Poker educational niche - Help needed!

[Bartek]

Hi Guys,

I launched a poker educational website over a year ago.

At the moment, the content focuses mainly on the poker books niche. However, in the future, I will extend the content to other areas of poker (strategy, etc.) and maybe casinos, sportsbooks.

The traffic is growing but very, very slowly. There are about 1200 visitors a month at the moment (all organic).

I offer only Amazon affiliate since I believe the traffic is too small to offer anything else.

On average, the visitors buy about 2 books a week via the affiliate links.

Can I please ask you for some constructive feedback?

- What can be improved/changed?
- Is there anything you see wrong with the website?
- Do you think I am going in the right direction because sometimes it feels like I am wasting my time on this?

https://www.bookonpoker.com/


Thanks in advance for your help!

[Tex Holdem Questions]

Hey

Your site looks slick, a good domain name and does what it says on the tin. The fact you're getting over 1k organic a month and 2 sales a week after 1 year is fantastic. Don't be disheartened, be encouraged!

I can see you have a way to capture subscribers. That's great too although does affiliate links work with Amazon via email marketing?

You're definitely going in the right direction so keep up the good work.

I would wait to extend to other areas until you have more data and time behind you assessing what your visitors are doing.

I will DM you about a potential collaboration too.

[chaumi]

Actually (from looking at a couple of pages - beginners and tells) I think you have done a great job. They're well-written, engaging, positioned well for the reader, and give the feeling that you're on a worthwhile resource (I don't know enough about poker books to know for sure if the presentation is authoritative enough, but it certainly gives that feeling to me.

So, take the beginners books page as an example ( I think the others are constructed similarly, so one example may be enough to start with).

It's ranked around 8. Arguably that's good going when you will have (and do have) competition from the likes of xxxxxxxxx (I won't say who they are, but any poker player/writer will know the names I mean).

Now, I can't tell why you're on page 1. It's not links (I think)...so pretty sure it's the content. But what we don't know is ..is it because of the general (authoritative-looking) structure, or is it because of the book lists specifically (actually, of course, it will be a number of things in combination). Pretty sure it's not just 'no competition' because you're above others that I might have expected to see higher up.

Bear with me, why I make that last point will be clear(er) in a minute.....

My instinct says there may be some value in taking all the books you have in on-page lists and building separate review pages for each one. Then you have much more (sensible) room for in-depth reviews of them....and....you then have multiple vehicles for internal linking between them and back to the main category page.

Potentially lots of value in that approach (although lots of work, too).

The problem is....you have reasonably deep write-ups on the books on the current pages. If that's the (main) reason you rank now, then removing the write-ups could be a negative.

Personally, I think you could maintain parts of the book write-ups as they are now on the current pages and transfer the rest to individual book reviews. Combined with internal linking between categories and the books within each category.....and building out the reviews so they're really in depth...and some thought around page titles for the new pages...it's possible that you could be building an authority level that the competition can only compete with because of their own inherent 'poker in general' authority. You still might top them.

As I said though, ton of work to find out.


PS Of course, the problem with Amazon affiliate returns is that they're low percentage (or were last time I looked a long time ago). So you 'sell' a book and I'm guessing you get a couple of $s?? You have to sell a lot of books to make the effort worthwhile.

But doesn't Amazon still give you a cut of everything bought from a referred visit? Which means if you can at least get the clicks thru to Amazon, then you have a chance for a better return ( I used to get clicks through to TV reviews, and people bought something like nappy cream, for example!! - along with the odd TV thankfully. But it all adds up if you can get the traffic.

If I'm right and they do still pay on all purchases, then your key activity is to get the click through. Maybe your CTA's would be better as something like 'read (more/other) real reader reviews' rather than 'find out the price here'

[Bartek]

Thanks very much. That's really motivating

I am not sure if Amazon links work in emails. I only have about 20 subscribers, so not sending a newsletter yet. I probably will have to start soon...

[Bartek]

Hey

Your site looks slick, a good domain name and does what it says on the tin. The fact you're getting over 1k organic a month and 2 sales a week after 1 year is fantastic. Don't be disheartened, be encouraged!

