Here are some of the questions about poker websites that people ask, along with my answers:

1. How to make a poker website? Making a poker website is simple but not easy. Come up with a niche, write honest and compelling content, and figure out a way to publish it to the Internet. Treat your poker website like it’s the only asset you and your family will ever own and make your business decisions regarding that website accordingly. Pretend that every decision you make regarding your website will be written about on the front page of every newspaper in the world, and act accordingly. That’s how to make a poker website.
2. How does a poker website work? If you’re asking about how a poker website where you can play real money poker works, then it has something to do with random number generators which deal cards, and computer programs which track how much money each player has. If you’re asking how a poker information portal works, that’s a little less complicated. Essentially, a good poker websites works by providing excellent content to its target audience. That target audience continues to visit the poker website, and then the owner makes money via advertising or some other method. That’s how two kinds of poker websites work.
3. How much money does it take to set up a poker webpage? It takes as much or as little money as you want to spend to set up a poker webpage. If you use a free blog platform like Blogger, then it costs you nothing to set up a poker webpage. If you hire a designer and copywriters and linkbuilders to set up a full poker site, it could cost you as much money as you want to spend. Your ROI isn’t necessarily going to improve just because you spend a lot of money on your site though. You can have a professional looking website with lots of content with an initial outlay of a few hundred dollars, and that’s assuming you buy Dreamweaver, get really good hosting, and take a class or two on web design. And that’s how much money it takes to set up a poker webpage.
4. How to create a poker website? This sounds like a repeat of the first question on the page, “How to make a poker website?”, but there’s a difference between “making” something and “creating” something. The connotation includes being creative, which is a fine aspiration for a poker webmaster. My best advice on how to create a poker website is to avoid looking at everyone else’s poker websites, and create something that’s entirely yours. You want to create a unique poker website, not a copy of Poker Listings.
5. How to improve poker ROI? This sounds like a player looking for advice on how to improve his tournament winnings. SitnGo Planet offers a good article for poker tournament players who want to improve their poker ROI here. But if you want to improve the ROI on your poker website, then I can give you some quick tips. Stop publishing junk content and start publishing real content. Measure everything and set goals for improvements. (You should know your clickthrough percentages on your ads and the conversion rates for your advertisers.) Cut costs – stop buying crap content and crappy links, and start doing some of your own work. Those are just a few ways to improve your poker website’s ROI.
6. How to run a poker website? Again, this sounds like something that’s already been covered in the answers to “how to make a poker website” and “how to create a poker website”, but it’s really not.  Running a poker website includes deciding on a publishing schedule. Running a poker website includes having a promotion strategy. Running  a poker website involves interacting with your readers. Do these things with integrity and use common sense, and you’ll be able to run a poker website that will be the envy of other poker webmasters.
7. How to SEO a rakeback site? I’ve always been tempted to create a rakeback site to SEO just because I’ve had lots of people explain to me how hard it would be to compete in that market without buying links. I’m convinced that it’s not nearly as hard as people claim. The first step I’d take in SEO’ing a rakeback site would be to do some serious, hard-core keyword research and brainstorming. I’m convinced that it’s a lot better to have 50,000 visitors a month from 5000 different keyword phrases than it is to get 5000 visitors a month from 10 different keyword phrases.  The next step I’d take in SEO’ing a rakeback site would be to create a deep and broad variety of content – at least 100 pages to start with, and an eventual goal of generating at least 500-1000 pages of content.  I’d blog. I’d post detailed “about me” information on the site. I think it would be easy to SEO a rakeback site; I haven’t seen many rakeback sites that were well SEO’ed at all.
8. How can poker sites operate? I think this might be a more general question about how online poker cardrooms can continue to operate. The answer is pretty simple: different jurisdictions have different laws, and even in jurisdictions where playing real money poker online is illegal, it’s a difficult law to enforce. (As it should be. Do you really want the cops knocking on your door because you’re playing poker on your computer for real money?)
9. How complicated is the program for a poker website? Again, I’m assuming that this is a question about running an online cardroom. I spoke with a friend once who told me that he knew someone who had spent $1 million and a year programming a real money poker site. At the end of the year, they needed another million dollars and another year to complete the project. The simple answer to this question is that it’s VERY complicated to program a poker website.
10. How hard is it to design a poker site? It’s not that hard, really. But you could look at the design of my poker site and say that it’s a primitive design. I’d rather have a fast-loading and primitive design than a fancy design that loads slow. And I’d rather rely on the quality of my content than the beauty of my design work anyway.
