Holidays and January Trips

Hope everyone had a good holiday.

I want to thank Bodog for sending me 3 bottles of wine & CasinoCoins for sending me a Bose portable iPod speaker. 2009 was the first year that I received holiday presents from programs and they will likely get increased exposure because of it. Though in 2008, Aced.com paid for a Las Vegas trip…which was a sick trip and is by far the best thing I have received from an affiliate company.

January Trips

January is a busy month, it started with celebrating New Years in Tahoe. Then January 15-18th I will be in Las Vegas at an annual MLK trip with friends.  On January 25th I will be leaving for Europe and attending the London Affiliate Conference as well as doing some traveling in Europe after the conference. On the flight back from Europe I will be stopping at Washington DC and will spend 3 days there and will be back in Santa Cruz (my home town) on the 7th of Feb.

Free SEO Gambling Traffic

There will always be a lot of discussion by affiliates about the percentage of traffic that they convert. I have found real money player conversions (from your site to real money players) has a lot to do with keywords. There are definitely other site factors including calls to action, programs you are promoting, banners used…etc. But in the end, I think if you have the best keywords (online poker, online casino) you will convert more traffic than the most optimized free casino/poker site.

I think most people realize that “free” is a really low converting keyword but there is a lot of traffic for it. So how bad can it really be?

I created a site to target a “free” (casino/poker) site and here are the stats so far:

Clicks: 719

Unique Downloads: 35

Sign-ups: 30

New Depositors: 0

Yep, no conversions…This doesn’t mean that later down the road there won’t be any real money conversions as this is a small sample size of time and players. Though, I can definitely say that “free” keywords aren’t a get rich quick type of keyword. Also, the program that I was sending the traffic through has done really well in the past with converting players so I don’t think it’s the program…Although, I may try sending the traffic to another program to see if I will get better results.