Yesterday we talked about the gap between what MyFC (My Football Club) initially promised and what the venture actually delivers in terms of value to the users. Today let’s talk about another company that arrived with a big bang but ultimately collapsed when the revenues did not materialise as expected (or rather, as their huge investments demanded).

FanBanta went bust some while back - the official word is that they’ve gone into administration, a euphemism for ‘we bet too much on the wrong horse’ and now one of the properties they owned (footballforums.net) has been bought out by Fast Web Media, the same company that owns 4thegame.com.

Recently over at Hive we talked about the need to operate in an emergency turnaround phase when running your business. To quote:

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Fancy owning a football club? It used to be that you needed millions to buy out a club, but then MyFootballClub broke the barriers between big football and the common man and brought club ownership to the Internet for only £35 per year.

The biggest draw - the biggest selling point - was the level of control offered to members. Few people are interested in buying a share in a football club they don’t support - with all due respect, I couldn’t give a rat’s ass about Ebbsfleet United FC - but MFC worked around that by offering the illusion of control akin to Football Manager. Owners (us!) were to have a say in tactics, team selection, transfers, kits and what not.

The best part of all this - the best-executed part, that is - was the promotion. Give the fan a chance to select the team for a real game? Real-life football manager - and if you haven’t played the game, grab a copy and waste away a weekend so you can understand the drool-inducing addiction we are talking about.

Many have previously argued (including myself over at Soccerlens and Ian over at 200 percent - links here) that MyFC was unrealistic in what it promised and impractical in that fans, once they got over the initial excitement, would stop caring.

Apparently, that is exactly what is happening at MyFC.

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Previously we talked about how to get your football news site listed in NewsNow. That’s only half the battle though - once you’re in, you also need to know how to maximise exposure and traffic from NewsNow.

Here are a few suggestions to help you maximise traffic to your football news site from NewsNow:

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NewsNow (Football) is, at the time of writing, the easiest source of traffic for football bloggers. Yes, Google (search, images and news) may get you more traffic and social media sites like StumbleUpon can also bring in plenty of traffic, but NewsNow makes it easy. Once you’re in, you just need a catchy headline and the right timing and hundreds (and thousands) of readers will come flooding through NewsNow.

And while you’d think it’s quite simple to get into NewsNow (a straight-forward submission process, hardly any editorial criteria), most people stumble at this step. Here are a few pointers to help you get your blog in, without any hassles:

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