Once you’ve got your blog setup with a hosting company and you’re posting loads of quality content the next move is to make your time and effort pay dividends. The chance of you becoming the next Bill Simmons, Will Leitch, or even Jay Mariotti is slim at best but you can still pull a few dollars in a reasonably easy manner.

The Sports Dollar is a site dedicated to generating income for sports bloggers, and this post by Alana G suggests ways for sports bloggers to become more business oriented. I covered a few money making options in a March 2008 Make Money With a Sports Blog post. Those ideas still work and some of them are featured on the list below.

Sales
The biggest money maker is independent sales. Simple math tells you that you’ll make more money if you cut the middle man. Ticket and casino companies are most likely to approach you. I don’t mind selling them ad space but a lot of people do. I’ve been offered money to place a logo on the entire background of the site, write a post pitching a product, and to promote a China-based dating site, and I turned them down. Even though I have a lot of ads I didn’t think those ads worked. Especially a logo that compromised the entire site.

Cost Per 1000 Impressions (CPM)
Fantasy Sports Ventures- This is my advertising network home. They offer an extremely competitive CPM and the split is 50-50. They’re partnered with Gannett Co. to provide another outlet for the network.

Yardbarker- Most independent bloggers first experience with a network comes with Yardbarker. They pay somewhere around 40 cents for every 1000 views of a 3rd party ad and $1+ from direct deals and this value goes up during key times like the playoffs. YB recently announced a partnership with Fox Sports which offers great exposure for their members.

BuzzLogic- They offer a $2 CPM but they’re kind of selective. Their inventory is kind of thin for sports blogs making your monthly earnings inconsistent.

Adsdaq- They allow you to set your own price for your ads and offer a 50-50 split. Don’t go crazy and set the prices too high (Over $1.50 is probably pushing it) and you’ll make some nice change. Use the backup feature to conserve ad space on your site.

Pay Per Click (PPC)
Chitika- This one doesn’t make a lot of money for me but some is better than none. You can set the ads to only appear to visitors from search engines giving you a better chance for a click thru.

Google Adsense- Most of the opinions I get from other sports bloggers about Adsense are negative. I’ve had decent success. I have the text link across the top, a box at the end of every post, and a smaller scraper down on the right. Obviously, the ads with the best positioning perform the best.

Text Links
- One of the easiest ways to make money but it takes awhile to kick in to effect. It’ll be anywhere from 2-4 months before you make sales. The ads are sold on older, indexed posts of yours. You’ll probably forget you signed up until you see the Paypal payment.

Linkworth- They allow you to set your price but like text-link-ads it takes sometime to get rolling. The ads usually appear on the homepage. You’ll see three Linkworth ads on my homepage at the very bottom of my ad list.

Amazon is the only straight up affiliate program I’ve used with any success and even then the earnings have been minimal. The holiday season is decent but the rest of the year is weak. You have to factor in that I don’t put much effort into Amazon and just take what I can get.

The unveiling of David Beckham’s new underwear poster last week in San Francisco attracted a large audience, and created the buzz Macy’s and Emporio Armani were looking for. I don’t know how much they paid Beckham or how much underwear they sold, but I’m sure the investment is paying off. The English soccer star revealed via his blog that he was shocked by the interest in his billboard.

“To be honest, I was amazed by the huge billboard poster outside Macy’s department store, but even more amazed by the amount of people who turned up to see it! I’m always surprised by the amount of attention certain things create, but the attention this campaign has created is pretty incredible.”

Becks is being humble. He knows he’s an international sex symbol, and I’m sure Macy’s and Emporio Armani told him his piece would be prominently featured on the side of a store. What David should find incredible is the way nobody cares about soccer in America, but they pretend that they do when Beckham’s involved.

David Beckham, soccer, football, blog, billboard

Putting all of the losing and lawlessness aside, the Cincinnati Bengals have figured out another way to be first in the league.. With a widget.

Bengals’ fans market them. Courtesy of The Enquirer
Bengals Widget. Courtesy of Cincinnati Bengals.com
Photo Courtesy of Cincinnati Bengals.com

Tags: Cincinnati Bengals, NFL, Widget, Myspace, Facebook, Blogger, WordPress

The guys over at Five Tool Tool dropped their Top 10 Tips For Sports Blog Traffic a few days ago. I wanted to talk about a few of the things they’ve mentioned and add a couple of thoughts. Here’s a review of the FTT list:

1. Ass Kissing
2. Current Events
3. Whore Yourself
4. Whore Others
5. Whore Strangers
6. Tech Fun
7. Cheap Heat
8. Keywords
9. Gambling
10. Lists!

