The past week has sure been busy and I had a lot of things going on. Academically that is. Although that didn't stop me from blogging, on the other blog.
For those not aware, I had started a football fan blog dedicated to Manchester United: Red Rants. Of course, thanks to Ahmed from Soccerlens for the promotion of the site on his blog the site, although just over a month old now boasts 82 posts. And yes, it crossed the 10,000 views mark yesterday (by the way, that was 10,000 for the day)!
What I wanted to basically talk about here, is a few thoughts about niche blogging in general, and sports blogging in particular. When blogging gurus tell you to find your niche, they mean it. Blogging becomes totally different when you find a niche you have sufficient knowledge about. But sports blogging could be slightly different from other niches. Especially football (soccer) blogs. If you want to have a successful sports blog that attracts good traffic, being current and regular with your content is an absolute must. Now that might seem pretty much the same for other niches, but in sports (football) blogging, it is the life blood, because it is what features you on UK based news aggregators like Newsnow.
Newsnow is what most sports (and specifically soccer) bloggers look to be featured in. And one of the things they look for while accepting you, among other factors, is regularity of posting content. These sites are scanned by humans in order to ensure they are not one of those splogs. In the meantime one needs to persist and produce good content, and once you are featured on Newsnow, you are golden.
Of course, in my case, I had the backing of an already high traffic blog, which instantly helped to drive traffic. And we now have our stream of 'loyal' readers ever since - that keeps growing - thanks to our furiously regular posting frequency. In the first 20 days itself we crossed 50 posts with me contributing around half of them! Now that's not something I could envision on my personal blog. If you look for instant traffic volumes, the best solution would be to buy an existing domain that gets decent traffic. Anyway, since I am new to sports blogging, I don't consider myself an authority as far as monetizing sports blogs is concerned, but I will keep you posted, as and when I learn more.
Although my sports blog primarily caters to readers from the UK, it is worth noting that at least three of our writers are desi. (Ahmed is Pakistani, which technically makes him a desi too!) Soccerlens in itself could be among the fastest growing sports blogs in its very first year, now boasting around 500,000 views a month!
I guess that should end this rather smug sounding post of mine, so in case you want to check out the blog, head over to Red Rants, where I blog as... you guessed it, Red Ranter.
10,000 views is impressive! I imagine you must be looking to drop out and do this full time :)
ReplyDeleteYou need a little more courage to go at it full time. I have just started out, and I do have a long way do go before I can sustain myself. At present, I do it because I enjoy it. The money is incidental.
ReplyDeleteSpeaking of which, I need to ask you about some stuff. Will shoot you a mail soon.
Confession. Didn't read this post. But just wanted to say that you need to stop obsessing about football and Man U like this. Did your parents send you all the way to Amreeka so that you can waste your time like this?
ReplyDeleteObsessing about football, yes. But if it can also help me make a few bucks then I am actually doing good, no?
ReplyDeleteAnyway, since you didn't read the post, read it. It's not about football, but a 'boast-post' (don't know if that is even a phrase, but copyright, TM - as Colbert would say) on the number of page-views I am getting.