FTP 1st Birthday

Hey Guys. It’s been over a year since I launched FTP on November 2nd 2009, so this is kind of a belated birthday post where I’ll take time to reflect on how far we’ve come in our opening year. Shortly after we launched FTP we followed it up with an official FTP facebook page, this was greatly received as our members list just grew and grew. We currently have north of 1,500 fans over facebook, if you have an active personal facebook account please support our group. Follow the widget below for our group;

On a sour note and I guess coins the philosophy ‘for every good there is an equal bad’ we have an almost dormant FTP twitter account which is a stark contrast to our popular ever updated FTP facebook group. The twitter account was launched to provide live in-running updates of our tournament schedule, however after tweeting our first tournament I found it very tedious and didn’t give it a second chance. This is disappointing as I have launched a ‘Live Tournament Updates’ section on FTP to work in association with our twitter account, so FTP fans without a twitter account can still closely follow our tournament progress via FTP. I don’t expect to run live updates for our usual light schedule, however I will make every effort to run updates via twitter for the more prestigious tournaments we enter during FTP’s second year.


The increase in traffic to FTP has meant when searching for ‘Full Trett Poker’ via Google we have an impressive 2,500+ hits, I hope we can continue to build on our popularity and hits in our second year.


Although Google offers us worldwide publicity we are acutely aware our regular loyal readers are locally based in Newcastle, for this reason FTP has it’s own thread over the NPF dedicated to our blog which I understand is one of the most popular threads within the NPF blogs section. See link below to the FTP unique NPF thread;

Full Trett Poker Blog

This boasts almost 250 replies and astonishingly nearly 10,000 views, it gives us great satisfaction knowing that our friends around the local Newcastle casinos are still enjoying FTP as much now as they did a year ago the day it was launched. In recognition of this support we share links with a host of very popular Newcastle bloggers including;

Teamdobbs (Team captained by Dave Collins)
Marc Mulhern
Ross Johnson

Amongst several others. Other notable achievements are our blog comments which if I remember correctly is somewhere near 250, albeit a lot of those are replies from both myself and Mark to fans comments but whatever still impressive. Although predominantly a poker related blog, anybody that knows me will know I find endless discussions about hands and theory to be boring. I don’t mind it in moderation but I took FTP in a more easy reading direction, involving our poker exploits and experiences both on and off the felt. This if you ask me proved pretty popular amongst our readers with;

Interviews (In The Tank With…)
Trip Reports (Travelling Misdemeanours)
Calendar

Three of our most popular sections, the first two neither talk in any detail about poker levels and the calendar is useful for both affiliates and fans to know which casino/card room we can be found loitering around. Recently I signed FTP up to http://www.pokerwonks.com/ in September 2010, this is a site for blogs containing poker content. It provides updated content from 100+ poker blogs globally, signing up gives FTP the perfect platform to expand our audience and build on our already impressive following.


One piece of advice I will pass onto fellow bloggers, not that I’m in a position to be lecturing after a year of blogging I’m still very much a novice but whatever. In order to maximise the longevity of your blog and to keep your enthusiasm it’s imperative your blog evolves with you, for example see a few changes I made over time to help keep my motivation;

Hands, Theory, & Levels: I started FTP hoping to discuss in detail some difficult spots but quickly realized this wasn’t the direction I wanted to take FTP, this evolved and I can say for sure if I tried to polarize FTP to strategy discussions I would have walked away from it a long time ago.

Acronyms & Abbreviations: I originally started FTP using a number of short handed a acronyms and abbreviations to help me type quicker, this wasn’t welcomed very well by my readers and I got several requests to cut them out. I was reluctant to do this but gave power to the people and began writing excluding all acronyms and abbreviations, pretty quickly I was surprised that it actually wasn’t much slower and now much prefer FTP without (or at least very few) abbreviated text.

Labels & Sections: I’m always looking to add innovate exciting new sections to the blog, some in the past have proved popular and others not so much. For example our Interviews and Trip Reports section are both very well received but our Heads Up section although has potential never got going passed the initial CGK vs. MBK feature. But whether my new sections succeed or fail it’s the challenge that keeps me motivated, and in turn helps the longevity of FTP.


Finally I would like to say a huge thank you from all at FTP to every single one of our loyal fan base, we really do appreciate all your feedback (positive and negative) and continued support.

Here’s to FTP’s second year.