11. How many people can run an online poker site? If you’re running an online poker information portal, you can have multiple people running the site, but you can also run it with as few as one person. On the other hand, an online cardroom will almost surely require multiple people, but I don’t know exactly (or even approximately) how many. You need people to program and maintain the site and the program, people to write content, people to do SEO and marketing, people to handle customer service, and administrators to look over all of the people running the online poker site. How many people can run an online poker site? Probably as many as you want. (I prefer to work without partners and/or employers, and that’s my recommendation to beginners in the business.)
12. How much are poker sites worth? Some poker sites are worth nothing. Some poker sites are worth billions of dollars. You determine a poker site’s worth by looking at how much potential money it could make you over a given period of time. Another way to determine a poker site’s worth is by looking at how much money you can buy it or sell it for. A multiple of 2 years’ earnings isn’t an unusual price to pay, but a multiple of 7 years’ earnings might be better if you’re the seller. How much are poker sites worth? It depends entirely on the poker sites in question. You might find my post about how to sell a poker site worth reading too.
13. How much money can an offline poker affiliate make? I don’t know a lot of offline poker affiliates, but I’m assuming if they’re really good at what they do, they’ll eventually go online to do a lot of it anyway. I think Beanie was making plenty of money as an “offline poker affiliate”, but I’m not privy to any exact numbers. I’d think that it would be a lot easier to make money as a poker affiliate online though, unless you’re a special case somehow.
14. How much can you make owning an online poker site? I don’t know how much money you can make running an online cardroom, but I do know that you can make a comfortable six or seven figure income running an online poker information site. How much you’ll make by owning an online poker site has a direct relationship to how much traffic you get to your online poker site.
15. How much do poker Adwords cost? If you can get approved to run ads on Google Adwords for poker related topics, you can expect those poker Adwords to cost between 5 cents and $9 per click.
16. How much does it cost to set up a poker site? It costs as much or as little money as you want to spend to set up a poker site. See #3 above.
17. How much for a poker domain? A good quality poker domain can cost seven figures. But you can find really great poker domains for five figures too. You can even find some decent domains for the cost of the registration fee. It depends. There’s a huge difference in a domain name like poker.com and a domain name like pokerseo.org.
18. How much does a poker affiliate make monthly? It depends on the poker affiliate. My guess is that the huge majority make $1000 a month or less. The really good poker affiliates make six figures a month or more monthly.
19. How does SEO interfere with usability? SEO doesn’t interfere with usability. If your SEO is interfering with your site’s usability, you’re doing it wrong.
20. How profitable is owning a poker website? Owning a poker website can be very profitable, barely profitable, or not profitable at all. Profits involve income and expenses. If you spend $10k a month buying links but only generate $9k a month in revenue, then you’re losing $1k a month. And people wonder why I advise poker webmasters against buying links. Owning a poker website is VERY profitable, but only if you run your poker website like a business.
21. How do online poker websites profit? Online cardrooms profit by taking a percentage of each pot. This is called the “rake”. Online poker information websites profit by selling advertising. (There are multiple advertising arrangements, including poker affiliate programs with CPA deals, revshare deals, flat rate advertising, etc.)
22. How to add poker affiliate links? This CAN be as easy as just adding the affiliate URL’s that you’re provided by the poker rooms. Or you can spend a bunch of time and effort masking and nofollowing and redirecting poker affiliate links. Once you know how to do those things, they’re not really that time-consuming, but I’m not convinced that masking your affiliate links is a particularly important task to worry about when running a poker site.
23. How to advertise online gambling via PPC? Find a PPC search engine which will accept online gambling ads. (I think 7search might be one candidate.) Open an account with them. Pay for advertising. Measure your ROI on your PPC spend closely. That’s about all there is to it in terms of how to advertise online gambling via PPC. (I don’t recommend trying to skirt around Google or Yahoo’s policies about not running online gambling affiliate advertising; it’s too much of a pain in the ass to worry about.)
24. How to generate poker traffic? The easiest way to generate poker traffic is to write robust, compelling content about subjects that poker players want to read. Then promote that content by asking other webmasters to link to it. Use common sense SEO techniques to make sure that the search engines understand what keyword phrases your poker content is relevant to. Generating poker traffic isn’t hard if you’re willing to generate poker content. See also: 50 ways to get poker traffic.
25. How to make an ROI chart? Use Excel. The formual for ROI is investment divided by return.

Those are answers to 25 of the more common questions which bring people to this site. Hope they’re helpful!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 19th, 2009 at 9:43 am and is filed under Duplicate Content, Google, Mistakes, Monetization, PPC, Poker Blog SEO, Poker Content, Poker Forum SEO, Poker Keyword Research, Poker Link Building, Site Reviews, Uncategorized . 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.