Poker Blog For Sale is a post from: Deneil Merritt - Journey through life

I am putting my poker blog up for sale. Since I added the forum to my main project Rakeback Rolls with a blogging option for all members. I don’t have a use for my poker blog. Although it has bring in most of my income over the pass year. I think its time to sell it and let someone take it to the next level and do something great with it.

The blog domain is 3 years old, pagerank 3, the blog uses a premium theme called the dealer theme valued at $215 and a banner plugin called oiopublisher valued at $47. The theme and plugin will be included in the sale.

Traffic stats
The blog gets over 500 visitors a month. The blog ranks for a lot of random keywords (all in or fold, sitngo, rush poker, limit holdem, and poker career) that could convert into signups if someone take the time to put in the right call to actions in the articles and do a little backlink building to rank number 1 for the keywords. The blog does come with a twitter account (kushmoney). The account updates with a lot of poker news and whenever the blog updates so the followers grow every month. Also it drives 10 to 40 visitors a tweet depending on the tweet message.

Revenue stats
There isn’t any revenue from signing up players as I drive all traffic to my latest project. I’m sure the right person will put in the right call to actions and make this site profitable. I did make nice amount of money from advertisements on the site. Most of the advertisements are expiring this month and next month. The more recent ads will be move to my poker news site or I will refund the advertiser. For my readers that are not in the poker affiliate business. If you buy the blog I will show you how to make over $3k a year from this website selling advertisements.

The starting bid for the blog is $500 and the buy it now price is $2,500. I am offering 10% finders fee to anyone that brings me a buyer that buys the blog at the B.I.N. price. To follow the current bid please click here.

June 2010 Income Report is a post from: Deneil Merritt - Journey through life

Sorry for the delay of this post and the lack of posting here my friends. I was busy with my poker blog and also had to wait until one of my affiliate accounts updated. Now that everything is done let me tell you what I have been up to with my other websites.

My poker blog has been fun to run lately. I have been updating it as much as I can and the traffic is growing because of it. So I will keep at it there. I still don’t know when I will get the custom design done but hopefully the traffic coming in now will pay for it. Can’t wait to see that site purple and white.

My poker news site hasn’t been updated as much as my poker blog but I am getting there though. I made a deal with one of my writers so that we both can profit from the site. I just have to wait and see how many people order our service. Other then that the traffic has been growing so I guess I am gaining more and more readers. I tried to get it into google news but got turned down because I was the only writer at the time. So I will wait to resubmit the site until I can afford to pay at least 2 full time writers.

Now for my big rakeback project. Since I haven’t been link building for it the rankings have dropped but I did get a chance to finally get a coder to match the forum to the site and open the poker forums. Now I just have to run a few promotions to get the forum going and from there I will have a little fun with forum vs forum tournaments against the forum I sponsored. Great group of guys at that poker forum.

Now to get into what you all been waiting for and below I will talk about a few plans I have for the rest of this month.

June 2010 Income Report

Direct Ad Sales: $420

Ad Networks: $0.58
Infolinks – $0.12
Adbrite – $0.46

Affiliate Marketing: $30.34
Poker Affiliate Solutions: $11.97
Yoga Poker: $0.30
Full Tilt Poker: $5.36
Spin32 Poker: $0.08
Outstandingpoker: $12.63

Other Income: $174
Content Writing: $60
Website Flipping: $110
Sponsored Tweets: $4

Total Gross Internet Income Of June 2010: $624.92
Remember, my income is from my small network of blogs, websites, affiliate marketing, services, and website flipping.

As you can see it was a low month. Not a problem as I was more focus on getting more content on all 3 poker sites. Also, you may have notice that google adsense was removed. They does allowed my fighting site so the last 3 or 4 days of June I replaced them with adbrite. So hopefully the income will be a lot more than the normal $2 to $5 a month from google adsense.

Now my plans for the rest of the month will be completely focused on 3 things but mainly 2 things.

