Costs of Starting a Poker Website

Websites are becoming increasingly popular and valuable as more people feel comfortable using the internet for e-commerce. The same holds true for poker related websites, since online poker is growing into a multi-billion dollar industry. Online gaming revenue is expected to reach north of seven billion dollars in 2009. Each year more people make the switch from live poker play to the online version. Let’s face it, online poker is convenient, private and more enjoyable than playing in the casino. All of these reasons support the case for affiliates to start their own website. However, affiliates new to website creation should be aware of the associated costs of starting a website.

Domain Name
The first thing you need to think about when budgeting money is a proper domain name. Your domain should reflect what you intend to promote. Are you reviewing poker rooms or sharing your personal poker experiences? Is your website going to be based on education, poker news or forum based? Domains should be as short as possible although shorter domains are more expensive. A quality poker domain will typically cost anywhere from $100-$600. Values can run much higher, but don’t overpay for a domain. A quality domain can be bought for low to mid $XXX. You can always buy a top level domain name after your website is established and making you money. If you are lucky enough to find a quality domain name that hasn’t been taken, register it immediately. Keep in mind that domain names should reflect the keywords you will target with your website content.

Design
First impressions are everything with the majority of people. This also plays out with internet websites as well - quality designs will attract the most people. A solid design will give your website the flash and excitement it needs to keep visitors coming back for more. Logos, custom graphics and site layouts are essential parts of web design. However, quality content should come first since that is what will bring your website traffic. A respectable website can be designed and coded for somewhere between 200$-800$. On the other hand free pre-made website or content management systems like wordpress are available. Free themes and plugins are also offered on several wordpress websites for download.

Forums
One great way to get get repeat visitors is through forums. Building a loyal community is a difficult, but rewarding challenge for poker webmasters. Forums provide an avenue for people to feel a sense of belonging. Players can reach out to one another to improve their poker skills, knowledge or just to vent. Friends, enemies and potential business partners are also made throughout the process. Since new forum software is search engine optimized, post and threads in forums will often rank in search engines. This is a great way to build traffic without any effort. A popular forum software license from Vbulletin is available for around $200.00. If you would like your forum software to have a unique look, you will incur additional design costs of around $500.00. If you prefer not spending anything PHP message board is free in your web hosting control panel.

Hosting
In order for your site to work you must have web hosting. A web host is a server where your website files are stored and made available for the world to view. With technology getting better each year web hosting costs have come down dramatically. A quality webhost will charge anywhere from $4.00-$9.99 per month. When your website grows in popularity you might have to upgrade hosting to “business class” for around $19.99 per month. When this happens hosting costs will be the least of your worries.

Time
The most costly element of start-up websites is the time involved in maintaining and building them. You will have to put forth full time effort to get your website started - or pay someone else to. Good websites aren’t cheap unless the owner can do the coding, designing and content creation themselves. Expect to put in 20-30 hours a week building your website. If you expect to eventually get paid a significant yearly wage, be prepared to devote a huge amount of your time to your website. Treat your website management as a full time job.

How Much to Spend?
High end and low end budgets exist in web development. If you want to commit to your website full time and are serious about making it a career you should consider investing more money in the beginning. There is no reason to waste time. If you know what you want go after it and don’t waste money with upgrades. Get the top of the line design, hosting, coding and software right away. Oppositely, if you are new to website development and think of it as a hobby or something to try, keep a lower budget. This will enable you to back out if you ever get sick of working on your website. You can always upgrade or redesign in the future at will. Below is a hypothetical budget for high end and low end options.

High End Budget
Domain Name - $100-$600
Design - $200-$800
Forum -$200
Forum Theme - $500
Hosting - $19.99 (monthly) $240 (annually)
Time - 20-30 Hours (weekly)

Low End Budget
Domain Name - $7.99 (yearly)
Design - Wordpress (free)
Forum - Php Message Board (free)
Forum Theme - Downloadable (free)
Hosting - $4.00 (monthly) $48.00 (annually)
Time - 5-10 hours (weekly)

The total cost of your website will largely be determined by what you are willing to spend. As you can see from the example budgets above a high end website can be created for $1500-$2000. While a low end website can be created for under $100. If you have a lot of time and web development skills you could easily get away with the bare minimum initial investment. It would be very smart to start off on the lower end and re-invest all of your profits back into your website as they come. That way you don’t get caught investing a lot of money into something that isn’t working or that you no longer like. Looking at this situation solely from a financial standpoint, the minimum fixed costs (domain & hosting) of starting a website are around $50.00 annually. Other than time expense websites are very inexpensive to start. Hopefully you can better understand how domaining and website development have become lucrative internet business ideas. The quality and uniqueness of your poker affiliate website will largely determine how far you go in the poker affiliate industry.