Why Poker Content Matters

by inga posted Dec 12th 2005 at 14:00PM

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Why it's important to have content on your poker site, and how content makes you money.

Content is king.

If you want to make money from an online poker site, having original content to publish is possibly the most important step in the process. You can and should write the content yourself if you can, because the best way to become an authority on a subject is to express your own unique viewpoint on the subject. Even if you're not really an authority, if you have a viewpoint on the web, you can become an authority.

Why Content is Important to a Poker Webmaster

Poker players tend to be more sophisticated than online casino players, for example. In order to get them visiting your site on a regular basis, and in order to get enough trust built up to get them to sign up for your affiliate links, you need to give them something good to read. A list of the top ten poker rooms online with signup links and bonus info just isn't good enough for a poker player. They want to know that YOU know what you're talking about.

The other reason content is important to a poker website is for search engine traffic. Every page of content on your site is another keyword phrase you might rank for, and the more unusual and interesting your content is, the more obscure keyword phrases people will find you for. More pages = more visitors.

Links are important too. And the poker sites you want links from, the authority sites, aren't going to link to you unless your content is worth linking to.

A friend of mine told me the other day that in the gambling industry, webmasters don't link to other gambling sites just because the content is great. I've picked up 2 links I didn't ask for since then, one because a new website I launched was considered newsworthy by a gambling news site, and the other because they had written an article and one of my articles explained a concept that they referred to in their article.

The more articles you have live on your site, the more potential reasons you give someone else to link to your website without your having to ask them.

Getting Ideas for Content

There was a post in the poker affiliate forums a few days ago from Poker King about writing content. And he pointed out that you should constantly be writing content about anything poker-related that you can think of.

Did you play in a freeroll online somewhere? Write an article about it.

Did you get a copy of the 2nd Season of the World Poker Tour for Christmas? Write an article about it.

Read an article about Phil Hellmuth and A-rod getting in trouble at a NYC poker room? Write an article expressing your opinion about it.

Another way to generate ideas for poker content is to generate keyword lists using Google and/or Yahoo Search Marketing's keyword suggestion tools. Type in "poker" or "texas holdem" and write articles related to the keyword suggestions on the list. "How to play" articles are good, "strategy articles" are good, and "history of" articles are good too.

I'm a big fan of lists, myself, and so must a lot of people be too, because when I look at a magazine rack at the grocery store, I see article title after title touting some kind of list. From the cover of Seventeen magazine: "650 Fashion, Hair and Makeup Tricks!" Take that one idea and turn it into a series of 65 articles, and title the entire group "650 Poker Strategy Tips & Tricks". Add 10 tips to each article, and boom, you've got the beginning of a poker content website.

This is the first in a series of articles I'm working on about poker content. Future articles will focus on some of the following topics: