Comments on: Football Bloggers Should Make Money Too…

By: Aden

Aden — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 14:49:45 +0000

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….

By: Focus Prints

Focus Prints — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 08:59:46 +0000

By: Chris

Chris — Wed, 06 May 2009 10:37:05 +0000

“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!

By: Gooner Chris

Gooner Chris — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 19:59:27 +0000

Great blog mate.

By: Soccer Dad

Soccer Dad — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 13:22:54 +0000

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.

By: Jason D

Jason D — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 00:56:01 +0000

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.