Ranking for a competitive term vs owning a large email list

[northwester]

If you had the choice between ranking for a competitive term like "poker bonus codes" or owning an email list with 10,000 double opt-in subscribers who are interested in online poker, which would you choose? Which would be more profitable to you?

For me, it would be owning an email list. That way, I own the traffic and could market to my subscribers over and over again.

[Mattbar]

Rankings every time because good rankings for one competitive term helps you gain authority to rank for similar terms and it can then snowball.

[Lee1]

Ranking for my money keyword.

One good experience on a website can lead to many social shares across Twitter, Facebook, WhatsApp, Word of mouth etc

And of course build brand awareness.

[universal4]

Owning a site with good keywords would also be my choice.

And as far as the "list" you said "own" but not how the list was acquired.

If the list was compiled from people signing up at your site, and they expect or would recognize the name/logo of the site in the emails because they did in fact sign up at your site, it would be good list.

A purchased list of supposed "double opt in" emails, is not more then a spam list anyway. Whether they signed up to get poker information at some other site, is not the same thing as signing up at your site. Such a list could still get a ton of spam complaints, as is logical.

Rick
Universal4

[PROFRBcom]

If you had the choice between ranking for a competitive term like "poker bonus codes"

FYI, this is a terrible keyword.

[northwester]

Thanks for the response PROFRBcom. I'm new to poker affiliate marketing. Can you please tell me what a good keyword would be? I remember you telling me that sportsbook and casino are more profitable than poker. Would "online casino" be a better keyword than "poker bonus codes"? Thanks.

[gm2891]

Poker bonus codes in this case i a better keyword that online casino.
Because for an affiliate it is impossible to rank for "online casino", i would say in the most countries. Even Wikipedia won't be good enough for it, they aren't an online casino. The user intent here is to find an online casino, and Google will very likely bring up a bunch of online casinos in the top 10 with the best affiliate sites sitting somewhere on the 2nd page at best.

You need to add an s letter "online casinos". This then will turn into a different story...

[PROFRBcom]

Thanks for the response PROFRBcom. I'm new to poker affiliate marketing. Can you please tell me what a good keyword would be? I remember you telling me that sportsbook and casino are more profitable than poker. Would "online casino" be a better keyword than "poker bonus codes"? Thanks.

The best KW are the ones that bring traffic, convert readers into depositors, and most importantly, are keywords that you can actually rank for.

Poker Bonus Codes is a terrible keyword because it has very little traffic and is quite difficult to rank for. It was probably a great keyword in the mid 2000s, but not now.

You need to learn how to research keywords to find good ones. No one is going to spoon feed them to you. For example, if I knew of any low hanging fruit keywords for poker, I would be ranking for them with my sites right now, not posting them on forums for everyone else to make money off of

And yea, like gm2891 said, Online Casino is a terrible KW because you will never rank for it. I will never rank for it. Online Casinos is still likely the same answer given how entrenched most of the sites are in the top spots for those ultra-competitive KWs.

[BCGame Affiliates]

I have to second ranking over the email list.

[astra]

Definitely ranking.
List can't grow but with ranking you get visitors + can grow a list.