Keep them coming!

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.

Just wanted to echo the sentiments of the commenters above me. Great article!

Hope all is well for you, Football Media, and Soccerlens!

Brian

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

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.

If timely and opinionated, an article today could generate far more traffic (and therefore ad revenue) than a long tail post.

Cheers,
The Gaffer