Jeremy over at Poker Affiliates Program has an interesting post on the difficulty of making affiliate money from blogging. I have commented on this many times in the past and Iggy, Pauly, and others have cried many a tear into our beers about the amount of effort that goes into blogging vs. the amount of money that we were making. But at the end of all these discussions we all agreed that regardless of the money we loved doing it. And that is the part that I think Jeremy sort of hints at but doesn’t really articulate.
My speculation is that poker blogs draw exactly the wrong type of traffic. Poker blogs tend to draw in existing poker players. Since most poker players already have accounts on the major online poker sites it’s not an easy feat to make money off of them. I was poker blogging for well over two years before I started to make anything more than spare change for my efforts (and it’s not like I’m getting rich off it today). But by that time my audience was changing and I was ranking high enough up in Google for several keywords that I was receiving more newbie type traffic so I started to get more signups.
The most important lesson is that you have to love blogging and you have to love poker. If you’re doing this for the money then you’re doing it for all the wrong reasons and your readers will smell a rat faster than they can hit the back button. Just blog. Blog because you love talking about poker. Blog because you want to meet new people. Blog for you. If you blog for any other reasons than those you’re sure to find yourself frustrated and wanting.
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Hi, my name is Bill Rini and this is my poker blog. I've been blogging about poker and the poker industry since around 2003-ish. Like most people I started out playing poker as entertainment in home games whenever we wanted to sit around and smoke cigars, drink beer, and eat pizza, and needed a good excuse. I started playing online shortly after the first online card rooms opened and it wasn't long before I was playing 20, 30, or even 40 hours a week or more. One day I received a phone call about a program manager position at Tiltware which was the company that consulted to Full Tilt Poker on software development and marketing. After Tiltware I spent about 2.5 years working at Party Poker where I was the poker room manager.
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