How To Make Money From Football Blogging In 2009
A time of crisis is also a time of opportunity – what happens today is a result of what happened two years ago, and what happens two years from now will be influenced by what we do today. With that in mind, we are moving not only to secure our present status and fend off the current financial crisis but also to secure our position at the forefront of online football media when it rises again, because when economies turn around and we experience our next ‘economic boom’ (be it 2 or 5 years from now) those at the front of the line will profit the most.
Here is our 6-step plan for 2009 and beyond (with some details removed for privacy) – I hope this helps you too.
- Diversify Outside Football: If you have just one leg to stand on, sooner or later you’re going to stumble and fall. As individuals, as bloggers and as companies, it pays to have a second, third and fourth stream of income. To be honest it’s an advantage entrepreneurs have over regular salaried folks and if you’ve been blogging about football all this time, it’s time to find something else to blog about (or find a second / third job).
In addition, there are two excellent reasons (beyond financial stability) to diversify outside football: One, it gives you a better perspective on how well or how poorly your football business is doing and two, it allows you an extra source of investment into your business (and as we discuss in #5, you’re going no where fast without investment).
- Consolidate Inside Football: Do a realistic check of what the most popular topics are for your readers and focus on them. On a personal note, I would like to cover the MLS on Soccerlens but that doesn’t always prove viable considering that a) the audience is mostly interested in European football and b) MLS itself demands considerably less interest than, say, the English Championship. If your US readers want Premier League football, who are you to argue?
- Become a Super Affiliate: The easy way to ‘make money’ from football blogging has been to put up a blog on Blogspot, slap on some AdSense and start churning out content in the hope that a) NewsNow will pick you up and b) you’ll get enough hits to make some money to buy Beckham’s #32 Milan shirt in January.
That’s also the lazy and least effective way to do things.
Learn about affiliate marketing. Learn how you can make money from recommending products and services in football (kits, shoes, tickets, betting, tv subscriptions, etc). The biggest profit margins (if you know what to do and how to do it) are in selling your own products and barring that, in selling other people’s stuff as an affiliate.
- Google, not NewsNow, is your best friend: The single biggest advantage that Google has over NewsNow is that you can get much better results (i.e. more traffic) by putting in less time (i.e. fewer articles). For example, this article on live football was written only once, yet it gets regular traffic from search engines every day. On the other hand, when you write about today’s latest transfer rumour involving Manchester City, it will only get you traffic from NewsNow today (and probably tomorrow) but not much more beyond that.
Don’t get me wrong – NewsNow is great for getting new readers, exposing your site to a UK audience, getting traffic, etc etc. But there’s a trade-off between what you’re doing now and the results you’re getting from your efforts. NewsNow’s biggest failing is that it’s all about NOW and relies on you writing every day to produce results and bring in new readers. With Google (or search in general), you only write once (and promote a few times).
- Invest or Die: Invest time and money in your best people and your most popular features / sections on your site. Remember that regardless of what your barometer for success is (Arseblog or BBC), you’re behind in the race and the ones at the top are working at light-speed to increase their advantage over the competition. To catch them, you need to either change the rules of the game (i.e. compete on a front where the industry leaders don’t have a clear advantage) or invest heavily to bridge the gap as quickly and as effectively as you can.
One approach requires you to invest time, people and money (as well as to take risks). The other approach requires you to invest money, people and take certain risks. Either way you’re going to have to move fast and you’ll have to invest (time, money, manpower, etc), or you’ll never get where you’re going.
- Change The Rules: Traditional methods of making money from football is to write about the latest news. That’s not going to work in a depressed economy with low ad budgets so you need to find your niche as an expert on something other than ‘latest’ news. Similarly, the most popular method of delivering content to readers has so far been the traditional blogging platform (Blogger / WordPress), the news aggregator platform (NewsNow / Google News) and RSS. That’s not going to give you an advantage because you’re competing with hundreds of other blogs and forums, the two (or three) best news aggregators and hundreds of RSS feeds when trying to get readers’ attention.
If you’ve got the money (and the will to spend all of it), go for competing the traditional way. If you’re on a budget like us, find new angles to acquire readers and essentially make yourself invaluable to your readers (e.g. eufootball.biz and their coverage of football business news). Learn how the industry is changing, how technology is impacting the way we interact with the world of football, reach five years into the future and implement those strategies today.
I hope this article helps you in growing your football blog / business, and if you have any questions or feedback, use the comment form below or get in touch via email.
Ahmed, an excellent article. I agree with everything you said. I do disagree, however, with your contention that articles that have a shelf-life of one day are less valuable than articles with a longer lifespan.
If timely and opinionated, an article today could generate far more traffic (and therefore ad revenue) than a long tail post.
Cheers,
The Gaffer
Chris,
You’re right, a timely article today can result in links and knock-on traffic as long as it’s on an interesting topic, is published before most other sites start discussing it and is promoted well.
On average though, on NewsNow you’ll see 0.001% of such articles, if not less.
As long as you’re matching search-targeted articles with quality (and timely) news reporting, you’ll do much better than 99% of the blogs out there, football or otherwise.
Absolutely brilliant article … this article has generated many ideas for me in my struggle to get going in the blogging/writing facet of my blog.
Good going and thanks a lot …
As an accepted publisher on NewsNow, I can certainly vouch for needed to optimise better for google.
I can write a belting article one day and get 11,000 visits (proud of that!) and leave it a couple of days and my traffic is very much back down to earth.
Google is vital, but competing with the big boys as you say, is very tough
Happy days!
Sam
Ahmed,
Just wanted to echo the sentiments of the commenters above me. Great article!
Hope all is well for you, Football Media, and Soccerlens!
Brian
Good post, and let me add that your advice seems pertinent for every niche and not just for football.
Most articles about football have a very short shelf life. There are probably a few exceptions like your post on live football.
If you wrote a post about Everton signing Jo on loan, the chances of a normal blog ranking along with BBC, Sky, Sportinglife for a particular search term are quite low.
Most bloggers are quite creative, but that creativity might not help in ranking in the search engines. For example, somebody will probably write ” Toffees snap up Brazilian striker”. A person searching on Google will not search for “Toffees Brazilian striker”. He’ll probably search for ” Everton Jo”. Your chances of ranking for that term are virtually nil.
I’m not saying that you must write for the search engines, but until you can boast of a regular readership ( which is why building up RSS readers and doing promotion contests is important), you’ll be better off writing it from the keywords POV.
And once Jo finishes his loan tenure, and goes to another club, no body will care for your post. If they wanted to see where Jo was at a particular point of time in his career, they’d go to Wikipedia.
Unless you have a bit of financial muscle, your site won’t rank that easily in Google.
The Newsnow strategy works because it gets visitors to your site. If you are running an ad network that pays you for the number of impressions you generate, you can make a fair bit of money.
Affiliate marketing will work if you’re willing to do a bit of PPC. Organic ranking isn’t difficult for some long tail keywords, but you need your site to be somewhat established for that. I noticed you are ranking quite well for David Beckham Milan shirt and Beckham Milan shirt
Quite a long comment :p.
I’d like to see more of this stuff here.
This is the best article about blogging I ever read. I’m impressed . Thank you for sharing
Great article, it had given me plenty of ideas of how to develop my blog.
Keep them coming!