How To Start A Sports Blog | Bloggers HQ

[UPDATED 2019] How To Start A Sports Blog And Earn Some Great And Fun Money On The Side bloggershq.org/how-to-start-a-sports-blog

Have you ever thought about or wondered How To Start A Sports Blog and what it takes to build a fun and profitable one?

Obviously, the fun part is writing about something that you are highly and very passionate about but do you know what the most difficult thing is?

It is not getting traffic - traffic is everywhere, nor is it monetizing your content! There are a number of monetization methods and strategies.

"Rugby is a beastly game played by gentlemen; soccer is a gentleman's game played by beasts; football is a beastly game played by beasts." Unknown #sports #Blogging The most difficult thing is getting started and getting yourself set up for long term sustainable success.

What makes it so difficult is that very few other blogging tips or affiliate marketing sites will actually show and teach you how to start a sports blog in that way.

Sure, they will they will show you what it takes to make a sports blog, and one that is initially successful, but what about sustainability and continued long term success?

Few are teaching you that, if any..in any niche or market!. If you are interested in starting a sustainably successful sports blog keep reading!.

7 DAY FREE BLOGGING COURSE 1/38

Do You Want To Earn A Living From Something You Are Passionate About?

Yes?

Bang Your Best Email In The Box Below & In Just 1 Week Your Brand New Site Will Be Set Up And Ready To Start Earning For You! Sign up now and get started today with My FREE e-course!

We Respect Your Privacy And Will NEVER Spam You!.

Quick Navigation Through this article I am going to fully detail exactly how you can get started with your own sports blog and set it up in a way in which ensures your sustained success for a number of years to come - essentially for as long as you work on your site, you will continue to grow your traffic and income.

I'll show you something that no other is teaching you in this area - how to ensure that you are unaffected by algorithm changes and updates.

What you will learn: How To (And Why You Should) Brand Your Blog - and the importance of it!

How To Generate Revenue for your Sports Blog and the varity of options that you have available to you What The Top Affiliate Programs Are For Sports Bloggers How To Generate And Amplify Traffic Using Social Media, and some strategies To Rapidly grow your social presence What To Write About.

Keyword Strategy To Get More Traffic How To Get Traffic From Search Engines Like Google And Increasing Your Search Engine Presence.

Top and Well Respected Sports Blogs To Emulate And Check Out For Inspiration

BOX OUT: The Absolute Essentials That You Will Need For Starting A Sports Blog Today Join my 7 day free courseand discover all that you need to know to build a successful blog!

Sign up for A Free Account With They Guy's that taught me! And Get Full Success Coaching And Assistance from me!.

If you plan on building an email list And Properly Owning Your Traffic, start a free trial of ConvertKit

2/38

According the statista the Sports market in the USA alone is set to rise to almost $80 Billion USD yearly!. I expect an industry average of 57% of those being from online sales.

This very much indicates an huge amount of money flowing around in the industry right there for the taking.

Sports Market Revenue in Billions of USD.

Niche Down and Find Your Sports Niche You just can't sports blog about anything and everything sports related under the sun. You are not ESPN, and you are not going to give them a run for their money!. (unless you have some SERIOUSLY deep pockets).

But all is not lost, besides, if you could make a general sports site it would take you years to cut your teeth and make some edge ways in such a busy industry and people to notice your site - even with a whole football squad of writers working for you day and night creating articles.

"The reason women don't play football is because 11 of them would never wear the same outfit in public." #Sports #Blogging #Quote A better and quicker way is to find smaller sub niches in the sports market that have a more specific and targeted audience.

3/38

Thus, the very first step for you is to identify a particular sport that you wish to create your blog around. This helps you to narrow down your audience a bit, but not significantly.

Step 1 (Recap): Sports Blog-->Pick a Sport!.

I recommend And Suggest that you bookmark this guide and article (Ctrl +D) so that you can come back to it and start reading where you left off and not miss out on any of the awesome tips and techniques Better still, take a few seconds to sign up for my 7 day 100% Free E-course on blogging and you will get absolutely everything you need to succeed delivered via email over the next week!

The next particular way of niching down and finding your niche is to identify with a particular person or group of people that would resonate with step 1, the specific selection of a sport.

This part could get quite creative and go a few ways depending on how your thought process is.

The more logical is to think of a Team, particularly is you have chosen a particular sport such as Soccer, Baseball, Basketball and so on.

In this case such an example would be Manchester United, Red Socks, LA Lakers and so on.

This clearly identifies with a particular group of people, fans of those teams.

For this particular niche site you can dedicate to fan gear or memoribillia targeted to fans of a specific team.

Sport-->Basketball-->Specific team-->fan gear or memorabilia Other Sports like Golf, Archery, Tennis could go in the direction of equipment at this stage.

For Example, Sport-->.Archery-->Best Bows, Best Arrows Sport-->Golf-->Best Drivers, Best Putters, Sports-->Tennis-->Best Tennis Rackets.

There are of course an infinite number of ways in which we can tackle the sports niche and properly niche down and find our targeted niche market of choice. The actual best way to find your niche is to use the tried, tested and proven method of leveraging Amazon to fully identify your niche.

Lets head on over to Amazon and find a sports niche.

4/38

Amazon invests billions is getting categories (niches) right..pay attention!

Mr Bezos spends billions making sure his site is easy to navigate and for people to find properly categorised products, often niches right there of the taking!.

From the above image, select "sports and outdoors" and then click search. From the resulting page (shown!) we still need to dig deeper to get more targeted that "Outdoor recreation" "Sports & Fitness" and "Fan Shop".

Simply click those categories and see what comes up, for our example lets have a look at what happens when we click "Fan Shop"

homing in a little bit more Fore here we are actually asked to select a sports league, which is fine, you can drill in on NBA basketball to help us to get targeted on a particular sport.

