PokerStars has always been so far ahead of the competition because basically they get their marketing right and provide a better solution for online poker players. No matter what guarantee they put on for their tournaments, they are always smashed because they know what works and have so many players.
As an internet marketer myself I always try to look at what the big boys do and try to emulate some of the things they do in some of my own projects. One thing that has particularly sparked my attention is their WBCOOP which is basically a championship just for poker bloggers and there are a lot of them out there i’m so surprised no other site has caught onto this and atleast tried to copy it. What they do is make you add a link and banner for the event and then you get a free ticket to the tournaments. This gets PokerStars thousands of basically free links and also plenty of branding because of the banners.
I received an e-mail the other day (which is what has brought this article on) where they are now asking for bloggers to write an article containing the text which is why playing poker is clearly a game of skill with the poker being a link to their site. In exchange for this, bloggers get some goodies.
Now my question to the PokerStars marketing team is this. Why are you making bloggers write the same phrase for the text you are targeting? Does this not scream a paid text link to the search engines because all of a sudden you have hundreds of bloggers writing articles with the exact same link and surrounding text all being published at the same time. This means you will be penalised in the search engines if they detect this. Why don’t you just let the bloggers place the link themselves, then you have different surrounding text for every article? This will seem so much more natural.
When I checked the rankings for PokerStars.com in google.com I noticed you were on the first page but now you are on the 2nd page. It concerns me that you have already been penalised for this and your rankings have dropped with your top competitor Full Tilt Poker now ranking much higher than you. You are also on the 3rd page in google.co.uk which is worth practically nothing for such a competitive term.
This is my first post in 2010 and i’ve had this post written in my head 2 weeks ago but just getting it written down now. Since coming back from holiday I have noticed a problem with my reading where I constantly have to re read lines because I did not take it in the first time. This is really pissing me off because it’s taking me ages just to read stuff and is actually putting me off from reading. My typing has also got a lot worse where I just missed complete words out my sentences or just don’t finish a word before hitting space. That is the reason for my post title because I don’t if it’s just my mind full of other shit that I can’t concentrate or i’m suffering from some sort of slowness. I sort of noticed it before my holiday but as I had been reading a lot on holiday it became more noticeable.
I had a good relaxing holiday where I basically did fuck all as usual so had some good time to do some thinking and read the books i’ve been wanting to read. It turned out I ended up taking my laptop because there was going to be a 10 hour delay so thought it would help pass the time away in the airport eventhough I did not end up using it. It was really good just to turn off and not have to worry about what was going on at home.
There was plenty of sun to be had which really makes a different to your mood to get away from the shitty constant greyness in England. I’m not much of a sun worshipper so i’m usually content in just staying in bed to miss the heat and then have a lounge later on. Eventhough it was an all inclusive resort I managed to lose about 5lbs as I just never feel like eating on holiday plus I had the shits for 5 days which didn’t help like. I tried to get in the gym but they didn’t even have any sort of squat rack and not even a barbell with more than 20kg so it was a complete waste of time. So now i’ve lost about 6 weeks of training and it’s really hard to get back into it when your gym is like 0 degrees.
For those that know me will know that I really have lost all interest in playing poker and the last game I played was the NPF Championships at end of October and even then I only lasted 5 hands and had not played for 2 months before that so i’m pretty serious about it. (About an hour before writing this I donked out the WBCOOP because it reminded me how much I just didn’t want to play). So it’s unlikely you will see me write about myself playing poker and will probably turn this blog into more personal stuff and posts will probably be random as the poker articles I planned to write will be written for the coming soon new NPF site.
That brings me to another point and expanding from my mental overload/slowness is that I have developed an uncanny ability to scan posts for where it talks about playing a particular hand, I can just see where it begins and ends and just skip it completely because I just can’t bear to read it. It usually contains something like ‘I picked up KK and there’s a raise so I re raise to 1500 and he flats…He turns over fucking AJ for the straight…what did he think I had like on the king high flop and the big re raise pre flop?’.
I really think 2010 is going to be the year for me as i’ve got a much clear goal of what I want to do and looking at the goals in my 2009 wrap up post I can really see myself having done all of those things and more by the time i’m 23. But it in order for that to happen I can’t just sit around and wait for things to happen which is what i’ve done all my life. I’m getting there slowly but surely.