The best looking website, top search engine optimization and most unique poker room reviews won’t get you far if you don’t have fresh content. Exciting and routinely updated content is far and above the most important thing you can do to grow your website. Most new poker affiliates make the mistake of spending all their time on web design. Search engine results have absolutely nothing to do with the look of your website. Instead search results are driven by content that targets specific search keywords.

Less than 2% of bloggers and webmasters post new content daily. Think about that for a second. That means if you stick with a plan to add one new quality post per day you will be ahead of 98% of other people. That is a huge competitive advantage if you ask me. Having a great website without updated content is like owning a convertible without an engine - it looks really nice but won’t get you anywhere.

According to Pew Internet & American Life, a new blog is created every 5.8 seconds - amounting to 15,000 new blogs per day. Only a small percent of that figure will be poker content related. However, a significant portion will and you can’t possibly beat everyone in web design. The key in separating your site from the pack is exciting and insightful content.

As I just mentioned your poker posts and content must be of extremely high quality. Write something unique, insightful, educational and useful . People use search engines to get answers on whatever topic they want. Your goal is to not only provide the right answers, but to display on the first page of search results. Most people only look at the first page of search results, or only the first few actual results on the first page. Ranking in the first few results for poker related keywords and phrases should be your number one goal as a poker affiliate.

Your poker content must also be unique. Copying poker articles and posting them as your own is not only illegal, but will ultimately penalize your search engine rankings. Google and several other search engines have duplicate content penalties, which demotes sites with unoriginal content. This is to prevent someone from simply gathering thousands of RSS feeds and posting them on a website in order to get high search engine rank.

As the popular saying goes among webmasters, “content is king”.  This popular cliche has been used around the internet for good reason. Content is what brings you traffic through search and eventually links. Everythink revolves around quality and up to date content. Without it nobody will want to exchange links with you and search engines won’t respect you. Make it your goal to write one quality post per day and you will already be ahead of 98% of affiliates. Once you have thousands of posts and articles you can focus on aesthetics and other tinkering. Then you will be well on your way to making big money as an online poker affiliate.

Building and growing your poker affiliate website traffic should be your primary goal. Since more traffic usually leads to higher player conversion volume, it would be in your best interests to get as many visitors to your poker affiliate website as possible. Many different methods exist for growing website traffic, each having unique assets and liabilities. A few bad ways of receiving traffic also exist that you should definitely consider staying away from. A few commonly accepted ways of attracting readership and visitors to your website will be presented in this article. However, you should keep in mind that not every method listed will best suit your needs. Trial and error and experimentation will definitely be needed to identify which methods work best for you.

Arbitrage
Buying traffic at a low price only to direct it to a website with advertisements where clicks or commissions are higher is known as arbitrage. This is especially popular with Google Adwords where users buy traffic at a low cost-per-click and sell it at higher CPCs one or more times. Theoretically you could buy one thousand dollars worth of paid traffic and turn a profit - providing the traffic you bought earns you more than one thousand dollars. Experimenting with this can be interesting, but rarely successful. If you do manage to arbitrage successfully you can make a ton of money!

Adspace
Again, paid advertising only works if you are able to make a positive return on your investment. You need to recoup the costs of advertising space at some point. Purchasing adspace can even operate on a break even basis since you are building your website brand. Furthermore, if the players you convert are signed up for revenue sharing you make money for the lifetime of the player. This can make paid advertising profitability difficult to measure.

Email Campaigns
Sending out a newsletter is a great way to build traffic. Newsletters are usually forwarded to family and friends of the receiptient, encouraging more people to visit your website. This can also build a sense of trust and loyalty to your website. Remember that spam is no longer tolerated under United States law - so stay away from unsolicited emailing.

Search Engine Traffic
Unless your poker affiliate domain name is a major keyword, search engines will account for 99% of your traffic. Creating unique and exciting content is the best way to get listed in search engines. Valuable information attracts readers to your website though various keyword searches. Best of all, writing articles is virtually free other than the time you spend creating them. If your website had one thousand articles and each article averaged one view per day you would be looking at the possibility of 1,000 visitors per day. Your number one goal as an affiliate should be keeping fresh content flowing to your site on a daily basis.

Partner Links
Backlinks are a great way to get your poker affiliate content ranked highly by search engines. You obviously want to show up at the top of the first page for poker affiliate keywords. Backlinks not only provide traffic, but will earn your website the respect of search engines. Partner links build trust and increase your websites page rank - a measure of popularity by search engine software.

Forums & Message Boards
Content is the number one determining factor in growing website traffic. Forums and message boards are places where users actually create content for you. They also bring repeat visitors and a sense of community for your viewers. Companies like Vbulletin have produced search engine optimized forums for websites. Threads and posts in these forums are often indexed in major search engines.

Awstats
Like Webalizer and Google Analytics a program called Awstats is a great way to review your traffic details. You should set specific goals for the volume of viewers you receive on a monthly basis. Awstats gives you a pretty good idea of where your visitors are coming from - particularly what keywords users are typing in search engines to get to your site. It also tells you what articles were clicked on in search results. If you find a certain article topic is getting a lot of traffic it would be wise to keep targeting that topic. This is commonly known as “keyword targeting”.

Hopefully you better understand the complexity involved with growing your website traffic. Fresh content provided daily is the best and cheapest way to grow your website traffic. It is completely free and will last as long as your website exists. Building a huge content base make take years to do, but will pay for itself several times over. Commit yourself to create at least one new article or post per day. Over the course of several years it will certainly add up, and so will your profits as a poker affiliate.