5/38

A list of all NBA teams appears As you would expect, the following screen includes a list of teams.

Making a blog dedicated to the entire NBA or a whole league is in itself quite a difficult task. better focused and again specifically targeted as mentioned before is a specific and exact team.

Get My FREE Guide "How To Make Money With A Blog" Here!

Because You Know With Your New Sports Blog You Will Be Sporting A New Income!. The Question Is Do You Have The Winning Mentality To See It All The Way To The Final?

For purposes of illustration I am going to click on Chicago Bulls.

At this point we have a pretty good and targeted blog centred around a specific team and sport.

6/38

Sports -->Basketball-->Chicago Bulls--> ?

There is still a missing part of what you want to target as content for such a site which could be a fan site with all the latest news, information, stats and so on. Or simply a fan gear site about the various products that are available on Amazon.

Or you can of course target specific memoribillia from by gone eras like famous shirts and gear from the 70's, 80's 90's a Dennis Rodman shirt for example.

Finding Products On Amazon Taking advantage of this stage of niche research we can actually find if there are products available on amazon for our specific niche. simply off to the left of the screen highlight products that are only rated as 4 stars or more and set a price range of $50 to $100.

The particular reason for such is you want products that are highly rated and sell well. Also as an affiliate you do want to earn a reasonable commission.

WARNING! Taking My FREE 7 Day Blogging Course May Very Well Result In You Winning Back Your Financial Freedom, Causing Tremendous Personal Satisfaction & Living Out The Life Of Your Dreams.

Getting Sexy With Your Niche

7/38

There exist a particular technique called sexing that allows you to make a blog mixing and matching your hobbies and interests. It does require the right mix or a certain uniqueness and panache to carry out and pull of mixed niches that are quite odd matches...

The options are really limitless just list your hobbies and match them off and see what kind of site you can come up with.

Twin sexed sports niche with Sports + one of the above niches could be: Sports + Travel Sports + Food Sports + Photography Sports and Fitness Sports and Fashion.

Sports & Technology

Sports And Fitness mixed together makes for an interesting blog ... you get the idea, some of those sound like really great ideas, particularly Sports and travel, which is something that would work out incredibly well as many people do travel to sporting events!

Another great one is Sports and Photography, two separate niches that really do marry well together and sports photography is very much a particular sub niche of the photography niche.

I particularly like the sports and technology, include tech products used in sports and fitness.

8/38

Trebling up and adding in a third, which is viable - and much more work to mix 3 particular niches and marry them in one blog. Something that really does have a very nice ring to it is Sports, Fitness & Fashion - very much a lifestyle kind of blog.

Personally if I was to sex up a sports niche I'd start with a base of just two niches and as time, content and the years roll past add in a new third dimension and grow the site into the third niche.

7 DAY FREE BLOGGING COURSE Do You Want To Earn A Living From Something You Are Passionate About?

Yes?

Bang Your Best Email In The Box Below & In Just 1 Week Your Brand New Site Will Be Set Up And Ready To Start Earning For You! Sign up now and get started today with My FREE e-course!

We Respect Your Privacy And Will NEVER Spam You!.

Defining Your Target Audience Once you have niched down and properly identified your niche the next step is to do some deep thinking in regards as to who your ideal audience and readers are. In short you want to identfy who ideally will be regular visitors to your sports blog.

You have to be a lot more vague than "fans of Chicago Bulls" although generally correct!

Be far more detailed than that. To get more detailed and create an avatar or profile of your ideal visitor you really need to dig down, get deep and answer a few questions.

What sex are they?

Where are they from?

How old are they?

Level of education?

Other hobbies?

What is their regular job What is their social and marital status? Do they have children?

What is their name? (give your avatar a name!).

How does your site help them?

Warning! - F.O.M.O ALERT! 9/38

Fear Of Missing Out On Taking My FREE 7 Day Blogging Course May Lead To You A Melancholic State Of Infinite Sadness Due To Missing Out On The Opportunity To Change Your Life For Ever And For The Better, Leaving You With The Eternal State Of Mind Thinking "What If I Actually Built That Darn Blog!"

Lets go through that little exercise!.

Our idea visitor to our Sports Blog is an avid fan of basketball, knows all the stats and details regarding players and is a Chicago Bulls Fan and regularly collects sports memorabilia, college educated and is an office worker, a regular office Joe, he is aged 35-44 married and has 3 kids both of which he shares his Chicago bulls passion.

He does n't have any other hobbies other than drinking with his friends, usually on game day where he enjoys the live match with his friends.

Our niche site helps him to find sports news and information about his fave team and to buy memorabilia which he enjoys doing and sometimes are a little difficult to find.

See pretty easy wasn't it?

Creating an ideal visitor and having a real good thought about that helps you to dig down and create highly targeted content for that individual and thus bring in targeted traffic.

This is something that is very important as creating that targeted content is what keeps your visitor on your site for longer as they are more interested in the content and interact more with your site.

This has the effect of creating a really good user experience which is a ranking signal that google looks for.

Get My FREE Guide "How To Make Money With A Blog" Here!

Because You Know That You Can Make More Money As A Sports Blogger!. The Question Is Are You Sporting Enough To Step Up And Take The Money?!?

Creating A Brand This is something that is absolutely essential for you as a sports blogger to do. Creating a brand is what will set you apart from the rest of the "run of the mill" sites out there.

Internauts will become used to seeing your logo, site name and slogan and will become memorable for them. Think Bleacher Report - and you know exactly what the site is and what to expect from it, even its design and logo.

Probably you even know the web address without too much effort or thought!. That is all down to great branding.

Branding is an integral part of everything that you do and will be doing. It very much covers everything related to your site. Your marketing strategy is something you can even consider as part of your branding strategy.

10/38

Market badly or to the wrong crowd, you wont be doing much justice to or for your brand.

