Want to Learn Marketing? Ante Up for Poker!

I know what you’re thinking – that I’m trying to put up an affiliate link for an online poker site here at Quantum SEO Labs and so I’m cleverly hiding it inside of an article about marketing skills. I’m not. I have no affiliate links for you and if you want to find them, you’ll have to look elsewhere.

I Don’t Even Like Poker

I personally don’t like poker and don’t like to gamble in general. I was in Vegas a few years back actually had to leave the casino floor after about half an hour. All that noise was giving me a god-awful headache and I didn’t see what the attraction was of sticking coins into a one armed bandit. Poker tables and other gambling venues were equally uninteresting to me.
Okay, so if I don’t like poker and don’t have an affiliate link to share with you, then what does poker have to do with marketing skills? Everything it turns out:

Keeping Your Cards Close

You know what the biggest problem is in the world of online marketing? Copycats – people will steal your idea and run with it on their own. Worse still are the scrapers who steal your content and pretend it belongs to them, but that’s for another discussion. Anyway, when you play poker, one of the things you always want to do is to keep your cards close and hidden. Developing a wooden poker face without a tell is also useful.
In online marketing, you need to do the same thing – learn not to tell the competition about your ideas until you are ready to show them to the world. Otherwise, you may find yourself upstaged by someone else who is faster than you are. Of course, at the same time, you want to get your ideas out there as quickly as possible so you avoid losing out to random chance as well.

Look for the Tell in the Competition

As I said, a good poker player needs to develop a wooden face with no tell. However, most of us do have a tell of some kind. So take advantage of it. In this case, watch your competitor’s websites carefully and watch for rumors that get leaked. Check as well on the reported source of leaks. Often, they’re deliberately put out to test the waters or throw the competition off the scent.

Know When to Hold ‘Em, Know When to Fold ‘Em

You can probably tell I’m not much of a poker player by the fact that I write the above cliché. However, it’s very true in poker and it’s even truer in online marketing. If something is a dud, don’t keep beating a dead horse (yes, I know – another cliché). Just give up and move on to something else. By the same token, just like in poker, if you have a great idea, then you need to run with it and up the ante as much as you can. So, if you see a winner, be sure to play it big and don’t be shy about trying to get the word out.