The problem: many sports bloggers, especially newbies focus entirely on driving traffic and increasing page views, paying less attention to what those visitors actually do once they land on their sports blog.  Is a blog that generates 100,000 page views a month, but only has 5 subscribers and little comments, really successful?  In my opinion, no.  Traffic itself can be deceiving.  Traffic is often a product of strong marketing and networking, not necessarily strong content.

I look at traffic on its own as a measure for my marketing and networking efforts primarily.  But measure the success of my sports blog by how well received and valued my content is.  As well as how readers interact with that content.

You can’t improve what you don’t track or more likely what you pay little attention to.  Here are four concrete metrics I use to measure reader engagement and interaction, and ultimately the success of my sports blog beyond traffic.

• Conversation rate
• Bounce rate
• Average page views per visit
• Average time on site

Conversation Rate

What’s the best way to tell whether visitors are engaging with your sports blog’s content?  Comments.  The more comments you have the more people are interested in what you wrote.  And you certainly have a better chance of converting them into regular readers.

That’s where conversation rate comes in.  Simply put, it is the number of comments per post (# comments divided by # of posts).  It is a good barometer to watch over the life of your sports blogging career.  You can see trends of how certain types of posts or style of writing leads to more or less comments.  And you can keep track of how your blog is improving in terms of interaction by your readers.

For Wordpress users there is a great plugin I use that tracks your conversation rate for you called Blog Metrics, created by Joost de Valk.  It tells you the average number of comments per post (excluding your own comments) over the life of the blog and for the last 30 days.  It also tells you how many words are in each comment which gives you a good idea if people are leaving substantial comments or just fluff.  For multi-author blogs, this plugin will break out the conversation rate by author as well.

Comments play a big role in strengthening your sports blog’s social proof.  A blog with 0 comments on every or a large majority of posts feels dead, empty and frankly unpopular.  For that reason I value comments more than anything when measuring the success of my own sports blog.

If you haven’t been tracking your conversation rate, you should be.

Bounce Rate

Bounce rate is another metric used to measure visitor engagement and page effectiveness.  You will often hear this term around internet marketers (my Clark Kent job).  Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who leave your site after landing on the entry page.  Basically, people who hit your site then “bounce” without exploring other pages on your sports blog.  As I am sure you are thinking, this is not a good thing.

Why you should care?  If your bounce rate is excessively high on average (75% or higher), it typically (not always) means your content isn’t grabbing visitors or persuading them to read more, and your page design isn’t effectively leading people towards more content on other pages.

You can easily find your sports blog’s bounce rate using Google Analytics (you should have Google Analytics by the way if you don’t already).  Here is a screen shot of the overall bounce rate of my Philly sports blog for the last month.

It is important to note that bounce rate will vary based on the source of traffic, and it should be measured against previous bounce rates, not different sources.  For example, different referring sites will have different bounce rates.  To a degree that tells you the quality of visitor each referrer is sending you.  My StumbleUpon traffic has a solid 29% bounce rate, whereas my Yardbarker traffic has a terrible 83% bounce rate.  Maybe I should try StumbleUpon ads, hmm.

There are many ways to improve your bounce rate, but that is enough information to fill many more posts.

Average Page views Per Visit

This one is well-known and monitored because it relates to CPM advertising models like the Yardbarker network.  Total number of page views divided by the total numbers of visits.

This another good indicator of how compelling your content is and how user-friendly your blog design is.  One of the most common ways to improve this number is by adding related articles to the end of posts.

Average Time on Site

This metric is self explanatory and the perfect way to see how well your content holds visitors’ attention.  Most stat packages give you this information, but if for some reason you don’t have any tracking you can check your blog using Compete’s site analytics.  Again, you should look at the average time on site from all traffic sources to evaluate your marketing efforts and referrers in relation to your sports blog’s content.

By evaluating your sports blog in these four areas you can make better decisions to improve your site.  You’ll have a better idea what content is really grabbing readers’ attention, if your blog design is working toward your ultimate goal and truly how successful your sports blog is in terms of visitor engagement.

How does your sports blog stack up in these four areas?

P.S.

The next post will be on getting more traffic and links with sports resource pages.  So make sure you subscribe to my free email updates or RSS feed so you don’t miss out.

1. I have been and will continue to focus most of my attention on growing my actual Philly Sports blog, the Recliner GM in the immediate future.
2. Running two blogs with real, high quality content was a tougher task than I anticipated and I made a conscious decision not to write crap just to get by.

Does that mean I have given up on the idea of producing a blog dedicated entirely to helping sports bloggers promote, grow and monetize their sports blog?  Hell no.  Just means for right now my priorities are on being an actual sports blogger, rather than a make money blogging writer.  I have a ton of ideas, more importantly I am gaining more and more experience that will help shape strong content when the time comes to go at this concept hard.

