Today, almost no one creates a blog just to share the ideas with the world. Everyone knows that a popular blog can bring money, therefore, bloggers are always looking for new ways to earn cash. Of course, sports bloggers are not an exception. Moreover, they have a plenty of options to establish connections with famous sportsmen, brands, and organizations. The article captures 9 steps to monetize your sports blog. Read on.
Whether you are an established sport blogger or just starting out, there are always opportunities to grow the income that you receive from your blog or website. You’ve spent time to get the layout just right and done your research on how to rank highly in search results. Next up is how to get your blog to pay you for your time.
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Steps to Monetize Your Sport Blog in 2020
Sports blogging can be compared to fashion, travel, and food blogging. It becomes more popular as modern society gets more interested in staying fit and healthy. However, it still has enough space for young bloggers.
If you just prepare to creating a blog or if you have already started it, you are to know how to make money with it. It goes without saying that your content (texts, photos, and videos) should be unique and high-quality as you’ll get no visitors.
Moreover, the blog should look perfectly and should have enough options for lead generation and working with the audience. If you have already created a perfect structure for your blog, it’s time to work further to monetize your sports blog.
1. Gamification:
Gamification is the process of applying game methodology to a non game situation. In blogging terms, this means adding a customer loyalty program that encourages your readers to compete to gain rewards and help you monetize your sports blog.
The rewards don’t have to have a monetary value – they can be something as simple as being the top of a leader board, getting “contributor of the month” or even badges that can be shared on social media.
Games that you can run, such as most shares on social media, most visits in a month or most helpful comments, can help drive additional traffic to your website or blog. However you choose to implement gamification, it needs to be simple to understand, show the results clearly so that those participating can see their progress and fun in order to engage your readers.
If your readers are engaged, they will spend more time on your website and are then 70% more likely to take your advice on purchases – enabling you to make more money from your affiliate links.
2. Grow Audience
If you have only 100 visitors per month, monetizing won’t bring you any income. Moreover, you can spend even more money on advertising than you earn. Therefore, you are to make sure that you have at least 5,000 visitors monthly.
Of course, this is a minimum number, and you should keep working on your blog traffic to attract about 100,000 visitors per month. With this number of readers, you can be sure that your monthly income will be high enough.
If you are trying to make money from your blog, you should focus on building a loyal audience. You will need to engage with them on social media as well as via your blog posts. Building a presence on multiple social media platforms will enable you to engage with your audience in different ways. It will also give increased opportunities for the sharing of your content which in turn will give opportunities to attract additional readers.
Your audience is very important as without them, it is unlikely that you will make money from your blog. You need to have an audience to click your links and buy the products you recommend.
3. Use Google AdSense
So, you have ensured that you have enough visitors on your blog, and now you want to make the first step to earning real money. The easiest step is to integrate your blog with Google AdSense, a platform that allows to feature advertisements on different websites. If your visitors click on the advertisement placed on your blog, you get money. This is another great way to monetize your sports blog for more money online.
The only problem here is that most of active Internet users have already installed ad blocks, and they won’t see any advertisement on your blog, therefore, they won’t click on it.
4. Join Affiliate Programs
If you are an opinion leader and have active community, one of the most effective ways for you to monetize your blog will be enrolling affiliate programs. To earn money in this way, you need to add links to different services and products in your articles.
Unlike banners by Google AdSense, inserted links cannot be blocked by the visitors, so anyone will see them. Not to make your reader annoyed with various linked adds, it’s better to insert not more than one to the article.
Affiliate links are a common technique used by bloggers to make money. It is the simple process of linking to a product or website from your blog. When your readers click your link to the other website and make a purchase, you are rewarded a small commission. The tracking is done using custom URLs containing a unique username or via cookies.
The cookies may linger for anything as long as 30 days which means that you will still get a commission if your reader makes a purchase from the linked affiliate website days after clicking your link.
