, for like $30 a month.

I figured what I needed must already exist somewhere and after doing a quick search, I found some of these services online. For under $10 a month, I have exactly what I want, a phone number that direct people to my own voicemail. When someone leaves a message, it converts it into an MP3 and e-mails it to me, then deletes it from my voicemail. That was perfect. And best of all, for a one time $30 fee, I was able to get my own toll free number that works from anywhere in North America (up to 300 mins a month, then there's an extra charge). I actually picked my own toll free number so I have a word in there which will be useful for marketing purposes.

There are other options available, such as redirecting calls to another number (in case you actually want to take the live calls), getting faxes (fax to e-mail), text messages (also sent to your e-mail), a phone menu with up to 5 items (for sales, press 1. For abc press 2 and so on).

Anyway, this service was perfect for what I needed. I got everything setup without hassle. I did some research on various plans and when with the best one I found. Should you be interested in something similar, check out this site. (referral link)

Tips to Speed up your Website

MPC — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 16:31:08 GMT

For the last week or so, I�ve been reading up on ways to make my webpages load faster and did a lot of testing. I'll save you the hassle of trying to figure this stuff out, and just tell you what to do (Or at least, what seemed to work well for me).

Please note that the performance tweaks in section 5 below require an .htaccess file so if you�re on a windows server, this will not work for you. I know there's other ways to make those tweaks without using .htaccess, but you'll need to research this on your own.

1. ****BACKUP YOUR FILES*** Just in case! If something doesn't go as planned and you're confused as to how to fix something, having a backup to restore is a good idea. No need to back up a database is you use a CMS as this won't affect it. But do backup your CSS files, JS files, and template files.

2. Start by downloading some tools. You�ll need:
� The latest firefox browser: Firefox Browser | Faster & Safer Internet | Free Download
� firebug add on: Firebug
� Google�s Speed Page add on: Install Page Speed
� Yahoo�s Yslow add on: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/5369

3. Visit your site�s hompage with firefox. Hit F12 to turn on the firebug. Go to the pagespeed tab and click �analyze performance�. You�ll get a score plus a bunch of information things you can improve. Have a quick look at these, then repeat the process with Yslow. Both of these tools give you similar information. Now you know how to test your stuff. For the purpose of this blog post, I�m just going to stick with �Speed Page�.

4. Simple Speed Page (SP) elements you can improve � These are common errors that are easily corrected. This applies to windows servers as well as there�s no need to use .htaccess for these performance tweaks:

Specify image dimensions � This is the easiest thing to fix. SP will list the images where this information is not specifed, and will also list the actual image size. All you need to do is edit your html code and include height and width parameters in your image tags. As an example, you would go from something like

PHP Code:

<img src="domain.com/images/file.gif" /> to <img src="domain.com/images/file.gif" width="120" height="60" />

Telling the browser image sizes saves time because it avoids the unecessary requirement for the browser to make the calculation itself.

Optimize images � This simply means to compress your images as much as possible to minimize file size. Again PS does all of this for you. It will provide URLs to the compressed versions. Grab those, upload them to your server to replace the non optimized files. WARNING � PS converts gif to png and jpg to jpeg. You�ll need to edit your HTML and template file (css) to reflect the new file extensions.

Parallelize downloads across hostnames � I created a couple of subdomains to send my template images. The idea is that most browsers have a cap of only being able to download 2 files at once per domain. By creating subdomains, it�s possible to transfer more than two images at the same time. So create like 6 subdomains (1.domain.com, 2.domain.com, etc). Create an images folder in each subdomain. Try to divide up your template images equally (in terms of file size) across yoru subdomains. Each subdomain should AT LEAST send 2 images. So let�s pretend that your template uses 20 images and you have 5 subdomains, try to feed 4 images per subdomain. You will need to edit your main CSS file to reflect the correct paths for each images.

