The Big One Five Oh Oh

I asked for some suggestions on what to do for my 1,500th post on Bill’s Poker Blog and I liked the one Vik sent in. Though, I probably will skip over a lot of detail Vik had suggested let me do a little stream of consciousness about this blog.

Originally, this blog was about technology. I got the idea for a blog during the dotcom crash. Myself and a few friends got tired of reading the pity stories about some poor guy who has to sleep in his $50,000 BMW because he couldn’t find another HTML coding job paying $100K a year. But then the stupidity started to dry up a bit and slowly I began to write more and more about playing poker. I had been an avid reader of guys like Dr. Pauly and Iggy for a long time and I sort of based my blog off the same sort of concept. I wasn’t trying to rip them off. I just liked their honest and direct approach in their writing. I aimed to do the same.

I guess I was lucky to have started writing about poker when I did. Back then it was much more of a community of poker bloggers. People helped each other out, hosted events (like the WPBT), and supported each other. I think it would be a much different experience getting into blogging about poker today.

I guess my claim to fame was writing a post titled, Proof Online Poker is Rigged, where I doctored some screen shots of the Party Poker client to make it look like the dealer was dealing off of the bottom of the deck and players had cards hidden up their sleeves. That’s still one of the most trafficked pages on the site (and the one most commonly ripped off with to attribution, haha) and is constantly being reposted to forums and on websites everywhere. Felicia told me “That’s as funny as you’re ever going to get. You’ve peaked,” and she was right. I don’t think I’ve written anything quite as funny since.

One of the great things about the poker blogger community is that we all sort of fell into becoming friends. Soon the LA contingent of the poker blogging world was hosting weekly home games and we would raid the local card rooms together. It didn’t matter that some were playing at $1/$2 NL and others were playing $50/$100 Fixed Limit. We just had a good time learning from each other.

Then one day I got a phone call from a recruiter. He said he was representing a company based in Westwood that was developing poker software. I already knew that my poker blogging buddies Henry, Hanel, and Franklin were working at Full Tilt, ahem I mean Tiltware, in Westwood so it didn’t take CSI to figure out who the company was. With my resume in technical project management, my blog, and solid recommendations from existing staff members I soon received an offer letter and my life took a huge turn.

When Tiltware decided to move to Dublin I went in another direction and flew out to Gibraltar to meet with Party Poker. I started out as Product Manager for the poker client but when Mike O’Malley announced he wanted to return back to the US after heading up the poker room almost from the start of the company I took on his role as well as Poker Room Manager. I remember O’Malley once telling me “I’ve read your blog. You already had the job before we interviewed you. We just wanted to make sure you weren’t a complete asshole in person.” I guess the joke was on him 🙂

So when people ask me about how much I make off the blog it’s never an easy answer. Without this blog chances are I would have never even gotten involved in the poker industry. I would still be running technical projects. So pretty much my entire career in this industry is owed to my blog. And I wouldn’t have met all the great people I consider to be good friends. Poker bloggers, industry people, affiliates, etc. All of them I know, in one way or another, because of this blog.

So putting a dollar value on what this blog has meant to me over the years is difficult. A good percentage of my regular readers are industry people or serious players. I don’t make much off of the affiliate side. But it has given me so many other opportunities and other benefits.

One of the funny things about this site is that the more popular it has become the more I have to watch what I write. It’s becoming increasingly common for me to make some comment about this or that company doing something stupid and to then receive an email the next day from the CEO or some other high-raking executive of the company taking objection to what I said and offering to explain their side of the story. But that’s kind of cool too. Even if they swear me to secrecy I still enjoy getting the inside scoop on the decision making that goes on.

So here’s some blogging advice based on my observations as Vik requested.

The more often I post the more my traffic goes up. Unfortunately, I tend to have fairly high standards even for myself so it’s difficult to always post things that I think have value. As many regular readers might note, I tend to cover topics in a lot of detail and there’s a whole process from having the idea to actually posting an entry on the site. That takes time. I am beginning to experiment around with adding in some shorter posts that don’t involve a lot of analysis and are informational but I don’t think I’ve got enough data to offer any sort of insight one way or the other. As with almost everything on this site, I just keep trying different things and find stuff that works and throw away what doesn’t.

I made a decision a long time ago to publish the full posts in my RSS. So, I’ve got close to 2,000 people subscribed to the RSS feeds so it’s difficult to take just a single look at the traffic numbers since many people don’t need to come to the actual website to read the content. Regular Google Analytics doesn’t give a complete story. I think as a blogger it’s more important to get your thoughts out there than to slap advertising on them. Again, some of that goes back to the fact that most of my regulars aren’t going to click on a Full Tilt Poker link anyway.

Obviously, a lot of people reading this who want to get into poker blogging aren’t going to like hearing about the low conversions but it is what it is. I think if you’re looking at poker blogging as a business then you’re probably approaching it the wrong way to begin with. One of the most important things is to establish a reputation for quality content. Once you’ve established a reputation then you can think about what to do with it.

One of the biggest mistakes I see a lot of new bloggers make is that they try to write for search engines rather than people. To be successful blogging you really need to connect with your readers. You need to offer them something they can’t get anywhere else. Maybe it’s your writing style or maybe you have some sort of analysis that is unique. Whatever it is you need to be able to offer value. Just rewriting press releases and jamming them with keywords isn’t very interesting to read. You might even get a lot of traffic from your SEO efforts but you’ll have a huge bounce rate and very few regular readers.

So I guess the best advice I can give is to be original.

That’s it for now. Thanks to everyone who has put up with 1,500 pages of nonsense 🙂