Another month is over, and while I’m still crunching the finer numbers to come out of my sites from the last four weeks, I’m in a position to give a general overview of how things went over the last four weeks.

Despite the fact that revenue was down this month, I’m generally happy with the way things went. Poker traffic increased by just over a third and conversion was up a little over 20% too. Although those numbers sound hugely impressive, I’m bearing in mind that this is only really the second full month that I’ve been getting some decent volumes of traffic to my main poker site.

Therefore, I’m looking at these numbers as a sign that things have started well and are heading in the right direction. Continuing to grow traffic to the site over the rest of the year will be much more of a challenge. One that I’m looking forward to though!

Sign up conversion rates were around about the same as last month which meant that overall registrations grew, even though not all players hit the necessary requirements for a CPA payment. I’m hoping I’ll see the fruit from these players over the course of September.

Facebook:

I mentioned last month how I planned on running some advertising on Facebook to help get my PPO Group off the ground. Let me give you some feedback on how that went.

Firstly, it should be said that the Facebook ad Module runs in a very similar way to Google Adwords. Users are encouraged to bid on keywords and are then charged every time that their ad is clicked on.

These ads can be targetted pretty effectively by targetting all sorts of Facebook metrics such as sex, age, interests and relationship details. Any text that a user has typed into their profile can also be targetted.

Anyway, enough of the blurb and on to the results.

I set aside $150 to run an ad campaign over the course of a week (limiting my ad spend to $20 a day). By the end of those seven days I had generated approximately 970,000 impressions, 180 clicks and 30 new members to my group. Average CPC was around $0.60 with the top bid ending up being $1.06.

Casino

Casino-wise, traffic remained very similar to last month although I’ve risen in the rankings for various secondary key phrases. Unfortunately these phrases aren’t quite high enough up in the rankings to make a significant difference to traffic volume just yet, but again things are heading in the right direction.

Overall click-to-registration levels were up on last month, although it’s still disappointing to see how few registrants at a casino actually go on and deposit.

Having said that though, August was a very roller-coaster month as far as revenue went.

Half way through the month, I was almost tearing my hair out at how slow things were going. Suddenly though, one of my players dropped a couple of grand in Rushmore Casino and things were looking brighter. Then a few days later, that revenue was wiped out as the same player took the casino for a little over $7k and things were back to square 1 again.

A week later though, he’d blown that $7k (and a little bit more) to put me back on course for what turned out to be a reasonable month.

Overall, I’m pleased with August as I feel that I’ve got the groundings for a good September to come. On top of that, I can feel that things are heading in the right direction and if traffic and conversions continue to grow at a reasonably steady rate then I feel I’ll be well on course to go full time at the end of December.

Fingers crossed.

As you may have noticed from previous posts, my current affiliate strategy is focusing mainly on two principal sites rather than doing a half arsed job with a load of domains … I’ve fallen into that trap before.

There are a few reasons for this, but the main one is that I think the domains for my poker and casino sites are strong enough for me to be able to go full time at the end of the year if I put the necessary work into them.

If/when that happens (and I get more hours in the day to work on my sites), then I’ll look at developing a few other domains to increase earnings further.

That doesn’t mean I don’t like hunting for domains though – in fact it’s one of my guilty pleasures over a slow lunchtime – and so I’ve picked up a few more with some good keywords which will hopefully give me a few extra revenue streams in the future.

The World of Bingo

First up is FreeBingoOnline.net – I haven’t got into the world of bingo yet, but having seen the search volumes that Google was throwing up (currently 8,100 on exact match although I’m sure it was more than that when I last looked!), I decided to do a bit of research on other affiliate sites and was convinced that despite the domain encouraging free play, there was still enough potential to earn a bit of cash … so I purchased it.
Even if it doesn’t work out, I should be able to sell it on for a small profit!

Come back to what you know …

I’m not entirely sure why I ended up hunting for these keywords, but I was quite suprised to find out that the domain FishiestPokerSites.com hadn’t yet been registered … and neither had the .net and .org variations.

So I snapped all three up for just the price of a registration fee and spent a few hours putting together a mini site based on those rooms offering the easiest opposition out there.

