I don;t have a plan for this post, so I’m just going to ramble a few things on my mind lol. The Poker Affiliate business is like a huge roller coaster and since I spend most of my time planning, I figured I would just “let it flow” with this post. Overall things have been going really well for me and my business. As usual I’ve gotten super lucky and I had a guy I know ask to intern with me for a while, this dude is awesome and best of all he has taught me some things. Check out his new site Steelers Gear (btw Greg you need to add the “www”)
Learning Adsense and Email Marketing
One thing I’ve really been enjoying lately is Adsense and learning Email Marketing. I think Email Campaigns are very underused in our industry and the potential is huge. I use Aweber which is an opt in service which takes most of the work out of setting things up. Greg recently setup an Ebook Email Marketing Campaign on Felt Poker that revolves around “Double or Nothing Tournaments“. This has been a huge success and the leads being generated are very valuable. This whole campaign is a great example of targeting a Key Phrase and attacking it form all angles. We have several Articles about this subject, a close to 30 page Ebook, email capture, and several follow up emails and broadcasts.
If you have not ever looked at Aweber, this program is cheap at $19 a month (cheaper for an annual membership) and it actually teaches you to conduct a proper campaign. I encourage everyone to check it our here: Aweber – <— Affiliate Link
The Twilight Project
Unless you are living under a rock, you have probably heard about the second Twilight Saga Movie that came out last week called “New Moon”. Almost a year ago my sister in law read the books and kept telling us how huge it was going to be. So being the opportunist I am, we decided to make a “Twilight” website to see where it took us. Unfortunately I knew jack about anything outside of gaming, but I like new challenges so we plugged along anyway. My wife and Sis in Law (Julie). They wrote a ton of content (over 500 posts and pages to date) and within a month we had 2k in traffic. The big issue is that we didn’t know how to monetize it very well. So we tried Amazon, Adsense, CJ.com, etc.
Then the owner of “Kick Ass Poker” chatted with em about a product called PHPbay and totally changed my perspective, of course Ebay took 4 months to finally accept me into their aff program. But once they did we started doing better. Of course with 30+ website, a full time day job, and a family which includes 6 kids, I couldn’t focus much on the website. So I let Julie and Ranna run it. They did good selling a few items a day, ebay was doing ok, and adsense averaged about $2 a day for months. Most of this time we have been getting 3k-5k in visits daily, but only making $400 or so a month. Then during the summer we just neglected the website.
Fast Forward to the start of November ’09 and I got everyone together, New Moon was fixing to be out in the theaters and I wanted to either get this site going or sell it. So we came up with a plan which included a new faster loading template, plans for content, SEO changes, etc. Within a week of these changes we started to see great increases. Also keep in mind that Ebay now does CPC and not a % of sales, which really blows, so we had to change focus from ebay to CJ, Amazon, Hot Topic, and Adsense.
Anyway, the new movie came out, and the day after we had close to 40k visits that day which crashed my server and made us realize we needed to get serious. So now we are, we’re selling about 1k a day at CJ, Amazon, etc and adsense has increased to almost $20 a day. It just took commitment, a plan, and of course goals. We are averaging 7k visits a day and we are doing an email campaign that is snagging close to 100 emails a day. With the holiday buying just starting, we are in a great position to make bank!
Anyway, luck is with me once again. Greg interning is just another list of awesome things that happens to me. I just hope I am helping him get to where he wants to be as well!