In the meantime…

The Sports Blogger Pack is going strong with 28 members in the Google Group and growing.  I will continue to update that page and list of blogs associated with it.  It’s in everyone’s best interest to promote the hell out of that group.  The bigger it gets the bigger the positive impact we can have on each others blogs.

I am changing my theme to something cleaner, more flexible and manageable so I can spend less time coding stuff and fixing crap that breaks and more time brainstorming and writing.

Once I make the switch my posting frequency will likely be sparse, with the idea to not waste time on crap you either already know or is of no real help to the cause of building a better sports blog.  Basically more meat less frequently.

Good luck to all my fellow sports bloggers.

It is a known fact that the best and most profitable way to make money online is by selling your own product or service. I mean you can’t really beat 100% of the revenue going into your own pocket. But not everyone has the drive, wherewithal, resources or time do develop a brand new and unique product or service.

That is where affiliate programs come into play. As most of you already know these programs allow you to offer other people’s products or services for a percentage of the revenue. All without having to deal with customer service issues, fulfillment and managing inventory.

With those benefits in mind I have decided to create an Amazon and eBay affiliate-based store as part of my overall blog monetization strategy. What the hell does that mean?

Project: The Philly Sports Store

My blog the Recliner GM Philly Sports Blog caters heavily to Phillies, Sixers and Eagles fans. That is who we promote to, our primary audience and regular readers. In order to monetize that traffic effectively I will create a store with products targeted to that specific demographic.

At the outset the product listings will consist primarily of Amazon and eBay merchandise from books, jerseys, dvds, sports memorabilia and anything else Philly sports-related I can find through those affiliate programs.

Now this is not some dinky “store” page added to the blog with text links and banners to affiliates. I created a subdirectory of my blog called Philly Sports Store with a new Wordpress install in order to create a full and completely flexible store that will house tons of product pages and reviews. This allows me to keep a uniform look and feel that blends with the branding of my blog as well interlinks the two seamlessly.

Benefits of adding a niche store to your existing sports blog

• Sports blog monetization - This creates a portal for you to sell relevant products to your audience in an unobtrusive way. You can easily reference and link to your store and products in posts without completely sending people into the abyss of the web, and provides them an easy path back to your blog as well.
• Passive income - Niche stores are huge right now. I myself have already created two BANS stores and have plans for multiple others in the near future. But why all the hype? Building niche stores creates a passive income stream. Do something once, and get paid over and over again on that one effort. It isn’t that simple; there is some maintenance over time, but it is very minor for the most part.
• SEO and targeted organic traffic - Amazon and especially eBay product listings are keyword laden therefore they have built in SEO benefits. For example on my BANS sites I was ranking on the first page of all major search engines for long tail keywords within a matter a days without any immediate SEO work (disclaimer it doesn’t last if you don’t build on it). By having a niche store attached to your blog you will get targeted search traffic (i.e. people looking for Sixers jerseys) showing up at the store. If you place a link or graphic to your blog in a prominent location many of those people interested in Sixers jerseys will wander over for some Sixers hoops talk as well.
• Growth potential - If you do decide to develop your own products or services that cater to the niche of your sports blog you will have already built a medium to promote it. And if you did your job you would have a head start with a store that is already generating targeted traffic.

In my head the possibilities seem endless. Now it is just a matter of getting to work and putting all this into practice. Over the course of developing my Philly Sport Store I will write several posts outlining things such as my thinking, progress, what tools and resources I’ve used, what expenses I’ve incurred and of course my success (or failure).

Will it work? I don’t know. I think so otherwise I wouldn’t be trying and putting in the time. But honestly if it doesn’t, so what? It will likely have cost me very little money, my own time and the learnings I get will be well worth the effort.

What do you think?

I am curious what type of results you guys are having? Is the $0.91 eCPM I have good, average or bad? Do you think these ads the most effective way to monetize the real estate on our sports blogs?

Let me try to extrapolate this Ad Network’s potential a bit to start the conversation off.

What the spreadsheet shows is an estimated $1.00 eCPM. Then a section with potential unique visitors per month. The sold impressions are calculated by multiplying the unique visitors by 1.65 (the average pageviews per visitor on my best blog). You can only have a maximum of 3 Yardbarker ad units on your blog so the rest of the spreadsheet projects the revenue for the blogger based on the number of sold impressions times the estimated $1.00 eCPM, then broken down by the number of ad units.

