Another Test Post For Aweber

This is just a test post for aweber, bear with us.

I line break / hard return above.

Bingo Bonus Site Wont Index

Ok, this is pissing me off. Normally all it takes to have google index your site is to put up a few links to it but I seemed to have done something out of order for google this time. They won’t index my friggin bingo bonus site where I hope to rank well for terms like us bingo sites and us bingo bonuses. I’ve gotten some really high quality links pointing in to it as well. I posted a blog entry at PAL with a link right in the text to the site, I’ve gotten a link from SlotsGeek because I actually played bingo online and not just pretended that I did, a high ranking portal focused on online bingo halls has linked to me, I put a link up in my forum, did a blogspot blog post still google refuses to index me.

A couple of things, newer wordpress installations come with the privacy setting set to block search engines but allow normal people. While I thought I checked this, about a week ago I realized that it was still clicked on and I fixed that setting. If you’re launching a new wordpress site you need to double check this variable for sure and make sure you set it to allow search engines.

At one point while checking to see if google had indexed it, the results showed the home page only but just the domain address and no desc or details of what was on the site. This was during the time that the block search engines was checked as on I believe. I had also installed a different sitemap plugin that pinged google to visit the site while they were blocked so that probably had something to do with it as well… google came, saw that we said ‘fuck you google, go away’ and did so. I’ve also checked my robots.txt file to make sure se’s are not blocked and they are not.

Frustrating.

Domain Name Resources

I love hunting for domains, many times I spend too much time on it but then again, not really if you find good domains it is very similar to investing in real estate. I’ve found a handful of useful resources that help you find a domain name for sale, or even an unregistered domain name. Plus, a friend of mine just purchased an incredible exact match two word poker domain, and he probably bought it at a prime time with the struggling economy… anyway it makes the hunt for good domains fun, and I enjoy the hunt.

Favorite Domain Name Tools

• DNForums – domain name forum, hundreds if not thousands of domains are listed for sale every week
• Name Pro’s – another domain name forum with tons of domains for sale
• Sedo – another domain name sales forum
• SnapNames – domain names that are dropping or in auction
• NameJet – domain aftermarket
• NameBio – see what domains sold for over time.
• Godaddys domain auctions – tdnam to those who’ve been around.
• Bustaname – finds combos of unregistered domain names available, type in your keywords and it arranges them in all ways possible up to 3 words, plus options like hyphens and more
• TLD counts – how many domains are purchased across many different extensions (like .org/.net/.us/.bz/.ca etc etc. (shows from 2009)

If you guys have any other useful domaining tools feel free to leave a comment and a link to the resource, I’m sure there are tons more out there.

Skill Games Like Rummy

As primarily an online poker affiliate, I am constantly trying to diversify into other markets. One of the markets is that of other skill games like online rummy. This is a card game that can be played online for real money. They offer CPA’s and revenue share, similar to poker. In an effort to get a foothold, or just a headstart on this niche, we put up two sites in the rummy niche. The focus being on the site that teaches players how to play online rummy and obviously we are trying to rank for the phrase(s) play online rummy and play rummy online and variations.

So far, the results have been less than stellar. Actually, they’ve been horrible. Not a single real money player.

Obviously we’re not doing it right.

Totally admit that the site is still basic and not very conversion driven. The content is all unique and quality information… but other than putting up the site we have done absolutely zero to market the site. It’s really just to get the site some age, trust and authority while we continue to focus on other sites.

After being live for about 8 months so far the site is starting to rank for some of it’s key terms. We’re hovering around the 2nd page of google for it’s main phrase so if anyone is feeling generous and would like to give us a link to the site, that’d be awesome. Something like play rummy online or play internet rummy.

Here’s some stats for the Rummy site

• July 09 – 391 Unique Visitors (through the 20th)
• June 09 – 517 Unique Visitors
• May 09 – 411 Unique Visitors

So as you can see, there is nothing ‘gangbusters’ going on here but the traffic does seem to be climbing. The site was really just designed to begin aging and starting to gain trust in google. Which is a fairly common requirement now, unless you can buy a domain with age and trust already, which is harder and harder to do unless you’ve got deep pockets.

