How to start your sports or poker blog

This gambling blog is now about 5 years old and during these years I learnt how to register a domain, where to host it, how to design it and how to monetize it in order to make money from it. I have come across many betting and poker blogs but very few make money for their owners in my opinion. Although a sports bettor or poker player starts his blog to share his experience and knowledge, there is also great potential for additional income by blogging. So, I decided to start up a series of blog posts sharing blog tips that I have found out during these years and possibly help gamblers to take advantage of their blogs.

In this first article of the series, I will give some blog tips about how to start your own sports blog or poker blog in case you haven't done already. If you are a sports bettor or poker player who spends a lot of time betting or playing, I think you should start your own blog not only to track your results, help others or get publicity, but to have an additional income which isn't that stressful as gambling.

1) Register your own .com domain, don't blog in free blogging networks.

Surely there are bloggers that make good money blogging in blogs ending in blogspot.com. There are advantages for such blogging, since Blogger.com is Google's blog publishing tool, it is free and Google will index your articles quicker. However owning a .com domain and blogging in your personal domain have far more important advantages which I think outnumber the disadvantages. You get your personalized .com domain which would be much easier to remember and spread the word, while the less letters in the address guarantee much more value for your blog. Additionally, .com domains sell much more expensive and easier if you later decide to sell it, they attract a lot more advertisers and they look more professionally. There are also ways to push up your blog effectively in search engines. If you are serious about your gambling blog, start with a .com domain. I personally register my domains with GoDaddy.com but there are numerous registrars out there. Do your search and decide on what looks best for you. If you decice on GoDaddy, make sure you use a  GoDaddy bonus promo code.

2) Invest in your blog right from the beginning.

Ok, owning and hosting your own domain isn't free, that's for sure. Registering a .com domain for a year costs about $8 per year and hosting with one of the best hosting companies costs $50 more per year. That is the total cost of your blog per year though, there are no additional costs. You get a domain ending in .com, unlimited disk space and unlimited bandwidth. You are in fact free to do whatever you want at your personal internet space. You should consider your blog like your new company, your innovation. You wouldn't start your business by sitting behind a desk out in the street. You would buy your office, invest in some furniture and start working. Well, hosting your sports or poker blog with a hosting company is like buying the property where you will build your office. It doesn't come for free but it is rather cheap considering the endless possibilities of internet! One word of advice though; don't host your blog at the company that you register your domain with. Companies are usually good at one field of expertise. There are good companies specializing in domain registrations and there are other companies specializing in hosting. It's the same as betting or poker. You bet effectively in football and you play No Limit poker well, would you expect to be that good tennis bettor or Omaha poker player? That isn't how things work, right? I personally host my blogs and websites at Hostgator.com which allows me unlimited domains, unlimited databases and some other useful stuff.

3) Install a free blogging software or content management system.

WordPress and Joomla are both free software that will help you design your blog. Their capabilites are endless and they are easily learnt and mastered. Once you take the hang of them, you can literally build an enterprise! WordPress is a free blogging software and is targeted for bloggers mainly, while Joomla is a free content management system and used for websites and blogs alike. I personally use Joomla and have never used WordPress, but many bloggers make use of WordPress for their blogs. You don't have to learn both obviously, visit their official websites, take the available product tours and make your choice.

4) Decide on your content and split in categories.

This is quite crucial and the thing I wish I knew right from the beginning. Say you are going to blog about poker. Will you blog about No Limit or other poker games as well? If the latter, you should write your posts under the respective section. So you will need to create some sections for each poker game you are going to write about. What are you going to write about for each game? Poker hand discussion, money management, style of play, bragging posts, news etc. You should create the categories you expect your future articles to be included in. Don't spend that much time on that though. You just have to create a couple of categories in the beginning and as you are inspired for new articles every day, you would then create the relative category. You can see as an example my own sports blog. I have plenty of categories while in the beginning I had started with just a few and completely unorganized. The sections and categories will also help your blog's layout and search engine ranking, while the visitors will not lose their way in your blog. You are going to write a lot as a blogger and you want your articles to be accessible at all times. Don't let them get lost in a chaos of articles.

5) Include a sitemap and submit to search engines.

Finally you should learn about sitemaps and include one for your blog. In a few words a sitemap is a list of all your pages in http:// format. This list is submitted in search engines daily and the search engines crawl the links found in the sitemap to search for new content. In other words you don't have to worry when your new article will be added in search engines' indexes. Add a sitemap in your blog and all will be done automatically.

Done all the above? Now you are ready to start blogging. You have bought your property (.com domain registration), built your office (blog hosting),added the furniture (blogging software) and organized the file cabinets so that you know where you'll find everything (categories and sections). You have also let the world know of your company (sitemap submission). Now you have to arrange your furniture in order to make space for advertising and make your articles appeal to the crowd (blog designing), attract customers (search engine optimization and traffic building) and make money (blog monetizing).

That is exactly how I see things with my blog and how I start my other websites. How you start your sports or poker blog will save you time in the future and make things much easier. I have encountered many difficulties during the past 5 years owning my own blog and I have come to the conclusion that the most prepared you are when you begin building your blog, the most effective the blog will be. I have redesigned my blog at least 5 times and nowadays it gets the most traffic and revenue it has ever received.

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