What I am wondering is, how, if at all can you increase your eCPM? These ad units are BIG and take up a lot of space on a blog. If you have little traffic it’s near impossible to find private advertisers. But you won’t make much of anything through this ad network either with little traffic or a low eCPM. But as you can see when you do drive some serious traffic (20,000 uniques) if the eCPM doesn’t increase significantly 3 Yardbarker ads would only net you $100 a month. Then it becomes hardly worth dedicating that space for those ads, right? So at what point should a sports blogger abandon this ad network and focus on selling private ads with a much better eCPM that you have direct control over?

Thoughts?

Calling all basketball fans or people that just want a chance at $50 there is a new sports blog contest going on over at Arin It Out - NBA Draft Contest.

The rules are simple predict the NBA draft order. Whoever gets the most correct wins. For more details and how to participate head over to Arin It Out now.

It’s time for sports bloggers to support each other and unite - in large numbers.

More and more sports fans are migrating online to express their opinions, and the sports blogging niche is growing at a rapid pace. I believe that to be true regardless of what Daniel Scocco said in his review of our friend The Sports Dollar. For example, I looked at the sports section on Entrecard, and the total was 146. The next day that number jumped to 216. What’s more, sports bloggers are attempting to monetize their blogs now as well.

For that reason I am creating The Sports Blogger Pack. Michael Martine, of Remarkablogger coined the term “blog pack” and wrote a great post on what it is, why you should create or be apart of one, and what it means to your blogging success. I decided to take that idea and run with it.

The Perks

We speed up the networking process among sports bloggers and help each other grow and succeed in the sports blogging niche.

• Social bookmarking: Posts submitted and votes by peers on Ballhype, Yardbarker, Stumblupon, Digg etc…
• Increase in RSS subscribers
• More post comments and blog interaction
• Traffic boost
• Quality, targeted backlinks
• Technorati faves and authority
• Most importantly networking and interaction with other like individuals in the sports blogging arena

My buddy Kellex wrote a post earlier this month titled: Growth Time! Sports Blogging for Money takes off?, and I have been thinking of how we can explode the sports-blogging-for-money niche. Remarkablogger’s blog pack idea was perfect timing and a great way to put into action what Kellex was calling for in his post.

How you join

I have created a page called Sports Blogger Pack dedicated to keep a running tally and record of everyone in the pack. Simply head over to that page and leave a comment letting me know you want to join. Be sure to leave your sports blog link and the anchor text you want associated with it.

What you do after you join

This is entirely up to you. However you choose to participate is cool, so long as you do actively participate. The minimum requirement is to subscribe to the feeds of everyone in the pack and regularly interact with your fellow sports bloggers.

From there you could link to other sports bloggers’ posts on your blog or participate in sports blog link-exchanges like Mitchell over at the Juiced Sports Blog has set up. Submit stories you like to social media sites. And anything else you come up with to support our niche.

It is important for people to understand what The Sports Blogger pack is not. So please pay extra attention to the sections “Networked Growth, Not Gaming the System and Be Genuine, Form Real Relationships - This is not about Using People” of Michael’s post.

What are you waiting for? Go leave a comment on the sports blogger pack page and join the club!

What followed was an influx of votes, comments and traffic to our blog over the next couple days. To be exact 76 yardbarker votes, 11 comments and over 1,339 visitors and counting.

Now I’d be lying if I said we planned this or that I knew we’d get that level of response from posting that article on Yardbarker. But in retrospect we can dissect it and identify the factors to lead to its success so it can be repeated.

Headlines That Pop

There are 2 main things that made “Breaking News! Eagles Linked to Top Receiver!” a great headline.

1. Newsy - “Breaking News!” Those two words immediately tell the reader to pay attention and creates a sense of urgency. That’s important if you want people to act (click through to your blog). Another tactic I have just started to use is a “Rumors” post. Now that the Sixers are out of the playoffs, their fans are pretty much sitting idly waiting for the NBA draft. Meaning there isn’t much active news on the team. So I am targeting my fellow 76ers fans’ tendency to jump on any recent developments surrounding the team, as well as stir up some healthy discussion.
2. Hot topic - “Eagles Linked to Top Receiver!” This may well be the most talked about issue for Philadelphia Eagles fans. Not only that, but it is an emotional hot button that Philly fans have been pained over before T.O. came and shortly after he departed. In order to utilize this point you must know your audience. Otherwise you won’t know what they really care about. (More on this thought in future post.)

The Description Box

When I first saw what Pete wrote here I was like, “That was weak.” But on second thought it was actually pretty good. He again tapped into the emotion surrounding the topic by saying, “Has there ever been a team linked to more top-end players and landed none?” He asked a question which is a great way to create interactivity. And most importantly, Pete kept it short.

If you want to create a description that drives clicks, keep it short and don’t give away the farm. If you give too much information away, you lose intrigue. Without intrigue why would anyone need to read the rest of the story?

