Writing about gambling topics, such as online poker, sports betting or stock trading has been a blessing for me. After a decade of putting my money at risk, I have found a great way to become once again creative. Although it has been a rather difficult way to make a living until now, I am enjoying every minute of it!
How did I end up writing about gambling?
If you look at my background (find it at the about page), I had already been an active gambler for about 3 years before I launched this very gambling blog. By the time I did that, I was totally ignorant of how the internet works, when it comes to blogging and marketing my articles. I was struggling to create HTML pages with Microsoft Frontpage (it sucked, I know), instead of publishing useful content.
Time went by fast and in 2008 I gradually learned how to blog more effectively. Still, the progress I had made wasn’t enough to justify any landing jobs for my writing. Fortunately, I had already been blogging in Joomla, only to end up as a WordPress blogger a couple of years later.
Meanwhile, though, I had been quite successful in my online gambling endeavors (here’s an interview of mine), which increased my popularity among gamblers. Word of mouth probably led some industry professionals to take notice of me and my subpar blog and I began writing for reputable websites. The Betfair Greek blog is one of them, despite the fact that the new Greek regulations of the online gambling market have pulled its plug nowadays. Sorry, those posts are nowhere to be found, except for my hard drive. And besides, they were written in Greek (remember? I am a Greek native speaker), so why would you care?
Why a blog by Betfair? Because Betfair changed my life!
Having written lots of articles for that blog and having made some encouraging advertising deals at my personal blog which was hosting all of my English posts, I spent a lot of time improving my writing style and most importantly learning about search engine optimization (SEO). Thus, my blog posts began to gain in popularity, I launched new blogs such as Trading Graphs where I discuss finance and even uploaded tens of videos at YouTube.
It’s been a couple of years now that I am focusing more on writing about gambling than actually gamble!
What’s better, gambling or writing for a living?
Hands down, writing for a living is a lot less stressful than gambling for a living! Besides the costs of hosting my blogs and outsourcing technical stuff, the money I risk in writing is not comparable with gambling risks by a mile. And even if I take into account the extra costs for lawyers and accountants, since I have incorporated my blogging business, I am looking at roughly $5,000 in total annual risk. That’s not even comparable to a severe drawdown in the investing world!
While I can’t lose 30K dollars in a day, I do have to make plans for my writing expenses. But in the end, the money I spend while blogging and writing about gambling is meant to just make my writing life easier and more productive. It’s not like I am betting on my next post, rather than investing in my writing career.
Time also comes into play. I can make my own schedule without depending on sports events taking place around the world.
For example, if you want to be a successful sports trader and trade horse racing markets, you must sit down and trade during the UK horse races. That should eat up about 4-5 hours of your afternoon every day. Or if you are trading US stocks, you should be trading at least in the first and last couple of hours of US trading sessions (meaning early in the afternoon and late evening if you are based in Europe).
Sports betting will also tie you down to the chair, especially if you are betting during the events (known as live betting). And if you fancy bets on different sports, like football, tennis, and horse racing, you will quickly feel that 24 hours are simply not enough to bet on all that and have a life at the same time! Don’t expect to fit all that in your daily schedule!
There’s a catch of course on all these. And it’s called money.
How much money can you make by writing about gambling?
Depending on the time and effort a writer spends on their writing, they could be looking to make from a couple of hundreds to thousands of dollars. Don’t get over-excited, I am not the Dan Brown of gambling, raking millions of dollars from gambling books! Besides, I haven’t authored one; yet!
Writing though can provide a steady flow of income, instead of sudden influxes of money experienced in gambling. You actively write in your blog, you sell some space of your blog to advertisers, while at the same time you make contributions of your writing to other websites. The more writing you do, the better. But that’s not entirely true. Let me rephrase that.
The smarter the writing you do, the more money you make per word you type in!
Surely, I could write for 16 hours a day. But that’s not writing in a smart and effective way. I’d rather write just one article today (maybe this is it?) but make the best out of it, instead of writing 6 mediocre posts that will be quickly forgotten in the lightning pace of the internet.
And may I remind you that writers do need to be actively engaged to social networking sites on a daily basis, in order to let the world know of their work? Something that’s unnecessary and frankly not worth the risk, if you are gambling. If you make money in online gambling, keep it to yourself, unless you want to sell your tips, run a subscription-based site, or become… a gambling authority!