Thankfully there is nothing complicated at all about creating or establishing your brand.

Your branding, like it or not, is an integral part of your sports blog's marketing strategy.

There are a few factors that you have to be aware of when it comes down to your brand and establishing it long term. Do keep these in mind.

Site Design or Theme: Absolutely have item, a must have is a top quality premium theme, eventually once you have established your site and money is rolling in do consider a custom theme. Originality will stand out.

Your Logo And Site Colours: Stick to 2 or 3, colours, preferably just 2. Be careful of picking colours that are too bright or too dark. These can spoil the message that you are trying to communicate to your readers.

Your Site Design: A good very well organised blog that is easy to navigate speaks volumes to your reader, they will hang around longer and enjoy a better experience all good for your SEO efforts!

Your Own Personal Style: Your own personal style and style of writing is one in which will draw in your readers, particularly your regular readers, they will resonate with it.

Absolutely word perfect grammar is not needed, just good quality content that your crowd like.

Your writing is something that, like anything else improves with time and practice.

#FACT I Absolutely LOVE Helping People, I Reply To All Emails, By Taking My FREE 7 Day Blogging Course You Get My Personal Attention And Coaching. All Your Questions Will Be Answered As Quickly As I Can. I Really Do Want You To Succeed And Win Back Your Freedom And To Live The Life You Have Always Dreamed Of. It Is Time Now To Take Action And Stop Procrastinating!.

Your Marketing Strategy: How you market your site has an effect on how you are perceived and how you are seen. Thus, classy quality marketing is much better. What I am essentially saying here, is any unsporting behaviour like spamming, and you will be caught off side and getting a red card for your brand!.

Your Site Name: This is something that ought to be obvious, make your site name 11/38

something that is easily remembered and related to what your particular sports blog is about. Also, use the address on all your social profiles.

Make sure that you do put your blog address on your social media profiles alongside your slogan, and logo. Make sure you have consistency across all channels.

7 DAY FREE BLOGGING COURSE Do You Want To Earn A Living From Something You Are Passionate About?

Yes?

Bang Your Best Email In The Box Below & In Just 1 Week Your Brand New Site Will Be Set Up And Ready To Start Earning For You! Sign up now and get started today with My FREE e-course!

We Respect Your Privacy And Will NEVER Spam You!.

Your Branding Options: Two Distinct Branding Strategies There are two main branding strategies, of which you will need to make a choice of which one is best for you and your funky new sports site.

Business branding or Personal Branding.

Personally I strongly advise that as a sports blogger you lean towards personal branding with a site name that clearly identifies your niche and what your site is about.

Personal branding, my own opinion, alongside "your name" website does not look so good.

Sure it can be done, I absolutely do not doubt it. Just, I personally think Chicago Bulls Memoribillia (dot) com website with your image used for personal branding is much better that using your own name in regards to sports blogging.

Creating a personal brand and strategically throughout the site using your image on your home page, about me page, contact and so on will help the reader to identify who you are and above all, actually aid you in humanising your brand and establishing rapport and trust with your readers and loyal fan base.

This is great, as a blogger and business owner you who is involved in person to person business model creating trust will help your business in many ways.

12/38

Building trust online is and absolute must for converting traffic into sales.

Monetisation Strategies For Sports Blogs When it comes to making money from your blog, you, thankfully have a variety of some very nice options available to you. Lets list these one by one and then go into them in more detail individually.

Lets face it, you want your blogging efforts to be worth your while in, at very least a job quitting way!.

Your Monetisation Options Available For Sports Blogs Affiliate Marketing Display Advertising Your Own Products Sponsored Posts Premium Membership Area Lets now get more detailed about those exact options that you have available to you.

Affiliate Marketing By far the best way for you to make money from your site is to get involved in affiliate marketing and recommending affiliate products for your audience. This is typically what call a stage 1 site, a new site that starts off and monetises its traffic using affiliate marketing.

13/38

The great thing in regards to affiliate marketing is that it has no upper ceiling as far as earnings go. The sky really is the limit here - as long as you can draw in the traffic (we'll get to that part later).

The only, very minor drawback is that it takes time to get your first sales and to get a consistent regular income that you can consider as reasonable. Do stick it out as the rewards are most certainly worth it!.

Get My FREE Guide "How To Make Money With A Blog" Here!

Because You Know You Can Earn A Good Living By Becoming A Sports Blogger!.

The Question Is: Can You Build A Champion Of A Site And Make It A Winner?.

Advertising You can earn money from the very outset with the use of display advertising programs like Google Adsense. This program though, will only pay you very much pennies unless you can get a reasonable amount of traffic.

Currently, Adsense pays 65% of the advertising revenue share to publishers (bloggers like you). One of the downsides in regards to using this monetisation method is you are taking visitors away from your site in exchange for a few cents.

Personally, I would rather keep the visitor onsite.

You can certainly try out Google adsense from the very start. I do advise you to hold back on this method of revenue generation until you are getting at least 25,000 site visitors (sessions) to your blog.

When you reach that number you can qualify for Media Vine Display Ads. Which pays out a a much higher rate than Google adsense. Typically you can earn, this depends on your niche and your optimisation of those adverts, $20 to $50 per 1,000 sessions.

Do the Math!

It means you are looking at $500 to $1,250 EXTRA for having ads on your site, for doing nothing.

Personally I use this extra money to invest to grow my site to a bigger one and when not needed, I ditch the ads. I mentioned, I prefer to keep my visitors onsite. So ads are a viable and genuine option to use once you have traffic and to help you to finance the growth of your site, later you can stop using them, if you wish.

(Sure, it is not easy switching off ad revenue that is pulling in $2,000 to $5,000 monthly for doing zip!).

14/38

those advertising bucks are hard to turn down and can be used to further develop your site and turn a good sports blog into a great one.