The site got indexed at the beginning of this week and yesterday saw its first visitor come through natural search. No conversions yet, but I’m hoping with a bit of link building, the site should make the first page of Google fairly easily.

Search volumes for the phrase aren’t huge (around about 800 exact searches a month), so this is a bit of an experiment. I figured it was worth it though for the price of a few available domains and a couple of hours spent writing content on a Sunday afternoon.

I shall (of course!) let you know how both sites end up working out …

I wanted to write a quick article today about a new service that has really helped me get organised this month.

As you’ve probably already gathered from the title above, the service is Dropbox – and I get the feeling that it’s probably one of those things that the vast majority of people have heard of (and probably been using!) for ages. I only found it a couple of weeks ago, so if you’ve been using it for a while, you might want to skip this post.

If you’ve never heard of it though, stick with me.

Dropbox is essentially a tool which allows you to both back up and synchronise your data. It works across both Mac and PC and also offers users the option of downloading a mobile app to your Blackberry, Apple or Android phone.

So what does this mean in practical terms? Well, let’s say you’ve finished doing your month end reports. By placing your report in Dropbox, not only are you protecting the file against corrupition or accidental deletion, but you’re also ensuring that you can get access to that file on any other PC or Mac that you use.

What’s more, should you need those numbers while you’re on the move, you can open the file on your mobile without any problem.

But lets say those numbers need updating.

Again, not a problem. You can open the file on which ever device is closest to hand, make your changes and when you save and close your file, this latest version will automatically be updated on Dropbox. In essence, you can be sure that whenever/wherever you open a particular document, the information you’re seeing is always up to date.

Read this before you sign up:

The good news is that Dropbox is free – sure, if you’re going to start backing up music and video files then they’re going to charge you. Not a huge amount, but they will charge you.

However, as long as your storing under 2GB of stuff, the thing is totally free.

Now if you’re going to give this a test run, can I ask that you click through to the site using THIS LINK.

As all good deals should do, signing up through that link will give us both something – when you download the software, we’ll both get an extra 250MB of storage added to our account at no extra cost. In other words, you’ll be able to back up 2.25GB of data for free rather than the standard 2GB.

In the meantime, I’ll leave you with a quick video clip, which may well explain Dropbox a whole lot better than I’ve just done!

When it comes to brushing up on your marketing skills, there’s obviously an awful lot of information available online which won’t cost you anything.

While I can thoroughly recommend subscribing to a number of decent blogs to get your daily feed of information, I’m a real stickler for books. It obviously doesn’t make sense to buy a ton of various books when there’s so much free information online, but I tend to find having one really good reference book dedicated to a particular topic on your shelf can be really helpful in advancing your skills.

The question is though, how do you know which books are worth buying for your shelf and which should be left in the book shop?

With that in mind, I figured it would be useful to review a few books on the blog and post up my thoughts as/when I finish reading them.

If anyone has any suggestions or recommendations for books, then do please let me know. As it is, I’ve got a few on the list to get me started.

They are as follows:

• Advanced Web Metrics with Google Analytics by Brian Clifton
• Web Analytics 2.0: The Art of Online Accountability and Science of Customer Centricity by Avinash Kaushik
• Twitter Power 2.0: How to Dominate Your Market One Tweet at a Time by Anthony Robbins
• The Art of SEO (Theory in Practice) published by O’Reilly

As you can see, I’m going through a bit of a technical phase at the moment. That will change though and I’ll stick up a few words about books focused more on general matters like the 4 Hour Working Week and The One Minute Millionaire, both of which I’ve read recently.

I’m already about half way through The Art of SEO, so check back soon for the review.

As I mentioned in my previous post, the last few weeks have been slightly frustrating as far as my websites go.

One of the main reasons for this is that I’ve been trying to get some Geo Targetting implemented into my online poker site.

For those of you who haven’t come across Geo Targetting before, what this will allow me to do is to change my messages based on the country which the visitor is surfing from.

Perhaps the most obvious example relates to the Gold, Silver and Bronze rooms which are displayed across the home page of the site. Should a player from the US visit my site, Geo Targetting will allow me to ensure that all three sites displayed there will accept US players.

If someone from the UK visits, another three sites could be displayed – perhaps poker rooms that accept pound sterling for instance.

