« Bad Day | Main | Bad Week and July Recap »
 | |
| Latest poker news |
July 28, 2005
Link Exchange
One of the funniest things about running a popular poker blog is the number of link exchange requests I get. I probably get them daily, or pretty close to it. It has gotten to the point where I just typed "link exchange" into Thunderbird's spam filters so I don’t even have to see them. They go straight into the trash.
When the request comes from a blogger I'll typically oblige them. I don't mind that sort of thing at all. These are people whose blogs I may or may not enjoy, but obviously I can understand and respect what they are doing so I'll do what I can to help them out. The best way for them to get me to add a link is to simply add one to me. I periodically go through my referrals and blogroll any new sites that sent me traffic.
Most requests, however, come from sites titled something like "pokerinformation.com" or "getgoodatpoker.com" or "pokersitereviews.com". There are a million variations on that theme and every one of them has emailed me asking to exchange links. They are always worthless little sites with a couple dumb strategy articles and maybe some reviews of online cardrooms' software, as if anyone cares about the software.
Hell, even if anybody did care about the software (and the existence of Party Poker proves that false) it's free to give it a test drive. It's not like a digital camera, where it costs a decent amount to purchase and is a pain in the ass to return if it doesn’t work as well as you like. For things like that there are whole industries built around reviews. A poker site is not a complex thing to the user. They download it for free and if they don’t like it they move on. No reviews necessary.
All of those sites try to turn a buck by using affiliate programs. The idea behind their site is pretty simple. Put up some crappy content, hope new players don’t realize how crappy their content is, get a bunch of links to their site out there, and hope someone somewhere comes along and clicks one of their ads. My questions is, how much are these people hoping to make? Do they realize how entirely useless their site is, and how entirely obvious it is that their site is entirely useless? Do they realize how little affiliate programs generate?
Making money off of an advertising based website is very hard. It isn't worth the effort in probably 99% of all cases, and the 1% that do make it do so because they have some original idea. I realize I could probably monetize this blog a lot more than I do, but even then I doubt I could ever make enough to live off of from it. And this site is very popular, receiving tens of thousands of hits monthly. Moreover it has frequently updated original content, which at least a decent number of people might find to have some value, rather than a bunch of crappy reviews of sites that are free to try anyway.
So in short, if your site is a pile of crap please don't email me asking to swap links. The answer is no. I suggest you quit wasting money on webhosting and time on writing "content" and get a job at McDonalds. You'd be better off spending that time reading this book and learning to beat a $2/$4 game.
Posted by themaroon at July 28, 2005 3:30 PM
Comments
Ug, I get those probably daily too. "Delete" is all I do, unless it's a blogger too.
Posted by: Chris Halverson at July 28, 2005 5:32 PM
shouldn't you be provided a link to your book?
Posted by: eric at July 29, 2005 3:26 AM
Party's software sucks. I could get a lot more hands per hour in if they just took one small bet from each player in the hand in 6 max games and just proceeded to the turn.
Posted by: andy at July 31, 2005 2:21 AM
Matt will you put my link up pretty please. www.poopypokerpalace.com thanks
Posted by: Jeb at July 31, 2005 9:58 PM