Sport commands a vast worldwide audience and there is every likelihood the audience tuning in to this year’s World Cup finals will exceed the 3.2 billion who watched the competition four years ago. You might run a blog about football (or soccer, depending on which side of the Atlantic you hail from); or any number of other sports. But have you ever considered ways you might generate some income from your sporting blog? The model with most potential is undoubtedly affiliate marketing, and here is how you would use this to monetize your blog.

Introducing affiliate marketing for sports products

The affiliate techniques under discussion here could apply to whichever sport you happen to blog about, whether that’s wrestling or table tennis. But let’s use football as our example, because it’s certainly the most topical sport at the moment, with the European Champions League final between Real Madrid and Liverpool looming and this summer’s World Cup in Russia around the corner.

In order to monetize your blog presence think about a product or series of products you could easily promote. Affiliate marketing itself is a simple business model – the blogger signs-up to an affiliate program, agreeing to advertise products on behalf of an advertiser. The onus then shifts to the blogger to provide a robust promotional platform to encourage sales for which the advertiser will provide a varying but generally worthwhile commission.

The advertiser doesn’t have to pay out for advertising any more, while the amount of income the blogger can generate is down to how much work you put in to promotion. The more efficiently you do this, the greater the potential  income.

As for the product? Ideally this should be something relevant to your existing blog topic. Say you like to write about the English national team. Shortly, several thousand England fans will be making their way to Eastern Europe to support the ‘Three Lions’ in the World Cup competition. Memorabilia will be in high demand home and abroad; everything from replica kits to t-shirts, hats to St George’s flags, books to DVDs and computer games. It would be worth considering affiliate programs that would focus on these types of items.

Blog content

It is important to appreciate there is so much more to affiliate marketing than simply receiving the appropriate code from an advertiser to place on your blog. People will not be seeking you out on the Internet because you’ve posted a series of links which will lead then to pages where they can purchase items. The clients who will be connecting are far more likely to be your existing blog readership, and it is interacting with these potential customers that is the most critical aspect of your affiliate marketing campaign.

In this respect the most important attribute of your blog is the content itself. If you have already been blogging for sometime, steadily building a captive audience, then you are already halfway there. Think of ways of engaging with your customers by discussing the merits of owning a particular item of sporting memorabilia rather than hoping people will click-through. There are all sorts of tricks you can employ, such as making short films about the items. Rather than saying ‘please by this football scarf,’ demonstrate how good it looks when actually being worn.

You can also tap into the resources of the many affilliate networks that have arisento find the best offers available online, such as TopOffers Mobile CPA offers. Here you will find all sorts of advice for budding blogger/entrepreneurs. And whether or not England progress far in the World Cup you can sow the seeds of your own success.