In a new niche like this, I didn’t feel it was necessary, especially since it is an unproven market, but rummy is a popular game. Well, the short answer is don’t feel like you need to rush out and get into the rummy market, at least not according to my results. I do think there is some promise in this niche though so I’m not ready to dump the site at digitalpoint yet.

We’ve got a few other sites in some other skill niches but so far, nothing stellar to report.

Anyone out there with a rummy site showing success? I know some of you guys have some rummy sites so what say ye? Leave a comment and I’ll leave up the links as long as it’s a real comment. But the spam gets deleted, fuck off spammers

Email Marketing Success 4 Day $$ Machine

Harvesting our email sign ups is something that we have not done very well over the past few years, we totally admit it. Although we have been collecting addresses since the beginning, we have let many of the lists sit without even a hint of an email, for years. And we also changed email list providers mid-stream… we went from a self hosted version called MailLoop (one of the late Cory Rudl’s products) to Aweber. Me gusta mucho aweber. If you don’t yet have it yet it is probably the easiest email auto responder / emailing program on the market today.

This past weekend, I tried out an email campaign called the 4 Day Cash Machine. It is an extremely simple method, and it did indeed generate cash for four straight days. Rather than go through everything again about what it is, just reference the blog post I made over at PAL.

Results of the 4 Day Email $$ Machine Harvest

• Email 1 Wednesday at 4:20pm – 25.1% open rate, 6.9% click through rate (half to the buy now page and half to the sales landing page) – 1/6 conversion rate.
• Email 2 Thursday at 2:50pm – 13% open rate 5.6% click through (half / half to buy now page and sales lander) – 1/18 conversion rate
• Email 3 Friday at 2:10pm – 13.6 open rate 3.4% click through (all to buy now page, none to the sales lander) 1/4.7 conversion rate *wow!
• Email 4 Saturday 12:20pm – 12.3 open rate, 4% click through (3 to 1 visiting the buy now page) 1/4 conversion rate.

So all in all, this gives us a baseline to judge future events from. It looks like direct linking to the page where they can buy it right away might be a test for future campaigns as the conversion rate on email 3, that only linked there was through the roof (even if a low click through rate).

I would view this email campaign as a success, one of our first strong attempts to harvest the fruits of our labor with a very simple and effective email marketing techinque.

Downsides of Email Marketing

Ok, what were the drawbacks of this campaign. Lets see how many unsubscribed from our list.

Wow, i just checked and we had no one unsubscribe from our list… the day prior to the campaign launching we had 4 unsubscribers, lol. Anyway it hasn’t seemed that the email list is any worse for wear after this promotion. I figured we would lose some suscribers but they wouldn’t be likely to ever purchase anyway.

How Much $$ Did we Make

Without revealing exact numbers, we made four figures for about 2 hours of work. This is money that we wouldn’t have made had we not ran this promotion so it’s a no brainer. It actually makes me want to go back and try this with another list that subscribed to our dealer training newsletter back a few year ago when we were using mail loop. May try to get them to re-subscribe to aweber and offer this promotion to them somehow. Perhaps for another day.

If you are a poker affiliate and interested in offering a non-competitive poker product to your sites, we’ve increased the offer to 50% for affiliates share of the sales price of Dealer-Training.com the poker dealer school. Lots of people are looking for casino employment right now… something to consider.

Aweber Settings for Auto RSS to Email Feature

Ok, I’m working on properly configuring a feature in Aweber, which is an email auto-responder series that we use to manage our lists. I was looking a bit closer into our auto responder series from aweber and saw that they offer an rss to email feature where rss feeds can be directly imported into aweber and set to que up.

I believe I have now set the rss feed correctly into Aweber, so when I enter a post into here, the rss feed is to be imported into Aweber and then listed in my pending broadcasts. . Not exactly sure what happens next, I have a notice on the system that the rss feed was last checked and it has no date in the area.