Anyway, this technology is based around matching the reader’s IP address with a particular country. So with this in mind, I’ve purchased a CSV file containing a load of IP addresses and their relevant countries.

The complete ball-ache has come about trying to get this information into a standard SQL database. Normally, I haven’t had any problems with the phpMyAdmin software that comes with my hosting package.

However, this time round (perhaps due to the sheer amount of data I’m trying to import??) I’m having no luck at all. I’ve tried reformatting the information myself, but I’m still getting a load of error messages when I try to upload the data.

I guess the other way of doing this would be to convert the CSV data into one long SQL statement, so that the database could be built that way. Again though, that’s caused issues as there doesn’t appear to be any software that will allow me to do that.

Andy over at Affiliate Guard Dog recommended Navicat, but that seems to be a server side software, and I’m pretty sure my host isn’t going to let me install it.

So I guess I’m throwing this open to you, my treasured and trusted readers.

Any ideas of how I can get a load of CSV data into a database? I’m sure it can’t be difficult, which is only serving to make things all the more frustrating at this end!

It seems rather pathetic to be apologising for a lack of new content after only a month of launching this blog … but that’s what this post is going to do nonetheless.

The last few weeks have been a bit crazy from a personal point of view and an affiliate point of view.

Personally, I’ve been away recently and am also in the process of undergoing some changes at work (more of that later perhaps).

That has left me with less time than normal to work on my websites, which have proved to be very frustrating due to various efforts and making my sites more ‘intelligent’ not quite working as I’d hoped (or indeed at all!).

But anyway, I’m back in the saddle and ready to go. I’ll try to write a more detailed post about something vaguely interesting this evening. In the meantime, accept my apologies for being a lazy bastard recently and accept my assurances that it won’t happen again.

For a while

One of the main reasons I started this blog was to be able to set down some goals in writing. The idea was that it would motivate me to get more work done if I was sharing my goals with anyone else who happened to stumble across this blog.

Well, having made my first goals post at the beginning of May, I now get to write my first review post to see how things went … and I guess overall they went ‘averagely.’

The goals I set out were as follows:

Add ten pages of content to my poker site: – Didn’t really happen. New content has gone up, but not ten pages worth. Instead, I ended up getting slightly obsessed with the crazily poor conversion rate I was getting … so I started working on improving on that instead.

Increase Revenue by 10%: – Not even close. Last month was one of the worst months I’ve had in a while

Regular promotional news posts on my casino site (preferably daily):- One of my chief gripes is with affiliate programs that don’t give you any promotional news until after the event. Despite that, I’ve managed to complete this goal through a mixture of Google News, regular research and improving relationships with my various AM’s.

Redesign the ‘Deposit Options’ section of the same casino site:- In the process of doing this at the moment. Half of the pages have been done, so there are still a few more to go.

Look into getting my eBookReader and Poker Bonus website re-designed:- I’ve managed to get a few names of designers and pulled together some costs too. This will be ongoing one as I need to pull together ideas of what I want on the site and how they will look.

Break into the top 5 on Google for principal keywords for my poker site:- According to SEOCentro, Play Poker Online is currently ranked at number 5 in Google … so I guess this means that this goal is a success too.

Overall, May was a really disappointing month. Revenue-wise it was the worst month I’ve had in ages and having re-visited my previous post, I can see that I got myself distracted by various other things rather than focusing on the goals that I’d set myself.

Things like re-designing the poker site to improve conversions as well as trying to set up a Geo Targetting system means that I didn’t complete all my goals. In order to work efficiently, I need to make sure that I finish one set of tasks before I start setting myself something else to do.

That’s something that I’ll try to change in June.

Speaking of which, I’ll write another post regarding June’s goals shortly but hopefully this post should be enough to let you know what I thought of May!

YouTube is one of those areas, that I’ve known for ages I should be getting involved with more, but up until last night I’d never had a presence up there.

That’s all changed though, with the arrival of my directorial debut – a short film full of emotion, intrigue and betrayal centering on the various avatar options available to PKR players.

I originally started off making the film using iMovie, which comes as standard with all Mac purchases. I got a bit frustrated with it though, especially with the rather rigid text tool so after a few recommendations from members on PAL, I switched to ScreenFlow, which I have to say I was quite impressed with. Its main purpose is to record actions directly from your desktop, but it also contains an editing suite which is fairly user friendly, even if it’s not hugely powerful.

