Guest blogging has multiple benefits. In addition to the exposure, back link, and credibility, it provides you the opportunity to reach out to your target market and gain their trust by writing a useful and informative post.
The idea is to lookout for a blogger on a relevant topic having good readership. And that’s precisely why I am always looking for a sports or golf blogger i.e. to build some exposure and credibility for our online store selling golf balls. But to my amazement, there is a serious dearth of regularly updated golf or even sports blogs for that matter, especially when compared to the plethora of blogs on topics like tech, Internet Marketing, health, or home improvement, which is strange to say the least. Because almost everybody loves sport and almost all sports fans love to keep tabs on their favorite teams and players. A cricket or soccer lover will happily spend hours on discussing about a certain team, player, match, or tournaments. Not only that, but sport as an industry is one of the most thriving ones, with millions and billions of dollars spent on advertising.
To cut a long story short, sports as a blogging niche has all the ingredients to make it an ideal niche. Not to mention that writing on your favorite sport and networking with your reader or other bloggers is a lot more fun than writing on home improvement or tech related topics. Still, we don’t find many active sport blogs, let alone the blogs targeting specific sports like golf, cricket, baseball, or tennis. Even if there are some bloggers catering to these topics, most of them are doing nothing but rewriting news, add to it the bloggers who don’t update their blogs very often, reason being, they aren’t motivated enough.
Now, there are two types of motivations for bloggers, first the comments and appreciation coming from readers, and second, the proceeds. Many bloggers don’t opt for sports as a blogging niche because they don’t see many ways of making money from a sports blog.
If you are looking to start a blog, and finding it hard to decide on an interesting yet lucrative niche, then you can consider starting a sport blog on your favorite sport. For earning, you’ve got the following options.
Contextual Ads:
One of the most common and easiest ways to earn from a blog is to place advertisements. You can sign up as a publisher at one of those platforms like Google Adsense, Chitika, or Site Scout. Good thing about these platforms is that you don’t need to have lots and lots of traffic to sign up and start earning. You wouldn’t be earning much in the start, but even the small earnings and some progress on regular basis will keep you motivated.
In order to make the post of these programs, all you need is to stay honest to your blogging niche and target audience. For example, if you have launched a golf blog, you will need to write on golf related topics. Remember that content needs to be unique, instead of simply rephrasing golf related news. That doesn’t mean you can’t write on some ongoing tournament or the news like Rory Mcllroy and Caroline Wozniacki getting engaged. After all, you cannot blog from a vacuum without getting influenced by all the happenings, but the idea is to add your own thoughts and write from your own perspective.
Banners:
If you are an active blogger, regularly updating your blog with relevant topics, and you’ve got good numbers to boast (e.g. number of unique visitors, subscribers, and returning visitors), you can sell banner advertisements on your blogs. If you are an active blogger with considerable traffic and readership, you can get handsome amount in return of advertising space from relevant businesses, all you need is to be a little smart while pricing.
Setting up a store:
Once you’ve build a community of readers, it means you’ve got a targeted group of people who trust you. Suppose, you are blogging on golf related topics, and most of your readers consist of amateur golfers who are just starting to play golf. You can partner with a pro golfer, and create a golf course consisting of illustrations and videos, and start selling to your readers. Or you can get in touch with some golf equipment supplier and try to sell the equipment like golf bag, golf balls, shoes, and the likes.
If it’s too much fuss, you can simply work as an affiliate marketer. Talking of affiliate marketing, selling tickets for sport events as an affiliate deserves a special mention, mainly because of great profit margins. To set up a store or work as an affiliate, you will need to know your audience, and you can get an idea by looking at their comments or simply interacting with them on Facebook, or maybe conducting a simple survey.
Sponsorship & Contest:
Blogging is an art that you will master with the passage of time. Not everybody is a born writer, and you will learn the trade after spending some time as a blogger. When you’ve spent some time and you are writing good interesting content on regular basis, you have got a good “fan following” and your posts are getting some shares and shout-outs from other bloggers or influential people in your industry. It’s now time to lookout for sponsorship. As earlier suggested, sports companies (especially Golf equipment) are ready to spend quite some dollars on advertising, and one of these businesses wouldn’t mind becoming an official sponsor if you’ve got the numbers to flaunt. You will need to come up with a good business proposal though.