Looking to monetize your sports blog? Thousands of blogs are created on a daily basis and just like many others you probably wish to make some money off of one. Making money with a blog is not easy, but through the following we have provided our top 10 list to making money with your sports blog! These tips should help you grow your sports blog into a winner!
1. Money Makers: Once your blog has been created it needs to be set up with advertisements and you have hundreds of choices. Our top choices are Google Adsense, Adbrite, Chitika, Text-Link-Ads, pepperJam, and LinkWorth. You can see them all in our 'Recommended Money Makers' section. Each site gives you options to place advertisements on your websites so do some research on each and the rates at which they will pay you. There are all kinds of options out there and your site may benefit from having different ads than our favorites. These are your moneymakers so make sure they are going to appeal to your audience and make sure you understand the best ways to use them.
2. Great Content: To have a successful money making blog you need traffic and in order to get traffic you need to have great content. If you don’t write anything that anyone wants to read, how do you expect to get traffic and ad clicks? Writing interesting material may not be as difficult as you are thinking. Let’s say your blog topic is football, you can do a Google News search for NFL or football news and it will give you thousands of pages with up-to-date information you can use to inspire you to write new meaningful material. Keep your writing fresh and entertaining; the last thing the blog world needs is another “Sports Game Recap” blog. Remember, I can get my scores and highlights from ESPN.com!
3. Break News: To attract a high volume of readers, you need to be the first to break exciting news. Being one of the first to break news about your topic can send your page views through the roof. Monitoring sports forums and other major sports sites can be your biggest resource when looking for new topics that have not yet surfaced in the blog world. My favorite again is Google News. If you do a Google News search during the middle of the night, you tend to get news stories from around the world that have not yet entered into the blog world in. Use topics from here to break news and have the post delayed until the morning peak hours to be released. Don’t forget, we also always love a good top 10 list!
4. Key Words: Key words are your best friend. Every time you post a new blog you need to have specific key words built into it. What I mean by that is, depending on the topic, you should have key words that someone would think about using when searching for the topic you just wrote about. If I’m writing about “Super Bowl Drinking Games” or "Making Money With a Sports Blog" a link to my article on that topic better come up when I type in those key words into Google. Sure enough, that is the case here.
5. Promotion: Once you have some content and advertisements in place, your next step is to get your blog out to as many websites and people as possible. This will probably be the longest and hardest work you will do with your blog besides writing great material. There are thousands of blog search engines out there to join that will help you receive some traffic and are a good idea to join. Make sure you submit your site to Google, Yahoo and possibly to MSN. If you really want to see early volumes, working your magic in your topic related sports forums is your best bet. If you break news on a specific topic or wrote up a tidy little top 10 list, a forum is a great place to share. Depending on your sport, you need to find its top forums and make friends there fast! Become a regular to these forums and join in conversations. Once you have been heard and provided interesting insight to your topic, you will create some credibility for yourself. This will also give you a chance to find other related blogs and hopefully help your blogroll which we'll discuss in step 7.
6. Social Bookmarking: JOIN BALLHYPE, DIGG AND DEL.ICIO.US! If you do not know what these are, please visit them immediately. Each article you write should be placed on all 3 of these websites. Every time an article of yours is HYPED or DUGG, you stand a great chance at earning some traffic. If you look at DIGG’s main page you will see topics that have been DUGG thousands of times. You can multiply that number by at least 3 in order to get the amount of initial readers that topic alone created. These websites will be your biggest ally in the beginning stages of your blog and also into the future. Every successful blogger should become a master with DIGG and if you are a sports blogger, with BALLHYPE.
7. Blogroll: Creating a solid BlogRoll is a step you cannot miss. Linking to other relevant sports blogs can be a great asset to you. Your goal however, is to get those blogs to link back to you! Trading links can be a blog’s best friend if you can do it. The easiest way to do it is of course to simply ask the owner of the site. You will get yes’s and no’s but just keep working at it. The number of pages you have linking back to you is called your authority and can mean thousands of page views depending on how high yours is. Authority should be a research topic for you and is also a part of step 8.
8. Technorati: JOIN TECHNORATI! Most of the blog world tends to run through Technorati. Registering your blog with Technorati must happen in the beginning stages of your blog’s life. You can track your authority through this site and see who actually linked to you and is also a fan of you. Make sure to tweak your Technorati to appear as you’d like and make as many friends here as possible. Once your authority starts to grow you can see you rank within the site; the higher the rank the better.
9. Track Your Stats: Find some free blog tracking services. My favorite is MyBlogLog which can be easily set up if you have a Yahoo! Account. MyBlogLog allows you to track the different websites your readers are viewing and clicking on. It also allows you to see which of your ads are working the best and getting the most action. You can join communities and add friends to your MyBlogLog; it has been instrumental for us in growing our blog. Without the ability to track your stats, you will have zero idea on how your blog is actually doing. Google Adsense also gives you the opportunity to track traffic, ad clicks and lets you view all of these in report form.
10. Zimbio: Create a Zimbio page! Zimbio is the Wikipedia of blogs! You can write articles on other Zimbio pages as well as yours and Zimbio allows you to easily import your already written blogs into any page. This is a newer website and has been steadily increasing; you should jump all over this as it will soon be the next big thing in blogging!
Enjoy these steps and leave us your feedback on how your blog is coming along! You can find tons of useful articles out there to tweak and mold your site to its specific niche. Thanks for stopping by!
2 comments:
I'm getting ready to start a sports blog. I was told to focus on one particular sport or team. I'm going to be using affiliate marketing with this blog.
I can write a lot of content about various sports in general. I follow all types of sports really well.
Would it be a better idea to focus my site on one sport or team? Thanks!
this is very interesting blog for online marketing.
work from home
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