1. Playing a lot more poker and blogging about it on my poker blog.
2. Running promotions for RBR to get people active on the site.
3. Finding clients to keep my writer busy so the poker news site will bring in an income and most importantly always be updated.

Addons To My Big Project is a post from: Deneil Merritt - Journey through life

Over the past few days I have revisited my research on forum software. My top picks was vBulletin and IP.Board for my forum. While people totally love vb 3.8 the latest release vb4 has far too many bugs for a non-techie no budget having person like me to spend my money on and then have to deal with the bugs. IP.Board is cheaper and more user friendly. So I went with the user friendly and budget friendly forum software.

After buying IP.Board I realize there are some great things I could do with the addons as well. So I bought IP.Blog and IP.Gallery. I contacted a designer/coder that specialize in Invision Power products such as IP.Board, IP.Blog, IP.Gallery, and etc. He gave me a quote on coding my forum to look like my site and I sent back a couple of questions regrading integrating aweber so when users sign up they are added to the newsletter and single log on for both my site and forum. Still waiting on a reply for that.

Until then I have been working on simple stuff like making the forums, added a few posts to see how it looks, added events to the calendar to see how that works and look, and added a shoutbox (mini chat room). I also created a blog and made a blog post to see how that looks.

I also seen an awesome video gallery addon that allows users to embed their youtube videos and others can comment on it. I think it would be great for users trying to help each other better their poker skills. I’m sure I will be active helping users become better limit holdem players and hopefully I can become a better pot limit omaha player.

I know its well known its hard to convert forum members into players. However, I will be running promotions that reward players for being active forum members, active bloggers, and since it’s a rakeback site they already rewarded for playing poker. Some of the promotions I have seen done while others I never seen done so it should be a ton of fun and a learning experience. I’m sure you can see the reasons why I want members active playing poker, posting in the forums, posting blog posts, uploading pictures, and videos.

I was thinking of adding the forum in 3 months or so. However, my players talk to me about it and I got to thinking. If I am going to build a community. The forum should be there from the very beginning. Anyways, I thought I’d update you all on what I been up too. As soon as the forum design is up, I will surely link to it or post a screenshot of it. Cheers.

Small Change In Project Focus is a post from: Deneil Merritt - Journey through life

My big project I was working on a rakeback site with a twist to teach limit holdem. I have change focus a bit as I will not be teaching limit holdem and has removed the limit holdem content and publish the articles on my other websites. The small change is a step towards a better site.

Overall this project is all about building a solid brand. A brand that players would want to tell their friends, promote on their own blogs, and wear the brand clothes. While the name isn’t something one would think about branding the logo surely change that view.

So to speed up development I have decided to take on one or two financial partners. I don’t know how long it would take to find a partner. It’s not going to stop me from focusing on building my own funds to develop the site. Anyway, you want to invest or know someone else that would like to share in the profits without doing the work. Please visit this thread. Thanks

Back To Work is a post from: Deneil Merritt - Journey through life

I took a small break from working which was great. I watched seasons 1 through 5 of Weeds. Now that I am back getting things done. I also did some thinking about the goals of this month. While content is great, it’s not going to make money today. Content is more of a long term, return on investment.

I will be producing and buying content as always. However, I am going to turn my focus to branding my rakeback/limit holdem site. I set up 2 tournaments to run every weekend. I am also, going to run some freeroll tournaments to bring in more subscribers to my mailing list as well as drive sign ups to smaller online poker rooms.

Things Done Since I’m Back…
I set up a $25 freeroll tournament on Full Tilt Poker for my rakeback site. All of my players will be added in the tournament so all the password/freeroll whose looking to sign up to my mailing list just for the password will be out luck with that. However, I will try to convert them with the $25 freeroll tournament on playersonly as a cross promotion for my rakeback site and a poker forum I bought advertisement on. Depending on how well these tournaments do I will host more of them.

As for content, I have produce some articles for article marketing as well as news articles for my poker news site. I did a lot of editing stuff, moving stuff around to add more banner slots without over doing it. I think I did a good job of it. I also decided to start taking some direct ad orders on this site so we will see how that goes for boosting my direct ad sales.