Your Own Products

Creating your own digital products is what many of us in the blogging industry call and refer to as a level 3 blog with the other 2 levels being Affiliate marketing, Affiliate Marketing + Advertising revenue.

Level 3 blog simply has 3 monetisation methods, affiliate marketing, advertising revenue and your own digital or physical products.

This is where you can get creative and think about what products you could either make yourself, have made for you and are either physical or digital.

Examples of digital products being ebooks regarding history of the sport or sports team you are writing about, recalling famed victories. Physical products, you could make a subscription box deliverable monthly in regards to sports memorabilia and equipment.

Digital products, perhaps you have a soccer training site, you could make your own detailed video training program with variety of training drills.

Having your own products and product range you can then turn affiliate marketing on its head and have affiliates working for you.

Sponsored Posts 15/38

This, for me is a genius concert that is a winner on many levels and areas.

1. You get content written on your site by someone else 2. Content can rank and pull in traffic 3. You get paid for that content!.

The writer wins by getting quality backlink from your site to their, which can help them to get a SEO boost.

My advice is go for it, accept sponsored posts, have a write for us page with your contact details and requirements for such posts and cost. Keep in mind you want to encourage longer articles.

Such ways could be by offering more links for longer content or cheaper price for longer articles. Longer articles tend to rank much better than shorter ones and thus of more benefit for you.

Also, I advise that you maintain full editorial control over what gets pubished as ultimately, once you click that publish button you are responsible for it and can face the consequences of a potential penalty for duplicate or spun content.

Accept original and high quality content that is related to your niche. Insist on social shares and replying to comments also.

7 DAY FREE BLOGGING COURSE Do You Want To Earn A Living From Something You Are Passionate About?

Yes?

Bang Your Best Email In The Box Below & In Just 1 Week Your Brand New Site Will Be Set Up And Ready To Start Earning For You! Sign up now and get started today with My FREE e-course!

We Respect Your Privacy And Will NEVER Spam You!.

Membership Site Premium membership sites are actually a very viable and darn good way of making money online from your website or blog.

I do warn though, it is hard work as you are by all means running two sites in parallel to each other - creating content for the free public side which draws in traffic and creating content for the premium area.

16/38

It is certainly something to keep in mind as you develop your blog and progress in the future.

Membership sites can indeed help to bring in a very nice and healthy profit for your blog

Best Sports Affiliate Programs Having covered the methods of how to generate money from your blog, it is now important to mention some of the best sports affiliate programs that could be of interest to you in your quest to gain affiliate commissions as you delve and dive into the sports niche.

Pretty hard not to mention, should I say, remention one we have already covered.

Amazon.

Amazon Associates Not quite an affiliate program that bloggers clam over buuut there those that do swear by and are quite successful using amazon associates.

The main polemic issue is the constantly changing rules and T&C's as well as the low 4.5% commission and 24hr cookie.

However the caveat is Amazon that does convert very well visitor traffic into sales and 17/38

buyers often buy more than just the one items that they initially collected thus earnings can be on par with other independent programs that don't quite share the same trust factor amongst online consumers.

Awesome Affiliate Programs!

Finding Awesome Affiliate Programs Is Only The Very First Step On Your Journey To Becoming A Brilliant, Successful Blogger Earning The Freedom That You Fully Deserve And Living That Life That You Have Always Dreamed About!.

Get My Help In Assisting You To Building That Affiliate Site The Right Way And Get Set Up For Sustainable Success By My Free Ebook and Taking My Free 7 Day Course On Blogging.

Al's Sporting Goods This independent affiliate program and company sell all the well known sports brands like The North Face, Yeti, Nike, Under Armour and many more. Known brands pull in greater custom and higher conversion rates.

They have gear for all sports, all years round. One of their selling points is that order over $75 qualify for free delivery.

As an affiliate of Al's Sporting Goods you can expect 10% commission and a very ample 150 day cookie. An average of $120 is spent by their clients, meaning you can expect $12 commission per order. Just a few of those on a daily basis and you are breaking the $1,000 mark - for one affiliate program!

Nice!.

Get more information about Al's Sporting Goods Here.

LeftLane Sports This a completely free membership based sporting goods community that gives its members access to their favourite sporting brands and goods and heavily discounted prices.

You can find on their site top known brands like KEEN, Asiscs, Colombia, Addidas and Under Armour to name a few at unbelievably low prices.

Community members, enjoy 90 day return policy and a two week long price drop guarantee in which if the price reduces during the 14 day period they will credit a members account with store credit in a dollar amount.

Average sales amount is just over $80 and a well respected and incredibly high conversion rate, alongside the 10% commission and 60 day tracking cookie you can expect to make an good income as an affiliate of LeftLane sports.

They have have performances based incentives with tiered commission rising to as high as 13% depending on your sales volume in a given month.

18/38

If you was you I'd get on LeftLane Right Away!

Get more information about LeftLane Affiliate Program Here.

Get My FREE Guide "How To Make Money With A Blog" Here!

Because You Feel Affiliated To Building A Rockin' Sports Blog. The Question Is: Are You Man Enough To Put In The Hard Work And Build A Job Quittin' Sports Site?

Soccer Garage Exactly what I was trying to get across earlier! Niche down and dominate a targeted market.

This is exactly what Soccer Garage does, it dominates a very specific market and targeted audience - Soccer fans!.

Affiliate Commission range from 7% to 10% and the average order value is $100 and the cookie duration last an ample 60 days. Their affiliate program is a managed one, managed by CJ.com You can get more information about their affiliate program right here.

Fanatics Fanatics is perhaps something you have heard of already, particularly if you are based State side as they are the biggest online officially licensed retailer for the NBA, MLB, UFC, NFL, NHL, NASCAR and MLS!.