I can see you have a way to capture subscribers. That's great too although does affiliate links work with Amazon via email marketing?

You're definitely going in the right direction so keep up the good work.

I would wait to extend to other areas until you have more data and time behind you assessing what your visitors are doing.

I will DM you about a potential collaboration too.

Thanks very much. That's really motivating

I am not sure if Amazon links work in emails. I only have about 20 subscribers, so not sending a newsletter yet. I probably will have to start soon...

[Bartek]

Actually (from looking at a couple of pages - beginners and tells) I think you have done a great job. They're well-written, engaging, positioned well for the reader, and give the feeling that you're on a worthwhile resource (I don't know enough about poker books to know for sure if the presentation is authoritative enough, but it certainly gives that feeling to me.

So, take the beginners books page as an example ( I think the others are constructed similarly, so one example may be enough to start with).

It's ranked around 8. Arguably that's good going when you will have (and do have) competition from the likes of xxxxxxxxx (I won't say who they are, but any poker player/writer will know the names I mean).

Now, I can't tell why you're on page 1. It's not links (I think)...so pretty sure it's the content. But what we don't know is ..is it because of the general (authoritative-looking) structure, or is it because of the book lists specifically (actually, of course, it will be a number of things in combination). Pretty sure it's not just 'no competition' because you're above others that I might have expected to see higher up.

Bear with me, why I make that last point will be clear(er) in a minute.....

My instinct says there may be some value in taking all the books you have in on-page lists and building separate review pages for each one. Then you have much more (sensible) room for in-depth reviews of them....and....you then have multiple vehicles for internal linking between them and back to the main category page.

Potentially lots of value in that approach (although lots of work, too).

The problem is....you have reasonably deep write-ups on the books on the current pages. If that's the (main) reason you rank now, then removing the write-ups could be a negative.

Personally, I think you could maintain parts of the book write-ups as they are now on the current pages and transfer the rest to individual book reviews. Combined with internal linking between categories and the books within each category.....and building out the reviews so they're really in depth...and some thought around page titles for the new pages...it's possible that you could be building an authority level that the competition can only compete with because of their own inherent 'poker in general' authority. You still might top them.

As I said though, ton of work to find out.

PS Of course, the problem with Amazon affiliate returns is that they're low percentage (or were last time I looked a long time ago). So you 'sell' a book and I'm guessing you get a couple of $s?? You have to sell a lot of books to make the effort worthwhile.

But doesn't Amazon still give you a cut of everything bought from a referred visit? Which means if you can at least get the clicks thru to Amazon, then you have a chance for a better return ( I used to get clicks through to TV reviews, and people bought something like nappy cream, for example!! - along with the odd TV thankfully. But it all adds up if you can get the traffic.

If I'm right and they do still pay on all purchases, then your key activity is to get the click through. Maybe your CTA's would be better as something like 'read (more/other) real reader reviews' rather than 'find out the price here'

wow that's very helpful Thanks a lot!

Actually, at the very beginning, when I started the website, I had exactly the same idea as you. I was writing in-depth reviews on single poker books. You can see the reviews at the bottom of the home page.

However, this approach didn't work at all. None of the reviews were listed high in Google and the ones that managed to be high didn't get any traffic. That's why I decided to post the write-ups

I get almost zero traffic from the single book reviews. Most of it comes from the write-ups.

But maybe the reason for it is that the content quality of the writ-ups is much higher than the content of single reviews.


About the Amazon affiliate, I think that the cookies work only for the items that you recommend because all of the sales I get are the reviewed poker books (but I will double-check that).

I think you are right about CTA's!
I will do a test for a few weeks and change the check the price to something else.

Thanks again. I really appreciate it!

[chaumi]

OK. Your book reviews look good too (although there is a ton you could do to improve them).

You're a good writer.

Sorry, I didn't get down far enough on the home page to see you already had some reviews.

But here's the point.....

The reviews are not necessarily to rank. I would imagine there are very few searches to individual books (by title + review). Anyone that wants a book review is more likely to just go to Amazon, type in the title, and they know they'll get real buyer reviews there.