Hopefully the sign ups from the tournament promotions and the traffic from the poker news site will boost the monthly affiliate marketing income. From the monthly income reports we all know my affiliate marketing income isn’t up to par with my direct ad sales. Also, I will begin my bankroll challenge on my poker blog soon so hopefully the readers I gain from it will join me at the tables by signing up through my rakeback site.

With all that being said, I guess I decided to change this month from being about content to producing more signups and affiliate marketing income. Let’s see what happens.

Frustrated With Life is a post from: Deneil Merritt - Journey through life

Disclaimer: This post is really just for me to release a little stress and not have a mental break down. No comment needed.

While I may seem so focus on my goals and know what I want to do with my life. I am completely frustrated with life. Yeah, I know it’s my fault for the way things turned out. At the beginning of the year I set a goal to find myself outside of business, poker, and food. I am slowly forgiving myself, finding myself, and most importantly accepting who I am.

I realize losing my mom when I was younger and the bad choices I have made between the ages of 15 to 23 lead me to be the person I am today. While I would love to have my mom back, I don’t think I would change a single thing in my life. Someday I will need to go to counseling to fully get over my bad childhood and forgive myself for 8 years of bad choices. Then maybe I can find someone to emotional connect with as a friend and lover.

Until then I guess I will have to work on improving my life one step at a time. Improving monthly income, paying off debt,  saving money, and most importantly moving the hell away from my family. I know what some of you are thinking family is important. Well they are for those of you are close to your family. However, for me being alone is far better then being around people whom don’t understand me nor will I ever be close with. The only close family connect I had was my mother and I haven’t felt that since I was 6 years old.

While I am not close with my dad, I do care about him. He’s a good guy that made mistakes as a father here and there but who doesn’t right? However, I need space from family for me to become the man I want to be and need to be for my future. But I get the feeling my father is going to need a short time after I move west. So I have mix feelings about moving so far.

Well writing this has been great. I feel much better. Now to work on the changes in my life to make sure I won’t ever have to write one of these again. I was seriously close to having a mental break down.

If you took the time to read this, well welcome to my mind and my world.

Changes To This Blog is a post from: Deneil Merritt - Journey through life

I have been working hard on my other websites and haven’t been doing much on this blog. I said I will do a lot more blogging here. Well I been doing a lot of thinking what I am going to do with this blog. I realize I lost my way from the reason I started this blog. It wasn’t to teach others to blog that’s what Blog Mastermind is for, it wasn’t to show others how to make money online we all find our own way of doing business anyway. The reason for this blog was for me to have a voice. Express myself beyond work. It seems all I ever talk about on here is blogs, websites, and making money.

I never talk about how to save money and how to make money work for you. My whole reason for being so motivated to make money is because I feel I deserve a much better life than what I was born into. To do so, I will need to make money, save money, become debt free, and make my money work for to build riches.

So far I management to help others make a full time living from their online businesses, sell off any online business I had that was just about there to making serious money, and start more projects. Well I am finally saying enough is enough. I am taking on a mission that nobody ever wants to face.

I am going to focus on improving my websites and their income without starting new projects, buy online businesses with cashflow, and most importantly pay off my debt. I know this is going to take awhile but I am ready to push hard to get things done.

What Does That Mean For This Blog?

First off, I am changing the look of this site a bit using thesis theme as always until I pay for a custom design. I will rarely give blogging advice as there are better bloggers out there that can give great advice about this stuff. However, I will be working on improving my affiliate marketing income and will publish how I am going about doing so. Publishing some things that work and other things that don’t work. I will be publishing articles about personal finance as well. What’s the point in building a really nice monthly income if we can’t control our spending or personal finances.

What Has Changed So Far?

I have made some changes before making this post. As you can see, I removed the big footer I had. I also removed the blogging ebook I wrote. Personally, I didn’t like it and the update I had plan was going to take me forever to finish. I removed some widgets and I will be finding the widget that let’s you set goals like I had last year. I only took it down because it was depressing to see my debt then it was depressing to see such a large goal to make monthly so I just took the whole thing down. This time I will look at it as motivation and not in a depressing way.