Combine external CSS � Instead of having the browser request multiple CSS files, put all your CCS into a single file. That way, you deliver the CSS content with a single request. If you use word press, some add ons will have their own CSS. You need to copy all of it into your own main CSS file, then edit the component files to make sure the code doesn�t add a redundant

Minify CSS � Minify simply means make your code as compact as possible. Space characters aren�t required. Comments aren�t required. All of these add to the file size. A good practice is to save a non minified version of your CSS file in case you do need access to comments and to have something readable, but do get your page to load up the minified version. How do you create one? Quite simple! Go to Clean CSS - A Resource for Web Designers - Optmize and Format your CSS and just past in your non minified CSS code, select the options you want, click �process CSS� and the minified code will be generated at the bottom. You can copy this over your current CSS file content (Make a back up of it before, just in case). A cool tool that will combine all the CSS files into one is Google�s Minify minify - Project Hosting on Google Code This app combines all CSS files into one and minifies them, without touching the originals.

Combine external JS and Minify JS � This is the exact same principle as what I just explained for CSS. It�s more efficient to call a single JS file than to call 10. You may want to attempt to combine all of those into one. You can minify JS with this simple tool (copy and paste your code it, click �compress javascript�, copy and paste the result back). Minify Javascript Online / Online JavaScript Packer. Again, Google�s Minify Tool can take care of all of this for you. minify - Project Hosting on Google Code

5. Advanced PS elements you can improve (these require using .htaccess)
Enabling Compression � There�s more than one way to do this, but I am doing it via .htaccess. First, I was looking into my cpanel and noticed I had a �optimize website� menu in the advanced tools. I turned on �compress all content� which is in fact probably overkill. I could have used the mime type to specify what content to compress. For instance, if some image types are already compressed, turning compression on for those images might actually slow things down. This is something I�ll need to look into further.

I then made the following additions to my .htaccess file from the root of my website:

PHP Code:

# Learning Apache to understand file type by extention: cascade styles and javascripts. # Usually it "*.css" and "*.js" files. AddType text/javascript .js AddType text/css .css # Some performance trick for PHP <IfModule mod_php5.c> #comment out the next line if on wordpress (magic quotes) php_value magic_quotes_gpc 0 php_value register_argc_argv 0 php_value register_globals 0 IfModule> # file we pass throughout "mod_deflate" AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/plain AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/xml AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/css AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xml AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xhtml+xml AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/rss+xml AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/javascript AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-javascript

Gzip compression on your CSS file using php: Create a new file called gzip-css.php in the same folder where you have your main CSS file. gzip-css.php uses the following code:

PHP Code:

ob_start ("ob_gzhandler"); header("Content-type: text/css; charset: UTF-8"); header("Cache-Control: must-revalidate"); $offset = 60 * 60 ; $ExpStr = "Expires: " . gmdate("D, d M Y H:i:s", time() + $offset) . " GMT"; header($ExpStr); ?>

Create a .htaccess file in that same folder with the following:

PHP Code:

AddHandler application/x-httpd-php .css php_value auto_prepend_file gzip-css.php php_flag zlib.output_compression On

Gzip compression on your JS file using php: Create a new file called gzip-js.php in the same folder where you have your main JS file. gzip-js.php uses the following code:

PHP Code:

ob_start ("ob_gzhandler"); header("Content-type: text/javascript; charset: UTF-8"); header("Cache-Control: must-revalidate"); $offset = 60 * 60 ; $ExpStr = "Expires: " . gmdate("D, d M Y H:i:s", time() + $offset) . " GMT"; header($ExpStr); ?>

Create a .htaccess file in that same folder with the following:

PHP Code:

AddHandler application/x-httpd-php .js php_value auto_prepend_file gzip-js.php php_flag zlib.output_compression On

Cache expiry on your files � This setting tells the browser to store some files locally so it doesn�t have to reload them every time a new page is requested. This is particularly useful for template related files (images and CSS) as they are static. If you prevent the browser from having to reload all those image files every time visitors browse your pages, you make things faster for them because they will load to files using a copy stored on their hard drive.

Remember the subdomains we created earlier to store image files? We�re going to create an .htaccess in each image folder of each subdomain. The .htaccess should contain the following code:

PHP Code:

ExpiresActive On ExpiresByType image/gif "A2678400" ExpiresByType image/jpeg "A2678400" ExpiresByType image/png "A2678400" ExpiresByType image/bmp "A2678400"

The syntax used is A + number of seconds before cache expires.Currently this is set to a month. If you want a day use 86400 (60 sec x 60 mins x 24 hrs). A week is 604800 (60 sec x 60 mins x 24 hrs x 7 days), and so on. Tempate files that aren�t expected to change should be set to a month or more.