A Picture is Worth 1000 Words

Pete couldn’t have found a better picture for this post. (Note it isn’t on Yardbarker anymore because it wasn’t displaying correctly after a few days, but it was on there when he first posted.) To me the picture is a representation of the quality of the post and the site the reader is being directed to. If you have a crappy image chances are you have a crappy site, and people won’t bother. On the other hand, a unique image is the last piece of a traffic-driving Yardbarker submission.

We can only control three things: the headline, description and image. Yardbarker is a great way to drive targeted traffic to your sports blog. But you can’t just plop any old article up there. I typically reserve my opinion posts and rants for my regular blog readers. But whenever I get something hot, that has wide-spread interest in my niche, Yardbarker is the first place I go to get it out to the world.

That’s my best Yardbarker experience. What do you think? Have you had similar or hopefully better results on Yardbarker?

When we first started our blog we didn’t have any way for readers, bloggers or anyone to contact us. That was mistake #1. Then I got a Gmail account for the blog and posted it as a link you could simply click on (emailexample@gmail.com) and it would open your email client so you can send your message. DUMB! That basically created a superhighway for spammers right to my inbox. My spam filter picks up most of it but the “smart” ones often find their way through.

What You Should Do Instead

One option is to spell out the “@” symbol and “.” Using the above example the address would look like this: emailexample [at] gmail [dot] com. I always wondered why some websites and blogs did this and I found out the hard way.

An even better solution - create a “contact” page and use a form that people can fill out to send messages to you like the one below.

If you use the Wordpress software I recommend using the Cforms II plugin. It offers tremendous flexibility to create any type of contact form you want and it is easy to use with the ability to add a form in a post or page with a single click. I have it on both my blogs now and I love it.

Do you have a past blunder, big or small?

This from the BlogBurst’s blog:

NBA bloggers - bring it (to BlogBurst)

Now is the prime time for NBA bloggers to show us their stuff. Believe me when I say that we have some seriously interesting publishing partners who genuinely want basketball content - now is your chance! If you have an NBA blog, or know someone who does, please consider submitting it to BlogBurst. I assure you, we’ll work to get you the widest exposure possible! - BurstBlog

Benefits of BlogBurst

• It’s free - What more can I say about “FREE” except that this service literally cost you 10-minutes set-up time tops. Then you are on auto-pilot.
• Impressions/Branding: Your blog content will be syndicated on reputable and authority news sites such as: Reuters, USA Today, Fox News and the Chicago Sun Times to name a few.
• Targeted traffic - As with most broad promotion efforts Clickthroughs will be at a premium, but those who do will be highly targeted for your blogs content. And if you’ve impressed them with your initial writing chances for a new RSS or Email subscriber when they land on your blog will be much higher.
• No ugly icons that become clutter on your blog. As we all know many other networking sites require you put those little chicklets somewhere on your homepage. BlogBurst on the other hand only requires you to put an invisible meta tag in your header file to get started.

Requirements for acceptance into the BlogBurst network

• At least weekly posting
• Family-friendly language and content
• Distinct, intelligent writing style
• Have an XML syndication feed in a standard format such as RSS, RDF, or Atom

So get your best NBA playoff posts together. Join BlogBust right now and get your blog’s content in front of thousands of quality readers.

Therefore, making money from our sports blog wasn’t our initial priority and internet marketing probably isn’t a core strength among most sports bloggers. Without question a successful sports blog begins and ends with great, unique content. But, sandwiched between needs to be consistent support of that content through promotion, search engine optimization and other marketing activities.

The problem: figuring out what works and what doesn’t for sports blogging specifically. There are millions of blogs offerings “how to make money from blogging” information on the web now. The challenge for sports bloggers is taking strategies that work in the tech and blogs about “blogging” arena and adapting them to sports blogging. With that minor problem before us I decided to create Sports Blog Earnings, a place where sports bloggers will discuss and find simple yet effective tips to improve and monetize their sports blog.

Sports Blog Earnings will cover:

• Sports Blogging Basics
• Monetizing
• Search Engine Optimization
• Promotion
• Link Building
• Writing Content
• Design
• Web Tools
• Blogging Analytics
• Wordpress

Finally, what you can do to help yourself as well as contribute to the sports blogging community:

• Comment on any and everything written on Sports Blog Earnings - All feedback and comments are welcome, especially criticism and opposing opinions. That will be the best way for everyone to learn and improve their sports blog.
• Submit guest posts - I am always looking for great, unique content from someone else’s perspective, experience and voice.
• Most importantly, have fun

Sports bloggers, lets go get paid.

To find out more about me check out the about page.