The Journey Begins…

While I know a lot of you come to my blog hoping I begin teaching you about blogging again I can not take that path right now. I am realizing what it is I need to focus on work wise as well as personally. I always feel the need to help others and feel that is what I need to do as a person. I believe that is what I am here for. I believe by taking this journey to turn my life around from being in debt to a debt free person and posting about how I am doing it. It will help others do the same.

I hope you enjoy my journey and maybe my journey will help yours. Thanks for your time.

June Goals 2010 is a post from: Deneil Merritt - Journey through life

I have more goals than I could fit in the May income report. So this post will be all about my goals for this month. Income may or may not drop well below my average monthly income. Due to my focus on goals for this month. I am calling this month “Content June” since I will be focusing on updating this blog, my poker blog, and my poker news site as well as adding more articles to my big project. Let’s get into the goals for this month.

Goal #1 – The poker news site. I will be adding news articles daily. Most days I will be writing the content and other days I will be buying the content. Depending on the topic. I will also be buying reviews of poker rooms and gambling sites to add to the site. Also, I will be adding sections about games, game rules, and poker commercials.

Summary – minimum of 50 articles added

Goal #2 – The poker blog. I will be doing a bankroll challenge and update the blog each day that I play poker. Go over what went well, what went bad, what I learn from it, and where my bankroll stand.

Summary – minimum of 10 articles added

Goal #3 – The limit holdem site. I will be adding more strategy articles. Once I add 3 or 5 more articles I will add a recent strategy articles section to the homepage. I also will be running tournaments on poker rooms on the weekends as well as run a few members only tournaments for a poker forum I sponsor. Tournaments are focus to sign up players and get subscribers to the mailing list.

Summary – minimum 5 new articles and 10 tournaments

Goal #4 – This blog. I will be updating my process to let everyone know what I have gotten done , whats to come, and how I feel about everything. I will also try to add suggestions for those of you running websites.

Summary – minimum of 3 process articles and ill try to add other articles.

This month I guess I am jumping back into blogging full focus being that I will be updating 2 blogs and 2 websites. As you can see, this month is all about content, gaining readers, subscribers, and signing up players. So I am pretty sure income may drop. Depends on if I can find advertisers. I have 2 slots on a site that just opened up and I will be looking to fill those spots so I should make the $400 average from direct ads. If I do fill the slots, I will still be $400 short from my average of $800 a month. Push comes to shove I will have to sell content or something. Which I really hate doing. We will just have to wait and see.

What are your goals for the June?

May 2010 Income Report is a post from: Deneil Merritt - Journey through life

Man this time of the month came really quick. So many things went on this month it almost was a disappointing month. However, I believe it’s the most work I have gotten done in one month. I spent more time working on getting things done then focus on pulling in short term income. From that I had a bit of a money depression or something because the last half week of the month I tried almost everything to pull in more money. Lucky a three advertisers contacted me which resulted in adding a nice chunk to the direct ad sells.

While I did do over $100 in content writing services. I realize why I don’t like selling content. I much prefer using the content on my sites or using it for article marketing. Also, sometimes the content sits there listed without a bite for awhile before it sells. Which leaves me with the thoughts about using the content for myself! So in June I guess I will be using all the content I produce. I’m not giving up on replacing my direct ad income with content writing. I just don’t want to go into the thoughts of I should have used that article not sold it. In June I am going to produce the same amount or more content and put it to good use to see if I feel much better doing that.

May Goals
I know in the May Goals post I listed a few goals I wanted to complete in May. I am proud of what I got done. However, I know I could have done much better. I just need to clear my mind. I notice I have been having problems focusing on work, poker, and even texting on the phone. More on that later. Let’s see what I completed and what I didn’t complete.

