Many people like the idea of starting their own sports blog as one of their first sites. While this is a great way to gain a quick audience, it’s also one of the hardest audiences for you to monetize and make money from here. The reasoning for this is simple… most people are simply looking for sports scores, news and videos. The majority of people visiting high end sites like ESPN have no real intention of buying anything or even clicking on ads.
However, that doesn’t mean that you still won’t be able to find success. Below is a list of a few ways that you can monetize your traffic, even if the majority of visitors to your site are just looking for scores and highlights.
Sports Tickets
Of all the items you can sell in the sports and entertainment world, tickets are one of the highest priced. Thanks to affiliate programs through sites like StubHub and TicketMaster you can partner with the big names and locations around the world for sports events. While pushing tickets might seem like a great way to make money, they have very bad conversions unless you are building out posts specifically about attending events.Memorabilia
Sports fans of all types love to sport their favorite teams and logos on their clothing and whatever else they can. Nearly anything and everything can be created with sports logos and many of them are big sellers. If you have a sports blog for a specific team or player, you may be able to make some money with merchandise and memorabilia. Ad networks likePeerfly also have email submit offers that pay $1+ for every person who enters their email to receive a freeNBA/NFL jersey.
Contextual Advertising
One of your best options might be to go with contextual advertising which can be anything fromGoogle Adsense to running affiliate links within your content. If you can show ads that are relevant to your post content and current sports events, users are much more likely to click on links within your content then banner ads on your site. Split test which ads and links get the most clicks and conversions to continually improve your revenue and user experience.
BONUS: Start a Facebook Fan Page
Whether you are planning to create a sports blog to make money or just for fun, I highly recommend you also create a Facebook Fan Page for your site as well. It’s very easy to build up a sports fan page as anyone will easily like their favorite sports teams with a simple click. This will also allow for you to build up your audience over time and connect with them whenever you like with the latest sports news, scores and highlights.
At the end of the day, if you are going to create a sports blog with the intention to make money with it you are going to need to be passing a ton of traffic through your site. Unless you can come up with some new and creative ways to monetize your audience, it may be worth trying the methods above but don’t expect to see a high conversion rate.
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