How do I monetize these amateur sport websites???

For many years I played amateur football and also set up a website but it's pretty hard to make money with these sites as they don't attract much organic traffic unless you start to write articles related to football etc....

A few ways you can make money for yourself or to raise club funds

- Sell sponsorship ads to local business or pubs

- Also, if you have a squad of 20 players just ask them all to sign up to a betting affiliate programme such as betfair ( you can get links from cj.com) and you will make £10 for every sign up from your site.

In most football teams, almost all the guys will put a football bet on at some stage so this should be problem persuading them to simply open accounts. You also have Ladbrokes, Paddy Power, William Hill etc so there is potential for many commissions if all your squad buy into this.

Good luck with your site.

Hi Malcolm,

Having worked in an amateur football club I know what a nightmare it can be to try and raise money and affects many. Hopefully there will be plenty of repsonses (i'll explain why later).

In terms of monetizing the site, the more people that access it, the better for obvious reasons. This is especially true if you have youth & childrens teams. The thing you need to do is get them message out to them that its all about raising funds for the club.

One thing you could try and do is find some way of linking to a betting website. One thing I've learned about being around amateur footballers is that the common themes of women, booze & gambling are popular. You only need to listen to them in the clubhouse at the end of the day as the scores come in etc. Somewhere in there is the lure of money from gambling. If you can make some money from their gambling then all to the good.

Another thing that you can do is set up an amazon associates account in the clubs name. If not them then there's a company called buy.at . They're not disimilar except for the way people will navigate what they're looking for. Time is of the essence here as Christmas is coming so getting it up in time and getting the message around the club for them and their friends (and their friends of friends) to get their Christmas shopping and January sales.

The other thing you can do is get an autoresponder going. Then as Christmas approaches, you can point them to some of the big ticket items on Amazon as people often buy big screen TV's etc around this time. If they're going to buy anyway they could spread a little love towards the club.

One of the other things we have done at our local club is a predictions league. Put it up online so people can enter. £x pounds to enter with a prize fund hierachy (including what to do in the event of a tie). You could get one going relatively quickly now that the football season has just started. The beauty of this is that it doesn't just have to be about football. Not long now to the NFL season, you've got rugby, there's all the major sports events such as wimbledon, golf, the football world cup. It's endless. You can get something in the local paper so that everyone takes part in the surrounding area.

Hope they can get you going.

Good luck

Andrew

Another thing

adsense, widgets like thepowerbar.info, other toolbar widgets, sell space on adhitz.com theres a whole bunch of stuff

You should check out classipress for wordpress. You can setup your own classified ads site. It's great for getting local businesses to put up stuff and even the community.

Most people interested in this would be the players and their families.
You won't find many people online who even care about football, unless it's Top 20 College or the Pro's

The worlds greatest sport and I agree it should be called football and american football should be called carry ball ... sorry small rant.

You may want to take a look at cafepress dot com ... you may be able to do shirts, cups, stamps and other items with the teams logo on it ....