This is a guest post by Simon from Play Poker Online. Simon has been a great friend to me over the past couple of years and has helped me out immensely. Thanks Simon for contributing and continuing to help fellow affiliates out.
PKR was the first room I signed up to as an affiliate and Whenever I log in to my account there, my profile shows me that I’ve officially been a poker affiliate for around two years now. To be honest, I disregard it as I feel that the first 12 months can be written off due to the fact that they were spent learning a whole load of new stuff, un-learning things which I thought I knew and generally making a shit load of mistakes.
It took me almost a year to swallow my pride, admit that I’d messed up and decide to start from scratch again with a new website and a better understanding of the industry.
When Nick asked me to write this post, I initially thought that I’d write a guide around the top 5 mistakes I made as a new affiliate in the hope that it might be useful to the new guys on the forum.
As I started writing though, I got rather carried away with point number one. To such an extent that I decided to make this an article based on the main mistake I made when starting out. If Nick has me back, maybe we’ll come to the other points at a later date.
Anyway, the moral of this post is “Don’t try to do too much.”
Having seen several review requests on PAL recently I know I’m not the first person to come along with a vision of building a website that would be a poker fan’s one stop shop.
A site that would have it all: reviews and bonus information obviously, but on top of that I’d have poker news both from the online world and the real world. There would be a strategy section that people would visit religiously and maybe I’d sign up to the Amazon affiliate program and set up my own book shop on the site too. Hell, if I was going to do all that, why not open a forum too so the world could discuss poker in the finest detail?
People would come from everywhere – with the site doing all that, why would they need to go anywhere else??
Well it was a lovely idea and Who knows, it may have worked … if I had all the time in the world to get people to the site in the first place.
You see, promoting your site properly is a lot of hard work. And when you’ve got so many different areas of the site to push, how can you possibly promote them all effectively?
You can’t.
I’m going to guess that if you’re new to affiliating, then you’re not doing it full time. You’ve probably got a day job and you’re spending a few hours each evening updating your site to earn a bit of extra cash at the end of the month.
If that’s the case, then it’s even more important that you don’t overstretch yourself. Do you know how much work/cash it’s going to take to rank well for keywords such as “poker books”, “poker news”, “poker strategy” and every other section you plan on having on your website? Trust me, if the likes of PokerListings, CardPlayer and PokerNews find it difficult to rank for these terms simultaneously with their marketing budgets, then you have no chance.
Instead, use those precious few hours you get every evening to focus on just one of these areas (and preferably one that’s slightly less competitive if you’re a new affiliate!).
Running a small site effectively is a lot of work and something that I didn’t appreciate when I first started. It’s not just a case of publishing a load of content and waiting for the world to stop by. In fact, that’s only where the work starts. There’s your on site SEO, linkbuilding that needs to be done on a regular basis, analysing of keywords and conversion rates … the list goes on.
Imagine having to do that for four or five of the most competitive niches on the internet. It’s just not going to happen in a couple of hours every evening after work. It is a sure fire way of draining all your motivation and ensuring that you end up packing it all in after six months when you haven’t made any money.
Start small and be patient. We all want to be making money as soon as possible, but you’ll get there a lot quicker if you get the foundations right and build from there. Learn something new each day and ensure that your site is a truly valuable addition to the niche that you’re aiming to promote.
Only then, will it be profitable for you to look at expanding into other niches.
Remember that the poker affiliate industry is not a place where you want to be jack of all trades and master of none. You need to make sure that your websites reflect this.
