10 Power Tips for New Poker Bloggers

Probably once a week or so I get asked questions about blogging by some new poker blogger trying to figure it all out, or someone considering starting their own blog, or even old hands who are thinking about trying to take their poker blog to the next level. I thought I would just get it all out there once and for all so anybody who finds the information useful can benefit from it.

1. Do it for the right reasons

You should not get into blogging unless you would be willing to do it for free. I say that because you probably aren’t going to make much money blogging. And if you do it will probably take you a long time to even make a trivial amount of money. In this post I wrote back in 2008 titled, Are Poker Blogs Futile? (which was a follow up to a post I wrote in 2005, The Futility of Affiliate Programs for Poker Bloggers) I outline some of the pluses and minuses of blogging about poker.

Pros:

You get to exercise a creative outlet and helps you meet new people.
It can often lead to job offers or other paid writing assignments

Con:

Most of the people visiting your site probably don’t need to sign up at Full Tilt or PokerStars or whoever you’re promoting because they either already have an account or like playing where they’re already playing.

2. Determine how committed you are

The internet is littered with the corpses of dead poker blogs started in a fit of enthusiasm to share with the world their love of poker but the authors didn’t become an overnight sensation and quickly folded. As I said in Point #1, you should go into it thinking that you’re not going to be making any money off of the blog. Assume it’s going to take you awhile to crack into a very competitive space where even I quit reading many of my close friend’s poker blogs because there are just too many poker blogs out there already and I have a limited number of hours in the day.

3. Figure out what you bring to the table

Do you have a entertaining writing style? Do you have in-depth knowledge of the poker industry? Are you funny?

You should have a strength that you’re bringing to the table. You don’t have to be Shakespeare but you should at least have some sort of reason why people would want to read what you’re writing.

For instance, HDouble is a very talented poker player. He could easily just write about strategy and while the strategy post itself would be valuable it would be very dry since we’re talking very hard-core sort of topics. But look at posts like The Poker Wisdom of Omar and The Wire where he uses film and television to convey lessons that can be learned in poker.

You don’t have to copy his style. The point is that his strength is in taking complex ideas and being able to express them in ways that people can understand them via pop culture. Your strength can be anything but you better figure out what it is and how to utilize it to engage your audience.

4. Add value

I really don’t need you to tell me who won the 2010 WSOP. I don’t need another site announcing that Barney Frank has launched a poker bill. If you can’t add anything of real value to a story you shouldn’t be writing about it. Believe me, your readers will hear about these major news events regardless of whether you write about them or not.

For instance, I try (I’m not always successful, it’s a bit of self-control issue sometimes) to only write about a major news item if I can add something to it that makes my information more valuable than what’s already being posted on a thousand other websites.

How can you do that?

Well, look at what OnlinePoker.org did to show how legalizing poker would stimulate the US economy. It’s a topic that’s been beaten to death by other websites but they found a fresh way to present the information and add value to it by presenting it as an infographic.

Instead of writing the same lame post about so and so winning the WSOP why not talk about how many starving people the prize pool at the WSOP would feed? You’ve added value by approaching the same tired old subject from a completely different perspective.

5. Forget about SEO (for now)

A lot of SEO people will hate me for saying this but if you’re using a standard blog publishing platform like WordPress or even Blogger you’re pretty SEO optimized to begin with. You can Google around for some optimization tips to help your onsite SEO but it’s not going to really boost you up in the SERP rankings.

There’s also no need to keyword stuff your posts and basically turn what might have been an entertaining read into a tedious exercise. Likewise, you shouldn’t pick the topic of your posts based on what you think is going to boost your blog up in SERPs either.

The thing that is going to help you the most in SEO is link building and you can’t get links until you write something worth linking to. I’ll discuss how to get the attention of other bloggers in Tip #8 but for now just keep writing and build up something worthy of linking to first.

6. Know your audience

I “think” I know my audience pretty well. Based on the people who comment publicly and write to me in private or “Like” things I’ve said on Facebook I get the impression that a good chunk of my readers are in the online poker industry. On my contact page I make the following point:

I do accept article submissions on this blog. However, I’m not stupid and neither is Google so I’m not posting any submissions that were written with the sole intent of boosting your Google Page Rank. In other words, writing a post where you link to your website on a keyword like “online poker” simply doesn’t fly. An appropriate link in the body of the article would be if you were discussing odds calculators and you linked to a page on your site that actually had an odds calculator. See, that might actually be useful to people rather than randomly linking to your site for keywords you think might drive traffic.

The sad part is that even though people have to read or scroll through that in order to send me an email 90% of the guest blogging posts I receive are people who want to link to the term “online poker.”

I know my audience. I know that an article about not folding pocket aces pre-flop isn’t going to be of interest to them. I know that. Never write your blog for search engines. Never write your blog for SEO. If you write good content people will link to it without having to be paid or begged.

If you write 99 articles about advanced poker strategy and suddenly come out with an article about how to clear a poker bonus so you can link to a page you have about poker bonuses your readers aren’t stupid. They know you’re generating content for Google rather than for them. If you treat them like cheap whores they will treat you the same way.

7. Know what you don’t know

Probably the fastest way to lose credibility in blogging is to blog about stuff you really don’t know anything about. It’s one thing if your opinion differs from other’s but if you make a habit of posting factually incorrect information chances are that people will write you off as not knowing what you’re talking about.

This is why you should stick with your strengths. Many bloggers feel a pressure to comment on everything that is going on in the industry even if they don’t have any particular expertise in that area. Don’t fall into that trap. Link to people smarter than you. Your readers will appreciate that more than you going off on a tangent about issues you aren’t well versed in.

8. Learn how to get attention from related blogs/websites

I probably get 5 – 10 link requests per month from ambitious new poker bloggers who want me to link to their masterpiece. Not even 1 out of 10 even gets my attention.

First off, don’t just email other websites and say “Hey, check out my website!” I don’t have time. Tell me why I want to check out your website other than you want me to link to you. My readers get zero value out of me just randomly posting links to every yahoo who sends me a “check out my website” email.

Figure out what the blog writes about. Yes, I know it might be about poker but look through their previous posts and figure out what they tend to write about. For instance, I don’t write about stuff like poker sunglasses. In fact, I’ve mocked the entire concept of sunglasses designed specifically for poker players. So don’t email me and tell me you have a great new site selling poker sunglasses you would like me to link to or write about.

If you want to get my attention solve a problem for me. Point me to a specific post you’ve written, show some knowledge of what I’ve said on the topic in the past, and suggest that it might make for a good blog post if I could address the points you’ve made. Brilliant! Now I have something fresh to write about and I have to link to your blog in order to respond.

9. Find inspiration all around you

Blogging is tough. Many times you’ll feel like there’s nothing left for you to say. I’ve been there. In fact, I think every blogger has been there at some point or another. But you need to find inspiration wherever you can get it.

I get inspiration for what to write about from all over the place. Blogs, news, talking to friends, things I see, things I hear. You can ask my friends but I always carry around a pen and a folded up piece of paper in my pocket at all times. I might hear or see something that will be the the inspiration for a blog post and I don’t want to forget it so I jot it down.

10. Know when it’s time to quit

A lot of blogs go on well after the author has lost interest. They post every six months, keep promising to post more in the future, stray off into all sorts of topics that have nothing to do with poker like politics, global warming, or whatever. Just kill it if you have nothing left to say. Chances are you started your blog for the wrong reasons and when the cash didn’t start rolling in you got disappointed and let it rot.