The first goal was produce 10,000 new words of content. Didn’t matter which site of mine I place it on, didn’t matter if I use it for article marketing, or sold it. So how did I do? I stop counting after I reached 10k words. A lot of the articles was hanging around the 600 words mark. I did a few for my rakeback/limit holdem site that was over 1k each. So reaching this goal was easier than I thought. Maybe 20k or 30k would have been a real goal. 10k words was far too easy.

My second goal was revamping my poker community site into a poker news site. Well this job is a big project. With zero funds to revamp the design right now. I have focus on revamping the sidebar on different pages, adding a ad slot within the news posts which was very easy since I use oiopublisher, and I move the news to the homepage. So google can notice the site is being updated daily.

Ok, my next goal was very disappointing. The only keywords I reach on the first page in google was for the sites name. I know google did a lot of updates to their systems last month so a lot of people seen drops in traffic while others got a really nice boost in traffic. Since this is not a to being first for keywords. I am ok with not completing this goal. I am sure I will start ranking for keywords as time pass. I still have a few things to do with branding and producing content before I go full force with my backlink building efforts.

My last goal for May was to finish the follow up emails for the newsletter of the new site with aweber. I finish that within a day or so. It was pretty easy since I like to send subscribers back to the site with each email. Completing this so quick allowed me to come up with more goals in the half way through the month post.

I made the twitter, facebook, and youtube accounts for the site. Feel free to click and check them out if you want. I have some work to do to customize the fan page. Also, the channel will fill up with videos pretty soon as I get the intro done for the videos. Oh, I almost forgot. I also got the banners done for the site. Check out the 468×60 banner below. I also have other sizes; 728×90, 125×125, 250×250, and 160×600. If you have poker traffic you can sign up to my rakeback site and use your referral link if you want too.

I would love your comments on the banner. I love the way it came out but I always like to hear other people opinions. Let me know your likes and dislikes about the banner.

This month I am not going to post the most viewed posts and traffic for this blog. I realize it’s just a waste of my time since I don’t post very often. I said I was going to do more posts this past month but I didn’t. This month, I will be posting what I am doing with the new site so that should get me back into the blogging mood. I just might start producing more posts for both blogs and for the poker news site. Until I can hire someone of course. Now let’s get into the income report. I know that’s what you came for.

May 2010 Income Report

Direct Ad Sales: $660

Ad Networks: $1.44
Google Adsense – $0.85
Infolinks – $0.58
Adbrite – $0.01

Affiliate Marketing: $38.12
Yoga Poker: $4.68
Full Tilt Poker: $0.30
Spin32 Poker: $1.94
Outstandingpoker: $12.70
OIOpublisher: $18.50

Other Income: $187.20
Content Writing: $150
Sponsored Tweets: $12
Hits4Pay: $25.20

Total Gross Internet Income Of May 2010: $886.76
Remember, my income is from my small network of blogs, websites, affiliate marketing, services, and website flipping.

Since I know most people only read this post for the income stats. I will post June goals tomorrow. So how much did you make in May?

Half Way Through The Month is a post from: Deneil Merritt - Journey through life

It’s a little over half way through the month. I am not liking how things are going but then again when things run slowly in the first half of the month I push harder to make the second half better. Today I want to go over a few things. May goals, a few things added to the “to do list” this week, and how the income is coming along this month. First let’s get into this month’s goals. I want to complete 10k words of new content, revamp one of my sites, rank on the first page for 5 keywords, and complete the follow ups for the newsletter using aweber for my new site.

So far I have done over 6k words of new content. So half way through the month I am over half way done with goal number one. I am really happy about this because I got into the mood of not writing my own poker content. Now that I am writing again, I really feel bad about selling the content. The articles are so good I want to place them on my site for my players to benefit from them. However, I need the money to fund my project. I will touch more on the income later. Some of the articles I do keep for myself if I feel it’s more beneficial to place the article on my site. I also use some of the articles for article marketing if I don’t like the way it came out or if it’s shorter than 400 words.