They have almost half a million items for sale and new products are added on an almost daily basis. It is sufficient to say they have absolutely everything that sports fans are seeking!.

19/38

Commissions are up to 10 percent and cookie lasts 7 days.

Get More Information About Fanatics Affiliate Program Here

Sports Memorabilia Perhaps Ideal for your Chicago Bulls Memorabilia site!. As you can imagine this site specialises in ...Sports collectables and memorabilia. Their products are genuine and authentic 100%!. Their product range covers 500,000 products from a range of 11 different sports.

Commisison level is 12% and the average sale is a very sweet $300 which very much means a single sale per day with Sports Memorabilia affiliate program you can top the $1,000 mark from a single merchant.

Get information about their program here!.

Baseball Rampage!

This online retailer has been selling sports equipment, specifically baseball, since 1996. They are official retailers for all the well known brands and manufacturers like Franklin, Wilson.

Nokona, Mizuno, Louisville Slugger and Under Armour.

Affiliate commissions is 9% and average sale is an ample $150 meaning there is certainly money to be made here!. Cookie duration is incredibly long...a whole year!.

Get Baseball Rampage Affiliate Program Information Right Here.

Getting Traffic To Your Sports Blog Knowing how to earn an income for your site and a number of affiliate programs and display advertising opportunities, but without traffic that knowledge means very little as it is essentially your targeted traffic that you monetise.

This section is dedicated to the art of drawing in highly targeted traffic. It is of course,

20/38

targeted traffic that gets converted much better to revenue.

Keep in mind, having a wide and varied source of traffic is essential for your long term success as I do highly advise you own your traffic and remain independent of algorithm updates from both social media and search engines.

It truly is a balancing act as you do want the social and search engine exposure and the traffic, but remain fully independent from their updates which could have adverse effects on your business, particularly if you were fully dependent upon them.

Get My FREE 7 Day Blogging Course! Discover All You Need To Know To Build That Income Producing Blog That You Have Been Dreaming Of! Enter your name and email below and you'll get instant access to my course and you'll be well on your way to building a sustainable business online - The right way!.

We Respect Your Privacy And Will NEVER Spam you!.

Social Media There is no denying the power and potential of using social media to drive traffic to your site and getting you sales, and above all awareness of your blog and brand.

When it is comes to using social media as a traffic source it is absolutely essential that you take a professional approach and not go at it all gung ho and scatter brained.

After all, you are representing your brand!.

Some basic do's and don't that apply to all social media.

Social Media Do's Upload Branded recognisable image as your main background image and profile photo.

Add in your links to your homepage in the relevant area.

Reply to all comments, be polite and sociable.

Post regularly, but not too often, Spark debates, ask questions and reply to questions asked.

Be Original and Stand out Social Media Don'ts Spam your own page with tons of post and updates . Too many will turn off your audience.

Don't make your posts and ramblings only about you and you fabulous blog, share content from other sites that are related to what your blog about.

Don't delete negative comments or comments of that nature. You have the opportunity here to show yourself and your site in a positive light. Delete negative

21/38

comments and you might well run into a PR issue later on in your blogging career.

Don't become over reliant on automated tools. Theses tools are great for growth and saving time, but dependency on them will make you lose out on that human touch.

One of the biggest keys to social media success and getting traffic is less is more. Focus on just 2 or 3 social media sites to drive traffic to your blog and find which ones are most effective for you.

Once you are making money you can of course hire a freelance social media manager to do your social tasks and perhaps add in one or two more to find out if you can drive traffic from those sites and sources.

Social is a great traffic source for your site, use wisely.

Lets now talk about driving traffic from my own personal social media favourites, starting with...

Twitter is, for me and in my own humble opinion a fab source of instant and ready traffic, making it ideal for when you need instant traffic.

This makes twitter pretty good for when you are starting out your blog and for when you need traffic to your new or indeed for the remarketing your older articles.

As I mentioned earlier it is important that you do get targeted traffic and not just random visitors to your site.

22/38

Getting targeted traffic and followers is as simple as finding the popular twitter accounts related to sports blogging or your particular niche.

Get My FREE Guide "How To Make Money With A Blog" Here!

Because You Know You Can Earn A Substantial Income From Your Hobby!. The Question Is: Will You Take Action And Turn Your Hobby Into Your Dream Job?!?

As you can see from the image above finding targeted accounts on this social network is pretty easy - just use search terms related to your niche, which in our case is sports and then click people as shown.

Naturally, is you are blogging about a particular team or sport use those search terms, the more targeted you can get the better.

The next step for you to do is to follow their followers. The followers of the accounts that you have found are highly likely to be interested in what you are blogging about.

Why? By following a similar account they have already shown an interest in the topic. rather than take forever and a day to build your smashing sports niche site's twitter following use a great little app called Tweepi.

Tweepi will help you to follow hundreds of followers daily in about 60 seconds!. You can most certainly do it with the free version. There is no absolute requirement to use the premium version, although later when you have a massive account it will be more logical to do so.

23/38

On twitter growth, you can certainly grow big and quickly using the free app that I mentioned. I grew mine from zero to 20,000+ followers in just 3 months.

Once you do go premium, use the facility to flush out inactive accounts that you are following and force unfollow of accounts that are inactive.

My own personal preference is to only follow accounts that are active in the past 7 days and unfollow those that have been inactive for over 7 days. This ensures a highly active following.

Which helps you to get more retweets and comments and so on.

Ohh and don't follow any accounts that are known as eggs, - no profile photo!. No matter how many followers they have or how frequently they tweet. These accounts are likely fake or run by a bot that just won't retweet your content..or indeed be indeed be interested in buying your recommended products There are other free and absolutely brilliant apps that you can use to grow your twitter following organically. One such app that I used regularly is Viral Content Bee.