The .htaccess file located in the folder of your main CSS file should contain

PHP Code:

ExpiresActive On ExpiresByType text/css "A2678400"

The .htaccess file located in the folder of your main JS file should contain

PHP Code:

ExpiresActive On ExpiresByType application/x-javascript "A2678400"

That�s basically what I�ve looked at so far, and a few things I mentioned above are not fully implemented yet on my site. Still, my PS score went from 60/100 to almost 90/100 with these tweaks. I am really not an expert at all with this .htaccess stuff and it's quite possible that I have some code that duplicates things, or doesn�t do anything! If anyone can provide feedback.
If you find this helpfull and want to thank me, throw me a link! xhttp://www.mypokercorner.com on "Poker Strategy". Thanks!

EDIT: One thing I forgot to mention - CSS Sprites. We all use a lot of icons to represent poker rooms. For must of us, each of these icons is a seperate image that must be loaded. This generates an HTTP request for EACH image you want to load, and the more request you send, the slower your page will load. The idea of CSS sprites is that you woudl instead have all these icons as part of one image and you would use CSS the specify which section of the image to display for each icon. In other words, if you had say 20 poker rooms with 20 icons, this method would load up a single image (so 1 HTTP request insetad of 20) and the CSS would "show" a portion of the image for each icon. I find this very interesting. In fact, one could develop an entire site template using this method. More on this, and example codes at http://css-tricks.com/css-sprites/. I'm very interested in this. I'll play around with this in the future.

Something different

MPC — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 19:17:27 GMT

I've decided to try out something else for fun. I recently purchased a telescope and I'm really interested in astronomy. So I figure, why not build a site about it. And that's exactly what I'm working on now.

I think it's easier to diversify if you go into industries that you find interesting and have knowledge in. I considered trying out the dating sites but I'm not that interested in writting about love. And prince charming. And soul mates. I'd be great at coming up with lame pickup lines, but that is a talent the world isn't ready for yet! So I passed.

Now I'm starting from scratch in a new industry, except I take with me the lessons learned from poker affiliating which is priceless. I'm going to start small, with a mini site that covers the basics of my subject matter and point people in the right direction.

Doing all the keyphrase research and preparing a site plan for on page SEO. I'll get that up in a week or so. I'm very excited about this project, but I don't know how competitive that industry is, nor am I familliar with the affiliate options. Still have to do a lot of research.

Meanwhile I have new poker sites to promote, and casino content to develop. Looks like I'm going to stretch myself too thin again! lol

My Baby is EVIL!

MPC — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 14:35:36 GMT

Consider this your entertainement blog post of the day, because it's not about poker.

I have a one year old who's obsessed with the reset button on my PC tower. There's nothing more annoying than playing poker online when suddenly, a sneaky little one decides it's time for your PC to reboot. And I'll tell you my friends, it has happened many many times.

I put on my macgyver thinking cap and came up with a solution to this little problem. (I tried the "no" approach. She doesn't understand what that word means...ever.). This is what I came up with:

That's right, I had one of those backplates in my box of PC junk so I drilled it right there. I can't even use the reset button MYSELF now. Problem solved!

Or so I tought...

This worked perfectly for about a month, but now evil baby has discovered the little button on my powerbar! lol

Value of a domain name

MPC — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 00:11:35 GMT

I was inspired by this thread http://www.pokeraffiliatelistings.co...brandable.html to write the following post:

Value of standalone domains (just a domain name with nothing attached to it). Most standalone domains are worth $10. To have greater value, there's really only four things to consider.

1 - Is the domain name made up with interesting keywords?
2 - Is the domain name short
3 - Is the domain name catchy/easy to remember?
4 - Is it a .com

If you can find something that meets all of these criteria's, you have a really good domain to start with. What is that domain worth? Probably no more than $100 unless someone really really wants it.

