In January of this year eight wild sports nuts stepped into our office asking for help designing a kewl-ass sports blog for them. So … we did.
As usual, during our initial conversation, I asked “Are you doing this for fun? or for money?” The response was a resounding “BOTH!”
Most of you know I’ve been working on my book, “Guerrilla Blogging Strategies,” and its companion class for some time. This was the perfect opportunity to practice the class and thus, The Sports Brewery Team became my guinea pigs and in no short time we began.
A few days later The Sports Brewery website was ready and on January 27th The Sports Brewery went live and the TSB Team took their plan into action.
Step One: CONTENT. Within days the site had 30+ posts and articles. Within the week close to 150.
Step Two: OPTIMIZATION. I gave the team some search engine optimization basics and they implemented them wonderfully. Its taken time for them to get into the habit of remembering to focus on keyterms and implement them within the content; but in the past 3 months they’ve become skilled at keyterm saturation.
Step Three: LINKING STRATEGIES. This is the hardest, but most beneficial strategy a blog-based site can implement. There are 3 basic linking opportunities: inbound, outbound, and relevancy. Linking to the right kinds of blogs AND having them link back to you is crucial; but linking to irrelevant websites can kill this strategy dead.
Step Four: BEING AN EXPERT. These sports nuts know their stuff and being experts is not a problem. Their content ranges from simple silliness to hard facts and stats. Writing fluff gets you nowhere… but writing cutting edge/volatile articles gets you attention. This often leads you back into Step Three.
Step Five: TIMELINESS/RELEVANCY*. With eight guys watching sports news as often as they can they often catch the first whispers of news and they often achieve high SERPs** from simply being the second or third sports news blog to jump on a story.
Step Six: UTILIZE SOCIAL MEDIA. As in all marketing, the more people you can reach the greater percentage of those people will visit your site, increasing your traffic and buying your stuff. Social media is the ultimate linking strategy because your Facebook page and your Twitter account count as inbound links, they increase your outreach and fanbase, and they help spread your content around. If you can say one thing once but have it appear in multiple places … doesn’t that make your life easier?
There are more strategies, but these are the six basics that can launch a site into the stratosphere.
Want proof?
Firstly, we use two main barometers to measure success for a site that wants to sell advertising as a way to make money. First and foremost is Alexa. Alexa measures site activity and creates a number that advertisers use to determine a site’s viability as an advertising venue.
Secondly, Google page rank. The higher your rank, the more opportunities for SERPs that result in greater traffic which, in turn, affects your Alexa score. Advertisers begin to consider your website a viable advertising venue when your Alexa score breaches the 100,000 mark.
Launch date: January 20th.
January Data:
Unique visits: 1,775 (in 11 days!) Total visits: 3869 Alexa rank: 5,753,234 Google rage rank: 0
February Data:
Unique visits: 5,845 Total visits: 13,457 Alexa rank: 3,582,618 Google rage rank: 0
March Data:
Unique visits: 7,094 Total visits: 14,476 Alexa rank: 871,852 Google rage rank: 1
April Data (incomplete as of this article):
Unique visits: 3,812 Total visits: 9,745 Alexa rank: 207,893 (WOW!) Google rage rank: 1
If you think these numbers might be bloated with irrelevant traffic let’s look at PageViews and TOS (Time on Site).
PageViews reflect the average number of pages (ie posts and pages) a visitor clicks to per visit.
A WHOPPING 15.6 pages per visit! The average on most websites? 1.5
Time on site reflects how long a visitor stays on your site each visit.
24.5% of visitors stay on the site 30 seconds or longer. You think that’s low? The average is around 5%!
Soon The Sports Brewery will be under the 100,000 mark and advertisers will start paying attention to them; then the site will start generating more revenue.
But we won’t rest on our laurels because we will soon teach them even more guerrilla blogging strategies!
* Timeliness/Relevancy. As in all journalism, the sooner you jump on a story (or gossip), the more likely you will be the resource everyone goes to for that story. If your site has the right elements (PR, traffic, content) your story’s link can be on the first page of Google right next to other major news media. Relevancy is important, as well. With a site about cereal, you aren’t going to get a lot of traction with an article about pool tables.
**SERPs. Search Engine Results Pages
