Schemey McGee

So I'm a perpetual schemer. It's embedded in my DNA. You name it, I've schemed it. Miniature donkey ranches, audio porn businesses, vanity book publishing, the whole shebang. All legal scheming, mind you, but usually a bit off the beaten path. Well, okay, way the hell off the beaten path.

The last couple of years I've worked pretty hard at the affiliate marketing businesses, designing and building websites to hawk virtual goods, memberships at online sites (ala the Party/Empire affiliate system), generating leads for people looking to buy cars, stuff like that. I'm pretty good at it and have made decent money. I've got a dedicated server for hosting, plenty of bandwidth, and competent Web design and marketing skills.

Lately I've been thinking about launching a poker-related site. For a couple of reasons. One, obviously, is hopefully to make a little scratch, via affiliate programs to online poker sites. But much more than that I think it'd be fun and potentially useful. Most of the Web stuff I've done is purely mercenary in its focus, as far as building sites to hawk things like body jewelry, alternative smoking products, assisted living products, pet medications, knives and swords, etc. Nothing I personally had an interest in, just stuff I knew people buy online, in affiliate markets that aren't yet oversaturated. But I'd actually enjoy building a poker site, which would be a nice change of pace.

So yeah. A poker site. The real question, though, is does the world need another poker site? Or, better yet, what would YOU like to see in a poker site, that isn't already out there?

I think there's a good bit of low hanging fruit to be plucked. Given that there are ten kajillion awesome poker blogs out there, content wouldn't be hard to come by. I've monkeyed with some content management systems in the past and could likely bang together a way for all of you kickass poker bloggers to have your own featured blog on the site (similar to the Blogger setup, as far as the ability to publish entries remotely, edit content, etc., just not tied to Blogger or other online services). It'd be a bit of a pain in the ass, blogging at two places, but not horribly so. I think it could be interesting, too, as it'd give people the chance to play with different personas, etc. Classified and searchable by different paramaters, including game predominantly played (1/2, 15/30, Omaha Hi/Lo, Stud), location, age, sex, etc.

Trip reports would also be a nice feature to have. I always enjoy reading them and think it'd be cool to have a huge archive of them, that people can search by location, game type, etc. They'd also generate good search engine traffic, as they'd be laden with targeted location-specific keywords (i.e. "new orleans poker rooms").

Book reviews would be easy. As would reviews of online sites. It'd take a bit more work, but I also think it would be cool to have a feature where you could view and print aggregated info from all the major online sites, as far as upcoming tournaments. So that you get, in a single place, a list of all the online tournaments (prize money, starting times, entry fees) being held in the next week for tournaments with over $10,000 in prize money. Or of satellites for major prize packages. Or of all upcoming Omaha MTTs. It'd be a bit time intensive but not horribly so, as most online sites stick to a fairly standard tournament schedule, so the work would be on the front-end, as far as loading the data and checking it on a regular basis for changes.

Strategy articles would be easy, too, given all the great stuff that people write on a regular basis. Arranged and classified in a sensible fashion, searchable, all that jazz.

In a nutshell, nothing earth-shatteringly new or novel, but basically just aggregating and arranging all of the great poker-related content out there, in one convenient place. It'd be a ton of work, in many ways, but the bulk of the content would be user-driven. It wouldn't be a money maker, in any fashion, but it'd probably pay for itself from affiliate links to online poker sites. And it'd be fun.

Whee, fun.