Time To Look At Our First Review
For our first review I’ve picked one from the Poker Listings site, as we’ve been looking at their site in some detail in past articles and they are after all far and away the most successful affiliate site out there so this is a good place to start for sure.
Presumably, they hire the best out there and they certainly have the resources to do that, so this should be at least of very good quality we would expect, and that makes it a good choice for sure. Just so you know though I will be looking at reviews on other sites as well for the purposes of contrast if nothing else.
Let’s hit the road a bit and see what we might be able to learn
Where better to start then with a review of their featured poker room, 888.com. I’m going to really look to dissect this review for you so this might take a little time, but any lessons we can learn here, both in terms of what they do well and what they could improve on, will be worth our while.
The Lead In To The Review
Before we talk about the review itself, it makes sense to first have a look at the lead in to it from the home page. If you look in the upper right of the home page you will see a box where they have their top ranked poker rooms. There’s 7 there now, with a link to “see more reviews.”
I’ve no idea why this box isn’t more prominent or why they don’t display more boxes on the home page. Their home page is loaded with all kinds of stuff and they obviously don’t see this as all that important. I also really dislike ranking them which I’ve mentioned in the past. I would classify their handling of this as terrible.
In any case, there is our review, in the number one position, and there’s the site, the bonus amount which is $888, and a little box to the right that says “review.” I guess this earns points in the simplicity department anyway.
The thing is dwarfed these days by that flash box dealing with poker news to the left of it. They even have a Poker Stars banner below it which is bigger. This really makes no sense to me.
Also worth pointing out is that I clicked on one of the news articles and it brings you to a main news page and there’s not one attempt to generate any business anywhere on the page. I think they have forgotten what business they are in.
It may be that they have determined that their news section gets more clicks than their poker room review section, but they have forgotten that these clicks are of much less value to them and what value they do have would be in transitioning people to click on the poker room reviews after they have read the news articles, but they forgot to put any banners or links on the news pages. This is a rank amateur mistake.
On To The Review
Regardless though, there will be some people who may notice this box and may click on the review link on it, taking them to the review in question. So let’s do that. We arrive at the review page for this poker room, which has a huge banner on top. These banners are the same one that they run on all of their review pages by the way, with the difference being that the reasons to play at the particular site being reviewed differ a bit.
Is this banner too big or too prominent? Well it is pretty large and commanding, but I don’t have a real problem with its size but if it were up to me I would reduce it. They do seek to command the first screen with this though and to an overbearing degree if anything, if they only did that with the poker room ranking box on the home page, made it bigger like this and even as big, this would make a lot more sense.
On the review page though they already have your attention as I’ve been saying, so there’s no real need to grab it in such an overbearing way. Not a big deal though I would say.
Let’s look at what’s on it though. To the right, there’s their freeroll promotion stuff, and I’ve spoken about this in several articles already so I won’t go into that in detail again, other than to mention once again that they really need to focus on benefits more with this stuff in general.
I can’t be too critical of the way it’s presented here on this page though, exclusive freerolls aren’t a bad thing, although in my opinion they do overrate this quite a bit and it is a benefit and a reason to play there to be sure, but far from the most convincing one I would think and not deserving of the excessive prominence that they give it.
I’ll pick this up in the next article.