As many as 80% of companies use affiliate marketing giving you plenty of opportunities to make money. There is no additional cost added to the purchase price that your reader will pay, so if you are already writing about products or websites on your blog, you have an opportunity to make money from them.
5. Sell Your Products or Services
Many create a blog to support their business. If you are one of them, you should start to introduce your products or services in your articles. For many visitors, a purchase-making decision is rather tough, and they need something more than just a price and a photo of the good to buy it.
Never hesitate to describe selling points and best advantages of your products, as people want to know how you stand out among other competitors and why they should make a purchase on your site.
6. Become a Consultant
If you are a pro in some industry, you can try to sell your knowledge. For example, you are good in cooking or betting and can share their experience with your readers. Additionally, you may use affiliate programs to make a great combo of your personal trainings (like paid webinars and seminars) with links to the websites.
You just write something like ‘I have always been great in betting, and I started to use the most popular platform. Do you want to know what exactly? Just click here, and you’ll get to know that!’
7. Use Native Advertising
Native advertising differs from affiliate programs and Google AdSense. The first difference is that you get more money. The second difference is that you devote the whole post for a certain product or good. Native advertising means that you get paid for promoting some content on your blog. In some cases, you don’t even to write a post, as the company will do that for you.
All you need is to place it on your blog. However, in this case, you should have at least 100,000 visitors, unless no one would like to cooperate with you. Monetizing your blog with adverts is a very simple and effective way to earn a little extra money. Adverts are all over the web and enhancements in intelligence means that they are more targeted to your readers personal interests.
This also means that if someone is on your blog page and sees an advert for something that is relevant to them – such as a product they have already been researching that same day – they are more likely to click the advert. The more likely someone is to click an advert, the more money that you can make from your blog.
8. Sell your blog
Sometimes, you just get tired from running a blog. You have already done a huge job by creating a site that will be attractive for the visitors, and increased web-traffic to 10,000 or even 100,000 readers per month. Now you want just to have a rest or even try something different.
Frequently, selling a blog is the best option for those who no longer want to work on their blog and want to monetize your sports blog for good money. If you just stop writing on it, you will lose money, as you will lose the number of visitors. It won’t happen in a day, of course, but in several months, you will notice that the number of your visitors gets lower.
In a year, your blog will bring you nothing. If you don’t want to get into the situation when your previously popular blog become a total failure, you can just sell your blog. The price will depend on the number of visitors, the industry you work, and the number of subscribers who receive your emails and notifications.
No one will ever tell you that blogging can’t bring money. If you take to monetize your sports blog as a goal, work on the number of your subscribers, regularly post interesting content and never stop to increase website traffic, you’ll start to earn money. Perhaps, you won’t even need to find the ways to do that, as the brands themselves will start to ask you for cooperation. Next, everything will depend on you.
Perhaps, you will work only with the most generous companies or maybe you’ll cooperate with everyone who sent you a request or who agreed to work with you. Just do remember that earning money is never easy, and you need to pay enough efforts to earn as much as you need.
9. Sponsored Content
If your blog is targeted towards a specific audience or interest – such as fashion, hair and makeup, cars or gaming – there could be an opportunity for you to reach out to companies that operate in that space for free products or even paid sponsorship. If you have a loyal audience for your blog, companies will pay you a fee to create tailored content about their product.
In order to know how valuable your blog is, you will need to collect statistics and information about your readers and have set yourself up as an expert in your field. Having evidence of your success as a social influencer will help when you are reaching out to a company and making your sales pitch.
It is also advisable to spend effort increasing your social media following prior to making contact, as higher reach will make you a more appealing partner. When picking a company to work with, make sure that they are relevant to your audience – you don’t want to alienate the loyal readership base that you have spent time building. You can also use social media to start building a relationship with your chosen companies.
This will increase the chances of them knowing who you are when you make your pitch. Don’t forget to disclose in your blog posts that the content is sponsored – make sure you know the rules and legal requirements before getting into any deals.
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