Your job is (among other things) to get the searchers on to the category pages (eg 'books for poker beginners') and then show them what books meet their need (then get them to Amazon to convert, either from that category page directly, or by getting them to a review page, an author page, or any other related page).

So you want to be targeting those higher level 'book' terms (the ones that have searches). To do that, you need authority (ideally as the place to go for poker books). One way to get authority is to cover your subject fully....and fully (to me, anyway) means one of the things you need (most likely, in order to compete at a higher level with the competition you have) is individual book reviews....and a site structure that leads from high level category pages to those reviews.

You already have a good start on categories (though if you sat and thought about it I suspect you'd get another half a dozen in 30 seconds...and there are almost certainly many more).

If you nail all the categories and then have at least a few in-depth reviews for each of them, your overall authority level potentially goes skywards (PM me if you want to understand the mechanisms that come into play, I won't go into them here, too lengthy to type up).

Similar (to some extent) with authors. There are known searches for individual authors. If you had an individual page for 'Doyle Brunson poker books' you might be able to rank for it. Right now, Doyle Brunson is diluted on the long 'authors' page. You won't rank...but more importantly perhaps, Google/search engines may not even register the fact you've even mentioned Doyle Brunson. It's just another example of building authority.


****************

Take a look at your 'subscribe and receive a list' CTA. It's an H1 I think...and it's on every page? Which means you have two H1s on every page that CTA appears on (the real H1 and that one). That's not ideal....but...you do have number 1 rankings for the main page term on some pages, even where you have two H1s. Which kind of indicates multiple H1s aren't a problem. Still, it's not ideal and ultimately could/might affect your rankings.

[chaumi]

PS Once you get the traffic volume...of course, the next step is what else can you be marketing aside from Amazon books.

And one answer may be....on the appropriate pages...it might be worth trying affiliate links.

Example....Poker for Beginners page...at some point on the page you could have something like ' once you've got to understand the basics of playing poker, you're going to want to get in some practice. These poker rooms are well known for catering to newbie poker players and are great for practising what you've learned from any books you've read .....abc, def, ghi, etc

[Bartek]

OK. Your book reviews look good too (although there is a ton you could do to improve them).

You're a good writer.

Sorry, I didn't get down far enough on the home page to see you already had some reviews.

But here's the point.....

The reviews are not necessarily to rank. I would imagine there are very few searches to individual books (by title + review). Anyone that wants a book review is more likely to just go to Amazon, type in the title, and they know they'll get real buyer reviews there.

Your job is (among other things) to get the searchers on to the category pages (eg 'books for poker beginners') and then show them what books meet their need (then get them to Amazon to convert, either from that category page directly, or by getting them to a review page, an author page, or any other related page).

So you want to be targeting those higher level 'book' terms (the ones that have searches). To do that, you need authority (ideally as the place to go for poker books). One way to get authority is to cover your subject fully....and fully (to me, anyway) means one of the things you need (most likely, in order to compete at a higher level with the competition you have) is individual book reviews....and a site structure that leads from high level category pages to those reviews.

You already have a good start on categories (though if you sat and thought about it I suspect you'd get another half a dozen in 30 seconds...and there are almost certainly many more).

If you nail all the categories and then have at least a few in-depth reviews for each of them, your overall authority level potentially goes skywards (PM me if you want to understand the mechanisms that come into play, I won't go into them here, too lengthy to type up).

Similar (to some extent) with authors. There are known searches for individual authors. If you had an individual page for 'Doyle Brunson poker books' you might be able to rank for it. Right now, Doyle Brunson is diluted on the long 'authors' page. You won't rank...but more importantly perhaps, Google/search engines may not even register the fact you've even mentioned Doyle Brunson. It's just another example of building authority.


****************

Take a look at your 'subscribe and receive a list' CTA. It's an H1 I think...and it's on every page? Which means you have two H1s on every page that CTA appears on (the real H1 and that one). That's not ideal....but...you do have number 1 rankings for the main page term on some pages, even where you have two H1s. Which kind of indicates multiple H1s aren't a problem. Still, it's not ideal and ultimately could/might affect your rankings.

