Building Traffic to a Poker Website

As a relatively small affiliate what advice do successful experienced affilates, such as the moderators of this forum, have in the way of inexpensively building traffic to their websites?

(Based on a recent thread it looks like this type of post is acceptable.)

[ QUOTE ]
As a relatively small affiliate what advice do successful experienced affilates, such as the moderators of this forum, have in the way of inexpensively building traffic to their websites?


[/ QUOTE ]I have spent thousands on SEO, only to have search engines change things and our sites ended up nowhere. The first step is to have quality content, then you can do many things. Getting other sites (even non-poker) to use your content, partnering with other sites, etc. all work. A short article on site partnering is
here

[morgant]

we have absolutely zero objection to this sort of post, nor should anything in the sticky or events suggest that.

for the post:

building traffic to websites is the backbone of the internet economy and its what most sites spend the majority of their money doing. you can play with optimization, and getting your site to come up on search engines, this can be done without expense and only by researching and applying what you learn. i know that john from RRR is very adept at optimization and maybe he would want to chime in on some important things to consider/do.

now, who are you trying to get to your website? rakeback players, where do you find them? advertising space is expensive, but also crucial if you want to expand your business.

i have recently gone into other poker related websites, and wanted to reach a broader audience of poker players. we(inthacup) researched popular sites among college students and we bought some ad space. a few havent paid off at all [img]/images/graemlins/frown.gif[/img] but a few have and it all balances out.

i think a good way to tackle traffic is starting from step one, who are you trying to get to your site? where are they currently? how can i get them from there to me? cross market, buy space on a bittorrent site(dont know if that exists, just ideas) but what else are poker players doing on the web, where they may not have encountered some of the services you offer.

all that costs money. but you can buy cheap space to test the waters and go from there. unfortunately, there is no free way to make a lot of money......

Subject: Affiliate Help

Hi.
Thanks for your help. I appreciate it. I in no way meant to suggest that your forum did not provide this kind of help for affiliates. The assumption was all mine and not based on anything presented by you, but only that this type of post was not prevelant in the forum.

[morgant]

cool, i hope this adds another dimension to this forum. we are here to mod, the content here is determined by the members/posters etc.....

[teddyFBI]

the Partyriches website has great forums dedicated to this kind of stuff

[Pokeraddict]

Google is a fickle and slow beast. If you find yourself moving up it is not what you did yesterday, it was likely something weeks ago. The most obvious solution is content. It needs to be 100% unique as well as gramatically correct and spelled correctly. If you go and steal/copy content not only are you being a thief but Google will penalize you too. The more pages of quality on topic and unique content the better. Do not just say rakeback over and over, its more then that. Part of the trouble with getting a rakeback site higher up in search engines is a lack of content. It is more of a commercial site, not a typical poker portal. These do not get graded high in Google. Those sites that do well in Google seem to, for the most part, offer other services on top of rakeback. Write original articles, news or something else that stands out. If you are not a good writer, buy it. You would be surprised though how well you may write. I did terrible in school, especially english, but yet get compliments on my writings. Give it a shot. Even if you think it is garbage publish it on your site, it is search engine candy.

Also get links pointing to you from on topic sites. The links are not so much to bring traffic directly, they are to help you in the search engines. Do not bother with links that are far off topic, they dont do you any good and could even hurt you. Ones that especially hurt are spammy link farms, pharmacy, porn and other non mainstream sites.

Start a blog, start another website, find people who own blogs or poker websites and buy or trade links. Dont add more then a handful every week and do NOT just start a link exchange page and trade with anyone you find. This used to work but now you cant trade links with just any trashy site. It is more the quality, not the quantity of links. These are like votes by other websites, one ways are best. Google was reconfigured a few months ago and it seems many sites with multiple pages of link exchanges got trashed.

As far as buying traffic be careful here. Obviously as a rakeback affiliate your choices are limited. Most poker portals run their own affiliate banners and do not want to sell affiliates space. Check out buying text links but do not buy pay per clicks. These can get abused. Always pay a flat amount per month. As Morgant mentioned do some testing on off topic sites. College sites, borderline NSFW sites and late teen early 20 message boards are great tests. Some will be a waste of money, others could be a goldmine untapped by other affiliates. This requires around $500 a month to try out.

Those are the basics. Go from there and every day is a learning process in marketing and SEO. No one really has the exact answers since it seems as soon as one figures out what Google is looking for they change it.

[Pokeraddict]

[ QUOTE ]
the Partyriches website has great forums dedicated to this kind of stuff

[/ QUOTE ]

I agree, they have an SEO section and several other sections just for affiliates and marketing. Just keep in mind there is not a sure answer to the question. Try and see what works for you.

[teddyFBI]

great post

[Degen]

i have a poker blog and would happily trade links with rakeback or other poker affiliate sites...

link to blog in my profile