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:

1. Read the editorial policy carefully - the requirements are lax but you don’t want to be rejected for being careless.
2. 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).
3. 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.

4. 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.
5. 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.

6. 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).
7. 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.
8. 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…
9. 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).
10. 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