If you own a Mac and you can’t justify spending a grand on Final Cut, then I’d certainly check out Screenflow – it’s worth a look. It’s not going to offer you the sort of power that full blown movie makers are going to want … but for short video clips on YouTube you don’t need that sort of power – just the kind of core functionality that Screenflow offers. If you’re interested, they do a free demo which gives you a good idea of how everything works.

So anyway, back to the video. There’s no real point to it, other than allowing me to get to grips with the Screenflow software. Most of the footage is recorded directly from my desktop, with the montage at the end being taken from a promotional video that PKR released a few years ago. The music was recommended to me by my girlfriend and comes from the Slumdog Millionaire soundtrack.

Without further a do, here it is …

This has not been a good week.

Work has been pretty stressful, and what with leaving do’s, birthdays and trying to organise a friend’s stag do, I haven’t had a whole lot of time for my sites … which isn’t good.

That’s not to say that I haven’t been able to get the ball rolling on a couple of things, I just haven’t been able to find the time to implement them quite as much as they need to be.

A good example of that is probably Aweber and my implementation of newsletters. I’ll dedicate a post to Aweber and my experience of newsletters at a later date, but for now it’s sufficient to say that last week I finally took the plunge and opened an account with Aweber in the hope of taking my newsletter marketing to the next level.

Since then, I’ve managed to play around with the backend enough to get a couple of forms up on my websites and I’m pleased to say thay seem to have attracted a handful of registrants.

However, things aren’t quite as I’d like them. While the initial forms are live, the sign up process hasn’t been implemented properly and is something I need to focus on.

I’m using a double opt-in method with Aweber meaning that a user needs to submit and then confirm their email address before they are added to my mailing list.

Now Aweber seems to be quite a flexible tool and as such it will allow me to:

• Direct the user to a specific page on my site to thank them for submitting their address and telling them to check their email to confirm their subscription
• Send them to a “Thank you” page once they have confirmed their email address.

Now my problem is that while I have incorporated the registration forms into my site, I haven’t properly set up either of these landing pages yet.

Instead, registrants are just re-directed to a dull looking blank page that Aweber sets up by default.

I know some people would argue that the the important thing was getting the forms into the page, and to a certain extent they’re right.

What bugs me though is that the people who have signed up to the newsletter haven’t had a good experience of my website so far.

I want my site to get a reputation of being an authority online poker and while it looks good on the surface, I don’t like the though that that reputation could be tarnished once somebody has interacted with it.

What’s even more frustrating is that it would probably only take me half an hour (if that!) to get all the problems sorted out but any time I’ve been able to find this week has been taken up with writing content, sorting out hosting problems and setting up some testing.

This week was also supposed to be the time that I set up a bit of Geo Targetting on my poker website. But again, it’s a tale of two halves: I’ve purchased the database, and know what I need to do (ish) … I just haven’t done it yet.

My problem is that I get too excited about the number of possibilities for my site. As a result, I often end up starting one task before I’ve finished another.

I’m sure I’m not the only person to have this problem – I just need to keep reminding myself to focus on one task at a time and see that through to completion.

With that in mind, this weekend I’m finally going to have a nice lot of time to myself and so this will be the time when the newsletters and the Geo Targetting finally get sorted!

I need to get into the habit of setting myself monthly goals, so this should be the first of a numbers of posts that I’ll make at the beginning of each month outlining a few things that I want to get done by month end.

I’ll also look back on previous months goals and update content to let myself (and others) know whether I achieved them or not.

Seeing as no goals were written up for April, I’ll just start setting myself some goals for the next four weeks. They are as follows:

• Add ten pages of content to my poker site
• Increase revenue by 10%
• Regular promotional news posts (preferably daily) on my casino site
• Re-design the “deposit options” section of the same casino site
• Look into various options for getting my eBook Reader and Poker Bonus site re-designed
• Break into the top five rankings for principal keywords on my poker site

As far as personal stuff goes, I need to get back to the gym. Starting today, I’m aiming to go for a run three times a week and hopefully go for a couple of games of football too. My first touch most definitely needs working on!