GPWA Times Magazine - Issue 26 - October 2013

basic – e.g., “I inform players on the best poker rooms to play at where they can find the games they are looking for and get the best rewards back for their play. In turn, the poker room gives me a per- centage of the fees they collect from the player.” – can go a long way toward help- ing the average person understand your work as an affiliate. You hear stories of families disowning people in this indus- try, but when you look at the root cause, it is often “Well, I was complaining that I lost 10k one night” or “I brag about hav- ing had six-figure swings” and it’s really no surprise. People form opinions of what you do in the poker world largely based on the information that you provide. Putting thought into what you do and explaining it in a rational and clear manner are key to having understanding family and friends. I’m not a flashy or impulsive guy, so I don’t think my family and friends worry too much about me being in an industry that they may not understand. Do you gamble online? If so, what do you play? I play heads-up sit and gos oc- casionally. I played $115 turbos when I launched this site, and ended up in the $230-$345 super turbos. Today, I rarely have time to play, and when I do I play $36s on the Winning Network. I still win, but I’m nowhere near as sharp as I was relative to a few years ago, when I coached and played poker regularly. I’m just too busy with HUSNG.com (less so with grinders and many feeder sites and other projects) to find the time to sit down and stay focused for several hours a day to play. How long do you give yourself for an- swering e-mail? What e-mail tips can you offer? I answer about 95 percent of the HUSNG.com and Sitngogrinders.com e-mail myself. I don’t give myself any set time limit. The first thing I usually do is check Skype and e-mail when I hop online, and I check it between tasks throughout the day. I make sure to give a complete an- swer to each person and I address them by their name when I can and make sure they understand that I’m there to answer any further questions for them. Some of the longer personal e-mail can be a bit tough. Reading through six paragraphs of some- one’s life story . . . that’s the kind of thing I push off until later in the day. As for tips, if you notice you are getting a lot of the same types of questions, make forum threads or FAQ answers. There are always so many ways to improve efficiency – as a matter of fact, I’m just thinking about it now. . . . How do you manage your “to-do” lists? Do you use any special software to help you out? I used to be terrible here. I would use programs and put a ton of big projects on them, but then I would never complete them on time or would stop updating the programs. The last thing I need is another unnecessary program or tab up on my computer at all times. Granted, there’s probably a low resource solution out there that I should use, but I just use pen and paper these days. One side of my desk is just papers of old to-do lists written in red, blue and black ink or in pencil, and most stuff is crossed out. My handwriting is terrible too; it looks like the scrawl of an angry child, to be honest. However, the reason it works is because I split up my tasks into smaller, more doable lists that I can constantly check off. For example, right now I’m work- ing on a two-month project designing the first premium note package, sold for PokerTracker 4’s NoteTracker soft- ware. I’m working with full-time pro Coffeeyay on this. Rather than writing down “NoteTracker development, test, launch” I’ll write out a master e-mail schedule and send it to Coffeeyay and PT at the start of this. Then I’ll write down smaller tasks on my handwritten list each week and I can just cross them off that way. It gives you a lot more motivation and a great sense of accomplishment to be able to check off multiple tasks every day, rather than working each day on what feels like an endless project. How much time do you devote to SEO and/or social networking in order to drive more traffic to your site? My short answer is not enough. I make sure that things like URLs, titles and descriptions are done with SEO in mind. I also do key- word research for various pages and posts (free video pages and video pack sales pages, for example). But SEO is really similar to playing poker for me; there is al- ways more and more to learn to improve. I don’t have enough time to be a full-time SEO expert, so I try to read quality mate- rial (e.g., GWPA, PAL, Digital Point, the SEOmoz bi-monthly top 10 links of inter- est) when I can and look for ideas of high value that fit into my site profile. What’s the most difficult thing about running your site? Choosing which work to delegate out to other people, finding those people to delegate to, testing them with small projects, letting them sink or swim, then elevating those that swim with more responsibility. The variables of cost, time and quality are difficult to keep in the “green zone” for me. Knowing when you can sacrifice time, or money, or quality, that’s important too. If you need someone GPWA AFFILIATE INTERVIEW SERIES Ryan with his significant other. GPWA Affiliate Interview Series