FINALLY
Nov/081
I’ve had a Phil Ivey blog for a long time now. I closed it for a few months last year (which was a mistake in retrospect), but re-opened it this year with a newfound dedication. Did I open this blog because I have a deep seeded love of Phil Ivey? Of course not. Sure, he’s an awesome player and everything but I opened this site to make money. One of my good friends Scotsman has been in the poker affiliate game for awhile now and has been making a LOT of money. It’s embrassing to me how much money he’s made because 1) he wouldn’t even have started playing poker if it wasn’t for me and 2) he’s been trying to get me into it for a long time but I’ve refused. So why I have sat around losing money in OneSeason, he has sat around making tens of thousands of dollars a month. Not good times. The Phil Ivey site was actually his idea and it’s done pretty good, visitor wise. It’s the #1 result for “Phil Ivey blog” on google (which is nice because it comes up on related search) and is on page 2 for “phil ivey” (which pisses me off to no end because there is a blog ahead of me that doesn’t ever update). Where it hasn’t done good is in conversions. When I closed it up last year it was because of this. Nobody was signing up. At that time I was on page 1 of google, getting lots of hits and nobody was signing up. So I quit.
Later, I’d come to realize that quitting was stupid and re-opened the site. You have to spend money to make money, you get what you put into it, Lincoln freed the slaves. Whatever business, not giving up cliche you want to use here applies. I have been dedicating myself to the site trying to get at least 5 updates a week and learning all the little things I can about Search Engine Optimization to make the site better. It’s been a learning experience and FINALLY it has paid off. Yesterday, I got my first person ever to sign up under me. They haven’t deposited yet (my theory, they are waiting on their lottery ticket check to clear so they can deposit $25 million dollars), but that doesn’t really matter. They could deposit the bare minimum and never play again because now I know. Now I know that people will sign up and that the site is viable. And that is awesome.
9:05 am on November 18th, 2008
Good feeling to get that first signup isn’t it? Wait till you get your first paycheque, that’s an even better feeling.