Selling Established Poker & Gambling Forums: 3 Sites, 6k Members, 7 Domain, 5 Years Old

Potential for a lucrative poker affiliate business. No Reserve.

Today, I've decided to sell my entire collection of poker and gambling related websites and domains. This listing is for my collection of gambling communities or related domains.

This listing consists of two established communities, BetCamp.com and FreeRollForums.com, one portal, PokerPlayerForums.com and four related domains, BetCamp.co.uk, PokerPlayerForum.com
PokerPlayerForums.net and PokerPlayerForum.net.

The reason for the sale is I've decided to abandon my original plans to set up a poker affiliate business, and instead focus my energies on my other business which had grown to be too big to divide my time between anything else.

I've been sitting on these sites for nearly 3 years, and done nothing with them! They still have the same potential they did when I developed or acquired them - but unless someone actively develops and markets them, they won't be any use to anyone.

Here's what you'll get in the bundle:

FREEROLLFORUMS.COM (Founded: 2005)

We bought this site 3 years ago for $6000, when it was already 2 years old. It was previously listed here: http://flippa.com/auctions/16318/Poker-Forum-with-6000-members-for-sale (also listed here: http://www.dnforum.com/f48/2-year-poker-discussion-forum-over-6-000-members-thread-239125.html). Includes a vbulletin license.

The site is in exactly the same state it was when we bought it; ie. it was a dormant community but the attraction was it was a nice niche topic of poker (ie. Freerolls), which also happens to be a huge attraction for new poker players, and hence new accounts, and contained a large enough membership to sustain it (6000+ members). Furthermore we really liked it because it had nearly 30,000 posts (anyone who's tried to launch a forum with 0 posts will know how valuable that is!), and it had an eager team of moderators actively wanting to get the forum back to it's former glory (I expect the former team would still be v.interested in helping the new owner).

Although we didn't get very far restoring it to it's former glory, because a complete absence of time commitment on our part, The former staff were very keen to get things going again, and this task was made a lot easier by the fact it's not at all difficult to list freerolls going on and link up with poker rooms to offer your own exclusive freerolls, and that can bring in a lot of traffic.

We did however hire one of the leading vbulletin designers (http://www.relivo.com/) to completely redesign the site and give it a brand new, unique design. We were really pleased with the results.

BETCAMP.COM (Founded: 2007)

Before the site launched in 2007, a lot of time was spent thinking about the name, branding and design of the site. To get the best results we hired a design agency who came up with a unique logo and the forum skin for the site. The layout and design were optimised for speed and to maximise advertising placement.

We planned the launch and used forum posting services to help get the site seeded. We purposely kept the number of forums low to increase the impression of activity amongst the forum. You'll see the site now has a nice foundation in which to grow from. Basically the next phase would have been to actively participate in the forums, hire a moderation team and market the site. Unfortunately we never had the time to do this (as this was a side project) and as a result the forum never had a chance to grow. The ingredients are all there though and an active community of this type could expect to earn significant referral revenue within a 12-24 month period if someone had the time to nurture it.

Extra info:

- We planned to do viral marketing via a collection of useful desktop wallpapers, you can view them here: http://www.betcamp.com/news-announcements/500103-poker-chart-cheat-sheet-wallpaper.html - these are all custom designed.

- We also launched with a competition to win an iPod to attract new users, this is the sort of thing that really helps to get activity going.

- We created a unique poker rooms section of the site here: http://www.betcamp.com/preferred/poker-rooms/ - this will be invaluable to help convert potential affiliate accounts once you start attracting new users to the site.

- Includes betcamp.co.uk domain; vBulletin and vbSEO license.

POKERPLAYERFORUMS.COM (Founded: 2004)

This is the oldest site and includes the following additional domains pokerplayerforum.net, pokerplayerforum.com and pokerplayerforums.net. The site and domains were bought at the same time as FreeRollForums.com. You can see what the site looked like several years ago: http://web.archive.org/web/20040831204620/http://pokerplayerforums.com/

The domain names are excellent in their own right, containing keywords particularly helpful for SEO. The site as it stands now is a simple portal containing dynamically generated links to useful articles and new forum posts.

Our initial plans for this domain was to develop a separate poker forum targeted at more experienced players. It would be a natural progression for our members on FreeRollForums, so that when they grew more experienced they'd have someplace to 'graduate' to.

In addition to the above, I'd be happy to provide my time in assisting any new webmasters who are new to either community management or poker affiliate marketing. I've a long background in the former and continue to this day to run a very large and successful community (not related to poker or gambling) which I've done so for nearly 10 years.

This listing would ideally suit someone with an interest in poker or gambling, and who has sufficient time to develop these properties so as to realise their potential. Poker affiliate marketing can be VERY profitable, so it's not a bad area to focus your efforts in, if you decide you want to get into community management!

Please note that no actual poker/gambling accounts are included in the sale, you will need to sign up yourself and populate with your own affiliate links.

Revenue Details

The sites you're bidding on are currently dormant and therefore the revenue from the site is minimal. You're bidding on the potential revenue the sites could generate given the write environment to develop them.

Traffic Details

The sites you're bidding on are currently dormant and therefore the traffic from the site is minimal. One of the best ways to start bringing in traffic, particularly on FreeRollForums is to re-engage with old users by sending out a mailing to notify them of the new management and start talking with the old staff about getting the site back on it's feet. Of course (viral/social/search-engine marketing will all help too!).

 

So you're selling "potential" for $7,500?

 

Anyone who's ever tried to start an online community will understand the value of an existing community where or not it's currently active. It gives you a huge advantage over starting from scratch. Also anyone with any experience of the affiliate/commission payments you can make from poker and gambling will know that there is substantial money to be made in these genres. Don't expect to sit back and let the money roll in, but if you put the effort in to energise these communities there's no doubt in my mind you'll make a lot of money.

The auction is ending tomorrow, if you want to know how to bid, then please pm me. Thanks

 

I think there would be a lot of poker affiliates that would jump at these sites at that price. Maybe being advertised in the wrong forum? If I had the cash I would jump at them.

Would be worth it just to obtain contacts for that many players, plus the domains would be worth a bit on their own