How to Monetize Your Sports Blog- You can turn your hobby blog into something that makes you money, with a bit of luck and a little bit of know-how. If you do very well, you might even be able to make some decent money from it. Sport is a great area to try to monetize a blog, as there are a lot of ways to do so and there is always a huge amount of interest in the field. For that reason, if that’s where your blog is at, you’re in a good place!
Below I’m going to give you a bunch of strategies that you can use. Note that some are quite easy and don’t require much work, while others require you to invest a lot of time indeed. So make sure that you choose the right one for you and the time you have.
Got that? Okay, then let’s see what we’ve got!
How to Monetize Your Sports Blog: 5 Tips for Beginners
Affiliate marketing and links
This is probably the best-known way out there. There are plenty of companies that will pay you for anybody that comes from your site and ends up buying their product. For example, the Amazon affiliate program is a great place to start. You might discuss wares that they sell and then give links to the website. From there, if those people do actually buy the product that you’ve offered, you make money.
Do note that affiliate marketing has a bit of a bad reputation. That’s because a lot of people use it rather sneakily. They don’t tell you that they’re going to make money from a product and yet that’s the entire goal of the site they’ve created. And so, they push absolute trash and sell it as if comes from God’s own test. That’s not going to make you any friends.
On the other hand, if you actually stand behind the wares that you do sell then you’ll do a real service to your fans.
Advertorial and sponsored posts
Another good way to go is through advertorials and sponsored posts. This means that companies pay you money in order to either post their own content or to post articles slash ads. Companies can often pay quite well for these, so they’re worth considering. Just make sure that you clearly mark content for what it is. Even better, use the ‘nofollow’ tag on any links to their content you’ve got in the article. Otherwise, you’re giving them some of your SEO mojos and that’s not what they’re paying for!
Companies that you might want to consider approaching are sports shops, sports clubs and other people that are trying to draw a bigger audience to their sites. Obviously, you can try to approach your favorite clubs to see if they’re interested, but be aware that they probably won’t be. After all, generally they get free news already, so why would they pay for more exposure? Still, reach out if you want to. Even if they’re not interested, just knowing you’re out there might be useful already.
Offer premium content
If you’ve got a big audience of loyal followers, then why not offer them premium content? This could be content that other people never get to see, or it could be that they get to see the content a month early, for example.
Note, that what you’re offering really does need to offer value – for example, tips about sports teams that would make them money in betting circles or other insights which they can’t just find by a search.
Another problem to consider, if you get like ten people accepting to pay for premium content then you’ve still got to write it! This can ultimately be a massive sinkhole of your time. So make sure that you take that into account when you choose this route.
Offer classes
If you have any video skills whatsoever, consider offering a course. Teach people some of the mad skills that you yourself have developed over the years. If you offer several hour courses, then you can often sell something like that for quite a bit of money. Some people will charge hundreds of dollars for something like that.
And the biggest advantage is that you only have to build the course once, after which whoever wants it, buys it. In that way, even if only a few people do, all you’ve lost is that initial investment of time. You’re not stuck having to repeatedly offer your services.
Consider offering your courses on something like the opponent. The great thing about a site like this is that they have the ability set up for people to comment on and reviews of companies like yours– as well as offer it across the internet. In this way, your course can reach a far bigger audience than your blog audience alone!
Flip it!
If you’ve site is generating a lot of traffic, then a way to make money quickly is to sell it on. A lot of people are willing to pay good money for a loyal audience. Normally, you can expect to make about 12 to 20 times the monthly income if you sell your site.
So yes, you do need to use some of the other monetization strategies mentioned here, but if you’ve gone through all that hassle and then no longer feel like actually keeping your site up to date, then why not flip the thing and invest your effort into building another site? Note, it’s a good idea to follow this strategy at a high point, as otherwise, you’ll not make as much money as you could have. Besides, it’s always a good idea to go out with a bang.
A good place to sell your site is a site like Flippa.
Last words
Really, that’s just the tip of the iceberg. There are other strategies that you can consider, like using your site to market your freelance services, building up an email list that you can offer to companies for sale or even selling individual links in articles (those last two are frowned upon practices, by the way).
So don’t despair. There are plenty of opportunities for you to put all that hard work you put into your sports blog to good money raising use. All you have to do is anexperiment, try out new things and – above all – remember that your audience is fickle and that if you lose them it will be hard to get them back. And that would be a disaster, as they’re the only way that you’ll ever be able to make any money off your blog.
In other words, try new things, experiment, but respect your readers. Then your blog will go far.