Here's the reality - Unless you're doing a mini site, the domain name isn't that important in the grand scheme of things. Take one of my sites for example - mypokercorner.com - Nobody searches for "my poker", "my poker corner" or "poker corner". I wouldn't even consider this a "short" domain, but it is a .com and its easy to remember. I meet 2 out of 4 criteria. I get thousands of visitors every month and it really has nothing to do with the actual domain name, but rather with the content of the site and the link building that went around it. If mypokercorner.com was not registered, I could buy it for $10 and probably resell it for no more than $20 if I'm lucky. There's just nothing special about it.

The third point - memorable name - that's really important if you plan on doing off site advertising. Let's say you were going to do radio ads, mypokercorner.com would work well. Something like my-poker-corner.com wouldn't sound as well. Just imagine hearing "visit my dash poker dash corner dot com". It blows. If you're not going to do offline advertising, it's not AS important to have a memorable domain name, but it never hurts to have one.

regarding mini sites, you would have an advantage of having a domain that matches your primary keyword. I recently sold us-online-poker.com and that has a lot of potential for targeting "us online poker" or other variations of that keyphrase. I never had time to do the required work, which is why I sold it. But someone could do well targetting that keyphrase when the domain matches it. Since mini sites are small in nature and content is limited, having the right domain name is a must. Domain name becomes a lot more important for small sites.

Bottom line, any domain name can be built to accomplish anything. I could buy pokerpizzabananacakeomfglol.com and target any keyphrase. Sure, having a domain name that matches the primary keyphrase helps, but it doesn't help THAT much if you can compensate with quality content that is well coded.

Marketing a Poker Site - Part Trois

MPC — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 01:43:53 GMT

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.

Marketing a Poker Site - Part Deux

MPC — Tue, 26 May 2009 01:33:31 GMT

This is a follow up to this post.

Alright, so I've decided to try and give my Titan Poker page a little attention. The process I will describe here is basically something I will reapply for other pages down the road. In the previous blog entry, I mentioned I would do this one page at a time. What I mean is all of these steps I'm about to describe have to be redone for every page I want to promote, but nothing is stopping me from doing a couple of pages at once. I didn't want to give the impression that I would focus all my energy on a single page until I rank well, and then move on to the next. That wouldn't be efficient. Plus, the actions I'll take now might not quite kick in right away.

Alright, so my Titan Poker Bonus page is coded the way I want. At least, to the best of my knowledge and abilities. Now, it's time to get some links. Where can I start?

Create links from my own existing content - Use other pages on mypokercorner

Create new pages on mypokercorner with new links

Use existing pages from my other websites to link to my Titan page

Create new pages on my other sites and link too my Titan page

OK, that was the obvious choice to start. However, for those of you who are starting a new site and don't have other websites, none of these options are viable. So here's what you should do:

Exchange links with other webmasters

Write content for other webmasters and get paid with links

submit content to article directories

create a wiki page about your topic, and link to it from your wiki

Use social networking to draw attention to your page (digg it, stumble it, the list of the web 2.0 sites you can use is long...)

Use the social bookmarks from above on all the pages that point to your site, not just on your own page. So if you created a wiki page for example, stumble that too.

Getting links doesn't have to cost you money. It can, but to doesn't have to. Getting free links cost you time. Time to create content, time to contact other webmasters, etc.

Link building is the most boring part of this job. It really sucks. You can always outsource this task if you have a budget, but beware how you go about it. Buying traffic doesn't work. Submitting to a gazillion directories for $20 doesn't do much.

Below you will find some of the things I did so far. Please help me out by stumbling these links (or use whatever social bookmark tool you regularly use). Begging is something I didn't include in my list... but it can work sometimes!

OK, so we begin with the actual page, and the targeted key phrase: Titan Poker Bonus.

Digg: http://digg.com/other_sports/Titan_Poker_Bonus - Digg it bitches! hehe! As I created this page, I just noticed that the link to my site is replaced with a random string of text, which sucks. Does this mean Digg is going to be useless now? My link to http://www.mypokercorner.com/titan-poker/ is replaced by http://digg.com/d1s1pb on Digg. Grrrrr....

I added a link from my Titan Poker Review Page on one of my other sites. If you read my previous blogs, you might recall this entry. Update on this: This static site that I haven't added content to in at least a year is getting more and more traffic every single month. In fact, it is now getting more traffic than mypokercorner.com. That's a temporary situation of course. MPC is about to take off again. But it's just to point out the importance of coding your pages the right way. Traffic has doubled again since I made that last post.

