Wednesday, February 21, 2007

Get Paid to Blog About Poker, Sports, and Other Random Weird Crap

One of the things I've been working on of late is an easy way to not only set up a collaborative and/or community blog that any fine poker blogger can post on, but to structure it in such a way that people can actually get compensated their efforts.

I won't say that I've completely cracked the nut, but I've got a beta version of a possible solution, as far as providing a community blog about poker that any poker blogger can post good, juicy content to, with immediate opportunities to make money, as well as a way to get your content in front of a potentially much wider audience.

So I'm basically at the point now where I'm looking for some poker blogger volunteers to give it a whirl and kick the tires, if anyone is interested.

It's set up through WordPress so publishing is a snap, it's all browser-based, and pretty easy to use. I'm also not envisioning this as a replacement to anyone's current blog. My plan is to basically offer the platform, hook it up with optimized ways to make bloggers some extra money, and then let you do your thing.

The content you'd publish to the site would be entirely up to you. You could post new, original content, repost old, existing content, embrace the more commercial side of blogging by posting paid reviews, explore creating content that is solely designed to get search engine traffic, whatever you want. You can also use your posts to drive traffic to any other blogs or sites you run, too. It's your canvas to fill as you like, as long as it's poker-related and within reasonable bounds.

To repeat, this isn't planned as a replacement to existing blogs. It could be, if you liked the results, but the main purpose is to give you an additional outlet to post poker content on, one that is more commercial in nature.

Will this make you filthy rich? Nope. But if it works as planned, it can provide you with a bitof extra money each and every month, and could continue to generate some extra cash for you even if you stopped posting altogether, as your old content would still be generating ad impressions for you.

Aside from the potential to make money, I think it'd be an interesting experiment in and of itself, as far as offering a community poker blog open to anyone, instead of simply a select few that were deemed to already have sufficient traffic or marketability. Lots of truth in the collective wisdom and power of crowds, so it'd be interesting to see that in practice, aside from all the other stuff.

Yeah, the UIGEA has taken a lot of wind out of the US-centric poker blog sails, but there's still a lot of great content being posted by bloggers, each and every day. (And, from a strictly commercial aspect, lots of poker terms are still producing decent payouts in Adsense, and people around the world continue to be interested in poker.)

If you're interested in giving the beta version of this a whirl, shoot me an email at prufrockrocks@yahoo.com and I'll get back to you with more details. I'm also going to run the same beta trial on a sports site and news of the weird site I run, so if you're interested in either of those, holler at me.

3 comments:

Dave said...

Just curious about what methods you were expecting to be making the money from? Advertising revenues (AdSense, banner ads, etc) or paid reviews (like ReviewMe...)

ScurvyDog said...

Chipper,

Sorry to be coy about the actual site but it still looks kind of dinky and just has some content I slapped up to take up space, so I was going to wait until it's more fleshed out before unveiling things publicly, etc.

It's currently set up for about 75% Adsense ads and 25% banner ads for retail affiliate programs, and the template serves up ads in 6 different locations.

The basic idea is that all of the Adsense ads and banners are rotated, with all the individual authors sharing the ad displays on the home page, as well as each author getting credit for ad displays on their individual post.

So on any page an author creates, they get something like 90% of the ad displays, and that applies to every ad on the page. As owner/admin, I get the remaining 10% of the ad displays, to go towards hosting/bandiwdth/admin duties/etc.

The script I'm using on the backend is smart enough to rotate the ads in the correct proportions on individual posts, as well as to rotate the home page ads for all authors equally.

TripJax said...

Scurvy pwns. I'd be interested, but I'm currently at work and can't email about stuff like this cause my emails are surveilled and I can't use my personal email as well. Big brother sux.

Anyway, I just wanted to mention that I'd be interested, cause if I don't comment now, I might forget. Since I can't email you right now, on my blog, http://tripjax.com, there is a tab for my email address. If you get a chance, shoot me an email of whatever you were thinking and we can go from there.

Thanks man!