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Excellent idea for a thread :thumbsup:
Here is the litany I follow every day:
“Late to bed and early to rise. Work like hell and advertise!”
In practice this translates to daily updating of my portals, continuous link exchanging with established sites in the niche I am targeting, studying and employing the latest SEO techinques to boost organic search traffic and lastly a small amount of PPC and banner advertising.
My best marketing technique is to learn & apply everthing you can in relation to search engine optimization. The problem is, there are so many resources for that, with many different varying opinions. And the reason for THAT is that Google, etc. does not publish any real guide for what you need to know n building your web site.
So you have to study all of this information and then test it for yourself. If your hosting company does not offer a good stats program, I would suggest buying one. And instead of having expectations that you will make a great amount of money, assume you will not, at least in the first 6 months.
Do keyword research – http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/
Type in what you think a potential customer visiting your web site is looking for and go from there in optimizing your pages for the search engines. It is best to start out with a niche word or phrase, as the competition is not as great, and you can test out what works or not.You cannot have any idea, as far as what traffic will translate into dollars, until you have targeted traffic coming into your site. And as far as targeting words and phrases that place high in natural search, you will need to do link exchanges with other related themed sites, with the anchor text being the name/phrase you are targeting. Make your web site attractive to potential link partners. This means trying to name your link pages something related to your and their themes, such as poker or blackjack, and keep the STATIC links on that page numbered to 25 total or less.
If we (gambling portals) still had any decent PPC advertising available to use, I would suggest using that. But what is left is low traffic, fraud sites. There are niche avenues still available, but if you want any serious gambling traffic, you still have to go through Google, and to a lesser extent MSN search and Yahoo.
Can someone recommend a good stats program. I need one with a database, because the host only keeps the last 5 days of log.
If we’re going to have a thread about best marketing techniques, then I’m going to have to add my 2 cents about tracking and measurement. As far as I’m concerned, there is absolutely nothing you can do that’s more important than tracking and measuring your marketing efforts as closely as you can.
Here’s why–let’s say you get 10,000 unique visitors a month. And you have an ad in your top spot on your home page that gets a 1% CTR (click through rate). And the casino that you’re advertising has 1% conversion rate of customers to clicks. And you’re average player value, in commission to you, is $200.
You’ll see 100 clicks and 1 player and $200 in commission.
But let’s say you take that spot and replace it with a different banner that gets a 2% click through ratio. For the same casino, with the same player value. Now you’re seeing 200 clicks, 2 players, and $400 in commission.
Let’s say you experiment further, and you find a casino that gets not only a 2% click through rate on their ad, but they also get a 2% conversion rate of customers to clicks. Now you’re seeing 200 clicks, 4 players, and $800 in commission.
But if you experiment even further, you can find a casino that gets a 2% clickthrough rate, a 2% conversion rate, and, since they have better retention and their players stay long, their average customer value is $400. Now you have 200 clicks, 4 players, and $1600 in commission.
Finding an ad that gets a 2% CTR instead of a 1% CTR isn’t that hard, IF you’re tracking and measuring.
Finding a casino that converts at 2% instead of at 1% might be a little bit harder, BUT it probably can be done. But again, only if you’re tracking and measuring.
Finding a casino with good retention and high player value and that has a player value of $400 vs $200 might be harder still, but it’s far from impossible, if you’re tracking and measuring.
But when you’re constantly tracking and measuring all 3 factors, and you’re constantly improving all 3 factors, you see exponential results. ($1600 in commission each month from 10,000 visitors is a hell of a lot better than $200 in commission from the same traffic.)
On a side note, I manage my wife’s PPC campaign for her business on Google Adwords. I had an ad running that was getting a 3% CTR. I changed ONE WORD in that ad, and it shot up to a 6% CTR and has stayed at that level ever since. I still haven’t been able to write an ad that could beat the results I’m getting from this one. This increase in traffic literally doubled her income every month.
Become a fanatic for tracking and measuring results, and you will make more money. That’s the most important thing I know about marketing. (As far as getting search engine traffic, it’s all about links and content. I don’t have enough of either, so I have to get back to work now).
totally agree with Randy, track the $%#@ out of everything. try to know which creative and which site stuff comes from at a minimum. I’ve sometimes use dozens of trackers for one program, to learn what works best.
Another thing, real simple: have plenty of links to the casino. if you have a page dedicated to a casino, make sure there is a link on the top, bottom and at least 1 every paragraph or two. I’ve increased performance by going from 2 or 3 links on a page to 5 or 6.
Stats – most of the time your hosting provider has these programs available as part of your account. All of mine do. I have a choice of Awstats, Webalizer, Analog, and I believe there are others. I use Awstats the most. This probably doesn’t help you any Titus, but I would change hosts if I didn’t have good access to the log files, either through a graphical interface like Awstats or the raw log file itself. At least with the log file you can open it up as a .txt and search for Google’s crawlers to see if and when they are on your site and what pages they are getting to. It’s not the best way to find out where your referrals are coming from though. I do not know of a program that would help your situation. Maybe somebody will come along this thread that does.
I also use http://www.extreme-dm.com/tracking/ as a supplement. It does not track the bots but is good for referrals – knowing where your visitors are coming from and how they get there. Some of this information has been helpful in finding more keyword phrases to research. They have a free or pay version.
And what Randy said about testing programs and banners. You may never know why a program does or doesn’t work on your pages, but with independent stats you can have a very good idea of how much, and what type of traffic you sent them, and act accordingly. It’s important to keep records and track them.