My list looks like this:

1. Good Material: It doesn’t guarantee traffic, but you have to have something interesting for the masses if they find you. How many boring blogs have you stumbled upon and then bookmarked? Exactly. It doesn’t matter if your post are breaking news, spins on mainstream stories, youtube clips, faux interviews, real interviews, something original, or a crazy story, you want to have something that can keep people’s attention.

2. Ass Kissing/Get Links: If you’ve crafted a masterpiece or you got a story/angle nobody’s going with, you gotta get the word out. The biggest sneezers in the sports blogosphere are DeadSpin, The Big Lead, and With Leather. If one of those sites picks up your story, you’re looking at a good day numbers wise. On the mainstream side of the tracks, your traffic’s gonna boom if you get picked up on SI’s Hot Clicks or The 10 Spot Blog… You’re fooling yourself if you think any of  those folks have time to sit and read through every blog, so your gonna have to point them in the right direction.

3. Be Social: The number one stop for a sports blog trying to get a rep is Ball Hype. It’s the easiest way to connect with other bloggers, and you can check out what everybody else is doing. In a nutshell it’s Digg for sports… Other bloggers see your stories on Ball Hype and they hype ’em up or down. On a good day, a number of sites will link to your story because they saw it on Ball Hype.

Don’t limit yourself to BH and Digg.. Go do some searching around and find which social site works for you. Blog Carnival is another site that can get you some new traffic, but I can’t explain how it works even though I know how it works… It’s just one of those things. All I can say is find a carnival, hop on, and enjoy the ride.

4. Spread Love: Traffic is the ultimate goal, but you have to remember you got brothas and sistas in the struggle for numbers. You see a story you like, link to it, or you can have the increasingly popular ”link dump”. The ”dumps” are a collection of stories from around the blogosphere. I have Bloggas Be Typin but you can check out Cheap Shots or Spanning The Blog as other examples. When you’ve linked to others, it encourages them to link to you. You can call it karma, I call it the Blogger Way.

 Deadspin’s “Blogdome“ is the most popular link dump, even if it’s been getting some neg(ative) press lately. Earlier this week Stop Mike Lupica wondered who’s leg do you have to hump to get a link on Deadspin, and got a few people aggy.. I definitely see certain blogs linked more often than the rest, but it is what it is. Like I said in tip #2, sometimes you gotta point people in the right direction.

5. Cheap Heat/Keywords/Window Shoppers/Current Events: I use this category to draw people that are passing through.. People that are looking for sports but not really. These terms draw the most people to me through search engines:

1. Serena Williams’ ass
2. Nip Slip
3. Brady Quinn’s girlfriend

The key there is the women. They don’t say sex sells for nothing. I wrote about the first story and linked to the last two, and everyday people find my blog by searching for those terms. I’m not saying those are the 3 best, but those perform for me. 

Just like sports radio hosts can yell “Pete Rose” or “Steroids” and watch the phone lines light up, bloggers have some automatics they can go to. I like to call ‘em Kobe and the 7A’s (A-Rod, Arenas, Artest, & African-American Athlete Arrested). Everybody does it in one way or another, and the only down side to this technique is if it’s your only technique.

STAT SHEET

These sites, technorati/alexa, allow you to track your ranking according to their guidelines. If you want all of your numbers delivered to you in one place check out popuri.us. Hopefully all of the tips above will have you climbing up the charts.

Top Ten Tips For Sports Blog Traffic. Courtesy of Five Tool Tool

DIGG IT  *  DEL.ICIO.US  *  REDDIT  *  BALL HYPE

All you ever wanted to know about a woman making love to a Red Sox fan. Courtesy of Ladies Dot Dot Dot

Taking a look at ESPN’s new football blog. Courtesy of The Big Lead

Roger Goodell prefers bitches to women. Courtesy of Leave The Man Alone

Joe Budden says Nas is right..Hip Hop is dead. Courtesy of XXL

Is the end near for Curt Schilling? Courtesy of the WBRS Sports Blog

Retro gear galore… If you’re in NY. Courtesy of Dallas Penn

Paris Hilton played high school hockey? Yeah right.. Courtesy of With Leather

Jim Jones and Cam are cool again? I can’t keep up. Courtesy of SOHH

Let’s all pray that there’s no video of Michael Vick doing this. Courtesy of Awful Announcing

Bill Simmons hasn’t off’d himself yet..Give it a week. Courtesy of ESPN.com