Site Review - er, blog review actually

tomt · #1 11-02-2006, 01:58 PM

I put up this poker blog about a month before the gambling bill crushed the life out of Party. Even during those first three weeks while it was still in a very rough form I was getting a nice little stream of rmps from party. Now I'm averaging 900 visits to the site a day, getting a fair number of players for FT and PStars, and about 2/3 of the traffic is from outside the US. Number two on the Google for "youtube poker" for whatever that's worth.

Any opinions, suggestions, ideas, brutal criticisms appreciated. I'm pretty tech-challenged so use small words.

And, yes, I'm a bit concerned about GooTube's purging of copyrighted (copywritten?) material, but have emotionally prepped myself for that possibility.

Also looking to sub for someone who can contribute just a bit of time and mentoring at other rooms, like: Doyle's Room, Bodog, Absolute.

http://youtubepoker.blogspot.com/

SunPoker.com · #2 11-02-2006, 03:59 PM

Great idea for a small little niche. I think eventually you will want to compile as many as possible and then group them in easy to read and find categories. Maybe by poker pro or by event. Perhaps you could eventually make it into a full fledged site.

Good luck.

Mark

haynesey · #3 11-02-2006, 04:50 PM

like sunpoker said, excellent idea. Just out of intrest how many real money players you had out of your sign ups?

tomt · #4 11-02-2006, 05:53 PM

they have been grouped. Down the right hand side, split up into: bad beats, wsop, wsop 2006, top ten videos, etc.
Since Party dropped out and I started with FT and Pstars it hasn't been spectacular. LIke three dozen FT downloads last month with only four rmps so far, and about a dozen and four from Pstars. Not setting the world on fire, yet.
Studying/working on presentation and trying to develop some marketing smarts.
Boy, do I miss Party.

Georgia Poker · #5 11-03-2006, 06:01 PM

I love the concept, awesome.

How did you get so much traffic to such a new site? PPC?

tomt · #6 11-04-2006, 08:59 PM

I'm a bad person. I spammed YouTube's comments sections.
God, I feel so much better now that I've confessed. I've stopped spamming and won't ever do it again.

On a more semi-serious note - it just hit an untapped niche, I guess. Two thirds of my traffic is from outside the US, places that haven't been inundated with WSOP reruns. I suppose that's part of the appeal. Plus it's nice to be able to catch a short clip and go back for more later.
A bunch of forums picked up on it: five German poker forums, three from the UK, one from the Netherlands, a French PC user forum, a north American sports betting forum, a nascar racers forum, a "combat arts" forum. Oh, and one day got about fifty visitors from the Neverwin forums when someone posted that the site had nude pics of Shana Hiatt.
Who's been spending too much time checking out his site-meter stats?

So I feel like I've got an audience, and am trying to figure out the best way to exploit it.

Got to thank everyone who's contributed to these forums and written articles for PAW. So much good information here.