Now goal number two is a little more work than just writing. This site I plan on changing from a poker community into a online poker news site with a little twist. I have taken off the dead poker forum, change some of the sidebars with an awesome wordpress plugin, and since I took off the forum where the poker commercials was published. I am going to add a poker commercials section. I still have to pay for the reviews, a new design, and logo as well as hire a poker news writer. The only problem with this project is funding. I told myself this project will only be funded by its income. So far, it has been producing from 2 online poker rooms and direct ad sales. However, I played poker with some of the funds and lost. It was during my downswing. So this project will be fund by my poker winnings since things have turned around and any direct ads I sell on it for now on.

Goal number three, this goal is bothering me a bit. I 301 redirected my test site which had a nice amount of backlinks and 301 redirect 3 mini sites to the new site. At first it seem google was taking forever and day to update the search results with the new site. Then it updated, I was happy until I notice some rankings dropped and others complete disappeared! So I began working on getting some of my rankings back by building backlinks for them but the more backlinks I built the more they dropped so I stop building backlinks for awhile. The rankings are coming back.  Then I read on PAL a lot of people are having all types of problems with google search results. So I guess I will have to ride the wave until things claim down. Until then, I am 1 out of 5. Rank for my own domain name. Not something I am happy about since that is pretty damn easy to do.

My final goal of the month, finish the follow up emails for the newsletter. I did this in the first week of the month. It took a lot of thinking and writing but I got it done. I should count the writing in the new word count for goal number one but I am not going to do that. I did 14 follow up emails including the welcome email. If the newsletter can not convert a player into a real money player producing rake each month I don’t know what will. Also I have some follow up emails that promote some poker tools that such bring in some nice sells as well. Once I get some training videos on the site I will be adding those to the follow up emails as well. By the time I am done with this newsletter it will have a ton of follow up emails. I will never have to send out a promotional email. We all know I will anyway.

Things I added to this months to do list. Create a facebook fan page for the new site, create a twitter page for the new site, and this one can wait until later maybe next month but it’s on the to do list. Hire someone to answer questions on Yahoo Answers. Personally, I think outsourcing this is best. It will give me time to complete other things.

The break down of income and what needs to be done. This month I said, I was not going to focus on direct ad selling. So far this month, I must say I only made a few comments this month in my sales threads. A few people contacted me but no deals. I have been focus on selling articles though. I stocked myself this one though. When it comes to something hard to make money. I normally run back to what I know best if I don’t see results fast enough. However, that’s not the case this month. I am really replacing my direct ad sells income with article writing. I have a few problems with this though.

1. Coming up with things to write about.
2. Getting over the feeling of keeping the article.
3. Knowing I will have to produce 50 articles to make $1,000

Now there is an up side to writing articles over selling direct ads. At first I didn’t even think of this but after talking with a friend. He help me realize a couple of benefits to writing articles than selling direct ads.

1. I only have to write 20 articles to replace my $400 a month income from selling direct ads
2. I will have less outbound links from my site. Which is always a good thing. I rather do internal linking.

As you can see there are good and bad things about selling articles than selling direct ads. I don’t know if I can write 50 articles a month plus content for my own sites. However, I have no problem producing 20 articles a month for $400+.

What will I do with the income? Here’s a break down of what will go where. All direct ads sold on my soon to be poker news site as well as some of my poker winnings will be reinvested there via producing content and hiring a poker news writer. All direct ads sold on my poker blog will be used for producing content and SEO for my new site. All articles sold will go towards producing content, design work, and SEO for my new site.

Summary
In my opinion, I done very little work in the first 2 weeks of this month and need to really pump out new content this second half. I only wrote 9 articles to sell this month so far. 11 more needed to completely replace my direct ad sells income for this month. Who knows if I will complete it. I been having writers block a lot lately. I think I am still having troubles getting back into the writing groove. Although, I always seem to crank out 1 or 2 articles around a long poker session. The twitter and facebook pages will be completed this week. However, I will have to find out the cost of a custom design for the facebook fan page landing page. If that make sense to you. I will wait on getting though. There are far more important things need to be done on the new site.

Here’s a little self promotion for my articles sales thread. Support my project and add new content to your site by buying an article or two maybe all of them. Until next time, work hard and work smart.