Let's talk a minute about building an online community or forum.  The benefits of this are obvious and can bring you tremendous results.  However, building an online community is one of the hardest things a webmaster will ever encounter.

 

The challenge with building an online community is that it is extremely difficult to get people coming back every day and posting.  If your thinking about starting a general poker forum, you are going to have an even more difficult time.  Why would anyone want to join your forum and start posting on a daily basis when they could simply go to 2+2, RGP, or any of the other large forums out there?

 

With that said (and you have heard me say this 1000 times) You need to find a niche!  Find a niche that will get people coming back every day.  Maybe you make a forum just for Omaha players, or a forum just for players at Ultimate Bet.  Or think outside the box and start a forum about something not even related to poker!  Whatever it is, you need to target a very specific group of people.

 

Also when getting started remember that motion creates emotion.  If you need to register 5 different names and talk to yourself for a few weeks, then just do it.  Nothing is worse than showing up at a forum and seeing that there hasn't been a post for 3 weeks.  This is an automatic turn-off to visitors.

 

Likewise post messages that pose a question or something controversial.  This will stimulate people to join and give their feedback.  This is so much more powerful than just posting general things about poker or whatever niche you are promoting too.

 

I will share a chapter out of my book about a forum that I launched that was extremely successful in its time.  Unfortunately the penny stock that this community was all about took a huge dive and is pretty much non exsistent right now, but nonetheless I saw an opportunity at that time and I capitalized on it.  I don't promote this site any more but if you look back at the forum in the summer of 2004 you can see how active it was. 

 

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www.PrizeWise.net.  After launching PokerBulls.com I realized that investors were a good niche market to go after.  The conversion ratios of investors and day traders were very good.  As I mentioned in the past chapter I had played around a little in the penny stock market.  Being interested in the internet I learned about a company called 21^st Century Technologies, ticker symbol (TFCT.OB).  In May 2004 they were going to be launching a website called PrizeWise.com.  The buzz about TFCT and PrizeWise.com was ridiculous.  Every forum or website you went to regarding the OTCBB or penny stock market was going crazy about this new concept and stock.

     I registered the domain name www.PrizeWise.netshortly before the launch of PrizeWise.com when all the buzz was still going on.  If you visit the site it will be pretty obvious how I marketed Party Poker.  The site is filled with great information about TFCT, but also has a reference to PokerBulls,com on the homepage.  The website was built in Microsoft Frontpage and is about as basic as it gets.

    The marketing of this site was really two-fold and in essence was a win/win for me.   Not only was my intent to drive traffic to PokerBulls.com and Party Poker, but I also had taken a healthy position in TFCT.OB.  In other words I had invested quite a bit of money into the stock.  PrizeWise.Net included great information about 21^st Century Technologies and PrizeWise.com. 

     Now to share with you what really drove my traffic and to this day still produces a great deal of sign-ups to  Party Poker --  The forums!  I set up forums at PrizeWise.net for investors of TFCT or anyone interested in the company.  At the time of this publication we have over 260 active members.  Although TFCT stock is absolutely in the tank right now, we still have some very loyal members.  Furthermore I will also preface the rest of this chapter by stating unless TFCT makes a big turnaround I don’t see PrizeWise.Net continuing to be as lucrative in Party Poker conversions as it has been throughout the 3^rd and 4^th quarter of 2004.   But that just goes to show you why it is important to constantly be assessing and reassessing your business.

     To market the new forums I simply went where TFCT investors already were.  I visited other investment forums and posted about PrizeWise.Net “The largest forum for TFCT investors on the Net!”  With so many new investors to TFCT at that time and all the interest in PrizeWise, I was getting enormous amounts of traffic.  In fact I had to increase my bandwidth limits.  The problem with most investment forums is that they are filled with people known as bashers or others with hidden agenda’s.  In most public forums, it is very difficult to have comprehensive discussions about just one individual stock.

     On the homepage of PrizeWise.net you will see the reference to www.PokerBulls.comas well as a section on the site about poker.  In the forums there is a Party Poker banner at the top.  After a couple of months PrizeWise.Net continued generating a ton of traffic.  I was ranked in the top 35,000 sites in the world based on traffic by Alexa.com.  My search engine page rank was in the top 5 for keywords TFCT and PrizeWise.  So even though much of my traffic was not turning into active members in the forums, these visitors were still being exposed to the PokerBulls.com advertisement on the homepage as well as the Party Poker banner in the forums.

     Also if you notice all of my posts in the forums contain an advertisement for PokerBulls.com in my signature.  Although I have over 260 members and all their email addresses I have never used them for exploiting Party Poker.  In my opinion this would be bad business and would turn individuals off to PrizeWise.Net.  Because it is my forum however I have opened up several discussions regarding poker, hand histories, or Party Poker, etc.  Throughout the existence of PrizeWise.net I have branded myself as an exceptional poker player (This is debatable J, but I have proven myself as a profitable middle limit player). My screen name in most of the investment forums I belong to has something to do with Poker.  At Prizewise.net my screen name is ‘Poker Star”. I will get into branding a bit more in depth in the next chapter.

     But because I branded myself like this throughout the past year I have gotten emails and PM’s from many of my PrizeWise.net members regarding poker.  Many of them I have been able to get signed up at Party Poker as affiliates of mine.  I have also been able to assist some of these members in starting their own Party Poker affiliate business. 

     In business you need to capitalize on the hot trends. Throughout the summer of 2004 PrizeWise and TFCT was huge.  I was able to attract tons of traffic to my site without spending a single penny on advertising.  It was simply by capitalizing on all the interest in this particular stock.  As I mentioned the stock TFCT is now in the tank and the interest in this company has almost dissipated.  However this is the time as a business person that I am thinking outside the box and planning on how I can build upon these past successes versus just letting everything go.  One way I could capitalize on having all of these members is to launch a new stock forum and bring all 260+ members with me.  I would still maintain PrizeWise.Net as in the penny markets you never know.  TFCT may turn around and the buzz could return.  However in the meantime I may work on building a new stock forum and attract all kinds of investors, not just TFCT investors.  Considering I already have a good base of forum members this should be quite simple. I’ll keep you posted J.

     To summarize the website www.PrizeWise.net; the key to my success was generating a great deal of traffic that was interested in the stock market, and more specifically TFCT.OB and PrizeWise.com.  I promoted www.PokerBulls.com on the homepage of the website as well as on some of the other pages.  I also placed a simple Party Poker banner on the top of the forums that all my members saw everyday they returned to the community.  Because they were my forums I was able to occasionally start some posts about poker and I branded myself as an exceptional poker player.  By doing this I was able to introduce many new players to the game and in turn have them sign up at Party Poker from my affiliate link.  The majority of my players however were acquired by following banners either on the homepage, the forums, or through PokerBulls.com