Anyway... back on track...

An example Titan Poker Bonus wiki page. I'll probably update that a little soon to add more content.

A link from a new Titan poker Bonus related page on MPC.

And now, the fun part: I'll have to harass people to get more links, do some trades, etc. I'll have to spend time writing articles for other websites. I'm stuck in a Hotel room for a few days this week, so the timing is perfect.

If you found this blog post helpful, or if you learned anything - Please link to http://www.mypokercorner.com/titan-poker/ using "Titan Poker Bonus".

If you didn't find this useful or helpful, please link to http://www.mypokercorner.com/titan-poker/ using "Titan Poker Bonus". HAR HAR!!!

Next post - I will talk about newsletters

Marketing a poker site

MPC — Fri, 22 May 2009 19:37:31 GMT

One of the first thing we do in affiliate marketing is to mimick great ideas, and this blog post is a tribute to Poker69's brilliance. As you can see, I am mimicking (and not copying) his blog post. This is a lesson in itself for the noobs!

I thought Poker69's idea has merit. I just recently built a poker site. Or I should say rebuilt a poker site. As many of you know, my online poker strategy website has been my baby for many years. And my baby needed a face lift, along with a hip replacement, a heart transplant, and pretty much needed to be 100% revamped.

I won't get into the details of all the steps I went through to fix up the site, but I will say this: I'm glad it's finally done because that took way too long! So now, I am at the point of having to market my "new" site.

Unlike Kevin's site, I have existing traffic. so it's not a brand new site. Unfortunately, while I was building the revised site, the live site went stale and I had no time to update it. I noticed that over the course of 4 months, my traffic went down about 35% which really sucks. So now I have to pick that up, and then double it. But most importantly, I have to make it more profitable which means conversion.

I was using RSS before, but not properlly. I was limiting my rss list to 10 post thinking people were only interested in what's new. But then I realized that we don't really use RSS for people. We use RSS for getting links. So why limit myself to 10 links when I can get 100? So the first thing was to change my RSS configuration. The next step of course is to submit my RSS feed to various directories and I started that today.

How do you market a site that has 200 pages or so? Other than the RSS method, I woudl say you do it one page at a time. Meaning yor "money pages", the ones where you have calls to action, need to be optimized for certain keywords.

The information I want to promote isn't really my poker strategy stuff. That's the bait to keep people comming. Plus, it's more pages for google to crawl. So one page at a time, I did some keyword research to determine what related keyphrases can I use that I have a chance to rank for with a little work. By related I mean something like "Full Tilt Poker Bonus Codes", which allows me to easilly attempt to rank for "fulltilt poker bonus","fulltilt poker","poker bonus codes", etc. You get the idea.

Once I selected my targetted keyphrases for a specific page, I then had to tweak the HMTL code fo that page accodingly, using a good mix of terms, titles, meta, header tags, you know the drill. (And if you don't, read up on SEO).

Now it's a matter of getting good links to these pages. How do I go about that?

That will be for the next post...

Evil Corporations - How to spot them

MPC — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 13:35:01 GMT

I always believed that corporations have a social role to play in our world. They have the means to make our lives a little better. Look at MacDonald's for example: Their Ronald MacDonald House Charities provide benefits to a wide range of individuals, including children.

Corporation play a huge role in sports, acting as sponsors and making it possible for athletes to compete in events they couldn't afford to on their own. And of course, the general public benefits from these events as well.

I enjoy curling a lot. This year, the Men's World Curling Championship was in my town and I got to see a few games, which was great. (now you know where I live!). There is in fact various curling events trought the season that I am interested in, but this year something hit me: There is evil out there...

How to spot evil corporations: Look at what they FORCE the athletes to wear:

Perhaps the women's team didn't make it and they had to recycle the outfits? All I know is I wouldn't be caught dead wearing this.

The same team in another event:

OK... no pink this time. But WTF is up with the white belt + white shoes?. I'll tell you what's up: CORPORATE EVILNESS!!!

So there you have it folks - Evil corporations are abusing world class athletes by giving them outfits that makes them... a little too colorful let's say.

