General

In my blog post at the end of December I talked about a little mini site experiment I was running.  Check out the post I linked to for the full details, but basically I tried creating a mini site for the BCS National Championship Game (college football) to attract sports bettors and get them to sign up at under me.

The terms I was targeting with the mini site were “BCS Odds” and “BCS Championship Odds”. I ended up getting ranked around 2nd-4th for “BCS Odds” in google, and just a little lower for the other term.  Initially I was thinking that I would receive well over 1000 visitors on the day of the game, and maybe like 3000+ visitors in total (just a guesstimation on my part).  I estimated that with that many visitors I could maybe expect 3-6 new sign ups that would be betting on the game.

The site didn’t do nearly what I expected, and I guess it kind of failed.  In the month surrounding the BCS game I got only 472 unique visits (mainly North American visitors).  Now the only problem with this experiment is that only 1 of the 3 sportsbooks I was promoting allows you to make individual trackers (so I couldn’t tell where sign ups are coming from on the other 2).  The one with separate tracking was the one I promoted mainly.  I had 65 banner/link clicks and 0 sign ups.  It’s possible I got a sign up at one of the other sportsbooks but it’s probably unlikely because of the differences in exposure.

So I am assuming $0 revenue from the site.  Now there is still an outside chance that one of the 65 people who clicked on my link might sign up with the sportsbook sometime soon and I would get credit.

Was this a complete fail and waste of time? Ahh no not really.. it was only one days work for me, the site has PR1 and can pass value to my other sites, and the BCS is yearly so I have the opportunity to grow the site more and try for a higher ranking to get some signups.

My next blog post will probably be a January recap + February goal post next week…

Just wanted to say Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to everyone who reads my blog.  Hope you all have a great time with your friends and/or family!

I am heading over to my mom’s house tonight (Christmas Eve) to do our xmas dinner and some gifts there, and then my Xmas Eve night usually consists of hangning out with some buddies having some casual beers.  On Christmas day I will be at my Dad’s house for dinner and gifts with that side of the family, and then me and friends usually get together for some drinks and head out to a local bar that is full of people we know.. always ends up being a lot of fun!

Enjoy your Holidays, and I will have a blog post before the New Years!

First of all just wanted to say Happy Thanksgiving (yesterday) to all the Americans.  I celebrated American Thanksgiving by watching NFL football all day.  Here is some random “love” to some American friends, thanks for helping me along my poker affiliate journeys – Mike has an awesome site about Online Roulette that is geared towards Canadians a little bit, Randy has one of the best Poker Rakeback resources I know of, and John Holloway is a big baller with his Online Poker resource which is shaping up to be one of the best on the net.

Since I recently got  into casino and sportsbook affiliating, after focusing solely on poker for a while, I wanted to give a quick little overview of the differences I see between Poker, Casino and Sportsbook affiliating.

Earnings – I think casino is the best for earnings based on each player.  I have been extremely lucky landing two whales (although they didn’t stick around long) which improved my player value a lot.  For me so far poker has been the next best with the $75-125 CPAs.  My sports bettors seem to be pretty good bettors which sucks haha.  Since I am on MGR I haven’t had enough time to really see the true value of my bettors because it will depend on how long they stick around and if they keep depositing.

Traffic – I see a lot of traffic for my sports stuff, but a lot of the traffic is just general sports traffic that I try to convert into online sports bettors.  This is going pretty well for me, and I am always testing different things to try and help my conversion rates.  My casino sites haven’t been developed enough to receive a lot of traffic, but the traffic I do get converts well.  With poker I know there is a lot of traffic and there is tons of content out there that can be written to get you poker traffic.  My advice for new affiliates is to not go the route of trying to rank for reviews pages and such, but start writing dozens of pages about poker rooms on different topics and you will probably see more traffic.

Potential – I am really leaning towards casino and sportsbook affiliating in this one, although I don’t like to.  The poker industry has been crazy the last couple years and I have completely no clue in which direction it is heading.  I think the best thing for poker would be to rank for general online poker terms -”best online poker site” for example – rather than room specific things like “Pokerstars marketing code“.  I believe online casinos will always be around, and again ranking for general converting terms like “Play keno online” would be your best choice.  I think sportsbetting will continue to grow online and I’m glad I got into it.

Anyways just wanted to make a post before the weekend, and give some link love to some American buddies – cheers.

I wanted to make a quick post about unused domains.  Over the past year I have bought some domains that I still haven’t gotten around to building sites on, and I’m not too sure what the best thing to do is.  The debate for me is whether I just let these domains site there with nothing on them, or if I should put up a couple pages on them and get a couple links pointing towards them?

I haven’t really done much experimenting with it, but my initial thoughts are that if I want to go after some bigger competitive keywords it would be best to start the domain off right.  By this I mean getting 20+ quality pages of content on the domain, all the proper on page SEO, and then consistently and sort of slowly build quality links towards the domain.

What do you guys think?  Would getting a couple pages of content up on a domain and getting like 2 or 3 links pointing to it help?  Does the age really matter much?

I have some decent domains sitting around that I want to develop within the next year:

RealMoneySlots.org
PlayVideoPokerOnline.org
SportsBettingSystem.org

Before I get to developing these I am wondering if I should get a quick couple pages up and point some links to let them age.. or if I should just wait until I’m ready to commit time to develop them fully.  Any suggestions?

*Just wanted to also give a quick update on my Vegas situation.  I am heading to Vegas for my first time in November .  I will be there Saturday November 7th and leaving Tuesday the 10th.  Staying in the Flamingo and heading down with two buddies.  If you are going to be in Vegas then hit me up, definitely would love to meet up wih some other poker affiliates.

I had read an article written by ShoeMoney a couple months ago about Local Internet Marketing and recently another blog I read occasionally brought up the link again.  I decided I would make a little post about local internet marketing because I have decided to test it out myself to a certain degree.

Most of these internet marketers usually talk about marketing local companies through pay per click advertising, but I have decided to go down a route I am more familiar with – SEO’ing for the SERPS

A couple months ago I was curious to see if I could rank for a local car dealership term so I went out and bought a domain and put a two page mini site for London Ontario Car Dealerships.  This has sort of been a test for me, as I wanted to see how easily I could rank well for the term “London Ontario Car Dealerships”.  I put about $200 into advertising from people over at digital point and ended up seeing myself sitting around 3rd in the Google SERPs after about two months.  The site bring in about 5 visitors per day, but if you visit the site you will see I have nothing set up but a e-mail for advertising.  I have also done a very similar thing recently with the Real Estate niche in my home town – I created London Ontario Real Estate Agent which is very similar.  My dad is a real estate agent here in London so that gave me the idea to do it.

What are my plans for these local niche sites?  Well they were kind of tests, but I would like to make some money off of them in the future.  I plan on getting a nicer looking template on the car dealership domain and possibly selling advertising to dealerships at a reasonable price.  For the real estate agent site I am trying to get it ranking on the first page of Google, and hopefully within the top half.  For that site I plan to just get a nicer template and get some advertising up for my dad.

Ranking in the search engines for local terms shouldn’t be too hard if you are somewhat decent in ranking for poker and casino terms.  The hard part is finding quality links, and it’s a lot harder to find link trades than it is on the poker forums.  Local internet marketing is something that interests me and I am going to continue to test things out with it.  It seems to be a lot more stable of a path than being a gambling affiliate that’s for sure.  Has any one else tried anything similar to what I’ve done?