Comments Are Like Frequent Player Points

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Unless you play poker, and poker online, you pro­bably have no idea what I’m tal­king about. Let me explain. If you play poker online for real money, and you win, along with win­ning money, you accu­mu­late what are called “Fre­quent Pla­yer Points” or FPP’s. The term Fre­quent Pla­yer Points is uni­que to the poker site PokerStars.com but the same con­cept applies to all poker sites whe­re­ver you play. -> The more you win the more FPP’s you earn. And when you lose, well you just don’t earn anything, and you usually get pis­sed off.

Not Easy to Come By

So how are they alike? First of all, FPP’s aren’t all that easy to come by. Just to give you an idea: win­ning a $10 buy in, 180 per­son sit-n-go tour­na­ment wins you a cash prize of $594, but you’re only awar­ded 5 FPP’s. While a $10 buy in isn’t exactly high limit, it still takes some skill to play in a tour­ney thats 180 peo­ple deep, and you cer­tainly aren’t going to win on luck. Also, even with a sit-n-go, which tends to move pretty fast, it’s still going to take 2 or 3 hours to win the thing. Even just to break even you have to place in the top 18, which still requi­res a fair amount of skill and time. For­tu­na­tely at a $10 buy in, the $594 first prize makes it worth pla­ying, but you cer­tainly aren’t pla­ying for the FPP’s.

Much like blog­ging and com­ments. Anyone who has a blog knows that get­ting lots of com­ments isn’t something that comes easily. And you cer­tainly aren’t going to “win” com­ments on luck. Com­ments are something that come by buil­ding your skills, unders­tan­ding how to write com­pe­lling and rele­vant con­tent, and with lots of practice.

They Only Retain Value When You Have Lots

Well here’s the thing, FPP’s don’t really mean all that much. Well, not at first any­way.. They have some mone­tary value but its very small. In fact here is a break­down of the mone­tary value that they assign to FPP’s. On the low end it works out to about $1 for every 100 FPP’s you accu­mu­late, and the exchange rate gets bet­ter the more you have. Someone like me, who only has in the ball­park of 1,500 FPP’s can’t do much with them. I’ve used some to buy into other tour­na­ments, but mostly they just sit there until I can start accu­mu­la­ting a sig­ni­fi­cant amount. (Read: TURN PRO) Howe­ver, if you’re a baller like my friend Bobby, you can actually start doing something with your FPP’s. Bobby has somewhere close to a million FPP’s, if not over a million at this point, which means not only could he trade them in for some serious cash, but it makes him one of the top ran­ked pla­yers online. As you can ima­gine, being one of the top ran­ked pla­yers online does great things for your repu­ta­tion and your career as a poker player.

Again, simi­lar to blog­ging and blog com­ments. Com­ments on a blog are a dime a dozen when when you have very few. Anyone can start a blog and get a few com­ments here and there.. No one thinks anything of it. But as you start to build out your con­tent and rea­dership, peo­ple start to leave more and more com­ments. And much like FPP’s, when you have a cra­pload of com­ments — it means something, and in a way they’re a form of currency. Lot’s of com­ments usually deno­tes good & autho­ri­ta­tive con­tent, which inc­rea­ses repu­ta­tion — etc etc.

So How do You Get More?

Well, stic­king to the ana­logy, when you play poker, you play to win. Cash. And the FPP’s just come natu­rally. The same with blog­ging, you don’t write a blog post to get com­ments. Blog­gers blog for all sorts of rea­sons, get­ting com­ments isn’t one of them. It’s not why you do it, but how you do it that will bring more comments/readership/links/etc.

Now I just need to make sure this post gets a few com­ments right?