At the national tournament, I was cheering for the other team. It's not that I don't like the Howard team. They are excellent curlers. But do you really think I want that outfit representing my country on the world scene? I don't think so!

Coding your webpage properly

MPC — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 12:25:03 GMT

Over a year ago, I created a static website. My goal was to target a key phrase that I knew was going to be difficult to rank for and it would probably take time. But since I have all the time in the world, I went for it.

When I created the site, I knew jack all about search engine optimization (SEO) and once the site was up, I bombarded it with links using my target key phrase. A year later, I was disappointed that my awstats didn't show a single referral based on that key phrase and I had assumed that it was just too competitive for me to rank. Of course, that was not the case. You can rank for anything. Some key phrase will be harder than others obviously, but to think it's just not possible is wrong.

What happened in this case is I didn't pay any attention to the site after it was up. In fact, it is still not very well optimized. But two months ago, I did go back to editing just the homepage of the site. I know a lot more than I did back then and the first problem I noticed was that this key phrase I was targeting only showed up twice on the page. I also noticed that I was trying to target too many different key phrases without having enough content to back it up.

The quick fix was to drastically trim the keywords I was targeting and to code my page in a way that made my primary key phrase stand out. That means tweaking the title, meta data, and H tags. Then, the last thing was about keyword density. If you want to rank for a key phrase, linking to your page with that term is not enough, the term has to be present multiple times on the page. Don't worry about repetition, just do it. Stick it in there 10 times if you can. Try to be creative in how you insert it so that it doesn't turn off the reader.

The outcome was as follows: Since I already had a bunch of aged links to my site using that key phrase, the effect was fast. During the same month, I started getting referrals on that key phrase. Just two months later, 60% of my entire traffic came from that key phrase alone and my traffic more than doubled. All this from a single key phrase, and more importantly a 5 minute effort to tweak a page that was not properly coded. I now rank on page one in Google for this very competitive key phrase.

There are a few lessons to draw from this experience:
SEO works and you can't succeed without it

Coding your pages to match your strategy is MANDATORY to succeed

If you can do it once, you can do it a million times

That last point is key. I mentioned that 60 percent of my traffic is coming in from a single key phrase (and I'm not even near the top of the Google page). This is actually not a good thing in my opinion. Putting all your eggs in one basket is never a great strategy in anything in life. Just ask those fools who invested most of their portfolio in Nortel where stocks plummeted from $40 to $0.40. (A relative of mine lost 40K relatively quickly with this company)

The secret to success is to not reinvent the wheel. It is not essential to think outside the box. What? Did you read this right? Yes: DON'T THINK OUTSIDE THE BOX. The condition of course is that you're already in a box that works. If your box is productive, stick with it. Find out what works and repeat the process over and over and over. This is what I intent to do with this website in the long run. I will reapply the process and SEO concepts to target more key phrases and keep driving traffic up.

If you can manage this, then the next thing to focus on is conversion. Someone should blog about that topic :)

Mini Sites - Benefits and Drawbacks

MPC — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 13:46:15 GMT

When creating websites, there are various strategies you can use. Typically, you're either creating a comprehensive authority site that covers a wide range of topics, or you'll create a mini site which focuses on a specific topic. It's the "wham bam thank you mam" method of targeting a smaller/more specific audience, drawing them in, offering them exactly what they want, and sending them on their merry way. It typically does not involve trying to get the visitor to come back over and over and over (although it can in some cases).

A single mini site can generate some revenue, but the money really is in a network of content related mini sites. The benefit there is that you can link between your sites on related terms/content and in doing so, all your sites end up gaining a benefit in the long run.

Benefits of mini sites:
- Easy to setup: You can create a template, or a small inventory of templates, and recycle them with minor tweaks. Find a format that works and don't reinvent the wheel - recycle.

- Limited content, little maintenance: I have mini sites with 5-6 pages that I never update. They rank well on some keywords and they generate income every single month.

- Designed to rank on a handful of specific key phrases: They don't rank for a wide range of keywords, but they can rank well for those that are targeted if your SEO strategy is solid.

- All about links: Once the site is built with all the SEO elements, it will probably be static and require little content updates. Linking strategy becomes the key to making the site profitable.

