30 Day Goals for Poker Webmasters

by Randy Ray

The power of goal-setting is talked about constantly in the "success" industry.. This has made the subject of setting goals tired.

My aim in this article is to breathe a little bit of new life into the subject of setting goals by applying it specifically to being a poker webmaster, and by looking at the process of goal setting through the singular lense of setting 30 day goals.

Why 30 Days?

There are a couple of reasons I decided to use 30 days as the timeframe to focus on for this article. One reason is that it's a simple, familiar number. (There are approximately 30 days in a month.) Another is that it takes about 3 weeks to develop a new habit. Since 30 days is just over 3 weeks, that gives a bit of a fudge factor, and if you find some success by achieving your 30 day goals, you'll be able to continue them because they'll have become habits. And 30 days is a great number because you can literally make huge changes in your website business in that amount of time.

30 days is also a short enough time period to "try on" a new set of goals that it doesn't seem overwhelming. If you want to commit to adding 2 new pages of content a day every day for a year, you might not ever start because 365 days of content generation just seems overwhelming. But 30 days of generating 2 pages of content seems a lot more do-able. And if you don't like your goal after 30 days, just tell yourself that you're going to quit after that period of time if you don't like the results or the process.

Action Oriented, Not Results Oriented

I like to set goals that are based on taking specific actions instead of goals based on achieving specific results. If I set a goal of getting 100 new links over the next 30 days, I'm setting myself up for failure, because I have to rely on other webmasters cooperating with me and adding my links. On the other hand, if I set myself a goal of requesting links from 25 other webmasters a day for 30 days, I'll wind up with a bunch of links, and as long as I demonstrate commitment and discipline, I'll achieve my goal. (Self esteem, by the way, isn't achieved by receiving praise or by patting yourself on the back. Self esteem grows as you set and achieve your goals.)

More results oriented goals include:

• Getting a certain number of search engine visitors each day
• Getting a certain number of player signups each month
• Making a certain amount of money each month

These kinds of goals are fine, but since they're side effects of action oriented goals, why not just set the action oriented goals for yourself in the first place?

2 Worthwhile Goals for Poker Webmasters

Here is the formula for making money as a poker webmaster:

content + links = traffic

traffic = revenue

The 2 obvious goals that you can set for yourself relate to the 1st 2 factors:

• Creating content
• Getting links

Generating Content

When I managed to get my 1st poker website up to 100 pages, I immediately called Steve Badger to brag. He told me, "Congratulations. You finally have a real website now."

I'd launched at least 10 websites prior to that, none of which had more than 10 pages of content. And most of that content was poorly written. Now I don't feel like a website is "real" unless it has at least 100 pages of content on it.

If you already have a 10 page website, then a relatively easy content goal for a 30 day period would be to generate 3 pages of content every single day. At the end of 30 days, you'll have 100 pages.

Having lots of pages is important because each page serves as an entry point to your website. Your goal with your website isn't to rank for the phrase "online poker" and nothing else. Your goal is to rank for as many potential phrases that are related to poker as you possibly can, while still maintaining a theme on your site.

Getting Links

The 2nd factor in running a successful website is getting links. Poker webmasters pay too little attention to generating content and too much attention to getting links. Trying to get good websites to link to a poor-content website is an uphill battle that's doomed to fail. Getting good websites to link to a website with great content is effortless.

Would you rather work really hard for only moderate results, or would you rather just achieve what you want as a side effect of doing something else?

Link building has its place though. When I set goals for how many links I'm going to get to a site, I set a goal of how many webmasters I'm going to contact each day about getting a link. ALL linkbuilding involves getting other webmasters to add your site to their pages, no matter what method you're using:

• Directory submissions
• Article syndication
• Link exchanging

I read that Mike Ferry made 25 calls to potential clients every day, 5 days a week, for 2 years, in order to build his business as a professional speaker. He eventually built a business generating $10 million a year in revenue. Apply this philosophy to building links to your website and see what happens. Even if you have bad luck building links, after requesting links from 750 different sites, you will have some serious link equity built up.

What Are You Going to do This Month?

This article is useless if you don't act on it. What goals are you setting for the next 30 days?