Who Will Come To Your Site?
I spoke about this topic a long time ago back when I first started doing this blog, as one of the essential strategies for constructing your affiliate websites, but now that the conversation has become considerably more sophisticated as the blog has evolved, it is time to revisit this topic and see how this fits in with our overall view of website functionality.
Make sure you measure your target audience to know what will fit best on your site
So we’ve come up with an idea or ideas for a particular site and now it’s time to come up with an effective plan on how we are going to promote our wares to the people we expect to come visit us for information on our chosen topic or topics.
Naturally the range of topics will vary, they will all be poker related of course in some sense, or at least online gambling related if we’re looking to promote our poker rooms off of sites whose primary focus is on something else other than poker.
So all we have to do is mention something about the topic on the site and then we’re off to the races? Well you could do that, but doing this well is a little more complicated than this.
What We Want To Avoid Here
The first and biggest demon we face is people just bouncing off our home pages without really checking it out. We want their out clicks to be directed toward where we want to send them as much as possible, and while it isn’t realistic to expect a whole lot of clicks to our poker room ultimately, we do want to try to limit the home page bouncing to be sure.
So if the theme of your site is monkey faced poker chips for use in home games, and your searches and traffic are oriented toward that, you’d better convince them first and foremost that they have come to the right place if that is what they seek. We know that is what they seek in fact, so this isn’t guessing, it’s by design in fact.
Getting back to what I spoke about in the last article, which was the importance of using simplicity to achieve maximum impact, having a box talking about these poker chips among what looks like a carny show or the Las Vegas strip isn’t the best way to approach this to say the least.
People might see all that and then think, this site isn’t really about poker chips, or it might be a little but it is mostly about all this other stuff, poker room reviews, news, strategy, or whatever else you are throwing in their face when they first land at your site.
What’s The Best Approach Here?
So how to we handle this? Well you do want them to grasp the fact that the site is mostly about what they came to see, with perhaps some other things on it as well, which is fine. These people don’t just have one interest and if they did, we often do not make any money at all from the main themes on our sites, so we’d be in trouble then.
Like most things related to our sites, there is clearly an element of what we could call art as well as what we could call science, and when it comes to deciding what the best mix of information we present them would be, it will depend a lot on what topics we are dealing with.
However, at a minimum, if the main topic isn’t the main focus then we risk losing their attention too much. It’s no good having side stuff on there if they aren’t even around long enough to look at it.
I would tend to prioritize this so called side content as well, according to the impact it may have on our bottom line. The poker room promotion stuff is obviously going to get the most weighting, as we need to presume an interest with this, but not so much that it interferes with the main message.
Beyond that, you need to look at the overall interest of the topic as well as how much it might appeal to your particular audience. This stuff really is value added but it needs to add and not detract from the most important stuff.
I much prefer to redirect those interested elsewhere to keep from cluttering up the home page in the manner that Poker Listings does it. I don’t like that approach at all and even though Poker Listings wants to be everything poker to everyone, something that we generally wouldn’t even aspire to, or at least generally shouldn’t, there’s a better way to do it than this.
So a small but prominent box should be enough to look to distribute these side interests, and enough is all we should be looking to do at this point. This will allow us more space to focus on what we know is important to both them and the search engines in terms of our focusing on the topics we’re looking to rank well with.