- Visitors get what they came for: While traffic is going to be lower than a large portal, conversion will be much better. At the end of the day, traffic isn't that relevant anyway. What's the point of having 1000 unique hits per day if you can get the visitors to buy what you're selling? If your mini is about "how to make pizza", you might have a page on preparing the dough, one on the sauce, one on ingredients, one on the cooking instructions and that's it. There's nothing more to making pizza than this. Visitors easily find what they want, are not frustrated by ending up on your page not finding what they were looking for, and they do what they have to do while browsing your site. Everybody wins.

- Easier to make money: I think this is true, though some will disagree, but it's probably easier to make $10,000 a month from 20 smaller sites than from one larger site. It's about diversity, and about not putting all your eggs in one basket. In addition to the inter-linking benefits, you get to offer a bunch of different look and feels. If the template of your large portal is problematic and turns off visitors, that problem may be present on every single page of your site. If you have 20 mini-sites with unique look and feels, then some of your sites may have template issues, but not all of them.

Drawbacks

- Mini sites are "focused" in content, meaning they are limited in content. Content limitations translate into key phrase limitations which translate into traffic limitations.

- If you didn't target the right key phrases, the site will not perform. It is critical to research and plan what key phrases you will go for and HOW you will market them.

- Generic key phrases won't do. Don't even bother building a mini site that targets "poker strategy". You'll never have enough content to compete and rank well on this term. You really need to make the site about something very specific and not generic to the point where the competition blows you away. Some topics are so broad that they are not really appropriate for mini site and fit better in a portal type site, like "poker strategy" for instance.

- Harder to find a good domain name: Because content will be limited, the domain name becomes more important. It should match your primary key phrase if possible. With all the good domains gone, it's a lot harder to do this, but it's still possible. Two of my sites are good examples: http://us-online-poker.com and http://pkr-bonus-codes.com. Are there any doubts what these sites are about, or what primary key phrase I am targeting with these? I don't mind stating this, because it's so damn obvious.

The best strategy

I think that if you are a serious affiliate, you should work on a solid authority site. It's hard to start out with a bunch of mini sites because you have no link juice in the bank. With limited content on your mini site, it's harder to get quality link exchanges. But if you have an established portal, then you can use its link juice to fuel your new mini sites and help them take off. Once that is done, then the mini sites can fuel each other. You also have more options to offer when setting up link exchanges. I've done a lot of three way exchanges to get some of my sites off the ground. I'm not talking about those crappy 3 way exchanges (although I've done some and learned the hard way), I'm talking about offering a good link on my portal site in exchange for a link to my mini site from someone else's portal site.

Anyway, mini sites is something I plan on developing more and more since I find them to be easier to setup, and they don't require much attention afterwards yet can generate revenue each and every month. I hope you found this post helpful, and feel free to respond and disagree! I love to learn!

Love is in the air!

MPC — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 15:13:06 GMT

Ah yes! Feb 14... Thank you marketing geniuses for making idiots like purchase jewlery just because you've proclaimed this day to be dedicated to love. And thank you for somehow twisting my mind into thinking that love is measured by material possession, and the intensity of the love is meassured by your price tags. Thank you! :rolleyes:

What of those among us who are not fortunate enought to have a spouse to spend money on? These poor souls are left out of the trinket frenzy yet marketers do not take advantage of their vulnerable state? What gives?

I think a day dedicated to singles in in order. And let's just make that day Feb 14 also. Why not? There's nothing that says you can't have two holidays on the same day right? So my friends, I give you "Singles Awareness Day". To all the singles out there, Feb 14 is now your day as well.

To all the singles people, I wish you a happy SAD day.

:p

Goals for 2009

MPC — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 13:43:15 GMT

75% of my affiliate efforts on MPC, 20% on other sites, 5% goofing around

Expand the scope of MPC - go from Texas Holdem only to all inclusive content (all online poker games)

Introduction of Video newsletters - I spent 1K on a videa camera. Might as well put it to good use.

SEO the fuck out of MPC

Write more content - goal: 500 new pages of content

conversion - modify templates to better position call to actions and give players incentive to sign up via my links

Have a drink with Graham