Doovde

Sad as it may be, Tuesday nights I play in a local darts and dominoes league. Last night we played at a small pub called the Bay Horse and managed an epic 5-2 defeat in both the darts matches and the dominoes games. Having only won two games so far this season the darts team needs a bit of work but generally our dominoes players do a lot better.

The format is simple there are seven players on each darts and dominoes team. The night starts with the ‘individuals’ which are drawn out at random and the first team to four points wins. Then there is a doubles darts and dominoes followed by a captains darts and captains dominoes. This is then followed by food which is provided by the home team and a hot topic of conversation, more on that later.

Last night I played first in the individual darts and lost. The guy I was playing was OK but I’d beat him over 1,000 games by at least 650 to his 350. This is our hypothetical yet widely accurate way of measuring how good people are at darts. He ran god like and checked out 70ish finishing on double 7 leaving me stuck on 61. The rest of the games played out and we only managed to win two which was pretty shit considering we beat the team top of the league the week before.

Usually I play in the doubles with someone selected at random by the bloke who runs our team. We have won five doubles games this season and I’ve played in all of them. The ones I haven’t played in we have lost. Four of the five doubles games we have won I have played with a guy called Neil. We played again last night and owned it as usual to keep our highly impressive unbeaten run going. We dicked on them actually, first game Neil left me on double 1 which I hit first dart and the second game he left me on 15 which I checked out with 3 double 6. Winnar! I’ve actually been nicknamed Dave ‘One Dart’Lenton because of my freaky ability to hit a double with my first dart, I guess it’s better than some darts players nicknames; MR Glitter (Bobby George), Lamp Chop (Ritchie Davies), Excellent Dude (Niels de Ruiter).

I had to play Dominoes last night because we were short. I managed to win what was my first ever game thanks to the help of Jono who explained the rules and some classic tactics on the journey there “You pick seven dominoes up and then put them down if you can, play your highest ones first”. This seemed to work extremely well as I beat their captain who is meant to be their best player. He was actually pretty pissed about it afterwards, some of the oldies take their dominoes very seriously. Dominoes is serious business! He spent the rest of the night moaning about how the music from the juke box was too loud and people playing dominoes couldn’t concentrate…. what a douche.

Every week, after the games, the home team puts our a spread. At our pub we always have hot food and it’s usually some kind of curry which is always well good. Food varies from place to place but you get scored down if you don’t provide owt hot lyk! Last night was just sandwiches and crisps. A valiant yet pretty poor effort. 3/10.

I know one of the biggest problems I faced when I first started making gambling affiliate websites was finding ways to get links. It took me a while to understand on page seo, design and getting the best out of wordpress but that all came with practice, link building is something I never found so easy. In fact it’s still the hardest thing for me personally. I have though managed to develop some strategies which are working really well for me at the moment.

Note: If you are a new webmaster and you are not willing to link to other people from your site then you may as well not bother reading the rest of this article. Period. Oh also you’re dumb.

How To Get Links

Lets talk about how to get links, there are obviously a million and one ways but I’m only going to talk about stuff that has worked for me.

1) If you are reading this article then you are probably a member of at least one poker affiliate forum. This is your first way to get links. Some allow you to set up personal blogs, you can link from there. All I’ve ever joined have a review my site section which is crying out to be used for link building. Whatever you do don’t be spamming the forum and linking to your site in the content of every post you make but over time you can certainly build up plenty of one way inbound links to your site via the forum.

Try: PAL, CAL and GPWA – All affiliate forums where you can build good links to your own site if you are a valid contributor to the acutal forums.

2) Link exchanges are my next port of call after I have launched a new site and got it some one way inbound links from the poker affiliate forums I’m a member of. As a member of these forums you meet people and network which makes getting link exchanges a whole lot easier. If you have a list of 5 or 6 webmasters on skype or msn or whatever then all you have to do is hit them up and sort out some exchanges.

I’m not just talking about resource link exchanges here. Offer to write people a piece of content they can add to their site which links back to you and then link to them from somewhere good on your site that’s relevant. Save the space on your resource page for people not willing to do the first option. This way your not saturating your resource page with crap and your getting more valuable links anyway.

3) Speaking of content one of the best ways to get links is to offer people content in exchange for links. If you are promoting poker then you can get endless one way in content links to your site by doing this. Go away right now and write 20 poker articles, offer them to people via PAL and just see how easy it is to get links using this method.

It’s a bit harder to do this if you are promoting bingo or casino’s but it still works, just slower. It’s not out of the question to link from a poker article to a bingo or casino site anyway.

4) Start a blog. Just a personal blog is fine. You can even do it for free at wordpress or blogger. It’s a great way to build one way links to any of your sites. Plus if you put time and effort into your blog then people will link to you, it will become a resource and the links you put in it will become more valuable. This is probably the easiest of all the ways to get links. If you’re to lazy to write a blog then you suck.

Use your contacts from affiliate forums to do blogroll links exchanges!

5) Want to know how to get more links and good in content homepage links? Then start a new site in the same niche that you are targeting. It doesn’t have to be a major commitment, it can even be a mini site if you want. Then use it to link to your main site, try to make your mini site a resource with good content. If it’s good it will attract natural links and the links you put on it will be more valuable. It’s simple, it doesn’t take that long and it works. Do some link exchanges with this site so it has some inbound straight away.

If anyone has anything to add then please post comments and I will edit the article at a later date to update it.

So I figured the best way to start my revamped blog off would be to talk a little bit about the sites I run at the moment. I have been part of the gambling affiliate industry for a year and a bit now and have three main sites. One focus on the poker niche and the other two are online bingo related.

1) Bonus Poker Code – This is the first ever site I built and has suffered as a result of all the the newbie errors I’ve made along the way. However, it still gets good traffic and sends quite a few RMP’s to a couple of the poker rooms it promotes every month. I don’t do a lot of work on it at the moment and haven’t done for a while though I still feel it has potential to earn more.

2) Bingo Deposit Bonus – With my second site I decided to move away from the poker side of the market and focus on promoting online bingo which is pretty massive over here in the UK at the moment. This site also gets reasonable traffic and generates real money bingo players every month. It’s a marked improvement on bonuspokercode.com but still suffers a little from my lack of early experience.

3) Online Bingo Halls – Onlinebingohalls.org is my newest site and benefits from everything I have learned so far about developing a successful gambling affiliate website. I have high hopes for this one and at the moment it’s what I spend pretty much all of my time working on. It has some good content which ranks well and hopefully will go from strength to strength from this point onwards.

I do have a whole host of other websites which are non gambling related but to many to list. I’ve even done some website design work for a few people so if you’ve landed on my blog from a seemingly random site that’s probably why.