Coming up with poker article ideas can be the most frustrating or the most rewarding part of being a poker webmaster. Mostly it just depends on how easy it is for you to get ideas. Next time you’re stuck for an idea for a poker article, dip into this list of ways to get inspiration for poker article ideas:

1. Poker discussion forum threads. If people are discussing something on a poker forum thread, then people are interested in that subject. So you can write an article on the subject that goes into far more detail answering the question than you’d ever post in a forum thread. I created one of the first posts for this blog by looking at discussion forum threads at a couple of poker affiliate forums. (20 Poker SEO Questions & 20 Poker SEO Answers)
2. Watch people in the local poker room. I don’t know many poker writers who aren’t also poker players. So play poker with people, pay attention to what they do, take notes if you need to, and then write articles about your experiences.
3. Write seasonal poker content. What kind of poker products or poker books would make good Christmas presents? What would be a cool way to throw a Halloween party with a poker theme? (Come as your favorite poker player?) For the 4th of July, you could write about poker and the history of the USA. Richard Nixon used poker winnings to fund his first political campaign.
4. Look at previous poker articles you’ve written and write an update. You’ve written content before. Suppose you wrote a profile of Greg Raymer right after he won the World Series of Poker. How about you revisit the subject of Greg Raymer and write “Greg Raymer – Five Years Later”?
5. Write local poker content. Surely there’s something poker-related going on near where you live. Can you somehow relate that to the broader world of poker? Even if you can’t, there IS an audience for local poker content. Tap into it by writing about it.
6. Play way under or way over your comfortable limit and then write about it. If you normally play $5/$10 online, try playing microlimits for a few hours ($0.01/$0.02). Then write about the differences required in your playing strategy. Or, try playing $$20/$40 for a while, and write about how it felt to play way over your usual limits. (That might cost more than the article is worth though.)
7. Poker blogs. People who talk about stuff on poker blogs love it when you talk about what they’ve written. You can get content out of the deal, make new friends, and probably pick up one way poker links, all at the same time, just by commenting on what other poker bloggers are saying.
8. Poker newsletters. A lot of poker sites send out newsletters that features their new content. Reading about their new content can give you ideas for your own new content.
9. Play in an event and write about it. You can play in the World Series of Poker and write about that. Or you can play in a qualifier for a World Series of Poker seat and write about that. Or you can play in a free poker tournament at the local bar, and write about what happened there. If you’re playing in poker events, you should have a constant source of fresh poker ideas.
10. Write about poker products. Poker chips, poker shirts, poker tables, poker books. These are all poker products that can be reviewed and commented on. You can even come up with 10 poker products you’d like to buy if they were only available.
11. Read poker magazines. If you disagree with the latest strategy article from Annie Duke in Cardplayer magazine, you can write an article about it. Or if you’d like to expand on the point Phil Hellmuth made in an interview in Bluff magazine, you can do that too.
12. Read magazines on other subjects. You can almost always take the headlines for articles in magazines like Mens Health and Cosmopolitan and convert them into compelling headlines for poker articles. For example, my latest Mens Health magazine has an article titled “6 Sex Mistakes She Won’t Forgive You For Making”. Hmm. A little though, and I’ve got an article titled “6 Poker Mistakes You Won’t Forgive Yourself For Making”.
13. Write a poker history article. Here’s an opportunity to do some real research. The amount of legitimate poker history available on the Internet is woefully inadequate, so do some reading in books and magazines. Interview some older poker players. Then enjoy your new niche.
14. Write interviews. Not everyone can get an interview with Doyle Brunson. But there are plenty of B-list and C-list poker celebrities and poker celebrity wannabes who would love to be interviewed. If you interview enough of them, eventually one of them is going to hit it big, and you’ll be well-positioned to take advantage of the surge in poker traffic.
15. Read Google News. A quick search for “poker” in Google News should give you some ideas. Don’t just rewrite other people’s news articles though. Do something original, like offering commentary and context to some of the news out there.
16. Keep a poker journal. You should be able to get plenty of ideas from here. The act of writing down your thoughts generates more thoughts. More thoughts = more poker article ideas.
17. Tie unrelated topics to poker. Diets are perennially popular. How about writing an article about how to maintain a healthy diet as a poker player? American Idol is always popular too. How about an article about what you’ve learned about poker from watching American Idol?
18. Visit a nearby poker room and write a review.The Internet has woefully few real articles about local poker venues. You can write about the quality of the seating, the ambience and atmosphere, the dealers, the food served, etc.
19. Explode a poker myth. God knows there are enough poker myths out there to dispel.
20. Do keyword research using Google’s keyword tool. If you have a keyword phrase, you have a topic. Then you just need to come up with an approach to the topic.
21. Connect poker to Twitter (or some other hugely popular trend). Any time you relate poker to something that’s cutting-edge and fanatically popular like Twitter, you get the double bonus of linkability.
22. Listen to poker podcasts. Just like blogs, only you get to listen to them instead of reading them. Offer commentary and compliments.
23. Write a detailed poker tutorial. With enough detail, a poker tutorial of some kind can be incredibly effective linkbait. Write a tutorial on something really obscure, like how to stack your poker chips or how to tip a dealer. That might seem useless to you, but plenty of newbies could probably use the tutorial.
24. Ask for contributions from other poker writers. This won’t really give you any new ideas, but it will eliminate the need for new ideas, at least for the day when a poker writer does a guest post on your blog.
25. Learn a new poker variant and write about that. Learn how to play razz really well, then write about what you learned. Unless you’re already good at razz. It’s always good to stretch yourself. (And how many Texas holdem strategies are there to write about anyway?)

The one thing you should notice in every single one of these 25 ways to get poker article ideas is that they require a personal approach to the content. People are interested in your opinions and your ideas. Oblige them.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 18th, 2009 at 8:05 am and is filed under Poker Content, Poker Keyword Research . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.