Thanks a lot again for your in-depth feedback really helpful

Re single reviews. It sounds good, I will have to think about it, how to implement it etc.
Although, sometimes I get a feeling that many users are not interested in in-depth reviews (unlike me).
They just want fast information what books is the best for them in a particular category (tournaments, cash etc ). But I might be wrong, will have to do more analysis on that.


Maybe, I will just create one post with all the book categories and from there send visitors to in-depth, single reviews. But I could get penalised by Google for duplicate content.

Re H1. I think you are right. I will double check and correct it.

Re. Book authors. I created this long list of all the poker authors with their books listed, and the plan is to add more information about each author in that single post.
I did that because I noticed that Google likes to rank those kind of posts (with everything in one post) high. I will only find out once all the information is there (unfortunately).

Thanks again��

[Bartek]

PS Once you get the traffic volume...of course, the next step is what else can you be marketing aside from Amazon books.

And one answer may be....on the appropriate pages...it might be worth trying affiliate links.

Example....Poker for Beginners page...at some point on the page you could have something like ' once you've got to understand the basics of playing poker, you're going to want to get in some practice. These poker rooms are well known for catering to newbie poker players and are great for practising what you've learned from any books you've read .....abc, def, ghi, etc

Yes, thats is exactly the plan for the future, once the proper traffic is there

- add relevant affiliate links
- create some products (e-book, courses, poker tools etc.)
- maybe some coaching
- offer advertising for authors who want to promote their books
- etc.

Assuming that the website visitors are interested in poker education, since they are searching for books. They should be also interested in other educational, high quality products.

But, that's just a plan. Let's see if it works

Thx,

[Brock123]

Hi Bartek
You are moving in the right direction.

[universal4]

I see absolutely zero reason not to join gaming affiliate programs NOW and provide advertising or links to such now.

One SINGLE player today, could make you more revenue then the revenue from books sales might make the entire year.

Rick
Universal4

[Bartek]

I see absolutely zero reason not to join gaming affiliate programs NOW and provide advertising or links to such now.

One SINGLE player today, could make you more revenue then the revenue from books sales might make the entire year.

Rick
Universal4

Yes, you are right. I have already added some affiliates and applied for more. Thanks

[Meistro1]

you might want to add some casino reviews and then have the affiliate banner link for that poker room in the review. just a thought.

[MyBid]

The Website is well made, the images that open quickly are optimized. Nice job!

[pokeraussie]

Good job I see you ranking on the 3rd page of google.com for "poker books". Interestingly, it's an inner page that is ranking well, not your homepage.

On a side note what's the best poker book you have read? Mine is Harrington on Online Cash Games; 6-Max No-Limit Hold 'em.

[PROFRBcom]

Wow, well done.

You are exactly the type of person I was hoping to hire to review books and do strategy for us. I suppose the good guys always go into business for themselves!

Keep up the good work!

[Bartek]

Good job I see you ranking on the 3rd page of google.com for "poker books". Interestingly, it's an inner page that is ranking well, not your homepage.

On a side note what's the best poker book you have read? Mine is Harrington on Online Cash Games; 6-Max No-Limit Hold 'em.

Thanks ��
That's interesting with the rankings for 'poker books'. Cause 'search console ' shows me about 30 position for that keyword. Which country/IP are you checking it from?

I enjoy the most reading non-strategy books, my favourite so far is 'The Biggest Bluff'

[chaumi]

It's this one G has picked.....

https://www.bookonpoker.com/blog/7-b...probabilities/

Around 30 for me from Australia, low 40s UK and US.

With the competition above you, it's not surprising the home page wasn't selected (although worth checking both to see if home is structured well enough and it's not a cannibalization 'issue'). I'd say it would likely take a significant authority increase to leap some of the pages above you.

But that page is high ranked for its own target term, implying it has some weight (and by inference, that suggests the site is starting to build some weight). You've got some heavy, heavy hitters below you. Worth checking if some links are doing the donkey work or if you're there 'on merit'.

[pokeraussie]

I enjoy the most reading non-strategy books, my favourite so far is 'The Biggest Bluff'

In that case I can suggest Mike Matusow: Check-Raising the Devil.