Posting your winnings or losses in your gambling blog

Posting your winnings or losses in your blog won't increase visits. Usually a gambling blog includes the gambler's trading or betting tips and their results. Winnings tend to be more often posted than big losses, proving that the gambling blog's owner is a winner in online gambling. Do readers care though for your performance or should you not publish your P&L? I believe your blog's traffic would increase if you posted something for useful for the casual gambler than brag about your profits.

This is a matter I have been discussing with myself a lot in the past. Back when I started, my gambling blog included just one HTML page showing an image of my daily winnings and losses. The image was a screen shot of my Betfair account's P&L, horse racing results to be exact, since in 2005 I was trading the horse racing odds at Betfair on a daily basis. I had been quite popular back then in regards to sports trading and all readers visited my blog just to take a look of how I did each day. I offered no advice, no trading tips and no articles were added.

I am not sure of my gambling blog's traffic in the early days, as I was unaware of traffic stats and had no idea of Google Analytics or traffic meters. However I believe more than 100 people visited my blog then, all being Betfair customers. No new visits, no new readers came to my blog. The only way a gambler could hear of my blog was word of mouth or forum posts mentioning my blog's address. Google couldn't drive people to my blog since there wasn't a real update of my blog, no new text added and there was only an image which was being updated without even changing the filename!

So, enough with this flashback! A lot has happened since the launch of my blog and I have now posted more than 500 articles, getting my blog in the first page of popular search terms. Nowadays almost half of the blog's traffic comes from Google itself, either to the home page or to individual articles. Well, guess what. NONE of the visitors pay their first visit on a page I post some kind of winnings or losses. None of my page under the Betting, Trading or Poker performance gets ANY traffic at all! I don't blame them for not coming there, I wouldn't!

Step back and think a reason why a recreational gambler or someone who seeks information would ever visit your blog if you only posted your P&L. Envy? Probably. Hate? More probably. Interested? Not actually.

The visitor is searching about knowledge, about information that would help him bet wiser. He is looking for betting tips for the forthcoming event, he is researching about trading tools, software or technical analysis. He is eager to find out a betting system he can make use of and make money for himself. He may also be interested in improving his poker game, his poker skills. There is no benefit for him at all to see that you actually make it pay, you are going all the way to the bank, or you are having a horrific drawdown. The gamblers seek information and useful tools, not just another gambler who brags about his winnings or complains of his recent losses.

Certainly that is not the whole picture. Visitors need to know from time to time that the writer is indeed a winning gambler. They need to get reminded that there is a winner behind the articles they read, or at least a gambler who knows his stuff. A good idea is to have a dedicated place in your blog where you mention your recent winnings or your future bets. No harm there. But try focusing on the articles themselves, since they are going to keep your blog popular and your readers coming back.

Next time you win a poker tournament, do well in online trading or score 5/5 of your bets, think twice before posting it.

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