So you have a new sports betting site, and you were hoping to compete with the established sportsbook sites. How do you go about letting the world know the site exists?
In the old days, new sports gambling sites would just start aggressive Pay Per Click campaigns. With today’s Internet, the search engines no longer allow gambling sites to advertise, including a ban on search engine PPC. Removing this type of advertising forced the online gambling providers to develop other ways of increasing their popularity.
There are many strategies you can try to attract potential members to your sports betting sites.
- Build your site for a higher ranking in organic searches. This is a tough one seeing as the competition is very steep. Don’t use questionable tactics; just be honest with your SEO and optimize the pages for the content on each page.
- Create topical content well in advance of the sporting event that you would like to promote. Generally speaking, search engines can take 3 to 12 weeks to find new pages, so unless you are really up on how to get the pages indexed quicker, give new pages plenty of time to be discovered by the search engines.
- Make other sites to use your topical content in exchange for a text link back to your site. Doing this allows you to gain precious one-way text links to increase your link popularity. Just make sure you choose the text for that link carefully and the site posting your article maintains credit to you as the writer.
- Share articles from other sites. Make sure that the article you post on your site is full of keyword-rich text and optimize the page that contains that article for the contents of that article. When done properly, this can greatly improve your chances of being found in a search engine for that article topic.
- Build a forum on your site and create categories that promote the events that your site specializes in. For instance, if your site is based out of Europe, you might want to make many categories based on Soccer, such as Soccer Injuries, Soccer Trades & Rumors, etc. Doing this will generate keyword-rich, topical pages that eventually will be indexed by the search engines. The more active your forum, the greater the chance of creating countless pages that the search engines will love.
- Forums on other sites and actively contribute to them. You see, when posting to other forums, your signature is added to the bottom of your post. In your signature, you have an opportunity to place some text that could be used to promote your site. Also, some forums will allow you to place text links within the signature. Be respectful, and do not stuff the signature with too many text links.
- Post your site to as many directories as you can. Some directories can take a long time for inclusion, the DMOZ, for instance, so you should apply to them as quickly as you can after launching your new sports betting site.
- Building links can be helpful as long as you carefully search out potential linking partners. Ensure that the sites you are linking to are quality sites that you yourself would actually spend time on. A good rule of thumb is this if you would bookmark the site, others would probably bookmark it as well, and therefore, the site would be a good site to trade links with.
- Affiliate programs to other webmasters. If you offer affiliate programs, make sure that you actually pay your affiliates promptly. You would be surprised at how many sites actually don’t treat their affiliates very well. Treat the affiliates like the limited partners they are. That level of respect will likely result in your banners and text links gaining better placement on the affiliate’s websites.
- Banner space on sports-related websites. This can be an expensive proposition, so you really need to take care in selecting the sites you want to buy banner space on. Don’t base your decision on Alexa ratings alone, as these can easily be skewed. Also, be wary of sites stating Hits and Impressions as their verification on traffic. The best stat to base your purchase on is monthly unique visitors, and don’t take their word for it, use an independent third party tracker for unbiased results.
Just like everything else in life, there are no guarantees, but if you adopt some or all of the above-mentioned marketing strategies, your site should see improvements over a short period of time.
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