Viral Content Bee Viral Content Bee is a social sharing app in which you collaborate with other users and get social shares for you and your content, be they retweets, pins or what ever action is taken on a particular network.

The shares are genuine and by real people and not by bots. One of the the benefits of using Viral Content Bee is not just getting retweets but gaining organic followers from people who have retweeted your content or indeed their own followers.

So, put in the effort and share other peoples related to your niche content and use this app on a regular basis.

A third app that is going to help you a lot on twitter and other social sites is Rite Tag. The free version, as per the two above is good enough to use.

This app tells you which tags you ought to use now to get good exposure and which ones to use to get exposure over a period of time.

24/38

An example of what hash tags to use for sports blogs to gain longer term exposure for your Tweeting efforts.

A super nifty ninja thing you can do on twitter to growth hack your account and efforts is to check your twitter analytics, look for your most followed follower.

Once you find out who that is go into "stalker mode" and check out their twitter account and see what kind of tweets that put out and create content every now and again to that person and mention them in the tweet.

Talking of your tweet, be sure to add in images or video in every single one of your tweets..that way you are occupying more real estate in the twitter feed of your followers and your tweets are more noticed.

Also, when it comes down to hash tag marketing use only two tags tops, my opinion, use one for exposure now and one for longer term exposure. Have a good look at what hash tags are getting retweeted.

Get My FREE 7 Day Blogging Course! Discover All You Need To Know To Build That Income Producing Blog That You Have Been Dreaming Of! Enter your name and email below and you'll get instant access to my course and you'll be well on your way to building a sustainable business online - The right way!.

We Respect Your Privacy And Will NEVER Spam you!.

Pinterest, often ignored by many in the social media world and it is something that you should pay a lot of attention to.

25/38

Pinterest although much smaller than other social media powerhouses like Facebook boasts of one very interesting fact and statistic. Users on Pinterest are 2x more likely to buy something they have seen or learned about on Pinterest than on Facebook.

Secondly, Pinterest users have money to spend. The average income is in excess of $120,000 annually - that's five figure earners..monthly.

Thirdly, it is a search engine in reality and the way in which it functions with Jquery. Your efforts are not lost in the sands of time like with Facebook and Twitter.

You can, and you will build up a steady stream of traffic with this fabulous source of traffic.

I have a particular niche site in which I have not pinned for 18 months and I still get good strong regular flow of traffic from Pinterest.

Everything here just points to and makes darn good business and blogging sense to get using this social network.

Ignore the power of Pinterest at your pearl!.

Pinterest and is a social site that you just can't ignore!

Pinterest growth hacking is something that is very easy to do and fully automated thankfully.

As you would expect you don't particularly want every Tom, Dick and Harry, following you unless they are genuine sports fans or into your niche!. Again, as always target traffic and following is what is required for you to succeed.

Getting those followers is as simple as following the exact process as growing your twitter account. Find popular Pinners in your niche of choice.

26/38

Once you have, follow them as they have already shown an interest in your niche topic and thus quite likely to follow you back.

Performing mass follow acts is, in my opinion best done using the Ninja Pinner software, which is not free but is thankfully very cheap $35 or so and performs a number of tasks related to Pinterest.

Follow/unfollow, Repin and comment. To name but a few good aspects of this software. I like the facility of it to unfollow followers that are not following back after a certain number of days.

The whole process can be fabulously automated. I do advise setting and using the time delay filters that are on the software and just letting it run in the back ground doing what it does best - grow your Pinterest Account.

Get My FREE Guide "How To Make Money With A Blog" Here!

Because You Know There Is Money There On The Table For You As A Sports Blogger!. The Question Is: Are You "Game" Enough To Take It?!?

Pinterest is not just about how big your following is or indeed how many repins you get.

On the face of it, although repins are good for SEO purposes and social signals they, unfortunately mean very little in the Pinterest world and what we want to achieve.

We want website visits, not repins. This is where you play a little on X factor of curiosity.

Reveal too much information on your pin and, right away you are telling potential readers (and buyers!) what the blog post is about.

If you for example put up a pin "Top 5 Chicago Bulls Players Of All Time" and you either name them in the pin or do it visually with images of their face there is no curiosity value of what the article is going to be about.

Don't name them or name a few or two and leave the rest with question marks people will wonder who they are and click on over to your article and read it out of curiosity.

This why infographic based pins although great for getting repins, are horrible for getting actual clicks over to your site. People save them for later! Kinda like bookmarking them for later.

Also, it has to be said, making your pins beautiful attract a lot more attention pins will win more attention and clicks. Do use a graphic design package like Canva, which is free for getting the best out of this aspect of Pinterest.

Canva is a Great free tool that can help you to make beautiful pins.

Given that Pinterest is fully searchable there are a few optimisation techniques that you can do to help your pins to get noticed more by the Pinterest search engine.

27/38

The benefits of doing so are obvious, getting you to be seen more easily and by more people, thus greater potential of traffic to your site.

On your profile, when naming it use keywords that fully identify what your account is about.

E.g.

Your Site Name | Sports Memorabilia In the above example, sports memorabilia is the keyword.

In the "about you" part, use keywords to properly describe what your pins are about, this helps Pinterest's search facility to identify what you pin about. Use Keywords as names of your boards also.

When comes to describing what your boards and pins are about, lightly use keywords, I mean no keyword stuffing at all, just natural sentences that are natural language and contain keyword phrases.

Also, use hash tags, just 2-3 maximum to describe what your pins and boards are about. It has been known that the use of hash tags to generate more traffic on Pinterest.

Get My FREE 7 Day Blogging Course! Discover All You Need To Know To Build That Income Producing Blog That You Have Been Dreaming Of! Enter your name and email below and you'll get instant access to my course and you'll be well on your way to building a sustainable business online - The right way!.

We Respect Your Privacy And Will NEVER Spam you!.

