Poker Webmaster Goals for 2010
“If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is were they should be. Now put the foundations under them.”
–Henry David Thoreau
1. Write a poker article every day.
A personal poker article a day challenge is the best thing you can do for your poker webmaster career. Not only will your skills as a poker writer improve (noticeably, and within 3 months), but your skills as a poker editor will improve too. And you’ll be more sympathetic toward the writers you have working for you, and you’ll get a better sense of what the difference between poker content that sucks and poker content that rocks.
2. Write down and prioritize your goals.
Do you know how much money you want to be making from your poker sites this time next year? Do you have an idea of how many pages you need live and how many links should be pointing at them in order to achieve those goals? Write this stuff down, make a checklist, and start ticking things off the list.
3. Read a book every month.
You can choose from two kinds of books: books about poker and books about writing. You want to make money as a poker webmaster, then you should know something about poker. And since poker webmastering is all about poker content, then you should know something about writing well too.
4. Join or start a poker webmaster mastermind group.
You might be using PAL for that purpose already, but consider starting a smaller club with deeper interaction. Consider doing things like content exchanges, team poker blogs, private poker webmaster forums, and weekly conference calls. People get energy from the communities they belong to. Why not form your own poker webmaster group with people you want to get energy from?
5. Subscribe to 5 new blogs.
Sorry, but most poker affiliate and poker webmaster blogs aren’t useful. Poker webmasters just don’t update their blogs often enough to make them useful. Most of the readers here are probably already subscribing to Michael Martinez’s SEO blogs, but some other useful blogs you might consider include Problogger, Copyblogger, and SEO Book.
6. Write a book.
Publishing a book makes you an instant expert, and being an expert gives your website an authority that you can’t really gain in any other way. The difference between sites that get really high-quality, editorial-chosen links and the sites that have to pay for links is often related to the perceived expertise of the site’s author.
7. Focus on just one poker site all year.
What kind of unique, high-quality poker resource could you create if you worked 60 hour a week on one site and nothing else? How much money could that site make? Do you think that if you put that kind of time and effort into a single poker website that it would be better than most of the other poker sites online?
8. Get a mentor.
You don’t have to do anything formal as it relates to mentoring. In fact, it’s probably better that you don’t. But do find someone who’s more experienced than you are in this business, get to know that person, and hit him or her up for some advice from time to time. Having a mentor to bounce ideas off will improve your business in ways you can’t even imagine.
9. Plan a month’s worth of content.
Or plan a whole year’s worth of content. You’ll be surprised at how relaxing it is to have a poker content production schedule in place for the next 30 or the next 365 days. You can always make adjustments to it later, but planning for it ahead of time has all kinds of benefits.
10. Give something away.
It doesn’t matter what it is, but giving away links is always good. Links are like smiles; they cost little but give much. People will reciprocate in different ways. But the most important thing about giving something away is that you’ll become known as someone who’s generous, and that’s worth more than you think.
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It’s great to see that you restarted publishing posts in your pokerseo blog!
Thanks. I probably won’t be posting as often this year. Maybe once or twice a month, maybe more if inspiration hits.
Great post, I especially like the “focus on one website” tip even though I am incapable. Building a robust site was always a good plan, but I’d have to say now more ever before.
I think #6 – writing a book is an interesting idea. Anyone that is willing to put the time and effort into making a quality book would have a killer site I’d imagine.
Numbers 1, 7, 9 and 10 is how I feel people should go about creating websites. It would almost be impossible not to make money (IMO) if someone had a years worth of content planned for one, and only one website and then linked out to other openly.
Great post Randy.
I’m not familiar with the mastermind concept – Do you know if it is the same thing that Napoleon Hill talk about in “Think and Grow Rich”?
Good to see you around again Randy. What will you be focusing your attention on this year?