Posted 5/19/08

Guest post written by James of NE Patriots Draft, a site dedicated to the wonderful world of football and the incredible amount of coverage given to the NFL draft.


Maximizing your Sports Blog Traffic

NE Patriots Draft has been operating for exactly two months. During this time, as lead writer and designer for the site, I have learned quite a bit about obtaining traffic, both quality and quantity. During our first two months, we have had just over 25,000 unique visitors and 105,000 pageviews. 80% of our traffic comes from referring links, while 15% comes from search engines. Here are my three thoughts on how to receive more traffic.

Stay Focused

My website deals mainly with analyzing the NFL Draft, the Patriots, and Patriots personnel moves. On occasion, I'll write a humor or editorial piece, such as the article that won me a free trip to the Patriots/Chiefs opening day game, courtesy of Bleacher Report. These articles don't bring in returning visitors very often, and some of my regulars have commented that they find them a waste of their reading, as they come for NFL Draft and Patriots analysis. Variety is nice, but losing focus risks losing your regular readers.

Fill a Need

There are literally millions of blogs out there. Why should someone read yours? Quality content and a nice design sometimes isn't enough. Most sites that succeed provide a service that can't be received elsewhere or at least many other places. HailRedskins and Walter Football have superb Mock Draft Databases and the Sports Dollar has advice you can't get elsewhere. We had our Undrafted Free Agent list. We were sick of looking at disjointed snippets of UDFA information, so we collected all the info and with our own sources we are able to put together a pretty accurate list in no time. Thus, need filled. That one post got over 115 links and over 15,000 pageviews in a short amount of time.

Use the Right Social Bookmarking

At NE Patriots Draft we started off using Digg, StumbleUpon, and Delicious as our Social Bookmarking focus. If you look at the popular Digg pages you will rarely see something from a blog, and even rarer to see something from the sports world. Leave Digg to tech and politics. After two weeks and about 15 total hits, we decided that we needed to find something else. Yardbarker.com was found to be an excellent way to bring in more traffic (3,000+ UV) while Ballhype hasn't lived up to our expectations (900+ UV), although perhaps we need to give it more time.

Follow your voice, provide a service, and target the right audience, and you too can reach your traffic and exposure goals.

Check out NE Patriots Draft's most recent post on their 2009 Patriots Mock Draft Database.


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