I do see that we have the ability to preview the email blast prior to it going out. You can set it to go automatically as well but have the flexibility to put the emails into a preview queue that you can manually click ‘go’ to actually send out the emails to your list. Not a bad idea in our situation as not all of our posts will be designed to be emailed as well, and especially useful if we have a team member writing the blog posts. It’s always a good idea to review the posts before we send them out.

You can also set it to send on a certain time and day, which is quite useful. This is still at test, thanks for bearing with me.

Testing an Email Auto Responder Series

Using an email auto responder series is one tool that we have and use, but I don’t think we utilize it as effectively as we could. This post is really a test to see how exactly we can use a feature of Aweber (our auto-responder series of choice) where we can create newsletters directly from blog post rss feeds.

I’ve added the feed from PokerRoomAffiliates.com to be set to send a newsletter to anyone signed up to the newsletter here (approximately 1 person so far, me, lol).

Ok, this is really just a test post to see how the process works from me posting this thread in wordpress and having aweber automatically turn that into a newsletter email blast that automatically goes out to anyone on our newsletter list.

Some Poker Domains You Can Buy

I have enough poker domains but I still love the hunt.  Here are some that I had on my ‘consider’ list that I just can’t purchase because I have enough going on.  Looking for a keyword rich domain?  Take a look…

poker-promo-codes.com
holdempromocodes.com – bought this one
holdempromo.com
best-poker-codes.com
best-codes.com
validpokercodes.com – snagged this one, too .
pokertopcodes.com
top-poker-codes.com
poker-codes-online.com
toppokerstar.com
referral-codes.com
pokersiteusa.com
instantbonuspoker.com
pokerinstantbonus.com
pokerdownloadsite.com
downloadpokersite.com

*more added on 11/4/08

listonlinepoker.com
listpokeronline.com
list-poker.com
pokerchaironline.com
chairpoker.com
onlinepokerseat.com
online-rules.com
rulesonlinepoker.com
strategypokeronline.com
pokerstrategyweb.com
pokerwebtips.com
tipsholdempoker.com
tips-holdem.com
tipsonlinepoker.com
pokergamesstrategy.com
pokeronlinenet.com
poker-cow.com
pokergeekonline.com
locatepoker.com
locatepokeronline.com

If you found a good poker domain name in this list we would really really appreciate a link to this site please!  Thanks Guys and Gals!

Full Disclosure, we use this tool to find these domains and sometimes when we go to register one they are gone. You can also get discount Godaddy Domains from them. Also props to Toronto SEO for putting us on to the domain tool in the first place!

Enjoy the list and good luck with the domain hunting!

Poker Leagues – Managing Points Video

One of the most popular and recurring theme on the poker affiliate programs forums is the idea of incorporating a poker league into the mix…

Poker leagues are a great way to keep players playing over a period of time, but as many league managers have found out, it is difficult to keep track and display your league results, which is a KEY to maintaining interest in your league.  One of the tools we developed that we are offering our readers free of charge is the Poker Leaderboard Points Management Software, available at Poker-Leaderboard.com.

Poker-Leaderboard Points Video

One of our users, a guy by the name of RC with the Atlanta Poker Club was kind enough to put together a video tutorial on how to enter points using the Poker-Leaderboard points manager. He did it for the tournament directors at the APC but you can see how it works yourself with his video.

Enjoy the video and I hope this video helps save you time!

Did you know? You can send your friends or league players a link to Full Tilt Poker and if they click it, become a real money player and earn 100 FPP’s you will earn $125 bucks? Yep, it’s that easy, and you can also promote other online poker rooms all from one interface. Click Here for Current Commissions

Quality Wordpress Plugins

A few of the online marketing forums I frequent listed out their favorite Wordpress plugins.  I haven’t tried all of these and honestly I just needed a place I could quickly find the links to the plugins whenever I need em, so here goes.

• Wordpress Plugins thread from Poker Affiliate Programs Forums
• My Famous Website Wordpress Plugins

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