I replied in a thread at PAL today about how to get started as a poker webmaster. I’m going to expand on those thoughts a bit here.
Learn how to write well. Most people getting started as poker webmasters should do everything themselves, including writing their content. How will you know if your content writers are doing a good job if you can’t write good content yourself? How are you going to establish an identity or brand unless you express your own point of view?
Resources for learning how to write well are easily found:
Taking a course at the local community college probably isn’t a bad idea either.
Learn HTML. The advice I saw at PAL was to learn how to use Wordpress. That’s fine, but if you’re going to operate a website, you should understand the fundamentals of how to write HTML code. If you can make a sandwich, you can write HTML. I hand-coded one site in Notepad, and I recommend that everyone do the same. Once you know the fundamentals, you can make more intelligent decisions about what to do with WYSIWIGS and CMS’s and so on. But if you don’t know HTML, you’re left taking others’ words for whether or not a solution is appropriate for your business.
You can html tutorials online pretty easily. You can also buy books like HTML For Dummies.
Learn SEO. You don’t have to struggle day and night to learn SEO. The basics are covered in detail at places like SEO Book, High Rankings, SEO Theory, and SEO Moz. Stick with the fundamentals and stay away from the tricky stuff, and you’ll make plenty of money.
Contrary to what most people think, SEO is pretty easy if you focus on quality instead of quantity.
Write content every day. You don’t need lots of domains or websites, but you do need lots of content. A robust website will get traffic from a large variety of keyword phrases. And in order to rank for a lot of keyword phrases, you need lots of pages with lots of words on them. Just make sure the pages and the words don’t suck.
And even though you need a large quantity of content, the quality of your content is even more important.
Promote your content every day. Find places to get links from. Network with other webmasters. Offer to write content for them in exchange for their promoting some of the content on your website.
Repeat those steps over and over and over again until you’re rich.
It really is that simple. The people who make it more complicated than that are the ones who aren’t making enough money.
I totally agree about learning HTML (xhtml/css). It’s so incredibly useful to be able to fix and improve your website without having to pay or ask for others to help you out.
Wordpress is great, but you really distance yourself from the code by using it when you start out. This means that you don’t really have the opportunity to learn how to code websites, which I think is essential for any website owner.
Wanting to create a website without the intention of learning how to code is like planning to run a marathon without the intention of doing any training.
Thanks a lot for the advice about “On Writing Well”.
I have just finished it, and while I didn’t learn as many new things as I had expected, it made many of the small bits and pieces of writing advice I have collected fit nicely together into somethig more useful.
If you like the way that Randy writes, I’m confident that you will also like On Writing Well.
“Contrary to what most people think, SEO is pretty easy if you focus on quality instead of quantity”
Totally correct. Quality makes the difference between two sites.
More great advice thx!. Just went to the copyblogger link they have just put up a best of 2009 page which is excellent well worth looking at. Thakns again, i’m getting addicted to this site now.