Football Media

Euro 2012 is just over a month away. With league titles in Spain and Germany decided and rapidly drawing to a conclusion in England, Italy and France, European football is slowly transitioning from the weekly cycle of league matches and to a near-daily cycle of international football.

Covering an international tournament is no small feat – whether you’re an editor working with a team of writers to provide comprehensive coverage of each minute of action or you’re a single blogger planning to follow a single team throughout the tournament, there is a lot of ground to cover. Whether it’s live blogging through all 31 matches or poring over the latest Euro 2012 odds to offer betting tips, for most bloggers it’s impossible to cover every single inch of the Euros.

Based on our experience in blogging major tournaments on Soccerlens (Euro 2008 and the 2006 and 2010 World Cups), here are four key steps to providing tournament coverage that makes an impact, and at the end, a handful of blogging ‘angles’ to get you started:

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Posted by: Ahmed Bilal Posted under: Football Blogging Comments: 0

The usual process for a blogger placing ads on their site goes something like this:

• Start your blog.
• At some point, put up ads (your own products, affiliate items, an ad network such as Google AdSense, text link ads or direct banner sales).
• Watch and wonder why the ads aren’t making you any money.

If you’re looking to make money off your football blog, knowing where to place your ads (and which placements work best for each type of ad) is crucial. Instead of hiding the ads away in a corner, you need to look at maximising user engagement of ads (while ensuring that quality of a reader’s experience of the site is not affected).

A higher engagement rate is much more valuable to advertisers than pure traffic – more engagement means a higher chance of an eventual sale happening, so whether you’re an affiliate, selling your own products or working with an ad network, more clicks on the ads will generally mean more money for you (but please ensure that you’re not artificially inflating the number of clicks as that will get you banned from any ad network).

Even if you’re not interested in ads, you can still use the advice in this article to understand how to promote yourself / your own content by knowing which areas of your website / article / webpage will engage the most users.

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Posted by: Ahmed Bilal Posted under: Advertising Comments: 5

If you’re a football blogger / football site owner and you’d like to make more money from your website, you absolutely need to read this.

Football Media’s Guide To Making Money From Football Blogging, released on 16th March 2011, is the only ‘how-to’ guide specifically targeting football bloggers.

Inside, you’ll learn:

• 11 different monetization tactics.
• Insights and examples on how to use each tactic for your football business.
• The truth about text link ads and search rankings.
• Why you need to rethink your approach to football blogging.
• How to get paid to write on your blog.
• Get the maximum out of banner ads.

And plenty more. Plus it’s completely free, so all you need to do is to get registered below and we’ll send the report to you via email.

If you enjoyed reading the report, feel free to share this article on Twitter or Facebook by using the social media links below.

Posted by: Ahmed Bilal Posted under: Football Blogging, Football Business Comments: 0

Football fans have had much to cheer and despair about in the last seven days, always a sign of a good news week. From Rooney’s overhead wallop to Arsenal and Tottenham upsetting the odds to a football journalist conducting a publicity campaign by pretending to stand for FIFA presidency, it’s been a fun week.

And there are the downsides – although you can’t begrudge football fans their God-given right to have a whinge – the biggest of them being the announcement yesterday from Uefa on the 2011 Champions League ticket prices.

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Posted by: Ahmed Bilal Posted under: Football Business Comments: 0

If you’ve ever had trouble with your webhost – downtime due to your site getting a lot of traffic in a short period of time, resource outages due to increased traffic leading you to exceed your bandwidth limit, or most commonly, shabby / non-existent customer support – then take out the time to read about TigerTech, and why they might be the right choice for you.

I’ve been working online for over 6 years now, and in that we’ve managed 100s of websites and worked with dozens of webhosts, from your cheap-as-dirt shared hosting variety to VPS providers to cloud hosting to top-of-the-line dedicated servers.

There are three things that I absolutely insist on (always) when working on any webhosting service:

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Posted by: Ahmed Bilal Posted under: Internet Comments: 0

It’s hard to overstate what a boon the internet has been for football fans. Fans can now share their views instantly and on multiple platforms, and receive responses from other fans in seconds.

Four years ago, Soccerlens was born out of a desire to share our opinions on football with a wider audience. The market for ‘general’ football sites may seem saturated now but for football fans around the world, there are still plenty of opportunities to share their thoughts and be heard by thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of fellow football fans.

How do you do it? Here are some pointers to get you started.

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Posted by: Ahmed Bilal Posted under: Football Blogging, Internet, Social Media Comments: 0

It’s the dream job, isn’t it? Getting paid to watch football, free tickets to games and the chance to hob nob with the stars. Who wouldn’t want to be a full-time football writer?

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Posted by: Guest Authors Posted under: Football Blogging, Football Journalism, Social Media Comments: 1

The Football Media network is looking for writers. If you want to skip ahead, you can read up on the submission details at the bottom of this article. For more details, read on below.

Football Media is a collection of 30+ football websites covering all aspects of the beautiful game, from fantasy football to hot WAGs to football politics and your usual assortment of team blogs, forums and intelligent football coverage from around the world. We have sites – and writers – from all over the world, and we’d like you to be a part of this growing family.

If you’re passionate about football, love expressing your views on the game and are looking to start your football journalism career, we might just have a spot for you.

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Posted by: daryl Posted under: Football Blogging Comments: Comments Off

Football blogs and bloggers are still an afterthought to PR agencies. There are exceptions (the folks at M&C Saatchi are generally clued in) but by and large, they don’t understand how bloggers tick and they don’t understand how to use blogs to deliver the type of ROI that looks good for their bosses.

At the end of the day, PR agencies are as result-driven as any other business entity, and if they can’t figure out how to work with bloggers, they’re not going to bother unless they’re forced to do it. And this is a real shame, because bloggers have been telling PR agencies (for several years) how to pitch to them.

Which brings us to this point in time, one day before the World Cup kicks off. It’s 6:30 AM (UK time) and I’ve already received 5 pitches for various World Cup related services / products. The last week has seen hundreds of emails come through at Soccerlens and most of them have been ignored.

Football PR people, listen up. I know that the World Cup happens once every four years and everyone has to make the best of it, but that doesn’t give you license to spam bloggers.

In fact, nothing is going to guarantee an instant deletion of your emails more than shilling your product a couple of days from kickoff, when anyone who’s writing about football / would be writing about the World Cup is crazy busy.

Having said that, we don’t blindly delete emails (not really). It’s just that after having read several dozen pitches PER DAY in the last seven days, I can tell just by the email subject and first line (easy to see without opening the email if you’re using GMail / Google Apps / any decent webmail client) if it’s going to be worth my time. And unless I recognise your brand’s name, you’re just shortchanging yourself by approaching bloggers at a very busy time in their schedule.

So what can PR agencies do? Read on, and take notes.

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Posted by: Ahmed Bilal Posted under: Football Business, Promotion, Social Media Comments: 2

On Monday Google AdSense disclosed the revenue share offered to publishers through two of their products, AdSense for content and AdSense for search.

There are many differences in what Google AdSense and Football Media each provide for web publishers, and I strongly maintain that football blogs (or other sites for that matter) shouldn’t use AdSense as their primary monetization strategy. But that’s not the point.

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Posted by: Ahmed Bilal Posted under: Football Business Comments: 1