How to get your Football News Website listed in NewsNow
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:
- Read the editorial policy carefully – the requirements are lax but you don’t want to be rejected for being careless.
- If your website / blog is syndicating content from other sources, make sure that you are also producing significant content yourself as well otherwise your site will get rejected. This doesn’t mean that you can’t just quote and rewrite other news sources – some websites do that exclusively (one of the main reasons NewsNow is flooded with spam).
- The technical requirements are important if this is the first time you’re working with NewsNow. There are pieces of advice that you can safely ignore (such as the tip to create a url structure based on the date and month). On the other hand, the ‘start’ and ‘end’ tags around your articles are important.
Make sure you read the points listed under #3 – the most important section on the tech requirements page.
- When asked to mention the ‘country’, list the country which hosts the majority of your target audience, NOT your own country. When NewsNow lists news items, it includes a small flag next to each site. This helps to identify the source to the readers. So, if your primary focus is on the English Premier League, choose England. If it is the MLS, choose US, if it’s FC Barcelona choose Spain and so on.
- NewsNow editors say that they take 5 working days to include your website, but in practice this can vary depending on the time of the year (and thus the backlog of sites they have to process) and the competition in the newsfeed you’re applying for (the general football news feed has far more competition than the Serie A news feed, for example).
Some sites are included after a month or more of waiting, for others you need to resubmit after a while. If your site is not rejected (you’ll get an email telling you so) and not accepted either after a month, resubmit it.
- Your site may be rejected if the editors consider that your site doesn’t add any value to their network – this can happen if there is already a lot of competition in a news feed (for example, the ‘Arsenal’ news feed is oversaturated so your site would need to have a significant point of difference to be considered for inclusion – this is based on personal experience).
- Have at least a month’s worth of content (around 15-30 articles) on your site before submitting. Sometimes new websites get rejected if the editor sees that there’s nothing there on the site.
- Having your own domain or a custom design is NOT necessary – many blogspot and wordpress.com sites are in NewsNow, and you could have the default design for WP / Blogger and no one will bother – if you have quality content. Of course if your content is crap then you need all the help you can get…
- If you have a general footy news blog, keep in mind that not only do you have a LOT of competition from other sites outside NewsNow, you’ll have way too much competition in the NewsNow general news feed to make any significant impact in terms of getting readers. Better to pick a specific club to cover (this will make it easier for you to get included as well).
- Including multiple sections of your website is much harder than getting your site listed the first time (so if you’re hoping to get your WordPress categories included in specific news feeds, it’s not going to be easy and you might get rejected at the first attempt for lacking enough content / uniqueness / quality).
I hope this helps you get your website included in NewsNow – if you have any questions, let me know in the comments or via email.
Also see: How to get maximum traffic from NewsNow
Hi,
I’m having trouble getting into Newsnow any advice?
I just read this article. Its a real help to me. I’m waiting for my website http://www.footballmatches.net to be approved or rejected.
What do you think my chances are?
Its bloody hard trying to get into NewsNow. The fact that they don’t reply if they’ve rejected you makes it harder, but i’m not giving up
Nice article, Ahmed.
As someone whose website’s articles (caughtoffside.com) generally dominate Newsnow’s football sections, the best piece of advice I can give you is to focus your energy on other generators of traffic. Keep submitting to NN by all means, but if you’re serious about making a living from your blog then ‘easy’ traffic from NN is not really going to be a big help.
The readers from Newsnow are in a pure browsing mode, much like those from StumbleUpon. They aren’t going to stick around and they aren’t going to click on ads or sponsors. If you’re spending hours thinking about NN rather than growing your website properly, you’ll ultimately end up with a rather soulless website.
For Studs Up (www.studs-up.com), I’m deliberately avoiding Newsnow. I want real readers who visit my site because they like it, not because I came up with a catchy headline to lure them in.
Chris
CaughtOffside.com
Studs-Up.com
Very good point Chris.
NewsNow can sometimes seem like the holy grail for blogs and footie sites but I myself must hold my hands up and say that more often than not I am in browsing mode when using it. I very rarely follow a link elsewhere once onto a site or often don’t even read the article in full.
I generally use NewsNow as a fact-finder, for example I was trying to figure out the Villa line-up against Pompey the other day as I didn’t believe the formation skysports.com’s match console claimed (I was right to doubt it, it had James Milner playing left back!).
Also, not sure if you already know this but your site doesn’t work on the Opera browser. If ever I click a link to caughtoffside.com I have to then open IE and copy and paste the address. Needless to say I rarely bother. Dunno how many other weirdos out there use Opera like me though
Mart
Hi Ahmed,
I wonder if you might be able to help identify why my site (Just-Football) has still not been indexed on NewsNow. I have submitted the site for inclusion twice now without any joy.
My suspicion is that section 4 entitled ‘Maximise your articles’ exposure’ is perhaps not properly organised on my site. I use Blogger, and in section 4 on Newsnow it says you have to edit your website templates as follows:
1. should follow the headline but immediately precede the first paragraph of the article
2. should immediately follow the last paragraph of the article.
Is this something you have to edit in the HTML template on Blogger, or is it only relevant if you do not have an RSS Feed for posts?
I am struggling to understand why twice I have not made it on there. I will re-submit one more time I think, but having come across this site and article thought I would ask if you perhaps knew why and could help.
Thanks, and keep up the good work here and on Soccerlens.
Jonathan.
Hello
I am one of the authors of Avenell Road, and would like to use newsnow to attract Gooners to the site, to have reasoned debate about Arsenal FC – the owner of the site has made may attempts – how do we get this sorted out please
HELP
Rico,
Best thing to do is to follow the instructions on this page.
Guys,
I’ve set up fledgling aternative to NewsNow and I’m looking for good sites to include for each team and some with general footy chat.
It’s over at http://www.footballnewsnow.co.uk
Feel free to submit sites to me and if they’re any good I’ll get them up onto the site for you.
Cheers, Paul.
Hi,
Tried and failed on newsnow. Probably because of a requirment I didn’t really get.
I don’t really know how to set up a dedicated headlines page.
Thanks,
Louie
Louie,
That shouldn’t be a problem, you can just use your RSS feed.