Football Bloggers Should Make Money Too…
In the last 3 years (since I started Soccerlens in 2006), traditional media – publishers and advertisers – in the footballing industry have come around to the reality that blogging is going to be a key element in the football fan’s experience online and they’ve worked hard to get up to speed with ‘blogging’ and ‘social media’.
Part of these efforts has been the evolution of ‘marketing strategies’ targeting football bloggers. The underlying principle is sound – football bloggers often have loyal audiences who trust their opinion, they are opinion makers and thought leaders. Fans (a consumer) will trust the blogger (a fellow football fan) more than they will trust an advertiser, so why not get the blogger to pimp your products for you?
In many cases this has worked out well. Retailers like SoccerPro (disclaimer: Soccerlens.com recommends several SoccerPro-retailed products at their football shirts blog), Getting Personal and Kiki James offer free product samples for review, and as long as the reviewer is objective about their product evaluation it’s an ethical and effective way to market your product.
Most advertisers usually have an affiliate program and by offering bloggers a chance to make money, they’re offering value in exchange for . Sure – in many cases bloggers are unaware how difficult it can be send through paying customers (especially when it comes to betting), but since the advertiser doesn’t make money if you don’t, it’s a relatively balanced deal.
At the end of the day, a blogger’s following – their blog’s community – is a valuable commodity and advertisers recognise this and try to reward this accordingly.
In some cases however, football bloggers get taken for a ride. Over the last year online advertising agencies, on behalf of major brands like Nike and Adidas, have offered bloggers ‘exclusive’ content or access to content before it gets promoted through traditional media. The content is usually good and worthy of sharing, so this isn’t a criticism of what they’re pushing.
However, consider this: here you have media agencies charging their clients big money to promote these campaigns online, promotion that they get done for free through bloggers like you and me. Your passion for the sport and your loyalty to a brand (Nike, Adidas, etc) is being exploited leveraged for the financial gain of an advertising agency, people who are the financial equivalent of football agents.
Not all advertisers and media companies are bad – take Online Media Relations (an online marketing company) as an example. OMR provide value to bloggers in the shape of content in exchange for links. Now you might not like giving out links to Betfair or some other betting client, and you might not like the quality or tone of the content on offer. However, OMR are still providing you with something that you can use, something of value.
It’s not about posting about the new football shoe from Adidas or the Nike Five initiative for free – I’d post articles about them regardless. But if you’re going to profit from my hard work of building up a football blog that gets tens of thousands of readers every day, which is what media agencies do when they have us post articles for their clients to meet their ‘links’ or ‘blog mentions’ quota, the least you can do is compensate me for that hard work.
In the short term, things won’t change. Football bloggers are both naive and doing this for the love of football, and such value considerations may not be their first concern when they get an email offering them an ‘exclusive’ sneak-peak at content that was already previewed by major publications before-hand and is due to be promoted full scale the next day.
In the long run however, things need to change. Football bloggers work bloody hard to create a loyal readership, and to have that exploited by mainstream advertisers is unfair. Even sponsored posts, allowing for the negative press they get, make their intentions clear from the start (exposure in exchange for compensation).
Money may be an uncomfortable topic in football for some, but regardless of whether you write about football for money or for fun, your hard work should not be open for other peoples’ profit if you’re not making any in the process.
I saw your twitter rant earlier, and want to thank you for the followup. While I’m no where close to the level that it would take for this to be an issue for me, I’ll certainly be aware in the future.
I’ve found similar reactions even within advertising networks dedicated to blogging. I’ve had a soccer blog (granted for youth soccer) since 2005. Not huge traffic, so I didn’t appeal to mainstream advertisers. But I approached BlogAds about creating a soccer ‘hive’ on multiple occasions. It made sense to me that advertisers would be more apt to advertise on a broad range of soccer/football sites since most did not have the huge traffic of, say, political blogs. I figured together, the 30-40 solid blogs could generate significant ad views/clicks and advertisers would buy in bulk. Easy. BlogAds rejected the idea, multiple times, even though they had hives with sites generating little to no traffic. I had to beg and plead to get a BlogAds invite – finally got one – ran the teaser for three years – I think I got one or two ads. SoccerPro? Awesome folks – had advertised on our blog for well over a year now. I hope they are getting a good return on their investment.
Anyway – I got so frustrated with BlogAds and the like – I seriously considered putting together an ad network for soccer bloggers – heck even own the domain soccerads.net. There is some amazing ad serving software available (OpenX), but the lack of an easy to use PayPal module for automatic payment/purchase and lack of time to develop one put those plans on hold.
It’s ironic the most popular sport in the world has bloggers who can’t seem to leverage solid income (yeah I know Boots & All/Offside are doing VERY well – but they nail a niche at the perfect time). Part of that is because of how many soccer bloggers there are and the inability of soccer/football advertisers to easily aggregate all that disparate traffic into an easy to buy and run ad campaign.
Great blog mate.
“But if you’re going to profit from my hard work of building up a football blog that gets tens of thousands of readers every day, which is what media agencies do when they have us post articles for their clients to meet their ‘links’ or ‘blog mentions’ quota, the least you can do is compensate me for that hard work.”
Couldn’t have put this better. Some companies are starting to realise this, the ones who don’t should go into your permanent block list, turn them away when they coming crawling in the years to come!
Ad networks are great ideas, although its much better to get one way links for you ranking. But you are right if you have put in the hard work and got thousands of visitors then when you get the higher ranking blogs you may well want to charge for a links from your blog, a bit of reward for your efforts. Its hard to figure out which are the honest advertising agencies running seo campaigns for you and which just spam your website allover and get you blacklisted.
Ad networks are great ideas, although its much better to get one way links for you ranking. But you are right if you have put in the hard work and got thousands of visitors then when you get the higher ranking blogs you may well want to charge for a links from your blog, a bit of reward for your efforts. Its hard to figure out which are the honest advertising agencies running seo campaigns for you and which just spam your website allover and get you blacklisted….