YouTube I am willing to guess or bet that you would not have considered YouTube as Social Media!.

It absolutely is!.

Due to the social interactivity of liking and commenting of videos and sharing of them YouTube is very much a social network.

This video sharing giant is something that is fantastic for creating not only awareness of your brand it is great for humanising your brand.

Humanising your brand and appearing in your video's is something that is nothing short of brilliant for becoming real and building trust with your audience.

People will naturally want to know who is the guy or gal behind the brilliant sports blog that they are reading. When you build trust it helps you to convert the traffic into sales.

Just like the creation of your written content you ought to base your video around keywords.

28/38

Do mention the keyword naturally in your content within the first 30 to 60 seconds. Use it in the title and Video description also. Use tags to help Youtube to determine what the video is about.

In the video description link to similar and popular videos to yours. Simply you want to do what you can to help YouTube to determine what your video is about and to make it easy to be found.

Video SEO is not difficult. Brian Dean, explains it very well here in this video. Take the time and effort to watch it.

https://youtu.be/aJFK9k5i1ew One thing that I like to do on YouTube is to encourage viewers to subscribe to my channel and to my Facebook group. I do this by having a clickable area on the video and mentioning it to them in the video. which of course being me to...

When it comes to social media the absolute king is of course Facebook. The very best is Facebook Groups.

When you are building your Facebook group you are building your community. Having a thriving community is something that draws great traffic and serves you very well during any Google Update that you may suffer from.

Having a thriving community of loyal fans, readers and advocates of your brand is something to highly aspire to. Do that and you won't ever be worrying about traffic generation, Just keep it ticking over and growing.

29/38

Growing your Group is no mean feat!. Sure you have seen groups with tons of members, tens of thousands in fact!.

But, They take time and persistent effort to grow!. It is something you have to keep on top of on an ongoing basis.

Think of it like a vine, A vine that stops growing dies. Keep growing your group and before you know it you will have wild traffic and yes sales for your site.

Put in an effort to grow your facebook group.

Few Tips For Growing Your Facebook Group: Pin a tweet to your twitter home page inviting people to join your FB Group.

Mention Your FB Group in your YT Videos and Place a Clickable Icon on Your Videos to aid group Joins.

Mention Your Group to your email subscribers in the very first email and place a link in your email signature.

Cross Promote on other social media channels mentioning your FB Group.

Run an Advert from your Fan Page, mention the URL of your group.

Have an ad in the side bar of your blog informing visitors about your group.

Make a Category "Join Our FB Group" on your blog that links direct to your FB Group.

Mention your Facebook group on your important pages, About me, contact, Thank you pages.

Apply those 8 tips on a frequent and regular basis and you will quickly grow your site. Do have patience, as this does take time.

Get My FREE Guide "How To Make Money With A Blog" Here!

Because You Know Earning A Living From Something That You Love Is More Enjoyable!. The Question Is: Are You Going To Put In The Effort And Build Your Sports Blog Or Forever Be Stuck In The 9-5 Grind?!?

Getting Search Engine Traffic Having mentioned the importance of and owning your own traffic it would be completely mindlessly crazy to ignore the highly targeted traffic that search engines do bring in.

What I am saying is don't be reliant on any single source of traffic, have a number of equally balanced traffic sources.

Lets say you have 3 sources of traffic owned, search engines and social media. you should aim for 40% Owned 30% Search Engines and 30% Social Media.

30/38

No single source should be greater than 40%.

Getting highly targeted and quality search engine traffic is actually pretty darn easy!.

It is as simple as giving the search engines what they need and helping them to find it.

What they need is quality content.

Getting traffic from search engines is about creating quality engaging content that your potential audience is going to consume. That is one of the very reasons why Google puts a lot of emphasis on user experience.

Getting Traffic from search engines begins with good SEO, and the first step in good SEO is Keyword research.

Good SEO Starts with keyword research

Keywords That Drive Traffic!

Without diving too deeply into the art of keyword research, which is covered in another article I will cover the type of keywords that are more effective for driving traffic to your site. Some of those are actually pretty obvious, other not so.

Here is one of my favourites..

Question Based Keywords Question based keywords are pretty awesome for a number of reasons, one of the top one is you are helping you audience with their pertaining questions and problems which has the positive effect of increasing your authority in your particular niche.

Also, by helping people you gain their trust which is something that helps you to convert traffic into sales and of course email subscribers.

Finding question related keywords is very easy - just use Buzzfeed, Ahrefs or my fave AnswerThePublic!. Just log in to anyone of those websites, enter your search term or niche and really see what comes up.

31/38

Question Based Keywords are great for driving traffic to your site Another bonus in regards to Question related keywords is that many of them have featured position zero places, meaning answer a question well enough and your site and article can get placed in best position of them all - above position 1!.

And when that happens, expect an avalanche of traffic!.

List Based Keywords Like it or not as a race we just seem to be addicted or attracted to listicles! list based articles.

These kind of articles are traffic magnets!.

Usually we are talking about "Top X" style articles, for example "Top 10 Sports Shoes" "Top 5 Touchdowns of all time". When these involve products you can get a lot of clicks over to the sales page, which is really good. They tend to convert less well than review based keywords, mostly because they are higher up in the sales funnel.

What converts much better is "Best" type keywords, particularly where products are concerned.

I would n't do "Best 10 Running Shoes" and "Top 10 Running Shoes" due to the potential of google flagging your site for having similar keywords and content.

Save the "best" type keywords for products and "Top" ones for "Top 10 ways" to find a bargain at a sports memorabilia auction for example, saving the "best" for products will help your site to earn more money.

32/38

Helpful Keywords The name of the game here in the blogosphere is to help your audience be you a sports blogger, fashion blogger or whatever. Help your readers and you will gain their respect, trust and chances are they will become regular readers of your blog.

Such helpful keywords are those related to tutorials or "How To's". How to kind of article like "top" are high up in the sales funnel and can gain you some sales or signups or whatever it is you are seeking.

Again, How To, keywords can generate a lot of traffic on both social media and from search engines. You can find those kind of keywords in AnswerThePublic keyword wheel.

Get My FREE 7 Day Blogging Course! Discover All You Need To Know To Build That Income Producing Blog That You Have Been Dreaming Of! Enter your name and email below and you'll get instant access to my course and you'll be well on your way to building a sustainable business online - The right way!.

We Respect Your Privacy And Will NEVER Spam you!.

The Best Sports Blogs To Inspire You To Sport Blogging Success Inspiration is good, very good, in fact great!. Be inspired by theses successful blogs and check out the quality of their content and monetization methods. Perhaps they can inspire you to make a site every bit as brilliant as they have. ​Lets make this a list of mixed sports and just focus on one individual sport!.

The Football Lab This is a pretty brilliant football blog that focuses on much more than just the English Premier League, giving details about the Championship, League 1 and League 2 also.

It is a Pretty terrific site detailing everything about the game including news, transfers, opinions. It's does appear to be much more of a hobby site with very light advertising as a means of making money from it.

They could offer some kind of merchandise in regards to teams on some pages to increase revenue. Great site none the less.

Check out the football lab here!

33/38

The Football Lab! Darn great Award winning blog! Love it!

Get My FREE Guide "How To Make Money With A Blog" Here!

Because You Know That You Can Make A Living As A Sports Blogger! The Question Is: Do You Want To Earn A Living Doing What You Love Or Continuing As You Are?!?

Love Tennis Blog Cleanly designed and with a premium theme but not the most eye catching of blogs for what is a very popular year round sport.

Love Tennis Blog, is though incredibly popular and is lacking in monetisation, all in all as far a making some coin, these guys could do much better. Another hobby blog I think.

I am guessing here, many sports have blogs that are not properly or efficiently monetised to make money and are run as fan sites or news sites as hobbies. Meaning there is good potential out there for wannabe sports bloggers.

Blood And Mud! 34/38

Brilliantly and aptly named Blood And Mud!. Is one of the absolute top independently run rugby blogs out there! Their content is diverse and detailed with regular articles, podcasts and video updates.

Much better monetised that the previous two blogs that I have mentioned, I do wonder though if they have affiliate sales to go along with their advertising revenue to diversify their income sources?.

Bad Left Hook Bad Left Hook keeps its readers hooked with latest news in the boxing world across all of the weight categories. Interestingly, there a lot of fan posts, which could lead boxing bloggers to guest post opportunities.

35/38

Planet F1 The formula 1 blog Planet F1 is one that you could consider as highly informative and very interactive with plenty of competitions and plenty of quizzes for you to enjoy and have fun testing your knowledge.

There is also a forum area for fans of the motor sport to make their voices and opinions heard!.

Planet F1, probably the most engaging of all motor sports blogs out there on the internet.

Sports Blog FAQ Frequently Asked Questions Time is now to answer any possible pertaining questions that you may have in regards to Sports Blogs and starting your own sports blog.

36/38

If your question is not answered here - ask away in the comments section below!.

What Makes A Good Sports Blog?

Way to go! Great question!.

A great sports blog is one that is highly targeted towards a predefined targeted audience with high quality informative content that is available in different formats, video, podcast and articles.

A good sports blog fully engages its readers, has a some interactivity, like regular sports quizes and "test your knowledge"is great and enjoyable for readers. Can also ask readers opinion on a few topics? show they videos or memorable sporting events?

Where To Start A Sports Blog?

The very best place to start a sports blog is from the comfort of your own home and on WordPress, I show you here exactly how to go about that.

Sports Blog V Sports Vlog?

Seriously, you should n't differentiate between the two you know, you can easily do both together and reformat your blog post content into video format.

Besides, You don't own YouTube and your channel can get shut down at any time and you certainly don't want to run your business on rented land thus, very advisable and darn well common sense for you to run your business from something you have full control over - your own domain.

Sure, run your Vlog in conjunction with your Blog and use YouTube as a means of driving traffic, recognition and humanisation of your brand.

Get My FREE 7 Day Blogging Course! Discover All You Need To Know To Build That Income Producing Blog That You Have Been Dreaming Of! Enter your name and email below and you'll get instant access to my course and you'll be well on your way to building a sustainable business online - The right way!.

We Respect Your Privacy And Will NEVER Spam you!.

How To Start A Sports Blog - The Conclusion Now that you have learned how to start a sports blog, learning how much the market is worth, and how much money you can make from sports blogging as well as key topics such as learning how to grow your social media following, drive traffic to your site and monetize that traffic.

37/38

The question is what are you going to do with all that knowledge? Are you going to use it to build a brand?

(I am hoping you are nodding your head here!)

Are you going to use that information and what you have just learned to build your dream blog and earn a full time income from it online?

Or are you going to sit around twiddle your thumbs doing nothing and then cry when the opportunity passes you and you have your next big bill to pay!.

Take Action!

It is time for you to put in an effort and take action and get building that dream sports site of yours and earn a nice income from it too - one that will end up with you quittin' your day job!.

Simply fill in the box below and grab your free 7 day e course on blogging and get yourself started right away! and before you know it, you'll be earning money online!

Are You SERIOUS About Making Money Online?

Grab My 100% FREE Guide For Beginners And Learn How To Build A Sustainable Business On The Internet

By Doing It The Right Way! We Respect Your Privacy And Will NEVER Spam You!.

I hope that you have fully enjoyed this article "How To Start A Sports Blog" and has inspired you to take action get going with what you have been dreaming about for a while.

If you have any questions, or need any help, leave a comment below and I get back to you as quickly as I can.

To your success and blogging best.

Derek.

38/38